Metamodernism

Alexandra Dumitrescu In 2007, writing for the Australian art journal Double Dialogues (Issue Seven), in an essay titled "Interconnections in Blakean and Metamodern Space," the New Zealand writer Alexandra Dumitrescu envisaged a "budding cultural paradigm" that "concurred" with postmodernism, and partly "emerged from it and as a reaction to it." Dumitrescu was the earliest theorist to link the term "metamodern" to a paradigm shift. She began using the word "metamodern" as far back as 2001, and developed her thinking in an article about James Joyce in 2005. See, e.g., More Deaths than One, a novel that examines the Central Illinois roots of the late David Foster Wallace and his gradual shift to metamodernism, emphasizing Dumitrescu's role in developing the fundamental concepts of metamodernism. Postmodernism, in Dumitrescu’s analysis in Double Dialogues, was hapless and dying – especially because of its dependency on fragmentation, individualism, and "the preeminence of analysis over synthesis." She described metamodernism as a continuum of revision and interconnectedness: "a boat being built or repaired as it sails, or a palace under continuous construction." Vermeulen and van den Akker Cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker published their essay "Notes on Metamodernism" in 2010 and ran an online research blog with the same name from 2009 to 2016. Their work is often considered an attempt to explain post-postmodernism. 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 2008 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 They asserted that "the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a sensibility that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling through "ironic sincerity".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 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 neo-romantic 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". They asserted that the 2000s were marked by a return to typically modern positions, while still retaining the postmodern sensibilities of the 1980s and 1990s. 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!" with the trio embarking on a series of metamodern performance projects exploring connection, empathy, and community across digital and physical platforms. Hanzi Freinacht Hanzi Freinacht is the pen-name used by author Emil Ejner Friis and sociologist Daniel Görtz who published The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics in 2017. Written as a philosopher and polemic, Freinacht plays into common metamodern themes like informed-naivete and ironic-sincerity vis-à-vis his performance as an author. 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. To this end, Freinacht conceptualizes development by showing how inner-personal growth and trends follow patterns that 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 strong social programs, which can be found in his second book: Nordic Ideology (2019). Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm In 2021, American academic Jason Josephson Storm published 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. Brendan Graham Dempsey In 2023, Dempsey wrote Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics, in which he attempted to synthesize the various strands of metamodern discourse to date (e.g., Vermeulen, Storm, Freinacht, etc.) into a single coherent framework based on the idea of "meta" as "recursive reflection". For Dempsey, what all forms of metamodernism have in common is the attempt to move beyond postmodernism by means of postmodernism—a move which requires progressively "decentering" from the postmodern vantage in order to reflect on it as an object of analysis (i.e., "going meta" on postmodernism). This reflective move creates a new orientation that is able to critique the previous perspective from a higher vantage. However, since this is also the process by which postmodernism distinguished itself from its modernist predecessor, such a dynamic can be seen as an enduring throughline in the development of all cultural logics. As he puts it:"The claim I'd like to make is that cultural shifts—like those from modernism to postmodernism to metamodernism—reflect society-level manifestations of such recursive, self-reflective moves. Postmodernists come after, objectify, reflect upon, critique, and transcend modernism; metamodernists come after, objectify, reflect upon, critique, and transcend postmodernism; and so on. As they do, genuinely novel insights and sensibilities are generated that justify speaking in terms of distinct cultural phases."Dempsey sees this "recursive transcendence through iterative self-reflection" operating (implicitly or explicitly) as part of all contemporary articulations of metamodernism. Consequently, he posits that such a "logic" to the unfolding of cultural logics is itself a defining feature of the emerging metamodern worldview: "In sum, what 'metamodernism' speaks to, I am suggesting, is 1) the cultural moment when the deep recursive process of iterative self-reflection is applied to postmodernism, and thus constitutes an advance beyond the postmodern that includes many of its strategies. In the process, metamodernism becomes 2) the cultural moment when this deep recursive process in cultural shifts becomes an explicit object of reflection and the basis of a new way of seeing. Metamodernism thus becomes a cultural logic about (meta) cultural logics. Thus, with the awareness of the full implications of 'going meta' in eternal recursive reflection, metamodernism entails the necessary inclusion within it of all prior cultural logics (at least insofar as it contains representations of their information in its complexity from a higher vantage). In this way, metamodernism signals an inherently multi-perspectival perspective, one that recognizes its inherent ability to toggle in and out of its own recursive contents." He links this to "metamodernism", as aligning with a new way to view reality. == Examples of metamodernism in the arts and culture ==

is expressive of "attempts to negotiate between such opposite poles as culture and nature, the finite and the infinite, the commonplace and the ethereal, a formal structure, and a formalist unstructuring". 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'. 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 literature In his early writing, David Foster Wallace was fascinated by the artificiality of narrative and drawn to the postmodernist irony of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Donald Barthelme. However, in his 1987 essay, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young", he asserted that his generation of writers had seen their "literary innocence taken from us without anything substantial to replace it," and he expressed his distrust of those “who claimed to know where literary fiction will go during this generation’s working lifetime.” By 1993, in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction," he considered the place of rebellion in art and argued that his former mentors, the "old postmodern insurgents," needed a shake-up: "The next real literary 'rebels' might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh how banal.' To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness." In his seminal novel, Infinite Jest, Foster Wallace's character Hal Incandenza provided a contrast to the postmodern irony of artists such as Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. Hal Incandenza wasn't a Pollock "force of nature" or a Warhol "machine." He was something new, and something old, and would not be contained: "I am not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything." In short, David Foster Wallace became a champion of the metamodernist single entendre. Alison Gibbons has identified several novels as exemplifying a metamodern version of autofiction: Ben Lerner's 10:04, Lance Olsen's Theories of Forgetting, Chris Kraus's I Love Dick and Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World. Zadie Smith's NW, Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Elif Batuman's Either/Or and The Idiot, Jenni Fagan's The Waken and several by Ali Smith: How to Be Both, and the four novels that make up her seasonal quartet—Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. Antony Rowland conceptualizes metamodern poetry as that which "resists the enduring bifurcation of contemporary ... poetry into mainstream and 'innovative' writing". In Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry, Rowland offers close readings of work by Geoffrey Hill, J.H. Prynne, Geraldine Monk, Ahren Warner, Sandeep Parmar and James Byrne. In More Deaths than One (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 2026, Forrester's volume of metamodernist poetry, The Ancient Light of the Dead, was published in Australia. The 84 poems were written while Forrester was living in the post-Soviet country of Georgia. Upon release, the poems were described as "a casual stroll through the kind of eclectic village cemetery that each of us designs and builds over the course of a lifetime, and that each of us will one day inhabit." In film and music 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". 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 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." Between 2014 and 2017, New Zealand musician Gary Jeshel Forrester recorded three solo folk/Americana albums that focused on synthesizing modernism and postmodernism, integrating aspects of both together by combining modernist idealism and sincerity with postmodernist skepticism and irony. Music critic Jeff Harford, writing in the Otago Daily Times, reviewed Forrester's solo material as follows: "For every nugget of truth in a great song, a corresponding seam of life experience is commonly found in its writer", and "Forrester brings a hatful of both to Americana-folk." Mike Alexander of The Sunday Star-Times (New Zealand's largest Sunday newspaper) wrote: "There's something almost serendipitous about Forrester posting his latest album with little or no fanfare. He's one of those people you might meet only to find that beyond the lack of self-important promotion, his life's work, influence, and achievements are those of someone who has already left a footprint (as an activist, academic, novelist, poet, and musician). Forrester's music is simple and down-to-earth, just straightforward honesty." James Belfield, the music critic for New Zealand's weekly current affairs magazine, the New Zealand Listener, described Forrester's "relentless storytelling skills" – the "easy acoustic strum and fingerpicking drift behind a clear, authoritative voice that tells outlaw country tales the equal of those by Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash." NZ Musician (New Zealand's only magazine devoted to the national music scene) described Forrester's solo compositions as both "lovely" and "surprisingly complex": "With a steely yet gentle voice, Forrester's neatly constructed songs and dulcet tones have an aged air, the word choices interesting without being corny or melodramatic. Stories range over a lot of topics and he uses nice rhyme schemes that don't follow his finger patterns. His rhyme and rhythm provide plenty to listen to in an uncomplicated way - the choice of chords, and the mixture of major and minor shapes come together beautifully without being something heard before, despite this being folk music. Choruses build nicely and verses flow down like rivers." An article in the Sunday Star-Times The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once was explicitly identified by the directors, The Daniels, as a metamodern film. 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". The music of contemporary classical composers Jennifer Walshe, Robin Haigh and Francesca Fargion had been described as metamodern. == Other works ==

Essays 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. 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 2013, 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 her 2016 essay, What is Metamodernism and Why Bother? Meditations on Metamodernism as a Period Term and as a Mode, Alexandra Dumitrescu described the foundational development of metamodernism in New Zealand and presented metamodernism as an interrogation of "modernist uprootedness or postmodern drifting." Dumitrescu's essay synthesized her work between 2001 and 2010, describing metamodernism as “a paradigm of integration of faculties (e.g. reason and emotions), systems of thought, and different ontological levels," as well as a paradigm of self-transformation or becoming. She wrote that "the metamodern is a paradigm in which ethical considerations are dominant and in which the disregarded 'other' is increasingly acknowledged and valued: women, the subaltern/colonised, the innocent and the oppressed become central actants in the contemporary cultural discourse. Acknowledging the other is a necessary element of cultural and personal 'becoming,' as Irigaray points out in Sharing the World. As a result of this transformation, values that have been occasionally sidelined in (post)modernity are increasingly revisited and redefined: innocence, the protection of the innocent and the disempowered, compassion, empathy, altruistic love, forgiveness of past injuries, respect for difference, creativity, and ingenuity." 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. An article applying metamodern theory to the study of religions was published in 2017 by Michel Clasquin-Johnson. 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". Books 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 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. == See also ==