"Crucial to "vibrationalism" as well as to Pelevin's work in general is that sign and subject overcome the dualism of subject and object, of thing and sign in a reductionistic performance. The successful suspension of this dualism can be achieved in various ways. It can be experienced in a mystical performance; it can be described using paradoxical Buddhist jargon; or it can be performed in a fictional frame that is accessible to everyone and that can always be invested with a certain degree of self-irony (in this case vibrationalism doesn't work because the artist doesn't heed his own instructions).(17) Because precisely this sort of ironic failure plays a major role in Pelevin's plot lines these are often confused with the ironic devices of postmodernism, whose own dysfunctionality and failure is a foregone conclusion. While a formal identity is undeniable, postmodernism differs from Pelevin by not recognizing that a unified, transcendent perspective can be temporarily instituted or performed within a fictional frame. In performatism the set is always toward transcending irony; in postmodernism it is toward generating irony ad infinitum "

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/perform.htm

"Because precisely this sort of ironic failure plays a major role in Pelevin's plot lines these are often confused with the ironic devices of postmodernism, whose own dysfunctionality and failure is a foregone conclusion. While a formal identity is undeniable, postmodernism differs from Pelevin by not recognizing that a unified, transcendent perspective can be temporarily instituted or performed within a fictional frame. In performatism the set is always toward transcending irony; in postmodernism it is toward generating irony ad infinitum . "

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/perform.htm

"In Russian literature the best examples seem to me to be Viktor Pelevin's short stories as well as his novel Chapaev i Pustota [Buddha's Little Finger]" - http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/perform.htm

"In Pelevin's programmatic short story with the characteristic title "Ontologiia detstva" [Ontology of childhood], the narrator states: "In general, the life of a grown person is self-sufficient and--how should I put it--doesn't have empty spaces that could hold experience not directly related to his immediate surroundings" (Pelevin 1998, 222). The "empty spaces," which can be psychological or ritualistic in nature, create room for a holistic perspective allowing characters to transcend their own immediate situations: compare, for example, the apotheosis of Lester Burnham in American Beauty; Chapaev's and Anka's passage to Nirvana in Buddha's Little Finger;"

"In spite of very different religious sources (theism in American Beauty, Buddhism in Pelevin, Judaism in Ulitskaia, cult in The Idiots) all performatistic authors share an identical cultural-theological perspective: namely that Godliness is everywhere where wholes are created by individual subjects."

"Lars von Trier's messianistic performatism (and Pelevin's as well) makes frequent use of such dramaturgical shifts, which the viewer is made to perceive and assimilate involuntarily. In general, performatism encourages self-therapy, it suggests we can transcend the force of rampant, oppressive contexts by repeatedly asserting our own selfhood (compare in this regard Run Lola Run, Pelevin's search for Nirvana or Michaels' critique of the pluralist dispersion of selfhood in Our America)."

"While a formal identity is undeniable, postmodernism differs from Pelevin by not recognizing that a unified, transcendent perspective can be temporarily instituted or performed within a fictional frame. In performatism the set is always toward transcending irony; in postmodernism it is toward generating irony ad infinitum ."