Timotheus Vermeulen

I have written a number of entries (which I hope will make the final cut!) for Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova’s forthcoming glossary of the Posthuman. ‘Ecopathy, or a trip to the beach’, a short text based on a paper I delivered at a symposium at BAK on the Anthropocene/Capitolocene, is one of them, discussing the Anthropocene, humanity’s footprint on earth, as structure of feeling. I have copied in the draft version (which I hope will make the final cut!) below. A video of my lecture can be found here.

Let me begin this contribution with a disclaimer. In itself, this is hardly surprising – if, for a glossary, unusual, I guess. I begin almost every essay with a disclaimer. It’s a consequence, I’m afraid, of knowing very little – about a specific topic, life, the world, anything, really. But in this case it is less a question of what I know about the topic I am writing about – the Anthropocene – than how I know it. I am not a specialist of the Anthropocene by any means. I suppose it’s fair to say I am not even a conscientious student. Until recently, I hadn’t extensively researched the widely available and often expert literature about it – I am thinking here of the excellent studies by the likes of Paul Crutzen et al (2006) and in cultural studies McKenzie Wark (2015), Joanna Zylinska (2014), and Etienne Turpin (2013) as well as Naomi Klein’s incisive programmatic text This Changes Everything (2014); nor had I gone out of my way to locate it’s effects in nature. Instead, looking back, I was, and to a large extent still am, more an accidental scavenger, someone who happens to, who cannot but, encounter discussions about, and effects of, the Anthropocene. I might be compared to a man or woman walking the dog on the beach who treads on washed up litter every other step and looks down to see what he has stepped on. One step, “hey climate change”; the next, “oh the last animal of this or that species”. And so forth, to the point that a walk on the beach resembles the experience of a walk on a garbage belt. The beach, or the field, that I most often stroll is that of art, and culture more broadly. What I want to discuss here are some of the things I couldn’t help – because they were so ubiquitous, so embarrassingly omnipresent – but step on the past years. What I present you with, if you will, is a socio-cultural history of the soles of my shoe after a stroll on the shores. In his superb study Anthropocene Fictions literary theorist Adam Trexler (2015) has argued that the Anthropocene is as much an environmental development as it is “a cultural transformation”. In line with Trexler, my argument is that the Anthropocene is also, parallel to, though not necessarily a consequence of, ecological developments, what Fredric Jameson (1991) might have called a cultural dominant: a prevalent structure of feeling, a sentiment, or rather still, mood, shared so widely so as to suggest it is one of the key characteristics of contemporary culture. The point here is not simply that the Anthropocene is on our minds, but rather that our bodies are on the Anthropocene, in the sense that one is not thinking about speed but is on speed – or LSD, or crystal meth, or rather still, asbestos: thoughts spinning, muscles tensed up, blood pumping. Ecopathy is the cultural condition of being on climate change-speed, of being born on climate change-speed. By poisoning the mother, Gaia, we have also drugged the ecosystem of everything and everyone springing from her womb – from the oxygen levels and the ocean tides to the dwindling panda populations to our own minds.

Keep reading

Bloomsbury has published the first anthology of post-postmodern theory, Supplanting the postmodern: an anthology of writing on the arts and culture of the early 21st century, edited by David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris. It includes essays by Linda Hutcheon, Alan Kirby, Raoul Eshelman, Ihab Hassan, Gilles Lipovetsky, as well as, I am honoured to say, Robin van den Akker and myself. You can order it here.

I am thrilled to share with you the German translation of Robin van den Akker and my 2010 essay ‘Notes on metamodernism’: Anmerkungen our metamoderne, published by Edition Uhlenhorst, an initiative by TEXTEM. It is a handsomely designed little volume, expertly translated by Elias Wagner. You can order it here.

I am really thrilled to share with you the second review of my latest book Scenes from the Suburbs (EUP, 2014). (For the first one, click here). What makes it extra exciting is that the reviewer is none other than James Walters, a film scholar whose work I admire very much. I have posted some excerpts I am particularly thankful for/overjoyed with (!) below. 

“A constant ‘oscillation’ between theoretical and critical approaches results in a series of chapters that move through a fairly wide range of concerns. So although it could be said that a consideration of film and television aesthetics is central to the book, a chapter on The Simpsons and King of the Hill (1997-2010) also incorporates a sustained and original re-evaluation of notions of realism and modernism in animation, for example. Likewise, a chapter considering Desperate Housewives weaves in an extended debate on definitions of post-feminism (and a persuasive dismissal of the show’s perceived status as a pro-feminist text). This thematic breadth extends to a stylistic freedom as the debates progress, so avoiding the linearity that might otherwise define case the study-based chapter structure that the book adopts. Vermeulen’s writing has the confidence to layer his arguments patiently and even disrupt the flow of discussion to achieve his aims. We are frequently presented with near-Cavellian vignettes that seem to draw us away from the main focus of a chapter, only to bring us back to the central thread with a newly enriched appreciation of the debates in play. Within this structure, Vermeulen succeeds in maintaining an engagement with the reader through the precision of his analyses and the vitality of his critical voice. A degree of commitment on the part of that reader is perhaps required at times, but it is worth persevering with Vermeulen’s prose style as he regularly brings us to points of precise emphasis that combine elegant composition with forceful insight, utilising patient exposition to justify potent assertions. 

[…]

Vermeulen’s relating of Happiness to Film Style seems an especially successful reconfiguration of the suburbs that encourages us away from the standard imagery of white picket fences, tree-lined roads and so on. Vermeulen draws attention to the film’s mapping of spaces, and his assertion that Happiness’ map is particularly ‘sprawling’ makes reference to the way in which he understands the film to be expanding the boundaries of the suburban. In attending to such a detail, Vermeulen likewise extends the terms in which we think about not only this film’s suburban spaces but also the notion of the suburban in film and television more generally. Happiness is a particularly apt choice for this kind of project because it appears to be precisely the kind of film that might conform to restricted and restrictive characterisations of the suburban, especially as it uses those conventions in a bleak, knowing and at times satirical way. As with so much of the discussion in the book, Vermeulen asks us to look again: to examine the exact nature of aesthetic composition and, in turn, to re-examine what it means to talk about the suburbs in film and television at all.

[…]

Scenes from the Suburbs makes a major contribution to the study of a type of film and television programme that is frequently recognised in critical writing but often escapes critical recognition. Vermeulen’s authoritative analysis of the suburban across a range of texts invites the reader to discover new levels of debate and his writing consistently sidesteps the trap of straightforward definitions or surface generalisations. Anyone wishing to talk usefully about the suburb in film and television will need to engage with Vermeulen’s arguments.”

You can read the full review here.

Last November, Galerie Petra Rinck published, or rather perhaps released, Ralf Brög’s beautifully crafted catalogue Zero RPM Records. The artist kindly invited me to contribute an essay. Entitled ‘In praise of the copy’, it contemplates the possibility of the authentic copy - something I have been thinking about a lot the past year. You can buy the catalogue here; I have pasted an excerpt from my text below.

The question thus is not whether Brög’s records are authentic or not. It is whether authenticity is the relevant term to describe this kind of art. If Brög’s copy is always already an ‘original’ – not the original but an original of another order, one that springs not from what we perceive to be reality but from a representation – that means that the categories of specialness, genuineness, quality and originality should also be reconceived – and with it authenticity. What we mean when we say something is authentic, after all, is that it acts on its own accord, within its own sphere of signification. This is a determination we cannot possible apply to the Zero RPM Records. They are authentic, in that they act on their own accord; and at the same time they aren’t, since part of their signification derives elsewhere. What these records, these ‘copies’, force us to do is to think up a new critical vernacular. One that is able to accommodate its tangible abstraction, its multiple singularity, its particular hermeneutic gesture. Art that makes us think; not of something we already know, but of things we haven’t yet a clue about. Copy or not, that is something very special indeed.