Periodising the 2000s, or, the Emergence of Metamodernism

Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen

Thinking at once negatively and positively about it is a beginning, but what we need is a new vocabulary. The languages that have been useful in talking about culture and politics in the past don't really seem adequate to this historical moment. (Jameson on postmodernism quoted in Stephanson 1988, 12–13)

In 1989, the social theorist Francis Fukuyama wrote a controversial article in the National Interest under the title 'The End of History?' In the article, he argued that with the pending demise of the communist empire, History with a capital H – that is, not simply the chronology of time passing, but the chronicle of mankind's evolutionary process – had ended. With the 'unabashed victory of liberal democracy', he suggested in his subsequent book The End of History and the Last Man (1992, xii):

mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. ... This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

Some twenty years later, in 2012, Fukuyama wrote another article broaching the subject of History. Published in Foreign Affairs, it was entitled 'The Future of History'. Here, Fukuyama wrote that calling the End of History may, in retrospect, have been just a bit premature, for the alleged 'unabashed victory of liberal democracy', he conceded, had since come under some scrutiny. Democratic governments all over the world increasingly failed to deliver on its promises: most national economies have not proliferated but have stagnated or gone into long-term recessions; political extremism – left and right, liberal and conservative, secular and religious – is on the rise; the middle classes, the traditional stronghold of twentieth-century liberal democracy, are shrinking; and social media have problematised twentieth-century notions of freedom of speech and the free press. In addition, a serious contender for geopolitical hegemony has emerged: China's state-regulated market system. There are, in other words, plenty of 'big questions' left to answer.

Since the turn of the millennium, it has become increasingly commonplace to declare that History has not halted and has not come to a standstill. Various authors from across the political spectrum have, for instance, written about the remarkable 'return' (Kagan 2008), 'revenge' (Milne 2012) or 'rebirth' (Badiou 2012) of History after the End of History. These authors all agree, as a premise, that History has been rebooted by recent world historical crises of an ecological, economic or (geo-)political nature. Arquilla perhaps most aptly summarises the current historical moment with his notion of a 'bend of History' (2011). A bending of History may simultaneously imply forcing History into a different direction or shape as well as causing History to deflect from the more or less straight line of teleological narrative. It also captures the increasing awareness across culture that there is something at stake, yet we are still very much unsure what this something – hidden around the bend, as it were – might be (and we will only really know in hindsight).

To an extent, this book is about the bend of History and its associated 'senses of a bend' that have come to define contemporary cultural production and political discourse. Our use of the phrase 'senses of a bend' is, of course, both a wink and a homage to Fredric Jameson's canonical essay 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' in which he tried to come to terms with all of the – by then very dominant – 'senses of the end of this or that' (1991 [1984], 1) in postmodern art, culture and politics. For Jameson, the main casualties of all of these postmodern 'senses of the end' might have very well been History and the historical imagination.

Now that History appears to have, once more, been kick-started, the postmodern vernacular has proven increasingly inapt and inept in coming to terms with our changed social situation. This goes for discussions of History as much as it goes for debates about the arts. We can think, here, of the waning of a host of different postmodern impulses, which nonetheless share some kind of family resemblance (Jameson's 'senses of the end', if you will): pop art and deconstructive conceptual art (from Warhol to Hirst, by way of Koons); punk, new wave and grunge's cynicism in popular music; disaffected minimalism in cinema; spectacular formalism in architecture; metafictional irony in literature, as well as the whole emphasis on a dehumanising cyberspace in science fictions of all kinds. Moreover, since the turn of the millennium, we have seen the emergence of various 'new', often overlapping, aesthetic phenomena such as the New Romanticism in the arts (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010), the New Mannerism in crafts (van Tuinen, this volume), the New Aesthetic in design (Sterling 2012), the New Sincerity in literature (Konstantinou 2009, 2016a), the New Weird or Nu-Folk in music (Poecke 2014), Quirky Cinema and Quality Television (MacDowell 2012; Vermeulen and Rustad 2013), as well as the discovery of a new terrain for architecture (Allen and McQuade 2011), each of them characterised by an attempt to...