Metamodernism

Metamodernism is the term for a cultural discourse and paradigm that has emerged after postmodernism. It refers to new forms of contemporary art and theory that respond to modernism and postmodernism and integrate aspects of both together. Metamodernism reflects an oscillation between, or synthesis of, different "cultural logics" such as modern idealism and postmodern skepticism, modern sincerity and postmodern irony, and other seemingly opposed concepts.

Philosophically, metamodern advocates agree with many postmodern critiques of modernism (for example, highlighting gender inequality); however, they often contend that postmodern deconstruction and critical analytic strategies fall short in facilitating desired resolutions. Metamodern scholarship initially focused on interpreting art in this vein and established a foundation for the field, particularly through observing the growing blend of irony and sincerity (or post-irony) in society. Later authors have explored metamodernism in other disciplines as well, with many frequently drawing on integral theory in their approach.

The term "metamodern" first appeared as early as 1975, when scholar Mas'ud Zavarzadeh used it to describe emerging American literature from the mid-1950s, and later notably in 1999 when Moyo Okediji applied the term to contemporary African-American art as an "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism." It wasn't until Vermeulen and van den Akker's 2010 essay "Notes on Metamodernism" that the subject garnered broader attention within academia.

To describe "the structure of feeling" of metamodernism, Vermeulen and van den Akker used the metaphor of a pendulum continually oscillating from the sincere seriousness of modernism to the ironic playfulness of postmodernism.

Metamodern authors

Vermeulen and van den Akker

Cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker published their essay "Notes on Metamodernism" in 2010 and ran an online research blog with the same name from 2009 to 2016. Their work is often considered an attempt to explain post-postmodernism.

According to them, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism" characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution. They asserted that "the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a sensibility that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling through "ironic sincerity."

Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker at the Between Irony and Sincerity Lecture at Columbia GSAPP

The prefix "meta-" referred not so much to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between (meta) opposite poles as well as beyond (meta) them. Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging... between two opposite poles".

"Ontologically," they write, "metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern."

For the metamodern generation, according to Vermeulen, "grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic; hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed."

The return of a Romantic sensibility has been posited as a key characteristic of metamodernism, observed by Vermeulen and van den Akker in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, and the work of artists such as Bas Jan Ader, Peter Doig, Olafur Eliasson, Kaye Donachie, Charles Avery, and Ragnar Kjartansson. They claim that the neoromantic approach to metamodernism is done in the spirit of resignifying "‘the commonplace with significance, the ordinary with mystery, the familiar with the seemliness of the unfamiliar, and the finite with the semblance of the infinite." By doing so, these artists seek to "perceive anew a future that was lost from sight."

Vermeulen asserted that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophy — which implies a closed ontology — as it is an attempt at a vernacular [or] a sort of open source document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political economy as much as in the arts." They asserted that the 2000s were marked by a return to typically modern positions, while still retaining the postmodern sensibilities of the 1980s and 1990s.

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

In 2021, American academic Jason Josephson Storm published Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. In the book, Storm argues for a metamodern method of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities which requires a "revaluation of values" and a new analytic process. He incorporates Hegelian dialectics to negate what he argues are reflective negatives in postmodern thought, including general skepticism, antirealism, ethical nihilism, and the linguistic turn.

Notable concepts detailed by Storm in the book include his proposition of metarealism, "process social ontology", and "hylosemiotics" (see: process philosophy and semiotics). Storm describes metamodernism in brief as follows:

"Metamodernism is what we get when we take the strategies associated with postmodernism and productively reduplicate and turn them in on themselves. This will entail disturbing the symbolic system of poststructuralism, producing a genealogy of genealogies, deconstructing deconstruction, and providing a therapy for therapeutic philosophy."

In 2024, Storm also launched the academic journal: Metamodern Theory and Praxis as Chair of the Science and Technology Studies department at Williams College. Storm asserts that self-analytical, "anti-disciplinary" thought is needed to effectively engage metamodern ideas in the real world and has stated his work is more about creating a paradigm shift than describing an intellectual movement.

Hanzi Freinacht

Hanzi Freinacht is the pen-name used by author Emil Ejner Friis and sociologist Daniel Görtz who published The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics. Written as a philospher and polemic, Freinacht plays into common metamodern themes like informed-naivete and ironic-sincerity vis-à-vis his performance as an author. Freinacht centrally argues that metamodernism is the natural successor of postmodernism and earlier developmental stages in history, advocating for stage theories as a valid way to understand metamodern phenomena.

In The Listening Society, Freinacht attempts to describe how relationships between memetics (or units of culture), epistemology, and developmental psychology are integral to comparative politics and a metamodern lifestyle in general. The book seeks to broadly and systematically describe the world under the framing of "symbolic development", arguing that societies can most effectively address their issues through better understanding how developed its people and places are. To this end, Freinacht conceptualizes development by showing how inner-personal growth and trends in culture and politics follow patterns that can be found in relation to stages of increasing complexity (notably building upon Michael Commons' Model of Hierarchical Complexity).

Görtz summarizes this concept of "stages" in his own name in the collective anthology: Metamodernity: Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds:

"It is a tenet of metamodern sociology that perspectives are not arbitrarily ordered, but that they emerge in recognisable patterns... These sequences are, in turn, always dependent upon social and material – ultimately, even biological – conditions, with which they interact. Postmodernism did not emerge before modernism, nor could it have. For this reason, metamodern sociology always looks for meaningful explanatory developmental sequences, putting them in relation to one another on some kind of developmental scale. This developmentalism thus accepts at least some minimal form of stage theories… Each stage must be, in clearly definable terms, either more complex than the former, or, at a minimum, be derived from the former and qualitatively distinct."

In terms of political ideology, Freinacht advocates for government policy that emphasizes environmental sustainability, economic liberalism, and substantial spending on social programs, which can be found in his second book: Nordic Ideology.

Brendan Graham Dempsey

In 2023, Dempsey wrote Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics, in which he attempted to synthesize the various strands of metamodern discourse to date (e.g., Vermeulen, Storm, Freinacht, etc.) into a single coherent framework based on the idea of "meta" as "recursive reflection." For Dempsey, what all forms of metamodernism have in common is the attempt to move beyond postmodernism by means of postmodernism—a move which requires progressively "decentering" from the postmodern vantage in order to reflect on it as an object of analysis (i.e., "going meta" on postmodernism). This reflective move creates a new orientation that is able to critique the previous perspective from a higher vantage.

However, since this is also the process by which postmodernism distinguished itself from its modernist predecessor, such a dynamic can be seen as an enduring throughline in the development of all cultural logics. As he puts it:

"The claim I’d like to make is that cultural shifts—like those from modernism to postmodernism to metamodernism—reflect society-level manifestations of such recursive, self-reflective moves. Postmodernists come after, objectify, reflect upon, critique, and transcend modernism; metamodernists come after, objectify, reflect upon, critique, and transcend postmodernism; and so on. As they do, genuinely novel insights and sensibilities are generated that justify speaking in terms of distinct cultural phases."

Dempsey sees this "recursive transcendence through iterative self-reflection" operating (implicitly or explicitly) as part of all contemporary articulations of metamodernism. Consequently, he posits that such a "logic" to the unfolding of cultural logics is itself a defining feature of the emerging metamodern worldview:

"In sum, what “metamodernism” speaks to, I am suggesting, is 1) the cultural moment when the deep recursive process of iterative self-reflection is applied to postmodernism, and thus constitutes an advance beyond the postmodern that includes many of its strategies. In the process, metamodernism becomes 2) the cultural moment when this deep recursive process in cultural shifts becomes an explicit object of reflection and the basis of a new way of seeing. Metamodernism thus becomes a cultural logic about (meta) cultural logics. Thus, with the awareness of the full implications of “going meta” in eternal recursive reflection, metamodernism entails the necessary inclusion within it of all prior cultural logics (at least insofar as it contains representations of their information in its complexity from a higher vantage). In this way, metamodernism signals an inherently multi-perspectival perspective, one that recognizes its inherent ability to toggle in and out of its own recursive contents."

Luke Turner

Explicitly drawing upon the work of Vermeulen and van den Akker, Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto in 2011 as "an exercise in simultaneously defining and embodying the metamodern spirit," describing it as "a romantic reaction to our crisis-ridden moment." The manifesto recognized "oscillation to be the natural order of the world," and called for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child." Instead, Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate!" In 2014, the manifesto became the impetus for LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner's collaborative art practice, after Shia LaBeouf reached out to Turner after encountering the text, with the trio embarking on a series of metamodern performance projects exploring connection, empathy, and community across digital and physical platforms.

Examples of metamodernism in the arts and culture

Vermeulen and van den Akker state that the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron is expressive of "attempts to negotiate between such opposite poles as culture and nature, the finite and the infinite, the commonplace and the ethereal, a formal structure, and a formalist unstructuring."

Visual Arts Exhibits

In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York staged an exhibition entitled No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism, featuring the work of Pilvi Takala, Guido van der Werve, Benjamin Martin, and Mariechen Danz.

In March 2012, Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin curated Discussing Metamodernism in collaboration with Vermeulen and van den Akker. The show featured the work of Ulf Aminde, Yael Bartana, Monica Bonvicini, Mariechen Danz, Annabel Daou, Paula Doepfner, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Andy Holden, Sejla Kameric, Ragnar Kjartansson, Kris Lemsalu, Issa Sant, David Thorpe, Angelika J. Trojnarski, Luke Turner, and Nastja Säde Rönkkö.

In 2013 Andy Holden staged the exhibition Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity 1999-2003: Towards a Unified Theory of M!MS. The exhibition examined the manifesto he had written in 2003 that called for art to be simultaneously ironic and sincere. The exhibition told the history of the writing of the manifesto and subsequently M!MS it now often cited as a precursor to Metamodernism as a ‘structure of feeling’.

Starting 2018 the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has funded a Metamodernism Research Network. The Network has hosted several international symposia and conferences.

In literature

Alison Gibbons has identified several novels as exemplifying a metamodern version of autofiction: Ben Lerner's 10:04, Lance Olsen's Theories of Forgetting, Chris Kraus's I Love Dick and Friederic Biegbieder's Windows on the World. Gibbons distinguishes metamodern autofiction thusly: "[Authors of metamodern autofiction] write out of a postmodernist formulation of fragmented, fictitious textual identity and towards a metamodern affect, whereby subjectivity is linked to an external reality through personal connection and situatedness."

Scholars and critics have pointed to metamodern qualities in many other works of fiction. Some of these are Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, Zadie Smith's NW, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Elif Batuman’s Either/Or and The Idiot, Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man, Suzanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jenni Fagan’s The Waken and several by Ali Smith: How to Be Both, and the four novels that make up her seasonal quartet—Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn.

Mary Holland identified Don LeLillo's Point Omega as a notably metamodern departure from his previous postmodern work: “… with the concentration of his characteristic tonal evasiveness into the painful precision of Point Omega, DeLillo, never sentimental, moves into the realm of metamodernism, producing fiction that has more in common with the unabashedly connection- and meaning-centered fiction of contemporary writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and David Mitchell than with much of the ficton of his own bleak postmodern past.”

Antony Rowland conceptualizes metamodern poetry as that which “resists the enduring bifurcation of contemporary … poetry into mainstream and ‘innovative’ writing.” In Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry, Rowland offers close readings of work by Geoffry Hill, J.H. Prynne, Geraldine Monk, Ahren Warner, Sandeep Parmar and James Byrne.

In other media

James MacDowell, in his formulation of the "quirky" cinematic sensibility, described the works of Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Miranda July, and Charlie Kaufman as building upon the "New Sincerity", and embodying the metamodern structure of feeling in their balancing of "ironic detachment with sincere engagement".

Linda Ceriello's work with Greg Dember on popular cultural products such as Joss Whedon's seminal television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and on Whedon and Goddard's 2012 film The Cabin in the Woods proposed an epistemic taxonomy of the monstrous/paranormal to distinguish the character of metamodern monsters from those which could be read as postmodern, modern or pre-modern.

In May 2014, country music artist Sturgill Simpson told CMT that his album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music had been inspired in part by an essay by Seth Abramson, who writes about metamodernism on his Huffington Post blog. Simpson stated that "Abramson homes in on the way everybody is obsessed with nostalgia, even though technology is moving faster than ever." According to J.T. Welsch, "Abramson sees the 'meta-' prefix as a means to transcend the burden of modernism and postmodernism's allegedly polarised intellectual heritage."

Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade and Inside have been described as metamodern reactions to growing up with social media.

The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once was explicitly identified by the directors, The Daniels, as a metamodern film.

In 2024, Steve Jones published The Metamodern Slasher Film, "the first monograph to examine film in a sustained way using metamodernism, and the first academic work to analyse horror under a metamodern lens".

The music of contemporary classical composers Jennifer Walshe and Robin Haigh had been described as metamodern.

Other works

Essays

The 2013 issue of the American Book Review dedicated to metamodernism included a series of essays identifying authors such as Roberto Bolaño, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace as metamodernists.

In a 2014 article in PMLA, literary scholars David James and Urmila Seshagiri argued that "metamodernist writing incorporates and adapts, reactivates and complicates the aesthetic prerogatives of an earlier cultural moment", specifically modernism, in discussing twenty-first century writers such as Tom McCarthy.

In 2014, Professor Stephen Knudsen, writing in ArtPulse, noted that metamodernism "allows the possibility of staying sympathetic to the poststructuralist deconstruction of subjectivity and the self—Lyotard’s teasing of everything into intertextual fragments—and yet it still encourages genuine protagonists and creators and the recouping of some of modernism's virtues."

In 2017, Vermeulen and van den Akker, with Allison Gibbons, published Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth After Postmodernism, an edited collection of essays exploring the notion of metamodernism across a variety of fields in the arts and culture. Individual chapters cover metamodernism in areas such as film, literary fiction, crafts, television, photography and politics. Contributors include the three editors, James MacDowell, Josh Toth, Jöog Heiser, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Lee Konstantinou, Nicole Timmer, Gry C. Rustad, Kuy Hanno Schwind, Irmtraud Huber, Wolfgang Funk, Sam Browse, Raoul Eshelman, and James Elkins. In the introductory chapter, van den Akker and Vermeulen update and consolidate their original 2010 proposal, while addressing the divergent usages of the term “metamodernism” by other thinkers.

An article applying metamodern theory to the study of religions was published in 2017 by Michel Clasquin-Johnson.

In a 2017 essay on metamodernism in literary fiction, Fabio Vittorini stated that since the late 1980s, memetic strategies of the modern have been combined with the meta-literary strategies of the postmodern, performing "a pendulum-like motion between the naive and/or fanatic idealism of the former and the skeptical and/or apathetic pragmatism of the latter."

Books

In 2002, Andre Furlani, analyzing the literary works of Guy Davenport, defined metamodernism as an aesthetic that is "after yet by means of modernism.... a departure as well as a perpetuation." The relationship between metamodernism and modernism was seen as going "far beyond homage, toward a reengagement with modernist method in order to address subject matter well outside the range or interest of the modernists themselves."

In 2013, Linda C. Ceriello proposed a theorization of metamodernism for the field of religious studies, connecting the contemporary phenomenon of secular spirituality to the emergence of a metamodern episteme. Her analysis of contemporary religious/spiritual movements and ontologies posits a shift that is consonant with the metamodern cultural sensibilities identified by others such as Vermeulen and van den Akker, and which has given rise to a distinct metamodern soteriology.

In More Deaths than One (2014), the New Zealand writer and singer-songwriter Gary Jeshel Forrester examined metamodernism by way of a search for the Central Illinois roots of David Foster Wallace during a picaresque journey to America. In it, Forrester wrote that "[m]etamodernist theory proposes to fill the postmodernist void with a rough synthesis of the two predecessors from the twentieth century [modernism and post-modernism]. In the new paradigm, metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology all have their places, but the overriding concern is with yet another division of philosophy – ethics. It's okay to search for values and meaning, even as we continue to be skeptical."

In 2019, Lene Rachel Anderson published her book Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World, in which she claims: "Metamodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a much more complex way. It contains both indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements and thus provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time." In November 2023 she moved to working on Polymodernity to differentiate her work on Nordic Bildung from Metamodernity.

See also

• Eric Van Hove
• Invented tradition
• Jean Gebser
• Kitsch
• Ken Wilber
• Metatheory

References

Works cited

• Freinacht, Hanzi (2017). The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics. Metamoderna ApS. ISBN 978-87-999739-0-3.
• Josephson-Storm, Jason Ānanda (2021). Metamodernism: the future of theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226786797.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-226-78679-7. OCLC 1249473210. S2CID 243746314.
• Kersten, Dennis; Wilbers, Usha (2018). "Introduction: Metamodernism". English Studies. 99 (7): 719–722. doi:10.1080/0013838X.2018.1510657. hdl:2066/198020.

External links

• Notes on Metamodernism (research blog founded by Vermeulen and van den Akker)
• Metamoderna (blog)
• What is Metamodern? (blog)
• Why do movies feel so different now? (popular video essay on YouTube)