New Sincerity
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The New Sincerity is the name of several loosely related cultural or philosophical movements following Post-Modernism. The most notable grew out of the intermediary movement of Raoul Eshelman and, most notably, Judith Butler, among others, called "performativism." The New Sincerity takes the basic tenets of perfomativism (that, even when arising from intentionally constructed situations, happiness is experienced as such, not as a false and misleading outcome) and extends the tenets into a transformative way of experiencing life and understanding culture. Privileging human connection and non-ironic expressions of sentiment and concern, instead of disconnection and lofty cynicism, the New Sincerity increasingly returns academic attention from the increasingly deadening emphasis on social construction and the deconstruction of the soul, in cultural studies, to previously-"suspect" topics, such as beauty and aspects of the emotional life.
Current scholarship includes Wendy Steiner's The Trouble with Beauty, Denis Donahue's On Beauty, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, and Bryn Gribben's 2005 Bodies that Shatter: Ekphrasis, Beauty, and the Victorian Body as Art, which plays upon Judith Butler's notion of citationality and the body, in order to consider beauty and intersubjectivity as outcomes of the body's performance of itself. Gribben is also, some claim, responsible for coining the term the New Sincerity in 2003 (though notable uses of the term predate this), and the term was taken up by avant-garde director and scholar Herbert Blau and designer/film auteur Brady Becker, who implements the tenets laid forth in Eshelmann's seminal 2001 articles on "performativism" in order to construct spaces in which both design and designer are experienced and felt.
The New Sincerity is a cultural reemphasis on art as a harbinger for social change. It is a compromise between the tenets of modernism and postmodernism that returns an idea of progress, purpose and greater good. It brings an impetus of idealism, but with an inherent sense of healthy skepticism.
[edit] History
It is generally agreed that the principal impetus towards the creation of these movements was the September 11th attacks, and the ensuing national outpouring of emotion, both of which seemed to run against the generally ironic grain of postmodernism. Rough ideas of New Sincerity began to circulate as early as 2002.
Claim to the name “New Sincerity" is wide ranging, and it may have been coined independently by several parties. "The New Sincerity," as espoused by Jesse Thorn of the public radio program The Sound of Young America since 2002, is a cultural movement defined by dicta including, "Maximum Fun," and "Be More Awesome." This use of the term predates Gribben's coinage of the term in 2003 (almost 20 years before, it was attached to a set of rock bands, such as Wild Seeds and True Believers, largely based in Austin, Texas). It celebrates outsized celebration of joy, and rejects irony, and particularly ironic appreciation of cultural products.
In 2005, poets Joseph Massey, Anthony Robinson and Andrew Mister began using the term to describe trends in contemporary poetry with which they identify. Their aesthetic is characterized largely by the rejection of contemporary post-Language irony.
