Metamodernism is a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism. One definition characterizes metamodernism as mediations between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. Another similar term is post-postmodernism.
History of the term
The term metamodernist
appeared as early as 1975, when Mas'ud Zavarzadeh isolatedly used it to
describe a cluster of aesthetics or attitudes which had been emerging
in American literary narratives since the mid-1950s.
In 1995, Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon stated that a new label for what was coming after postmodernism was necessary.
In 1999, Moyo Okediji
reused the term metamodern about contemporary African-American art,
defining it as an "extension of and challenge to modernism and
postmodernism."
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 2007, Alexandra Dumitrescu described metamodernism as partly a
concurrence with, partly an emergence from, and partly a reaction to,
postmodernism, "champion[ing] the idea that only in their
interconnection and continuous revision lie the possibility of grasping
the nature of contemporary cultural and literary phenomena."
Vermeulen and van den Akker
In 2010, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker proposed metamodernism as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate. In their essay Notes on Metamodernism,
they asserted that the 2000s were characterized by the return of
typically modern positions that did not forfeit the postmodern mindsets
of the 1980s and 1990s, resembling a "neo-romanticism" represented
especially in the work of young visual artists. 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pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition
that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.
The prefix "meta-" here referred not to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them.
Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of
feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a
pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles". According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews,
this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy,
sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political,
and technology and techne." 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."
Vermeulen asserts 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." 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.
The Metamodernist Manifesto
In 2011, Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto
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.
Academic Engagement
At
the "Rethinking the Human in Technology-Driven Architecture" conference
in 2011, architectural theorist Stylianos Giamarelos explored "The
Essential Tension within the Metamodern Condition" through a
juxtaposition and philosophical contextualisation of the work of Zaha Hadid & Patrick Schumacher, Kas Oosterhuis & Ilona Lenard, and MVRDV.
The 2013 issue of the American Book Review was dedicated to metamodernism and 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",
in discussing twenty-first century writers such as Tom McCarthy.
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 McDowell, 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.
In a 2017 essay on metamodernism in literary fiction, Fabio Vittorini
stated that since the late 1980s, mimetic 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."
Linda C. Ceriello has proposed a theorization of metamodernism
for the field of religious studies. Beginning in 2013, Ceriello has
applied metamodern theory historiologically to connect 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 consonant
with the metamodern cultural sensibilities identified by scholars such
as Vermeulen and van den Akker that has given rise to a distinct
metamodern soteriology.
She proposes that the reflexivity and construction of liminal spaces
specific to metamodern epistemic shift (as distinct from postmodernism)
be considered analogous to the mystical encounter itself, mirroring
contemporary individuals’ felt experiences: "of being in-between, and of
being both secular and spiritual.”
Other scholars of religion who have published on metamodern theory include Michel Clasquin-Johnson, Brendan Graham Dempsey and Tom deBruin.
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. Dember, furthermore, proposes "the protection of interiority” as a central element for all metamodern cultural artifacts.
Cultural acceptance
In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York acknowledged the influence of Vermeulen and van den Akker when it 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, billed as the first
exhibition in Europe to be staged around the concept of metamodernism. 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 his formulation of the "quirky" cinematic sensibility, film scholar James MacDowell 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".
In his fourth novel, More Deaths than One, published in 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 More Deaths than One,
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 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."
In 2017, Daniel Görtz and Emil Friis, writing under the pen name Hanzi Freinacht published The Listening Society
in which they construe metamodernism as an active intellectual, social,
and political movement emerging to meet crises that potentially arise
from globalization. In September 2018, Görtz conducted a TEDx
talk in Berlin outlining the development of "value memes" claiming that
the metamodern value meme constitutes the highest form yet.
Brent Cooper of The Abs-Tract Organization focuses on
sociological meta-theory, specifically abstraction as a cognitive
process and social process of complexification, which he relates to an
emerging metamodernism. Cooper wrote a longform review and analysis of
Vermeulen, van den Akker, and Gibbons' 2017 book Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism,
jokingly dubbing their body of thought "The Dutch School" of
metamodernism, as his way of differentiating cultural, literary, and
other academic theories of metamodernism from those that utilize the
concept as a social/political activist intervention. Cooper's article The Abstraction of Benjamin Bratton attempts to identify Bratton
as an implicit metamodern thinker, whose work highlights the
intersection of abstract processes and the "accidental" creation of a
global governance matrix which he calls "The Stack".
In 2018, metamodern theory culture manifested in podcasts such as Emerge,
by Daniel Thorson, featuring thinkers using and developing
metamodernism such as Hanzi Freinacht, Bonnitta Roy, Ronan Harrington,
James Surwillo, and Zak Stein. Dr. Stein also appeared on Future Fossils with Michael Garfield discussing his background in Integral Theory
and how that leads into a new metamodern metaphysics. On November 16,
2018, the topic of political metamodernism was broached on Revolutionary Left Radio
hosted by Breht Ó Séaghdha, interviewing Austin Hayden Smidt, where
they discuss the paradigmatic backdrops of modernity and postmodernity,
and the need for leftist reform and unification which they suggest
political metamodernism could guide. Douglas Lain of Zero Books has also explored the topic of political metamodernism on his podcast with Luke Turner.
