Metamodernity

Discussion

Venkatesh Rao:

"Metamodernity could perhaps be clubbed with Late Modernity, but it is useful to keep it distinct.

I define it as attempts to resurrect patterns of modernity in piecemeal forms that might be viable for contemporary circumstances. (A friend of mine, Rob Knight, evocatively called it “modernism in drag”).

This project, I believe, is ill-conceived, unnecessary, and doomed. I react poorly to things with “meta” in their name and I intend to impose this prejudice on the book club and its activities :)

Perhaps the most important element of metamodernity is world processes and intellectual currents that can be understood as responses to unrecoverable localized psyche failures of modernity. Metamodernity is what you dream up when modernity fails completely enough that there is nothing to revivify or perpetuate, but you still want what it used to deliver reliably, especially inside your head. You go meta when it is too late to be merely late.

Continuing our monstrous taxonomy, if late modernism is an energetic zombie, and postmodernity is an intelligent ghost, metamodernity is ennervated necromancy.

The metamodern project is not reactionary (for a long time, I was convinced it was, but I’ve changed my mind). Metamodernists are typically neither deluded enough, nor chauvinistic enough, nor have enough raw material to work with, to be reactionary about the things they care about.

The so-called “meaning crisis” and ideas like “re-enchantment” could be classified as metamodern turns in intellectual currents. Sincerity, authenticity, and irony are particular concerns of metamodernity, but unlike late modernity, metamodernity does not treat irony as the evil manufacture of postmodernity, constituting a casus belli for culture warring. Rather, in metamodern accounts, irony appears as an emergent consequence of historical processes, resulting in a set of problems to be solved, rather than a set of crimes to be prosecuted.

So metamodern responses take the form of rather doleful adaptation and sentimental creativity, rather than culture warring. The so-called “trad turn” strikes me as more metamodern than neoreactionary (but I’m not attached to this reading). Philosophers in the neo-Heideggerian tradition like Byung-Chul Han strike me as pursuing metamodern projects.

So far, metamodernity exists only as a few weak intellectual currents and perhaps a few attempts at post-ironic art, especially in screen media. There are no meaningful world processes I would classify as metamodern. There are no high-energy phenomena like ethnonationalist political movements, or DEI-ESG wokeism, that we can associate with metamodernism. So far, metamodernists seem to have contented themselves with writing and making art with rather gloomy, tortured gravitas.

There is however, a negative space we can attach to metamodernity that helps define it — the class of ennervation phenomena generally referred to as involution. This spans hikkikomori, “laying flat,” “quiet quitting” and so on. Territories defined by the failure to meaningfully address what only the maps of metamodernity even attempt to organize and attend to.

Our go-to move in relation to metamodernism will be to pay attention to the negative spaces it points to, without doing anything about them."

(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-divergence-machine)