In 2010, cultural studies scholar Timotheus Vermeulen and professor of philosophy Robin van den Akker published an essay called “Notes on Metamodernism” in the Journal of Aesthetics & Culture. Here they acknowledged that postmodernism, as a cultural epoch, was largely being replaced by a new sensibility, this transition having begun approximately ten years earlier, around the turn of the millennium. They described the new sensibility—dubbed “metamodernism”—as one that oscillates between aspects of modernism and postmodernism, with artworks and other cultural artifacts swinging between modern/postmodern polarities such as: enthusiasm/irony, hope/melancholy, naïveté/knowingness, empathy/apathy, unity/plurality, totality/fragmentation, and purity/ambiguity. Beginning with that essay, then continuing on an ongoing web platform which they also named Notes on Metamodernism, and joined by many other researchers writing on various web platforms and in various scholarly outlets, Vermeulen and van den Akker launched a cultural mapping project that identified and explored diverse examples of metamodernism.
A full list of cultural products that this wide community of researchers—which includes myself—has examined (and/or are ripe for examination!) would take up too much space for the present venue. However, before I launch into a more theoretical explanation of metamodernism, I’ll mention a few examples right off the bat, in order to provide a more palpable sense of the aesthetic I’m talking about. In film: Rushmore (and Wes Anderson’s work in general), The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Jo Jo Rabbit. In television: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, BoJack Horseman, and Atlanta. In literary fiction: Life of Pi (Yann Martel), Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold), A Visit From the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan), and The Idiot (Elif Batuman). In popular music: Sufjan Stevens, Jenny Lewis, and Childish Gambino.
The items in the list above—again, only a smattering of metamodern cultural products that have caught the public’s attention over the last two decades—are thematically diverse. All, however, evoke a similarly complicated feeling: a braiding of playful irony or experimentation with an unabashed delight in the intricacies of being human. Indeed, a feeling generated—at least in part—by these products’ oscillation across the modern/postmodern polarities that Vermeulen and van den Akker noted as a common pattern in early 21st-century culture.
Significantly, the conceptualization of metamodernism—its identification as a trend—gave a name to a sensibility that many had observed separately and now could treat as a thing. While the artists creating metamodern cultural products likely did not self-consciously identify with the term, theorists and critics now had a language with which to discuss the emerging aesthetic sense. A search in Google Scholar shows that academic references to the term “metamodernism” have increased 14-fold from 2010 (the year the “Notes on . . .” essay was published) to 2018. One can now find dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers, and indeed entire conferences devoted to various scholarly disciplines’ exploration of metamodernism as an aesthetic or cultural turn. Meanwhile, outside the university, YouTube intellectuals have made use of the concept in video essays about contemporary film and television. In 2012, Sturgill Simpson famously released Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. Oasis Texas Brewery introduced their Metamodern Session IPA shortly thereafter. Fine art exhibits and fashion shows have put “metamodern” in their titles. Journalists in publications such as the New York Times have invoked this concept of metamodernism in their reporting on contemporary social trends.
If you are a reader of The Side View, and/or a member of its adjacent communities (such as the “sensemaking” community, for example), it’s likely that you’ve come across the term “metamodernism” and you may even have employed it yourself in discussions with your intellectual partners. In that case, you have likely seen it used with a meaning somewhat different from that which I’ve described above. Perhaps you’ve seen metamodernism used to signify a sort of mash-up of Hegelian synthesis, advanced cognitive/consciousness development, a “Third Way” in politics that attempts to transcend the normal right/left axis, and/or an aspirational stage of societal evolution.
Within the Integral community, you may have seen metamodernism treated as an approximate synonym for their “Yellow Value Meme,” a stage of consciousness that is about cognitive flexibility and “transcending and including” earlier stages. Or perhaps you’ve read Daniel Görtz and Emil Friis, who, writing together under the joint pen name “Hanzi Freinacht,” began in 2015 proposing a particular program for societal change and dubbed it “metamodernism.” Their doctrine calls for a recognition in our very politics and societal structure of the importance of adult cognitive development. Similar to the Integralists, they advocate for a multi-perspectival approach to political, intellectual and “tribal” conflict. While much of that may indeed contribute powerfully to collective efforts to navigate humanity’s current dilemmas, I would argue none of it has much to do with metamodernism as the “Notes on . . . ” authors originally theorized it.
My purpose here is not to fuel a turf war, but to make clear the shared terrain as well as the problems inherent in sharing of the term; and even more trenchantly, to open the discussion of what the foundational concept of metamodernism (i.e., the academic one as spread most vigorously by the efforts of Vermeulen and van den Akker) offers The Side View’s readership that is not duplicated or very thoroughly engaged by the secondary usage as re-configured by the “Hanzi” authors, the Integralists, and the like.
In the remainder of this essay, I will attempt to convey with more detailed examples how the concept of metamodernism has been deployed in the academic/cultural discourse, then critique some prescriptive notions found in the sensemaking construal of metamodernism and that I see as incompatible with the descriptive cultural sense. Finally, I will suggest some areas where I feel the cultural and sensemaking discourses on metamodernism can benefit from engaging each other. First, however, I will provide a brief explanation of how I employ some terms and concepts in this paper.
Before Metamodernism
Probably most writers who employ the term do share an understanding of metamodernism as some sort of successor to postmodernism, itself a reaction to modernism, which was a departure from tradition. For clarity’s sake, I offer nutshell definitions of those terms, as I use them.
Tradition
Culture devoted to preserving the knowledge of the past. Traditional artists and creators strive to excel based on established standards. To keep things simple, I’m lumping in everything from cave paintings to the Dutch Masters, from folk songs to Brahms. Even though, yes, there was progress and change in high art, change was not the point of it. Progress happened incrementally and organically, simply due to individuals attempting to make their mark, while mastering time-tested techniques and honoring existing norms.
Modernism
Culture enthusiastic about invention, liberation from the past, and the discovery of objective, underlying, universal structural truths to replace blindly accepted “just so” stories. In North America and Europe, historians use modernism to name a period beginning in the late 19th century and ending somewhere in the middle of the 20th. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, composers such as Arthur Schoenberg and novelists such as Virginia Woolf all approached their forms in radically new ways. Philosophers and scientists such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Einstein all transformed their disciplines by looking behind facades that had been accepted for centuries. Ambitious, totalizing ideologies such as capitalism, fascism, and communism competed for world domination. Society in general was enthusiastic about progress made possible by technology.
Postmodernism
Culture motivated by a suspicion of the kinds of universalisms and the faith in progress that were championed under modernism. Postmodern cultural products draw attention to context, margins/marginality, paradox, and the limitations of rationality and technology. In North America and Europe, postmodernism developed after World War II and many consider it to have peaked in the eighties and nineties. Postmodern artists include Andy Warhol and Alex Grey. Postmodern music includes John Cage and punk rock in general. Postmodern novelists include Thomas Pynchon and Brett Easton Ellis. Postmodern critics or philosophers include Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. Society in general was thrilled by irony, snark, self-referentiality, and put a high priority on seeing around edges and in gray areas and recognizing context.
Various terms have been used to name the kind of thing that these periods/sensibilities are—zeitgeist, paradigm, structure of feeling—but my preference is episteme. The term was coined by Michel Foucault, and is derived from epistemology, suggesting that the basis of each episteme is a characteristic attitude towards knowing/knowledge/how we know. (Foucault, in turn, seems to have developed his concept of the episteme in part building upon Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the “epistemic break.”)
So, similar to how postmodernism arose when people became dissatisfied with modernism’s certainty, metamodernism arose when people became exhausted by postmodernism’s skepticism. But, as they say, you can’t go home again. Metamodern cultural products don’t simply signal a return to the uncomplicated certainty of the modernist episteme. They use various methods to protect interiority from postmodern irony. Oscillation is one. In an article I have shared on Medium, I account for oscillation as merely one of eleven methods that I observe are used in metamodern artifacts in visual art, film, television, music, literature, and so on. Often these artifacts repurpose common PoMo methods, providing a spoonful of irony or reflexivity to help a potentially jaded audience swallow a dose of sincere meaning.
It’s important to note that in this epistemic model of understanding the drivers of culture, the presumption is not that everything is now metamodern. Instead, the presumption is that each new episteme builds on and refines the ones that came before it, and the older ones don’t go away. We’ll always have plenty of tradition, found in the basic ways we live, day to day; plenty of modernism in our technology and in the bureaucracies needed to sustain our complex society; plenty of postmodernism to contextualize and see through the cracks of things; and now we see more and more metamodern cultural products that work like ninjas to restore a place for interiority after modernism and postmodernism have done their work.
Interiority
I employ the term interiority often in this essay; it is a crucial part of my own theorization of metamodernism, which is influenced by Raoul Eshelman, a literary theorist whose work is adjacent to Vermeulen and van den Akker’s. In his book Performatism, Eshelman proposes a theory about the art emerging in the wake of postmodernism. For him, post-postmodern—or performatist art—is characterized by a reclamation of interiority (or a sense of “the subject”) from the ravages of postmodern irony and relativism. In my own work, borrowing from Eshelman, I extend Vermeulen and van den Akker’s notion of metamodernism by proposing that the modernist-postmodern oscillation they identify is motivated by a need to safeguard the individual’s interior experience against postmodern ironic relativism, modernist reductionism, and also from the ontological inertia of pre-modern tradition.
Metamodernism as a Cultural Sensibility
Vermeulen and van den Akker were not the first to deploy the term “metamodernism.” Several sources provide a means of tracking the genealogy of the term, including Vermeulen and van den Akker’s 2015 article “Misunderstandings and Clarifications,” Linda Ceriello’s 2018 dissertation on metamodern mysticism, and Brent Cooper’s Missing Metamodernism series. Within this combined genealogy, eight of nine original sources use the term to name an existing trend an author has observed in art, literature, criticism/hermeneutics, or religious practices. That is, all construe metamodernism descriptively, as Vermeulen and van den Akker do. One exception is Albert Borgman, who does briefly propose a vision for an ideal future, suggesting metamodernism prescriptively, as an alternative to a less desirable future he names hypermodernism. Importantly, none of these independent coinages—including Borgman’s—has launched a significant discourse like Vermeulen and van den Akker’s did. It seems reasonable, therefore, to largely treat Vermeulen and van den Akker as the initiators of the contemporary metamodernism discourse.
In the academic and cultural criticism world, discussions of metamodernism serve to make observations about culture as it already exists and is currently developing. Just in the same way that the theorists of modernism and postmodernism did for each. Vermeulen and van den Akker have attempted to clarify that, as they have construed it, metamodernism is not a philosophy, self-help program, advanced cognitive stage, or political movement. It’s not aspirational. It is, using their term, a “structure of feeling” that anyone can observe, particularly in the leading edges of the arts, but also in popular cultural artifacts.
Why is this important? When a theorist claims that the work of a particular musical artist, say, Sufjan Stevens, is metamodern, the implication is not that his music promotes a particular conceptual agenda. Rather, the theorist is making note of the way the songwriter braids whimsy with spiritual depth or combines epically bombastic set design with vulnerably tiny musical moments in order to create a vehicle to safely express authentic interiority in the face of his audience’s inherited postmodern cynicism. Or, in an example from this year, metamodernism can be seen in the way Grammy-winning singer Billie Eilish’s songs and videos are unabashedly and transgressively sexual, while exuding an almost reverential respect for the psychological intricacies of her songs’ characters. The singer, all the while, comes across as a very down-to-earth “goth next door” in her appearances on talk shows.
On television, BoJack Horseman has been cited as an exemplar of metamodernism. It’s an adult cartoon that combines a lot of postmodern ironic references to recognizable Hollywood figures, goofy plots, and outlandish animation tricks with a very heartfelt and serious exploration of depression, addiction, and the ethics of dealing with those and other very human problems. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has been identified as an early signaling of the new aesthetic sensibility in literature. The author, Dave Eggers, plays postmodern tricks such as blurring the difference between memoir and fiction and sneaking important text into the front-matter sections of the book, but within this disruptive container grapples with serious issues like coming of age, death, the relationship between brothers, and creative self invention. In other words, what is going on within the story is not downplayed as insignificant, not ironicized away.
Many examples of metamodern cultural artifacts are explored and catalogued at the website whatismetamodern.com, which I co-author with my writing partner, Linda Ceriello. It’s worth noting that we cover not only areas within the arts, such as music, film, literature, and the visual arts, but also cultural phenomena in politics, religion, language, humor, marketing, and comedy. Again, it should be stressed that we’re not identifying a message or ideology in these areas and categorizing them as metamodern, but rather a manner of expression, or an underlying attitude or sensibility. A vibe, one could say.
In the realm of contemporary politics, for example, we have identified the progressive U.S. Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s engagement style as metamodern because of the way she playfully disrupts the conventional expectations about how a member of Congress should communicate, while seeming to maintain a commitment to compassionate, authentic connection to all people. It’s not about the particular positions she advocates for or supports legislatively. At the same time, theorists have shown how the alt-right has some aspects that can be traced to metamodern sentiments. This new breed of conservatives appeals to some disaffected young people by wrapping a fascist/racist/nationalist agenda in the clothing of irony, playful self-reference and meta-reflexivity, connecting with their followers’ interiority in a way that both the pre-metamodern left and the conventional right have failed to do, as I will discuss next.
He Will Not Divide Us, The Alt Right, and Paper Boy
For people who are appalled by the increasing popularity of the alt-right, understanding the nature of their attraction is of vital importance, and a theorization of the metamodern sensibility is a useful tool for doing so. It seems clear that a significant motivational factor for the alt-right, beyond their ultra-nationalist political doctrine, is that they don’t find a home for their sense of interiority in the mainstream left or the conventional right.
An illustration of this claim occurred in 2017 at He Will Not Divide Us, a conceptual art installation created in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the United States presidency by the conceptual art team LaBeouf, Rönkkö, and Turner, wherein participants were invited to congregate in a plaza outside New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, and to say anything they chose into a video camera that was broadcasting 24/7 to the web. A banner with the statement “He Will Not Divide Us” was posted on the wall, above the camera. It rolled out rather like a reality show, available to all. The installation brought a fascinating number of social forces together. My arm-chair anthropological reading follows.
I observed the project over a number of days, during which I noted players from a variety of political communities, including an active group of white nationalists and pro-Trump 4chan trolls, who seemed to enjoy the opportunity to mock and antagonize the left-wing, anti-Trump participants. Their contempt was especially focused on one exceptionally charismatic left-wing regular, a whimsically dressed African-American musician who called himself Paper Boy. One charming moment that provided a break from the often hostile tone that had to some degree hijacked the project came when some of the alt-right trolls spotted Paper Boy carrying an old-school video-gaming device. For ten or fifteen minutes everything shifted: Technical curiosity about the device led to friendly passionate gamer-geek discussions that truly did seem to transcend the divide, and it seemed clear that for a brief moment, the trolls saw Paper Boy’s humanity.
While I continued to be repulsed by the ideologies on display, I began to feel I understood something about the alt-right trolls’ motivation as I watched all of this transpire online: an answer to the question “Why are they so passionately bratty?”
My take, based on a cursory amount of research into the alt-right and 4chan: The alt-right “hooligans” see the worlds of both lefty moralism and paleo-conservative formality as no fun. Perhaps because they are limited in their capacity to project interiority into people who are racially or ideologically different from themselves, they feel a need to rebel—if you will—against what seems like a drabness being imposed on them by these “dull” others. (A common trope among alt-right/4chan/gamer-types is to refer to liberals and others they don’t like as “non-player characters”—meaning stock characters that are operated by a game’s algorithms, as opposed to characters with a real human behind them.) When the alt-right hooligans discovered that Paper Boy was a gamer, suddenly they could envision him as a person with an inner world. At least for a short time, they were able to drop their loutish, wisecracking, antagonistic personae and be friendly towards Paper Boy. I would argue that, while their behavior is frequently vile and degrading towards others, from their own vantage, they are engaging in ironic play disrupting a hegemonic culture that leaves no room for their inner world. “Metamodern” helps describe the cultural-behavioral reaction observed here. A descriptive, epistemic theorization of metamodernism allows for exemplars not favored by the theorist. Put plainly, if “metamodernism” is used to refer only to content you agree with and like, it’s probably not metamodernism.
What Metamodernism Isn’t
Having offered a rendition of the way the scholarly and cultural criticism world employs “metamodernism,” allow me to note some construals of the concept that I believe diverge from the foundational usage.
Multi-perspectivalism: Perhaps because Vermeulen and van den Akker talked about oscillation between modern/postmodern polarities, some people came away thinking metamodernism is about the holding together of any pair of opposing positions. It’s not. A penchant for appreciating multiple perspectives is a contribution from the postmodern period. What’s metamodern is oscillation between multi-perspectival relativism and enthusiastic conviction. What’s metamodern are aesthetic mannerisms that protect interiority against the self-doubt that potentially comes with multi-perspectivalism.
An uncomplicated embrace of positivity: The postmodern sensibility often made it embarrassing to express positive emotions, such as hope, enthusiasm, glee, and so on. However, metamodernism is not a simple anti-postmodern return to positivity. It’s a sensibility that pays its dues to postmodern cynicism while making room for unabashed self-expression that can be emotionally positive or negative.
A new grand narrative: Jean-François Lyotard famously explained postmodernism as holding a suspicion towards universally true “grand narratives.” Metamodernism creates a space that allows for belief in grand narratives, but does not require belief in any particular grand narrative. Or indeed any grand narrative at all. In any case, metamodernism, itself, is not a grand narrative.
A justification for lying or gaslighting: Metamodern artworks often involve games, or made-up worlds, or persona-play. However, generally the reader/audience is in on all of this, and the purpose remains a sincere expression of the artist’s and/or the audience’s interiority. Saying something potentially offensive and then claiming “I was just kidding!” is not metamodern. Nor is lying and then claiming it was “for art” only after being caught. Nor, in my opinion, is posing as a character to express controversial views while the author’s true identity remains largely hidden.
The name of the community of people talking about it: The people who write about metamodernism as a cultural sensibility do not generally see themselves, collectively, as what comprises metamodernism; they do not label themselves “the metamodernists.” Rather, metamodernism is an aggregation of cultural products existing in the world, at this stage created quite often by people who have never heard the term.
Connections Between Cultural Metamodernism and Sensemaking
I’ve attempted to show how metamodernism as a term originally construed in the study of art, literature, and culture is a conceptual construct distinct from how it has been adopted and repurposed by many in the sensemaking community. So, other than just being an opportunity for me to act as a linguistic scold, what value is there to sensemakers in the information I’m providing? I’d like to think that the notion of metamodernism I’ve presented could be a useful part of the toolkit of those attempting to make sense of the totality of what is emerging. After all, my claim is that metamodernism describes and explains shifts in culture that began in the last twenty years and continue in the present. Perhaps, also, looking at culture this way may help direct some of the sensemaking focus towards the more embodied aspects of human experience—about how people feel—as distinct from more rarefied forms such as meditation, advanced cognitive development, and transformative social structures. And, while I feel there is a good deal of misconstrual and sloppy repurposing that threatens to obfuscate the term for all concerned, I do see overlap between metamodernism and several evolving areas of thought experimentation that I understand to be under the sensemaking umbrella. For example:
The Meaning Crisis
John Vervaeke has produced a prodigious series of video lectures called, collectively, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. After watching a portion of its 50+ hours, I infer that the project’s purpose is to trace the centrality of meaning in the human psyche, all the way from our paleolithic origins, through all historic periods and into the contemporary one. The present moment, Vervaeke asserts, confronts us with a crisis in which our connection to meaning has been severed by our displacement of traditional institutions and narratives.
Metamodern cultural products can be understood to work against the erosion of meaning that is a side-effect of modernist reductionism and postmodern ironic distance. I believe Vervaeke’s program for restoring meaning falls largely in the realm of cognitive science, and likely does not employ the kinds of artistic tricks that have been identified by researchers in cultural metamodernism, but the concerns appear to overlap.
Game B
As I understand it, Game B is a proposed social alternative to what its proponents call “Game A.” In their model, Game A is the currently prevalent mode, based on competition, zero-sum games, and power-based interactions. Game B, originally proposed by Jim Rutt and Jordan Hall, but increasingly involving a widening crew of innovators, is a “non-rivalrous” mode, characterized by cooperation, assumptions of good-faith, and the creative use of new technology to allow society to function free from Game A premises.
The actual ideas of Game B seem more modernist (universalism, uncomplicated faith in invention) than metamodern, but the sensibility surrounding Game B has a playful aspect to it that leads me to see it as a metamodern update of earlier 1960s-era utopian projects. First of all: it’s a game! But a game with a very important (possibly planet-saving) purpose. And a sort of humility in the name of the game. It’s Game B. As in, this was not the original plan, it’s the back-up plan, albeit a likely improvement. And from observing the discussions surrounding it, there is a palpable sense among the participants that the name itself operates as a strange attractor. Or as a kind of stone soup that the cooks have faith will eventually become thick with veggies and proteins. This faith in a game meant to save the world appears to be an example of the metamodern sensibility.
Memetic Mediation
Peter Limberg, Conor Barnes, Jason Snyder, and others have suggested that our society needs memetic mediators, people who specialize in bridging the gaps between ideologically divided “tribes.” I feel that metamodernism and memetic mediation are connected, but not in the way the memetic mediation advocates would probably expect. As I’ve mentioned, multi-perspectivalism, the capacity to hold more than one viewpoint, is not inherently metamodern, per se; it’s more a postmodern contribution. However, a metamodern interest in the interiority of whoever-is-sitting-across-the-table-from-you can help build bridges between ideologically-opposed individuals.
Here’s an anecdote from my own experience: Several years ago, I (a spiritually-open secular person) had the opportunity to meet regularly with a group of Evangelical Christians. The shared hope was to understand each other better. When we respectfully pitted our well-argued beliefs against each other’s, we made little progress. It was when we began asking each other what it was like to hold those beliefs, and what our lives were like as people belonging to communities that collectively held those beliefs, that we really began to connect with each other as humans, rather than as “Christians” and “Heathens” (our playful name for our group). The result was what are now deep friendships. Metamodernism is not “I can simultaneously be pro-abortion and anti-abortion” (multi-perspectivalism) nor is it “There is a higher truth that encompasses the two imperfect belief systems of pro- and anti-abortion” (transcend and include), rather it’s “I’m certain of some beliefs that flatly contradict my friend’s belief, and yet I enjoy their presence and am fascinated by who they are.”
Conclusion
A final point needs to be made about the issues in having differing conceptions of the same term in active use. Reasonable arguments can be made, from the perspective of the proponents of each of the construals of metamodernism I’ve written about here, that theirs is the broader one and it can subsume the other. Those who construe metamodernism as a prescriptive project may claim that they have liberated the concept from a restricted, ivory-tower box so that it can be applied helpfully in a world that does need a lot of help. The cultural theorists who construe metamodernism descriptively may see the project of the prescriptivists as merely one specific example—if it even is one—of the broad sensibility that they observe in many different areas of culture. In the end, it may turn out that an entirely different notion arises that can include both. Rather than push immediately for such a synthesis—being the descriptivist that I am—I would recommend that we let the distinct concepts grow and find their way towards or away from each other as they will. I suspect the history of all of this has only just begun.