Robin van den Akker - Utopia for Beginners

1. Utopia for Beginners

3. A structure of feeling [...] is a particular quality of social experience [...], historically distinct from
other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 1977

4. Since the turn of the millennium, it has indeed become increasingly commonplace to declare that
History has not halted and has not come to a standstill (…). Arquilla perhaps most aptly summarises
the current historical moment with his notion of a “bend of History” (2011).
Robin van den Akker (et al.) (ed.), Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after postmodernism, 2017
‘metamodern senses of a bend’

5. Periodizing the ‘2000s’
• Forces of Production
- Web 2.0
- Renewables
• Global crises
- Geopolitical crises
- Financial crises
- Ecological crises
• Relations of Production
- Capitalism 4.0
• “Millenial generation”

6. ‘repositioning’
Centre for New Aesthetics
Nam Jun Paik & Annabel Daou

7. ‘A New Regime of Historicity’
Centre for New Aesthetics
Richard Hamilton & David Thorpe

8. thanks