The emerging ideology is more than just an oscillation between credulity and cynicism.
Our universe seems to be neither maximally simple, nor maximally complicated. There’ s some regularity, but it’s not completely logically trivial. It’s not like every little particle follows its own set of laws, but it’s also not like we can reduce everything to one logical tautology. – Jonathan Gorard
Gorard is a research software engineer at Princeton. But he’s better known for being involved with the Wolfram Physics Project, which, if I understand it at all, is about taking the irreducible and unpredictable behaviour of N body systems, (aka the Three Body Problem), often imagined as a kind of dead end, or at least an obstacle, for physics and physicists, as a starting point and a foundation for modelling the universe.
I have no credible idea if this new physics is right or wrong. But I admire the ambition, and recognise in it something broader, something that transcends any one academic discipline. People have been struggling to name this something for a while, with various contenders put forth both before and since Linda Hutcheon explicitly challenged the “post-post-modern” movement to come up with a name for itself, in her 2002 book, the Politics of Postmodernism. But some time in the last decade or so, Metamodernism seems to have won out.
But the meaning of this term has not yet grown to meet the moment it describes. This essay is an attempt to stimulate and fertilise that growth.
One place we might look is to the phrase “The Beginning is Near,” which (after a few early but isolated spikes in interest) entered circulation around the same time. The Metamodern, I contend, is a name for the hope that slogan expresses. Both face forward, into the century which is now well underway, with a renewed and rearticulated political and philosophical optimism, which was present in the Occupy and Arab Spring movements.
Wikipedia says the term “metamodern” first appeared in 1975 in the work of Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, in the Journal of American Studies, to describe a trend in American literature. The essay, entitled “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives”, is an overview of the developments in American fiction writing in the period from about 1950 to the time of its writing, with a focus on the epistemological approach taken by the writers. In that context, he writes:
The fusion of fact and fiction blurs the dichotomy between ‘life’ and ‘art’ and indeed such a sharp division between the two does not exist in the emerging aesthetics which I shall, for the lack of a better term, call “Metamodernist”
A footnote explains further:
I am using this term to refer to a cluster of attitudes which have emerged since the mid-1950s. I shall use the term ‘metamodernist’ in conjunction with three others to describe various aesthetic and ideational approaches to the art of narrative in the present century. I retain ‘ Modernist’ for the ideas associated with Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and their followers. The reaction against their poetics in the 1950s by such writers as Kingsley Amis, John Wain and C. P. Snow I label ‘ Anti-Modernist’. The modified and sometimes radicalized continuation of the Modernist aesthetics in the works of Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and others I shall call ‘ Para-Modernist’.
Some critics use the single term ‘Post-modern’ to describe these new developments. However the term is too general to catch all the nuances. Ihab Hassan’s Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971), for example, discusses Kafka with Hemingway and Beckett. boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature (1972- ) has a grab-bag approach to recent writing, covering such an assortment of items as to make the term synonymous with ‘post-war literature’. Gerald Graff’s ‘ the myth of postmodern breakthrough ‘, in TriQuarterly (no. 26, pp. 383-414) lumps together everything published since the decline of the Proust-Mann-Joyce-Pound-Eliot tradition.
I did my best to create an image representing this taxonomy:
Annoyingly, he doesn’t explicitly name even a single author as metamodern, though a more careful reading of the essay might be able to tease out implied specifics. A further annoyance, though one which cannot be laid at Zavarzadeh’s feet, is the identification of writers like Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner as “modernists” by the literary community, when from a philosophical or socio-historical point of view, they are obviously early postmodernists, with fragmented, ungrounded, world-unmaking styles.
Their stylistic chaos is itself nested in a broader, collective, intellectual chaos, as the common vocabulary of knowledge is fractured at the boundaries of the different disciplines, turning the modern academy into a Tower of Babel, where nobody understands each other, or, ultimately, themselves. The first kind of chaos, that contained within the boundaries of the artwork, is fine. The latter is not fine.
As for the style of the metamodernists themselves, or a defining credo, it never really comes into sharp focus. It’s something to do with ‘the overwhelming actualities of contemporary America which render all interpretations of “reality” arbitrary’. This epistemic breakdown is a theme he returns to again, and again, discussing various literary responses, including Norman Mailer’s line “reality is no longer realistic”.
As he goes he does not generally identify which of the four categories each example he discusses falls into. But perhaps this lack of content was for the best, as it left the ideas, including the now significant “Metamodern” compatible with a wide range of future interpretations, (to which this essay hopes to add).
The next ‘notable’ usage mentioned on wikipedia is by Moyo Okediji, writing about “returnee” artists as in descendants of the victims of trans-atlantic slavery who had returned to Africa – artists with a foot in multiple words.
A Quote from Okediji, “[The] metamodern [is an] extension of and challenge to modernism and post- modernism”, opens the Editorial Statement of the Journal of Metamodern Theory and Practice, which recently published its first edition.
In Okediji’s framing, the term has shed its “Paramodern” and “Antimodern” sidekicks, and is now presented not as a subcategory of the reactions against modernism, but as a paradigm of roughly comparable status to both modernism and postmodernism, a hegelian synthesis to their thesis and anti-thesis.
Between and besides these two instances, we can identify other examples, where the term metamodern wasn’t used, but where the same ideas are being developed. In his foreword to Peter Sloterdijk’s 1983 book A critique of Cynical Reason, Andres Huyssen describes the search for “an enlightenment that is enlightened about itself”, for example. The work of Gen X critics of postmodernism such as David Foster Wallace or Stephen Hicks might be retrospectively included.
The major intrusion of the term into academic consciousness came in 2010, with the essay “Notes on Medamodernism” by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, which is described it as “another modernism… characterized by the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment.” These authors distance themselves from previous usages in literature studies saying (in a footnote) that
It is in so far related to these notions that it too negotiates between the modern and the postmodern; but the function, structure, and nature of the negotiation we perceive are entirely our own and, as far as we can see, wholly unrelated to the previous perception.
They position themselves and their ideas more closely to Nicholas Bourriaud and his term “Altermodernism”, writing:
As we understand it, Bourriaud ultimately defines altermodernism as a “synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism”12. According to Bourriaud, this synthesis is expressed, respectively, in heterochronicity and “archipelagraphy”, in “globalized perception” as well as in nomadism, and in an incorporation and/or affirmation of otherness as much as in the exploration of elsewheres.
Many of Bourriaud’s observations appear to be spot-on. The developed world has extended—and is still in the process of expanding—far beyond the traditional borders of the so-called West. Bourriaud argues that this development has led to a heterochrony of globalized societies with various degrees of modernity and a worldwide archipelago without a center; to globally intersecting temporalities and historically interrelated geographies. Consequently, he justly asserts, our current modernity can no longer be characterized by either the modern discourse of the universal gaze of the white, western male or its postmodern deconstruction along the heterogeneous lines of race, gender, class, and locality. He suggests that, instead, it is exemplified by globalized perception, cultural nomadism, and creolization. The altermodernist (artist) is a homo viator, liberated from (an obsession with) his/her origins, free to travel and explore, perceiving anew the global landscape and the “terra incognita” of history.
Here we have the much hated rootless cosmopolitan as the metamodern protagonist – something which brings to my mind the work of Todd McGowan, in which he argues in favour the concept of the public, with its quasi-anonimity, at the expense of the concept of community, with its claustrophobic implications of conformity and control. It is the former, he argues, which, through foregrounding our inherent sense of alienation, grants opportunities for individual freedom.
This element of “globalized perception” (as opposed to western perception) is, I contend, a key component of the metamodern worldview, and one which allows the (originally) modernist ideals of universality much fuller expression.
But the key idea, and the one most often quoted, is that of “ontological oscillation”. The key paragraph reads:
Ontologically, 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. One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather, it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles. Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm.
Perhaps I am putting too much weight on the metaphor, but it seems to me that having introduced this concept of “gravity” here, they’d have done well to define it further. What is it that defines the centre and sets the boundaries?
The metaphor of oscillation was made even more central in the 2011 Metamodern Manifesto authored by Luke Turner, who raised the concept to the level of metaphysics, boldly opening with the declaration “We recognise oscillation to be the natural order of the world,” and closing with a call for readers to “go forth and oscillate!”
But “Oscillating” between belief and disbelief, between hope and despair, between cynicism and credulity is not an ideology of a philosophical framework. It’s bipolar disorder, or something more sinister. Consider the example of the oscillation between “empathy and apathy”. I care about you, until I don’t.
The words “obligation”, “duty”, and “responsibility” are tellingly absent from the essay and the manifesto. The word “fidelity” appears once in the Essay, in a quote from Isaiah Berlin. The word “negotiate” and derivations (negotiation, negotiations) appear eight times.
But not everything can be negotiated. The philosopher Simon Blackburn (another proto-metamodernist) has an analogy he uses to illustrate this point:
A high-powered ethics institute presented a panel of representatives from the great religions.
First the Buddhist spoke of the ways to achieve calm, the mastery of desire, the path of enlightenment. The panelists all said “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.”
Then the Hindu talked about the cycles of suffering and birth and rebirth, the teachings of Krishna and the way to release. They all said “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.”
And so on, until the Catholic priest spoke of the message of Jesus Christ, the promise of salvation and the way to life eternal, and they all said “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.” But at that, the priest thumped the table and shouted: “No! It’s not a question of whether it works for me! It’s the true word of the living God, and it’s true for everyone.”
And they all said: “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.”
When a cynic and an earnest person agree to disagree, the cynic has won. This is true for the same reason it’s true that if you have nine people at a table, and one of them is a Nazi, you have 10 Nazis, and for the same reason that if one of us is enslaved, none of us is free.
Consistency matters. Sincerity matters. Count me proudly among the table thumpers.
Slavery really is is bad. The holocaust was real. Vaccines work. Astrology doesn’t. Lines must be drawn, and defended. If that’s not in your metamodernism, then there’s no conversation to be had, and we will see you, ultimately, on the battlefield.
Oscillation, as an ideal, is an expression of the dying, mercurial, post-modern habits of mind that are now weaponised by institutions against rationalisation, reform, and progress.
For Metamoderns sincerity must come first, and must wield irony as a tool for its own purposes, and never the other way around.
In place of, or at least as well as, the “oscillating” metaphor, I offer three metaphors, none of them mine, all of them repurposed by me as expressions of metamodern thinking.
A Buddhist Koan tells the story of the Sixth Patriarch, Dajian Huineng (b. 638- d. 713), who, like Mohammad, was famously illiterate, but able to compose poetry that more literary minds found deeply profound, being asked for help interpreting the Maha Parinirvana Sutra. He explained he couldn’t read and asked the woman in question (a member of a religious order) to read it to him, so he could respond. She was shocked, and asked “You cannot even recognize the characters. How are you able then to understand the meaning?”. He replied:
“Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?”
And so here we have, in the 7th or 8th century, Chinese philosophy dealing with the question of the signified and the signifier, the words and their meanings, the map and the terrain, the menu and the meal, a full millennium before the post-modern revolution. This perspective, coming from outside the western tradition, offers a fresh perspective on the western exploration of these same issues.
With our globally informed metamodernism we may finally approach the wisdom of the illiterate patriarch. It’s a perspective that allows for truth and perspectival difference. So I can use three different metaphors, on top of those used by others, and they can all just be different fingers, pointing at the same moon – the real world phenomenon of social change, beyond text.
The modernists, at least the most naive of them, may be guilty of conflating the finger and the moon, and missing the difficulty. But the Postmodernists have it far worse, and retreat to the finger, denying there is any moon, any thing “outside the finger”, at all (as PerJacques Deridda’s statement that “there is nothing outside the text”). It’s fingers (in lieu of turtles) all the way down. Let’s all point our fingers at each other’s fingers, and so on.
So a [Socratic] refutation really has the character of, like, a showdown in a Western, right? This town is not big enough for the both of us. Except in the case of the Western, the claim in question is not ever literally true. Two people could fit into just about any room, let alone a whole town. But logical space, big as it is, is not big enough for both an idea and its negation. – Agnes Callard, in her lecture “Socratic Politics”
The Philosopher Agnes Callard’s book “Open Socrates”, is due to come out in two weeks. But she’s been talking about the ideas in it for at least three years. What caught my attention was her articulation of “the problem that the [socratic] method is the solution to”, which is that “we have to believe truths and… avoid believing falsehoods and a lot of people throughout history have thought those were somehow the same very same project” before pointing out, that to the contrary “not only they’re not the same, their incompatible”, and then argues for an “adversarial division of epistemic labor”.
Personally it seems to me that Callard is being a little bit too humble, in that she attributes what is a unique insight on her part, about the tension between the desire to believe the true, and the desire to not believe lies, which she struggles to attribute to Socrates and/or William James.
Elsewhere, as in the lecture I quoted above she goes into much more detail about the rules of the Socratic game as she sees it, and how they can be used to make us wiser.
Among these is a distinction between “refutation” and “debate”. Here I think she (and/or Socrates) screwed up and should have said “argument” in place of “debate”. given that her point is it’s not a competition between ideas but between a single idea and its own negation.
So in a proper socratic refutation, while there’s (at least) two people involved, only one of them is “a carrier of an idea”. This means there’s only ever one idea and truth or falsity being tested at a time, which simplifies the task and increases the chances of success. But that’s exactly how we conduct formalised debates, with a statement, the truth/validity of which is to be argued for by those on the “affirmative” side and against by those on the “negative” side. The negative team don’t have to argue that the opposite of the statement is true, but only that the statement in question is it.
Our criminal system, which she sees as a good example of a “division of epistemic labour”, the asymmetry is even greater. The defence wins if they can prevent the other side from proving beyond a reasonable doubt. Here, in practice, not just in the Socratic ideal, there is only one “carrier” of an idea – the prosecution. Everyone else, including the judge, can, if their case is weak enough, sit back, let them fail, and go home happy.
What this shows is that we are, in the applied ethics of the law, balancing these two desires – the desire to be right, and the desire not to be wrong, differently, in different situations. The government needs to meet a high threshold of evidence to deprive someone of their freedom. You only need a low threshold of evidence that you might be in danger in order to lock your door. IRL, the consequences determine the urgency value we give each of these imperatives.
Oscar Wilde said that a cynic knows the “cost of everything and the value of nothing”. The post-modern instantiation of this has been to miss the value of believing true things, being focussed to tightly on the cost of believing untrue things.
Each era gets the classicists it needs, I would argue, and this insight, wherever it truly originates, seems to me, is of the essence of the Metamodern; perspectival, but objectivist.
[Caption: Image of Kagan from Wikipedia Commons]
The final metaphor I shall offer in my attempt to capture the spirit of the metamodern, and my favourite of the three comes from the work of Donald Kagan, a Professor in Ancient History who teaches at Yale. The actual wording “the higher naivety”, and the core logic of the concept, are very close to the “informed naivety” mentioned by Vermeulen and van den Akker. But Kagan has a way better story, which he tells in the second lecture of his course, Introduction to Greek History.
If you walked into the leading universities in the world, they would probably be German, in the 1850s, and you went to the classics people, and you said ‘well you know Homer wrote about these places, Mycenae and other places, can you tell me where that was?’ and they would say ‘you silly fellow, that’s just stories, that’s mythology, that’s poetry. There never was an Agamemnon. There never was a Mycenae. There isn’t any such thing.’
And then, in 1870 a German businessman by the name of Heinrich Schliemann, who had not had the benefit of a university education, and didn’t know what a fool and how ignorant he was, believed Homer, and he said he wanted to look for Troy. so he went to where people thought Troy might be, and he began digging there, and before you know it he discovered a mound filled with cities, which he believed was Troy, and after the usual amount of scholarly debate, there seems to be no doubt that it was the city of Troy.
So having succeeded with that, well now that I’ve seen Troy how about Mycenae? off he went to the northeast Peloponnese, to the site where he thought it might be Mycenae, from Homer’s account, and I wouldn’t be telling you this story…
The professors at the universities Kagan is talking about have been too caught up by the impulse to not be deceived, and missed out on a valuable opportunity to believe something true.
In lecture three he picks up the thread:
There is this critical school that says ‘I won’t believe anything unless it is proven to me.’ at the other extreme there’s me, the most gullible historian imaginable. My principle is this; I believe anything written in ancient Latin or Greek, unless I can’t
He describes a three step process of development, through which a budding classicist might grow:
- “You start out, you don’t know anything. You’re naïve, believe everything.”
- “Next, you get a college education and you don’t believe anything”.
- “Then you reach the level of wisdom, the higher naivety, and you know what to believe even though you can’t prove it.”
The intellectual developments of modernism, postmodernism, and finally, triumphantly, Metamodernism, can be understood as a collective, civilisation wide version of the same process of maturation.
The embryo of universality, present in pre-modern society, grown through the childhood of modernism and the awkward teenage years of postmodernism, is ready to step into adulthood.
See how this essay came together in the research portal above. Follow Austin on Bluesky at @austingmackell.bsky.social and on threads at @austinmackell
