Metamodernism

Metamodernism refers to a variety of related discourses that aim to describe contemporary phenomena beyond the constraints of postmodernism. Both/and mediations between modernism and postmodernism are defining features of the topic; however, their applications can differ substantially. Some scholars view it predominately as a "cultural sensibility" and way to understand specific qualities in art while others view metamodernism in relation to philosophy or their respective fields.

Metamodernists believe that the optimism associated with modernism is still compatible with the frequently-dominant postmodern critiques of human limitations. It is one of a number of attempts to describe post-postmodernism.

Early usages
The term "metamodern" appeared as early as 1975, when scholar Mas'ud Zavarzadeh used it to describe a cluster of literary techniques which had been emerging in American literary narratives since the mid-1950s. In 1999, Moyo Okediji utilized the term "metamodern", applying it to contemporary African-American art that issues 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 contributed to the theorization of post-postmodernism, using the term metamodernism. In their essay "Notes on Metamodernism," they asserted that the 2000s were characterized by the return of typically modern positions that nevertheless did not forfeit the postmodern mindsets of the 1980s and 1990s. According to them, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism" characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution. They asserted that "the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a sensibility that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling through "ironic sincerity." The prefix "meta-" referred not so much to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between (meta) opposite poles as well as beyond (meta) them. Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging... between two opposite poles". However, others have questioned whether "oscillation" captures the intended meaning; Jones suggests that "superposition" more accurately conveys their intended meaning.

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

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

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

Vermeulen asserted that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophy—which implies a closed ontology—as it is an attempt at a vernacular, or...a sort of open source document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political economy as much as in the arts."

Metamodernism in the arts
Since Vermeulen and van den Akker's 2010 essay, there has been a growing contribution to metamodern aesthetic analysis amongst academics, critics, and artists.

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

A number of exhibitions devoted to metamodernism have been staged. In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York staged an exhibition entitled No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism, featuring the work of Pilvi Takala, Guido van der Werve, Benjamin Martin, and Mariechen Danz. In March 2012, Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin curated Discussing Metamodernism in collaboration with Vermeulen and van den Akker. The show featured the work of Ulf Aminde, Yael Bartana, Monica Bonvicini, Mariechen Danz, Annabel Daou, Paula Doepfner, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Andy Holden, Sejla Kameric, Ragnar Kjartansson, Kris Lemsalu, Issa Sant, David Thorpe, Angelika J. Trojnarski, Luke Turner, and Nastja Säde Rönkkö. In 2013 Andy Holden staged the exhibition ''Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity 1999-2003: Towards a Unified Theory of M!MS''. The exhibition examined the manifesto he had written in 2003 that called for art to be simultaneously ironic and sincere. The exhibition told the history of the writing of the manifesto and subsequently M!MS it now often cited as a precursor to Metamodernism as a ‘structure of feeling’.

According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, metamodern 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."

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

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

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

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

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

In 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 it, Forrester wrote that "[m]etamodernist theory proposes to fill the postmodernist void with a rough synthesis of the two predecessors from the twentieth century [modernism and post-modernism]. In the new paradigm, metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology all have their places, but the overriding concern is with yet another division of philosophy – ethics. It's okay to search for values and meaning, even as we continue to be skeptical."

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

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

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

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

A strand of metamodernism can be identified in Sci-Fi, taking the place of Postmodernism. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is seen by Pappis as an example, "in that it explores an oscillation in and transcendence of time".

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

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

The music of contemporary classical composers Jennifer Walshe and Robin Haigh has also been identified as being metamodern.

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

Notable concepts detailed by Storm in the book include his proposition of metarealism, "process social ontology", and "hylosemiotics" (see: process philosophy and semiotics). Storm describes metamodernism in brief as follows:"'Metamodernism is what we get when we take the strategies associated with postmodernism and productively reduplicate and turn them in on themselves. This will entail disturbing the symbolic system of poststructuralism, producing a genealogy of genealogies, deconstructing deconstruction, and providing a therapy for therapeutic philosophy.'"In 2024, Storm also launched the academic journal: Metamodern Theory and Praxis as Chair of the Science and Technology Studies department at Williams College. Storm asserts that self-analytical, "anti-disciplinary" thought is needed to effectively engage metamodern ideas in the real world and has stated his work is more about creating a paradigm shift than describing an intellectual movement.

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

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

Görtz summarizes this concept of "stages" in his own name in the collective anthology: Metamodernity: Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds:"'It is a tenet of metamodern sociology that perspectives are not arbitrarily ordered, but that they emerge in recognisable patterns... These sequences are, in turn, always dependent upon social and material – ultimately, even biological – conditions, with which they interact. Postmodernism did not emerge before modernism, nor could it have. For this reason, metamodern sociology always looks for meaningful explanatory developmental sequences, putting them in relation to one another on some kind of developmental scale. This developmentalism thus accepts at least some minimal form of stage theories… Each stage must be, in clearly definable terms, either more complex than the former, or, at a minimum, be derived from the former and qualitatively distinct.'"In terms of political ideology, Freinacht advocates for government policy that emphasizes environmental sustainability, economic liberalism, and substantial spending on social programs, which can be found in his second book: Nordic Ideology.

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

In 2014, Brendan Graham Dempsey suggested a kind of mythopoeia ("mythmaking") in a metamodern register in his essay "[Re]construction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth" published in Notes on Metamodernism. In his 2021 book Metamodernism and the Return of Transcendence, Dempsey argues that metamodern developments in culture signal various ways in which "the transcendent" is more and more coming to be reimagined as a component of the immanent frame, and not as something "super-natural" (i.e., outside the naturalistic world). In 2022 He published a book Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World

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

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

2019 also saw the publication of The World We Create: From God to Market by Tomas Björkman, a work exploring the complex origins of our precarious situation today, along with a set of proposed solutions utilizing a metamodern framework.