Meta-Crisis

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Description

Mervyn Hartwig et al. :

"What distinguishes the meta-crisis from the poly-crisis is that, while the latter highlights that there are many different crises occurring simultaneously and recognizes that many of these are interconnected, the former goes a step further and uses integrative metatheoretical frameworks and distinctions to reveal the subjective as well as objective, semiotic as well as “material”, “interior” as well as “exterior” dynamics in play.

Whereas poly refers to ‘many’ crises and their objective interconnection, meta refers in addition to their higher-order unity as a complex totality or singularity that includes human construals and interventions and the possibility of a more adequate meta-view that grasps real future possibilities. Meta implies an overarching unity or identity that holds and operates on the differences in their subjective as well as objective complexity. The notion of the meta-crisis thus challenges the idea of an exclusively technological set of solutions to our global challenges. Because, in a context of generalized power (power-over) relations both construals and responses will be contested, resolution of the meta-crisis will involve among other things ‘hermeneutic hegemonic/counter-hegemonic struggles’ (R. Bhaskar, 1993/2008, pp. 62, our emphasis).

Metatheory is needed inter alia to orient and support the coordination of these struggles globally. Its meta view offers an integrated perspective of the human subject in relation to the world. Without it, we can’t even ‘see’ the poly-crisis, let alone construe it adequately or relate to it effectively; with it, new realities and leverage points for impact are highlighted. Metatheories have co-evolved or co-emerged with the metacrisis. On the one hand the metacrisis demands and in part drives the emergence of integrative metatheory. On the other hand integrative metatheories allow one to see and engage the metacrisis in its full holistic complexity. They thus present us with unprecedented opportunities for helping to effect a transition to a new sustainable form of life. They can help empower us to make it through the collective rite of passage that the metacrisis necessitates."

(https://www.academia.edu/26063515/On_the_Deep_Need_for_Integrative_Metatheory_in_the_21st_Century)


Related Concepts

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

"In an account of the present conjunction, Adam Tooze (2021, 6) describes a “polycrisis” of “overlapping political, economic and environmental conflagrations”. He regards this as a departure from world-market normality, but other diagnoses are possible. Alex Callinicos (2022) argues that “the new age of catastrophe” is the logical culmination of capitalism’s competitive accumulation, as a “band of hostile brothers, grabbing as a much as possible, drive humankind over the cliff”. He sees a “multidimensional crisis” with four elements: i) biological, with global warming as exhibit one, but accompanied by other symptoms, such as the zoonotic overspill of a pandemic unleashed by deforestation and commercial agriculture; ii) economic, as problems of stagnancy, inequality and financial instability that manifested in the great crash of 2008 remain unresolved; iii) geopolitical, in the struggle for global hegemony between the US and EU on one side, China and Russia on the other, with lesser powers maneuvering for position; iv) political, as the “extreme center” of globalizing neoliberalism is collapsed by populist eruption, primarily from the far-right. The war in Ukraine provides a condensed expression of these intersecting crises of economics, ecology, epidemiology, and international enmity.

Even two years ago—before the war in Ukraine, before the Covid-19 pandemic—Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2019, 50) could write of “a crisis rhetoric” spreading from the economic arena to “other areas of human and social concern” and comprehending “multiple issues of social and demographic sustainability”. They remark that “each of these predicaments has its own complex genealogy and dynamics, but their concatenation and articulation present a novel scenario“ in which “the prospect of exit from the crisis seems ever more remote as its effects continue to circulate in an uneven and syncopated manner.” However, as Mezzadra notes (2022), there can be no assumption that this leads to radical social transformation: familiar terms such as “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2008) and “the crisis state” (Negri 2005) make the point that capitalism now normalizes, manages, provokes and instrumentalizes catastrophe. Even if runaway harms escalate such that “disaster capitalism” becomes disaster-for-capitalism, the classic option of “socialism or barbarism” is today hardly reassuring (see Lilley et al. 2012) . "

(https://projectpppr.org/populisms/biocommie-power-and-catastrophe)


Discussion

Jonathan Rowson:

"I have three main things to say about the wisdom of going meta. First, there are several meanings of meta. Second, there is epistemic skill involved in knowing when and how to go meta, and when not to. Third, we are already meta.

At its simplest, meta means after, which is why Aristotle got to metaphysics after writing about physics. It can also mean ‘with’ or ‘beyond’ but these terms can mean many things. With can mean alongside, concomitant or within. Beyond can mean transcending and including, superseding or some point in the distance. In most cases ‘meta’ serves to make some kind of implicit relationship more explicit. The ‘meta’ in ‘metamodernism’ can simply mean ‘after modernism’, but a more precise way to capture what that means is with another kind of ‘meta’: metaxy. Metaxy is about between-ness in general, and the oscillation between poles of experience in particular. Being and becoming is a metaxy, night and day is a metaxy, and modernism and postmodernism is the metaxy that characterises metamodernism; Jeremy Johnson put the point about metaxy particularly well in his feedback on this paper:

This is why I think it’s helpful to keep returning to the etymological roots, re: metaxy. Charging the word with its quicksilver, liminal nature, it approximates both the magical structure of consciousness (one point is all points), it provides a mythical image (Hermes, anyone?), it elucidates a healthy mental concept (oscillation, dialectics, paradoxical thinking), and in a back-forward archaic-integral leap, it challenges us with the processual and transparent systasis (‘from all sides’). Tasting the pickle.

One additional point on the meaning of meta is that it is invariably used as a prefix and it appears to have a chameleon nature depending on what it forms part of. The meta in metanoia is mostly beyond, as in the spiritual transformation of going beyond the current structure of the mind (nous). The meta in metamorphosis and metabolism is a kind of ‘change’, and the meta in metaphor has the composite meaning of the term because metaphor literally means ‘the bearer of meta’. The point of showing the multiple meanings of meta is not to get high on abstraction – though there is that – but to illustrate that meta need not be, and perhaps should not be, thought of principally in semantic terms as a word with its own meaning. Adding the prefix ‘meta’ introduces a shift in gear or register that can take us to several different kinds of place. It’s a manoeuvre in our language games that changes the mood and tenor of a discussion or inquiry.

As Zak Stein argues, however, there are also limits to the wisdom of going meta, which can easily become a pseudo-intelligent love of infinite regress disconnected from the pragmatic purposes of thought. Worse still, the constant availability of the meta-move creates the kind of ‘whataboutery’ that makes it difficult to create a shared world. For instance, when someone says: ‘this conversation is going nowhere’, they are going meta in a way that unilaterally ends whatever collaborative spirit of inquiry may have characterised it up to that point. To paraphrase Aristotle on anger, anyone can go meta – that is easy; what is difficult is to go meta in the right way, at the right time for the right reasons. Going meta in the wrong way can feel strenuously abstract or even absurd, but when done well, going meta should feel more like a return to sanity or a step towards freedom.

The good news is that it should not be particularly difficult to go meta in the right way because we do it all the time. Meta phenomena are more diverse and pervasive than we typically imagine – the meta world arises from our relationship with the world as sense-making and meaning-making creatures. Meta is already here with us, within us, between us, beyond us, waiting to be disclosed and appreciated. We are already meta. Learning how to learn is meta – and schools increasingly recognise the need for that. A speech about how to give a speech is meta – and people pay to hear them. Parents of young children experience meta whenever they feel tired of being tired. For a different take, if you ‘go meta’ on oranges and apples you get fruit (or seeds, or trees). If you go meta on fruit you may get to food, and if you go meta on food you may get to agriculture, and then perhaps land and climate, and then either soil and mean surface temperature, or perhaps planet and cosmos. Meta is also what happens in meditation (meta-tation!) when the mind observes itself in some way: there I go again, we think, without pausing to feel astonishment at being both observer and observed. Meta themes abound in popular culture, for instance in Seinfeld, where comedians successfully pitch for a television show in which nothing of significance ever really happened; that idea was the explicit expression of the implicit idea that made the whole series funny.[19]

The meta-move is often noteworthy because it tends to happen when normal moves exhaust themselves. For this reason, ‘going meta’ is a key feature of metamodernity, characterised by our encounter with the material and spiritual exhaustion of modernity and the limitations of postmodernity. Going meta is therefore important and necessary, and it’s already a part of popular culture, so we should not fear talking about it as if it was unacceptable jargon. But we do need to be a bit clearer about why and when we use it, not least when acting in response to ‘the meta crisis’. Since I have argued that crisis has a particular meaning relating to bifurcation and time sensitivity, and we often use the terms meta and crisis to describe our predicament as a whole, the relationship between meta and crisis deserves closer attention.

Here is how I see it. The idea of the meta-crisis is pertinent and essential, and the term offers the kind of creative tension and epistemic stretch that we are called upon to experience. However, in our social change efforts we need to remember that language is psychoactive, and it matters which terms we use to attract, persuade and galvanise people. I don’t think the aim should be to stop talking about meta as if it was a secret code we had to translate to make it more palatable. Instead, I think the aim should be to disclose that what is meta is so normal and even mundane that we don’t need to draw special attention to it.

While most developmental progress is about the subject-object move, in the case of meta-phenomena, I wonder if this is an exception that proves the rule. What we appear to need is for whatever is meta in our experience and discourse to become subject again, such that it becomes a kind of second nature that we simply ‘do’ rather than reflect on or talk about. The aim is to close the observational gap by integrating what you previously exorcised by making it object, moving from unconscious, to conscious and then not back to unconscious as such, but to dispositional and tacit. In this sense, the aim is to know the meta-crisis well enough that it ceases to be ‘meta’, and ceases to be a ‘crisis’, and frees us of the need to speak in those terms. The aim is to get back to living meaningfully and purposively with reality as we find it.

Some of the most profound and promising theorising in this space comes from those who suggest we might precipitate the new forms of perception we need by understanding the provenance of our current sense of limitation more acutely. Jeremy Johnson puts it like this:

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 recognise what the new world might be like – to re-constellate ourselves around that emergent foundation.[20]

I have endeavoured to try to do that in what follows. Once you take the idea of meta-crises seriously and start looking at them closely, it seems we are caught up in something oceanic in its depth and range, and plural. The idea of trying to define the meta-crisis as if it could be encapsulated as a single notion and conceptually conquered is a kind of trap. I have come to think it helps to distinguish between different features of an experience that ultimately amount to the same underlying process. In fact, that’s how I see the meta-crises writ large: they are the underlying processes causing us to gradually lose our bearings in the world.

There are many ways to parse the different qualities of meta-crisis, which are of course interrelated, but I have alighted on four main patterns, unpacked as ten illustrations.

The socio-emotional meta/crisis (meta as with/within; the crisis of ‘we’) concerns the subjective and intersubjective features of collective action problems relating to management of various kinds of commons, not least digital and ecological. In essence it’s the problem relating to the limits of compassion and projective identification, and of the world not having a discerning sense of what ‘we’ means in practical, problem-solving or world-creating terms.

The epistemic meta-crisis (meta as with/self-reference; the crisis of understanding) concerns ways of knowing that are ultimately self-defeating, underlying mechanisms that subvert their own logics. In essence it’s the problem of ideological and epistemic blind spots.

The educational metacrisis (meta as after/within and between; the crisis of education) concerns the emergent properties arising from all our major crises taken together, which entail learning needs at scale, particularly how to make sense of the first planetary civilisation; how to confer legitimacy transnationally; how to do what needs to be done ecologically; and how to clarify collectively what we’re living for without coercion.

The spiritual meta crisis (meta as beyond; the crisis of imagination) concerns the cultural inability or unwillingness to ‘go meta’ in the right way, for instance to think about the political spectrum rather than merely thinking with it, or for economic commentators to question the very idea of the economy or the nature of money. More profoundly, it is about being cut off from questions about the nature, meaning and purpose of life as a whole as legitimate terrain in our attempts to imagine a new kind of world."

(https://systems-souls-society.com/tasting-the-pickle-ten-flavours-of-meta-crisis-and-the-appetite-for-a-new-civilisation/)


The Meta-Crisis Has Both an Exterior and an Interior Dimension

David J. Temple:

"The exterior dimension of the meta-crisis is catastrophic and existential risk, the full or partial death of humanity and all future generations. This is what we referred to above as the first form of existential risk, the extinction of humanity as we know it.

This exterior dimension can be seen and touched, so it is an obvious aspect to focus on. There are major problems with human economic systems, supply chains, electrical grids, weapons with catastrophic potential, and other aspects of the built environment. These interface with the biological world in ways that result in polluted oceans, extinct species, climatological disruptions, and humanitarian catastrophes.

Planetary computational megastructures encircle the Earth. While they have their clear benefits, the sheer size, volume, and scope of these exterior systems can elicit an overwhelming, sublime terror that calls forth everything we have in response.

However, this spectacle must not distract us from the interior dimension of the meta-crisis, where the death of our humanity quietly and invisibly occurs. Through the countless thoughts and feelings of the billions whose lives and futures are being foreclosed, the interior dimensions of the meta-crisis unfold. In the fragmentation of cultures ripped apart by novel technologies, there in the immeasurable interiors of human consciousness the meta-crisis pushes the limits of what can be endured by human nature.

It is possible that we will cease to be human in all the ways we have traditionally understood and currently recognize and honor in the human experience. This is what we referred to above as the second form of existential risk, the death of our humanity as we know it."

(Source: draft review of CosmoErotic Humanism document)