Meta, Crisis
What do we mean when we say we are going “meta”? Is “meta” a multiplication of reflexive thought—thinking about thinking? A theory of theories? Is it an example of what Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin understood as a moment when thought folds back upon itself? Does a turn towards meta thinking implicate a new intensification of planetary consciousness? In the past decade, the word “meta” has been widely adopted by intellectuals and popular culture alike, from the construction of meta-theories, which are theories of theories (such as Integral Theory, a grand synthesis of knowledge domains developed by Colorado philosopher Ken Wilber), to metamodernism (as a cultural-historical period we currently inhabit after postmodernism, see the 2010 essay “Notes on metamodernism” by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker), to developmental metamodernism (as a grand synthesis of evolving socio-political systems, see Hanzi Freinacht’s “Nordic” school), to even “metagaming” in major e-sports.
Vermeulen and van den Akker define metamodernism as the contemporaneous “structure of feeling” we find ourselves situated in: modernity has all but come undone, and with postmodernity waning, we reside in the anticipatory tensions of an emergent mentality, knowing we are “out” of former cultural sensibilities but not yet cohered in the nature of the new.[1] They go on to broadly define this situatedness: “with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism.”[2] The manifold crises of the 20th century culminated in the turn away from modernity’s positivistic bent for grand (totalizing) narratives and technological utopianism. Academics and philosophers instead turned towards (post) structuralism, (post) modern skepticism, and elucidated the emergent style of late 20th century capitalism’s mass cultural pastiche. But following the events of 9/11, neoliberalism’s 2007–8 crisis (as well as our current 2020 economic downturn following the COVID-19 pandemic), and as we confront the disruptive challenges of the Anthropocene, we no longer inhabit a mere (post) modern sensibility. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and The Last Man (1992) never occurred and, it seems, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009) did not condemn us to the stasis of history. Our position in the present is oscillatory, characterized by liminality. Vermeulen and van den Akker describe this “structure of feeling” as one that “oscillates between the modern and postmodern . . . enthusiasm and . . . irony . . . hope and melancholy, between naivete and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”[3] This structure of feeling, like a pendulum, swings back and forth in anticipation of a new cultural sensibility. But we need not merely bounce between modern and (post) modern; tomorrow is already latent in our cultural phenomenology.
The etymological definition of “meta” that Vermeulen and van den Akker adopt stems from metaxis, or the state of being in-between. They quote philosopher Eric Voegelin: “Existence has the structure of the In-Between . . . metaxy . . . it is the language of tension between life and death . . . time and timelessness . . . sense and senselessness.”[4] Arguably, it is this betweenness that comes to the forefront of any of these discussions about what new attitude that might be emerging. I suggest that meta, in the sense of the word as the feeling of being “between” worlds—specifically between the mentality and forms of sensemaking characteristic of (post) modernity and whatever prefigurative mentality many new schools of thought are attempting to articulate—is a more appropriate and even cosmopolitan definition than meta-theory, meta-thinking, or other references to the heights of cognitive complexity (though it does not preclude those forms). This structure of feeling also alludes to another significant quality that we can identify with this emergent mentality: that its foundation is more akin to a non-conceptual sense of the whole rather than a synthetic or intellectual one; more precisely, “meta-theory” and complex systems thinking are forms of conceptualization of this non-conceptual sense of wholeness. It is the meta-crisis that has underscored this turn. Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker, before attempting to give readers a definition of the word hyperobject (coined by philosopher Timothy Morton to describe complex, distributed realities across space and time such as the climate crisis), aptly describes its feeling as “a hidden sense of continuity . . . concrete details stand in contrast to the presence of an abstract whole—a whole that shapes life, but isn’t wholly visible from within it.”[5]
As we seek aids to help us navigate through this new attitude, we might look to pair our conceptual, map-making, meta-theorizing apparatus with the non-conceptual efficacy of aesthetic presencing. Aesthetics has the potential to become pedagogical in that it holds the promise of teaching us new modes of being-in-the-world. It also has the potential to become a catalyst for dramatic transformations of perception, as art finds the hidden voice, anchoring us in the poetics of tomorrow. Morton writes, “Art is thought from the future. Thought we cannot explicitly think at present . . . If we want thought different from the present, then thought must veer toward art.”[6]
Yet, theory itself acquires a new attitude. Vermeulen and van den Akker's attempt at a (non) methodology is significant here. They mention at the outset of their paper that they attempt to avoid any “predetermined system of thought,” and therefore they are “essayistic rather than scientific, rhizomatic rather than linear, open-ended instead of closed.”[7] There is something to be said for this style of thinking as indicative of a new mentality itself; in its comfort with betweenness, process, paradox, not knowing. Complexity philosopher Nora Bateson writes, “The knowing is only possible in the aesthetic of uncertainty . . . complexity demands a more engaged inquiry to explore the patterns that connect.”[8] Echoing Rothman’s “hidden continuity,” Bateson writes, “there is something holding all of this together, all of us together. There is an alive order that we are within and that is within us.”[9]
The “alive order” seems to be found in-between, when we make “linkings and meta-linkings.”[10] Maria Popova, creator of the popular literary website Brain Pickings, affirms this wholeness poetically: “Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making . . . facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth—not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once.”[11] The compulsion to know this new reality leads us to certain idolizations (we could also say oscillations), reaching back to retrieve, or indeed revive, certain habits of sensemaking modernity provided for us. Meditating on the possible forms of a future culture after modernity in her essay, “A Non-Euclidian View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” Ursula K. Le Guin writes that, “side trips and reversals are precisely what minds stuck in forward gear most need . . . knowledge is power, and we want to know what comes next, we want it all mapped out . . . I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways.”[12] This uncanny world of hyperobjects we have entered defies categorical and compulsory mapping. There really are “No Maps for these Territories.”
In The Listening Society (2017) Hanzi Freinacht writes that, “reconstruction must follow deconstruction,” and so developmental metamodernism’s project, in similar fashion to Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, is to “erect a new grand narrative by combining all known knowledge and wisdom, well aware that it is a never ending endeavor and that the only achievable synthesis is a proto-synthesis.”[13] Hanzi’s developmental metamodernism retrieves grand synthesis and systemization—albeit with many more caveats, warning labels, and complexities, taking elements from both modernist and (post) modernist thinking. Both Integral Theory and developmental metamodernism attempt to incorporate process, complexity, and (post) modern skepticism as a kind of “safety valve” to ward against modernity’s penchant for totalizing thought—Dostoyevsky’s “euclidian mind.”[14] Is this a sufficient response to the task of articulating the emergent ontology?
These schools of thought—dubbed the “emergentsia” by sociologist Brent Cooper as a constellation of different sensemaking approaches—present us with varied attempts to remix and retrieve (post) modernity and synthesize it, transcend and include, as (meta) modernity, hybridizing the collapsing ontology while anticipating a more processual, future one. Integral Theory, developmental metamodernism, Game B, the “memetic mediators” and other tribes are noble waymakers finding the latent paths not yet trodden into tomorrow.
But what of tomorrow?
What about the “thought we cannot explicitly think at present?”
If we wish to render transparent the true extent of the meta-crisis, to get a clear sense of how to navigate through it, then we need to thoroughly identify the foundations of the world coming undone. In order to navigate this space “between worlds,” we need a phenomenology of consciousness that can help us to trace, as it were, the underlying ontological “structures” of the old world, the constellations of sensemaking we have relied on up until now. We should do this so that we can better recognize what the new world might be like—to re-constellate ourselves around that emergent foundation.
Meta, Method: Jean Gebser’s Kulturphilosophie
The Swiss phenomenologist, poet, and integral philosopher Jean Gebser (1905–1973) provides us with just such a careful study of consciousness. He is best known in the English literary world for The Ever-Present Origin (1949), Ursprung und Gegenwart, adapted and re-introduced to a new generation of readers through Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory framework. But it is appropriate during this meta-crisis to trace our roots to some of the foundational thinkers of Integral Theory. Gebser provides a unique cultural philosophy (Kulturphilosophie), wherein he describes a “phenomenology of becoming consciousness” (Bewußtwerdungsphänomenologie) through a careful study of texts and cultural artifacts.[15] Gebser elucidates this “becoming of consciousness” as a series of unfolding time-space ontologies, mutations, leaping forth at pivotal junctures—often civilizational crises—of human history, radically restructuring self and world, space and time. These ontologies spring forth out of a primordial “integral” ontology (Ursprung), creatively realized and manifested in human cultures.
What began for Gebser as a study of contemporary transformations in Western culture through the new arts and sciences (such as Rilke’s poetry or the quantum mechanics of Werner Heisenberg) extended into a grand study of previous epochs—still earlier pre-rational “magic” and “mythic” structures manifesting as early as the Upper Paleolithic. Although this unfolding occurred in a certain sequence, it was not a strictly linear or developmental one but discontinuous, expressing a series of gains (individuation and self-reflexivity) and losses (disenchantment and alienation). The earlier, pre-rational ontologies had their own foundations in vitalistic (magic) and imagistic (mythic) emphases. Importantly for Gebser these previous epochs and their respective structures continued to influence the present culture, although in latent fashion.
Gebser understood that the civilizational crisis of the 20th century was a breakdown of modernity’s foundational structure of consciousness—the “mental” structure, or as he first called it in his earlier writing, the “perspectival world”—emphasizing a rational ontology. In this ontology, thinking is being, and being, thought (Parmenides, Descartes). The mental structure is characterized by its subject-object dualism (illustrated well through the discovery of perspective in Western Renaissance art), abstract spatial thinking (that “euclidian mind” again), and directed, or progressive time (clock-time). Coalescing over millennia and crystallizing during the rise of modernity, the mental structure reached its zenith. Efficient realization became the deficient “ratio.” Mastery over the spatial, measurable cosmos expanded into the splintering age of colonialism, the Protestant Reformation, the industrial revolution and the onrush of modernization, and (eventually) the hyper-fragmentation of atomized culture. Mental consciousness, Gebser asserted, with its three-dimensional limitation, its one-sided emphasis on step-by-step causal sequence was ill suited to overcome the civilizational crises of the 20th century, let alone the non-linear complexities of the ecological “meta-crisis” in the 21st.
The emergent epoch was neither a return to the latent pre-rational ontologies of the magic and mythic, nor was it a doubling down of the collapsing rational ontology of the mental (via new synthesis), but a sidereal leap into the arational ontology of the integral aperspectival consciousness. The emerging ontology manifested a new relationship to objects, space, and time—namely, a transparency between objects, the overcoming of dualistic thinking, and a more processual sense of time as an interrelated whole.
It is intriguing to note that, as early as 1936 in Rilke and Spain, Gebser appears to anticipate Vermeulen and van den Akker's metamodern emphasis on metaxis: “the notion of [perspectival] objects has lost its significance. . . . What is gaining importance now is the spiritual light reigning between objects—the tension and relation between them.”[16] The cultural phenomenology of the 20th century evidenced a dramatic restructuring from static, or otherwise mechanical, perspectival space to processual aperspectival time. Time irrupted in Western culture as a veritable flood: from Dada to the Surrealists to the Italian Futurists. Gebser befriended Picasso during his time with the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés circle in Paris, and would emphasize Picasso’s ability to “concretize the fourth dimension” through his painting: “we take in at one glance the whole man . . . simultaneously the front, the side, the back . . . [it is] the pure present, the quintessence of time that radiates [from Picasso’s paintings].”[17] If subject-object divisions were overcome through this new attitude, then time-as-divider (mental “ratio”) was also overcome through achieving a transparency of past, present, and future—showing up “at one glance” in the radiant present.
Pertinent to the crisis we are enduring in our century, Gebser refers to the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1782 as the decisive moment of inception for the “breaking forth of time.”[18] Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen has highlighted the importance of Watt’s steam engine as the beginning of the Anthropocene. Morton defines it thusly: “The end of the world has already occurred,” he says, “it was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust—namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.”[19] The neat cultural divisions between nature and civilization, human and non-human, were quietly, radically superseded two centuries ago. Andreas Malm sums up nicely how the meta-crisis of the Anthropocene is an irruption of aperspectival time over perspectival space: “Now more than ever, we inhabit the diachronic . . . the fossil fuels hundreds of millions of years old, the mass combustion developed over the past two centuries, the extreme weather this has already generated,” he continues, “already our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural responses, even our politics show signs of being sucked back by planetary forces into the hole of time, the present dissolving into past and future alike. Postmodernity seems to be visited by its antithesis: a condition of time and nature conquering ever more space.”[20]
Meta, Awareness
We embody this new ontology not through thinking (rational ontology) but through becoming present (Gebser admittedly nears a contemplative injunction, here). It is only through becoming present concretely, and not abstractly, that time and therefore space is rendered translucent—diaphanous—in its fullness, its wholeness; the “alive order.” As William Blake poetically annunciated: “I cast futurity away, and turn my back upon that void which I have made, for lo! futurity is in this moment.”[21] Gebser adds that this “clarity . . . is adequate, for it alone is free of brightness, twilight, and darkness, and is able to penetrate the whole where somnolent timelessness [magic], somnial temporicity [mythic], and mental conceptuality all become diaphanous. Anyone who perceives in this manner is free from time and can see through the whole in which he partakes, not as a part, but integrally.”[22] These statements allude to Gebser’s personal attainments during his lifetime, from a “lightning like” flash in the winter of 1931–32, to the writing of his Winter Poem (Wintergedicht) in 1944 during a single 45 minute session, to a remarkable satori experience in Sarnath, India in 1961: “There was the overcoming of the mental-rational . . . there was arational transparency and with it that intensity of consciousness that had integrated both the irrational and the rational in such a manner that both were respectively available, without the possibility of being overwhelmed by them . . . one could speak of it as the flashing-forth or sudden shining-through of the whole.”[23]
Meta, Concepts
If we turn from the personal to the cultural, these more rarified contemplative insights translate to manifestations of cultural phenomenology. Kulturphilosophie identifies key themes of the new mutation as they are made manifest in all cultural zones. Roughly, they are:
a) time being taken into account as quality rather than (dividing) quantity,
b) the superseding of (perspectival) dualisms, and
c) arational modes of perception being introduced in all disciplines.[24]
These themes could help us to navigate our present sensemaking challenges. What I suggest is we do not need more meta-abstracting, more meta-modernity—perspectival thinking ramped up to higher heights—but a discontinuous leap into new modes of participatory sensemaking and worlding. Modernity (whether post- or meta-) is rooted in the rational ontology of the mental consciousness. Perspectival thinking is useful here insofar as it is rendered transparent to time-as-quality, the “alive order,” and theory and thinking itself is retained here insofar as it approximates art (Wissenkunst).[25] Bateson echoes Morton’s “thought veering toward art” when she writes that “art may be the only way to truly describe living complexity . . . because living entities exist in interaction over time.”[26]
The word system, itself, raises certain problems, as Bateson suggests, “while useful in many cases, [system] does not suggest the contextual fields of simultaneous learning that are necessary for life.”[27] System invokes the mechanical stasis of spatial thinking—so what might invoke Rothman’s “hidden continuity of things?”
New concepts are needed. New words, rooted in the emergent ontology—however nascent and prefigurative it may be—are called for. Somehow, our knowledge-making, our ideas themselves must not only represent the alive order but, as in Bateson’s concept of symmathesy (entities and processes of entities formed over time in contextual and mutual learning), and vita (entities that form larger entities of contextual and mutual learning),[28] or Gebser’s synairesis (instances or expressions of the whole) and systasis (spatial extensities transparently coupled with temporal intensities), become instances of integrality—they become “process and effect.”[29]
“We . . . react like someone attempting to fly a supersonic aircraft in a room,” Gebser says, “the airplane exceeds and transcends our erstwhile spatial perception.”[30] Further, he adds, we must cultivate a “new form of statement.”[31] Like Gebser or Bateson, Vermeulen and van den Akker's call to be “essayistic rather than scientific, rhizomatic rather than linear, open-ended instead of closed,” reveals incipient attempts to cultivate such new forms of statement.
Meta, Futures
We live in a Janus-Faced age, an “interim world,” where we are bound to the “collapsing consciousness structure,” yet at the same time, as Gebser writes, we are “already indebted to the new yet only gradually emerging consciousness structure . . . as a consequence a certain confusion comes to the fore.”[32] This interim world is the time between worlds that we are burdened, and gifted to navigate. Fortunately, within this dissolution there is a solution.[33]
We can cease our rushing forward, our totalizing abstractions—for neither are sufficient to the task—and lean into the present, for the latent integral ontology in our cultural phenomenology is not exclusive to a particular theory or meta narrative but is a “felt sense” of the whole in which we already participate, and to which we can learn to become present with.
The existential extent of the meta-crisis (all is at stake) rouses this felt-sense in us (we participate in this all). This catalyzes an intensity of consciousness that demands simultaneity, Popova’s “being everything at once.” It has arguably become a planetary felt-sense. The “meta-linkings” that are required to be lived and to therefore aid us in outliving the meta-crisis.
This intensification is expressed well in Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). Performing a literary exegesis of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, McLuhan writes, “[Joyce] discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while being quite conscious.”[34] McLuhan elsewhere emphasizes the existential intensity of such a mode of planetary sensemaking: “It is the dispelling of all our unconscious aspects altogether in order to live with ourselves in such depth . . . it seems to be forced upon us . . . the need to become completely autonomous and aware of all the consequences of everything we’re doing before the consequences occur, is where we’re heading.” Gebser echoes that remark with, “we are shaped and determined not only by today and yesterday, but by tomorrow as well.”[35]
A clear path leading us to the emergent forms of sensemaking during this time of planetary meta-crisis may be through adopting a cultural phenomenology like the one Gebser presciently offered to us; in turn, this phenomenology of consciousness can help us to cohere the meta-linkings intimately present throughout the emergentsia, be they explorations of the meaning-crisis, practices of memetic mediation, or designing regenerative cultures. The “meta-tribes” then become transparent to us—diaphanous in their hidden continuity—cultivating the strengths of tomorrow’s ontology wherever it appears, while also clarifying where our efforts still rely too much on the forms of sensemaking that have outlived their time.
How can we listen to tomorrow if we have yet to clarify what belongs to yesterday? We don’t just need new maps that order the world in the same old ways. New vision is required. New ontologies reshape the map, and reshape us.
So we should listen to the future.
Whose voices do we hear? Le Guin writes, “which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent—the dead, or the unborn?”[xxxvi]
To listen, we must first be present.
[1] Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker (2010), “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2:1, doi: 10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Joshua Rothman. “The Weird Thoreau,” The New Yorker, retrieved online https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/weird-thoreau-jeff-vandermeer-southern-reach [last accessed 27 March, 2020]
[6] Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 1.
[7] Vermeulen & van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism.”
[8] Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2016), Kindle Edition, 499.
[9] Ibid., 150.
[10] Ibid., 123.
[11] Maria Popova, Figuring (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), 5.
[12] Thomas More, Ursula K. Le Guin, and China Miéville, Utopia (London: Verso, 2016), 189-193.
[13] Hanzi Freinacht, “5 Things That Make You Metamodern”, Metamoderna, retrieved online https://metamoderna.org/5-things-that-make-you-metamodern/ [last accessed 27, March 2020]
[14] Le Guin, Utopia, 173.
[15] Aaron Cheak, “From Poetry to Kulturphilosophie: A Philosophical Biography of Jean Gebser with Critical Translations,” retrieved online http://www.aaroncheak.com/from-poetry-to-kulturphilosophie [Last accessed 27 March 2020]
[16] Georg Feuerstein, Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser, an Introduction and Critique (Lower Lake: Integral Publishing, 1987), 128.
[17] Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 2425.
[18] Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, 301.
[19] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 7.
[20] Andreas Malm, The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (Brooklyn: Verso, 2018), 11.
[21] Le Guin, Utopia, 176.
[22] Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, 292.
[23] Cheak, “From Poetry to Kulturphilosophie.”
[24] Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, 380.
[25] William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 4.
[26] Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, 2786.
[27] Ibid., 2596.
[28] Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, 2620.
[29] Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, 310.
[30] Ibid., 291.
[31] Ibid., 309.
[32] Ibid., 280.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 75.
[35] Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, 7.
[36] Ursula K. Le Guin. Always Coming Home, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 7.
References
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Mywebcowtube. “Marshall McLuhan 1965–The Future of Man in the Electric Age.” YouTube video, 16:11. June 2, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pcoC2l7ToI&feature=youtu.be&t=910
Popova, Maria. Figuring. New York: Pantheon Books, 2020.
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