Conservatism as affect

Abstract 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 shift. One particularity of the metamodern shift is the departure from the 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. 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.