Robin van den Akker - Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism

Series editors: Fay Brauer, Maggie Humm, Tim Lawrence, Stephen Maddison, Ashwani Sharma and Debra Benita Shaw (Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London, UK)

The Radical Cultural Studies series publishes monographs and edited collections to provide new and radical analyses of the culturopolitics, sociopolitics, aesthetics and ethics of contemporary cultures. The series is designed to stimulate debates across and within disciplines, foster new approaches to Cultural Studies and assess the radical potential of key ideas and theories.

Sewing, Fighting and Writing: Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture, Maria Tamboukou

Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice, edited by Debra Benita Shaw and Maggie Humm

Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism, Dan Hassler-Forest

EU, Europe Unfinished: Europe and the Balkans in a Time of Crisis, edited by Zlatan Krajina and Neboja Blanua

Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities, Iain Chambers

Austerity as Public Mood: Social Anxieties and Social Struggles, Kirsten Forkert

Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth, after Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen

Pornography, Materiality and Cultural Politics, Stephen Maddison (forthcoming)

Affect and Social Media: Emotion, New Materialism, Anxiety and Contagion, edited by Tony Sampson, Stephen Maddison and Darren Ellis (forthcoming)

Writing the Modern Family: Contemporary Literature, Motherhood and Neoliberal Culture, Roberta Garrett (forthcoming)

The Male Body in Digital Culture, Jamie Hakim (forthcoming)

Edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen

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Selection and editorial matter Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen 2017

Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN:HB 978-1-7834-8960-2

PB 978-1-7834-8961-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Van den Akker, Robin, 1982 editor. | Gibbons, Alison, editor. | Vermeulen, Timotheus, editor.

Title: Metamodernism : historicity, affect and depth after postmodernism / edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen.

Description: London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, [2017] | Series: Radical cultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017031627 (print) | LCCN 2017041820 (ebook) | ISBN 9781783489626 (electronic) | ISBN 9781783489602 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783489619 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Post-postmodernism (Literature) | Postmodernism (Literature) | LiteratureAesthetics.

Classification: LCC PN98.P67 (ebook) | LCC PN98.P67 M49 2017 (print) | DDC 809/.9113dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031627

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Julie; for Nick; for Ines.

List of Figures and Table

Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen

SECTION I: HISTORICITY
i. Metamodern Historicity

Robin van den Akker

James MacDowell

Josh Toth

Jrg Heiser

Sjoerd van Tuinen

SECTION II: AFFECT
ii. METAMODERN AFFECT

Alison Gibbons

Lee Konstantinou

Nicoline Timmer

Alison Gibbons

Gry C. Rustad and Kai Hanno Schwind

SECTION III: DEPTH
iii. Metamodern Depth, or Depthiness

Timotheus Vermeulen

Irmtraud Huber and Wolfgang Funk

Sam Browse

Raoul Eshelman

James Elkins

.

This book has benefited from many stimulating discussions, sharp debates and critical interventions. We are particularly grateful to the many contributors to the research platform Notes on Metamodernism that was founded in 2009 and that we have been editing with a great editorial team ever since.

The aim of the research platform was, and still is, to make a start with mapping, transcoding and situating contemporary aesthetics and culture by way of the arts. Today it features countless contributions from mostly young writers across the globe, all of whom have sought to document and conceptualise developments in arts, aesthetics and culture that are symptomatic of the post-postmodern or, rather, metamodern condition. Without these contributions, our research project on metamodernism to which we hope this volume will contribute would have been more daunting, if not to say impossible, as well as too single-minded to say anything meaningful about the recent reconfigurations of Western capitalist societies at large. If we have to name anything that has given us the satisfaction that comes is supposed to come with intellectual collaboration and exploring new lines of inquiry, it has been NoM.

We especially have to thank Nadine Feler, Luke Turner and Hila Shachar (in the order of appearance in our editorial life) for their co-explorations of metamodernism and their much-needed interventions in the editorial course of NoM. Nadine and Hila were both unable to contribute an undoubtedly very valuable chapter to this volume and their voices will be missed. Lukes ongoing artistic practice, alongside Nastja Sde Rnkk and Shia LaBeouf, has been both fascinating to observe from afar and thought-provoking in its ambitions.

Our respective departments have been supportive of our research the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Humanities Department at Erasmus University College Rotterdam, the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Nijmegen, the Institute for Media and Communication at the University of Oslo and the Humanities Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University who also provided financial support for us to meet during the process of editing this book.

We have been fortunate to be invited to various symposiums and conferences on the post-postmodern contemporary. Raoul Eshelmans Thinking in Unity After Postmodernism (Munchen, 2010) has been the first in a series of forums in which our intuitions and conceptualisations have been rigorously tested and accordingly adjusted. Another notable litmus-test of our ideas has been Danuta Fjellestads and David Watsons The Future of Futures Symposium (Uppsala 2013), an event filled with fierce debates (and for that we are more than thankful) with, especially, Jennifer Ashton, Walter Benn Michaels, Marie-Laure Ryan, Pieter Vermeulen and Phillip E. Wegner. We very much enjoyed Oscillate! Metamodernism and the Humanities, a symposium at the University of Strathclyde. Thank you to the organisers for inviting us, and for the great conversations: Biserka Anderson, Fateha Aziz, Sara Helen Binney, Andrew Campbell, Brendan Dempsey, Fiona McKay, Craig Pollard, Emma Sullivan and Andrew Woods, among others.