Authors

Maria Engström¹;  ¹ Uppsala University, Sweden

Discussion

The conservative, populist, and civilizational turns, accompanied by an erosion of democratic institutions in Russia and a number of other countries, may be viewed as symptoms of the metamodern arrival. One particularity of the metamodern shift is the departure from intellectual and analytical postmodernism and the mixture of culture and politics, leading into trans-individual affect, performativity, and corporeality in conjunction with a simultaneous reduction of rational thinking. Unlike the deadening of affect found in postmodernism, metamodernism operates precisely with the pre-discursive field of culture and politics, and it is for this reason that the metamodern is often described as a “sensibility.” Affect is a phenomenon of an extra-subjective and collective order and suggests a kind of experience that is communally participatory – experience of a sensation that remains free from semiotic signification. In this paper, I shall discuss several examples from Russian contemporary popular (both mainstream and non-mainstream) culture and music that form the new metamodern ‘civilizational’ affect.