Metamodernism and counterpublics: politics, aesthetics, and porosity in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet

Influential critics including Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen have characterised the metamodern turn as politically reenergizing aesthetic practices with a mixture of hope and irony after a period of postmodern cynicism. While such studies have examined political movements or individual writers, few have examined how the metamodern shift affects the habitus of British artists and intellectuals who are the current instantiation of what Alan Sinfield calls the ‘dissident middle class’. Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet wrestles with that very question as she populates her four novels with characters whose conversations about art and politics revise tropes of metropolitan cynicism common in postmodern British literature and scholarship. Smith’s colliding representations of historical and fictional artists reflect a ‘porous’ aesthetic approach to the novel that combines fiction, ekphrasis, and contemporary politics and reimagines Britain’s ‘dissident middle’ counterpublic. Smith’s metamodern vision of a counterpublic sphere affirms the civic role of artists and intellectuals yet ironically tempers the novels’ utopic moments with acknowledgments of other characters’ barriers to participation in the counterpublic. The Seasonals present a distinct theoretical approach to the relationship between art and politics by blurring boundaries between a fictional counterpublic and the author and her readers’ public sphere.