or: How Metamodernism Makes Meaning Amid our Entropic Chaos
“You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
“The present is an intangible moment squeezed in between a growing past and an approaching future. Therefore, perceptual truths are, at best, an inconceivably fleeting part of the experience of life. The bulk of life consists of internal myths.” -Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory
Just as science strives for poetic elegance, artists might assume a quest for truth. All information is grounds for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, no matter its truth-value. We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of a magical realism. Error breeds sense. -Luke Turner, Metamodernist Manifesto
The Problem: our Postmodern Quagmire
This argument might land more effectively as a series of memes of increasingly obscure and complex self-reference presented over several years, but we’re going to try with words.
We (i.e. anyone thinking about this shit, and, to a lesser and derivative extent, everyone else) are caught in what looks to me like an academic bottleneck — a false impasse in our information culture, a meaning-consuming, irrational event-horizon from which our discourse seemingly cannot escape.
This traffic jam has paralyzed the zeitgeist. It’s cognitive, it’s meta-cognitive, it’s linguistic.
It is a paralysis in how we talk about what we think, and how we think about what others say.
The symptoms of this paralysis, which are macroscopically self-evident, but individually observable, are A) difficulty discerning facts from lies, B) a paucity of positive leadership and messaging, and C), a breakdown in our ability to use language to resolve differences of understanding.
A brief case for each:
A) difficulty discerning facts from lies
It is commonly accepted that politicians, pundits, and advertisers all deliberately misinform us to serve their own ends. It isn’t remotely disqualifying; we accept this as a necessary aspect of their work, simultaneously elevating them above normal society by removing normal social expectations, and exculpating them by calibrating our electoral and consumer choices around a lesser-evil analysis bound up in coercive false dichotomies.
B) paucity of positive leadership and positive narratives
Per a), most political rhetoric and all news media is about making you fear future contingencies in which things are worse than they are now. This happens at all scales. What is missing in the news, in political speeches, even in a television and film industry obsessed with destruction, dystopian corruption, and the fascistic worship of state-serving and capital-worshiping ubermenschen (sup, Mr. Stark?) is a clear vision of better alternatives. It’s not impossible to create such a vision, it just isn’t happening in our culture except at the fringes.
C) inability to discuss and debate across almost any ideological bounds
The narrative confusion, disinformation saturation, and fear caused by A and B give rise to C, the increasing problem we are having working out our differences without things getting heated and escalating either to violence, or a collapse of the discourse into righteous indignation.
People aren’t wrong to feel passionately about issues large and small. What seems like a small issue to one person may be a matter of life and death to another person because of how varied and complicated our circumstances are. We’re pointing back at the failure of language here — we can’t even write many sentences about what our collective problems are without breaking down in disagreement.
It’s not these disagreements by themselves, but our attempts to make sense of them, that cause the breakdown. The arithmetic of logic reduces all the context of political claims to binaries: at the end of the day, you either support Trump, or you don’t, which makes you either an idiot, or not. And guess what, you can actually support Trump by opposing Trump the wrong way, which, in an analysis of outcomes, is functionally (and therefore, morally) tantamount to supporting Trump.
Operating in this mode, this disheartening blend of A, B, and C, our brains are outrage-in, outrage-out.
In our political analyses and comments, we lose sight of sonder, the understanding that all other people are experiencing equally complex interior worlds to ours, with different contents and a different perception of everything outside their own heads, and that we are extras in their movie, as they are in ours.
It’s easy to lose track of someone’s humanity when they seem to be erasing or subordinating your own.
Small Problems with the Assumptions Above
1) Language is a mess. It’s impossible to ever say exactly what you mean; you can only get close and trust people to take your words charitably and work with you to ensure clear enough transmission of intended meaning. I put those italics in there to suggest this only seems fucking impossible now, but is actually the default human mode of communication.
2) It’s never “the end of the day.” Time goes on, no issue exists in a vacuum, and everything bears on everything else. It is easy for propagandists to frame information to fit a narrative by situating it in a proper, narrow window. Our 24/7 news means our memory for what isn’t under a spotlight is fleeting.
The gun debate is a great place to look at this issue in action, because no one wants more shootings, yet we aren’t even able to communicate about the reality of the problem to begin solving it. We are stuck slinging ideological rocks at each other across the shallowest level of analysis.
Imagine me getting into examples here and losing half of you, depending on which 2 sentences I say next about guns. That’s a whole essay for another time; to be honest, I don’t yet trust an audience with my Gun Problem Forest for fear that they’ll nail me to one tree.
3) Smart people aren’t good, and dumb people aren’t bad.
We may have to back up here and address the fact that there are people who have an easy time learning and remembering and doing new things than others. There aren’t just “different kinds of intelligence,” there are also people who have more or less, when all’s tallied. The word “dumb” is mean, but not as mean as denying that it signifies a real quality of humanity.
Hear me: it is cruel to people who have a harder time to pretend that they do not, out of some desire to be kind, or, maybe more accurately, a desire to seem like a considerate and humble person.
Dumb people don’t need condescending, gaslighting support, or pity. They need a society that doesn’t lie to itself about being meritocratic, or about intelligence being a virtue. They need a basic social safety net so that when they are exploited, or unable to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, they can survive.
Maybe we decided that literal death being the consequence for failure to integrate into a capitalist society is the best motivator for the labor force; I’m not sure. It seems obvious now that it’s disruptive to the economy to have people die needlessly, but that’s just my perspective.
My point is most of the abuses of power in our world come at the hands of smart people, who fall into several sub-types based on how capable they are of getting away with their corruption. We imagine psychopaths as people who use their understanding of empathy to perform unfelt compassion as a way of manipulating others. We eventually catch these people, and force them to move on. What about psychopaths who are never caught, because they use their understanding of empathy to convince people with better intentions that they are good? What about non-psychopaths, average people who perform vital and exploitative functions in our great big economy, not because they want to perpetuate the ills of our non-utopia, but because they have no choice, either coerced by the inexorable market, or else laboring under a myth, the dissolution of which would upend their entire world view and leave them marred in nihilism?
The Quagmire
Okay so here we are, and there seems to be no way forward, except for individuals with the resources to figure out better alternatives for themselves. It’s damn near impossible to share any insights for the betterment of one’s situation without seeming either comfortable, privileged, or confident beyond the point of relatability. It’s hard to avoid seeming like a know-it-all, a prescriptivist.
Receiving advice can feel like being blamed for suffering.
Being asked to participate in a collective solution to a problem you don’t experience can feel pointless.
Seeing demands for collective solutions that do not help you with your problem can be alienating.
Etc.
Because of this, it’s clear we need a solution that comes from the bottom up, but which can be understood, restated, and disseminated macroscopically, i.e., that is congruent enough with various top-down propagandas that people won’t reject it out of hand as a terminal risk to their worldview.
This solution will be an artistic and philosophical movement, which will give rise to new modes of political discourse, and possible avenues for repairing our tattered language.
First, we have to look at the ideological underpinnings of the swamp in which we are drowning. We have to talk about the different facets of the problem to understand that they are all One Problem.
The phenomena kinking our philosophical hose are these:
- Irony
- Analysis
- (Uncertainty)
3. Uncertainty is the result of 1. and 2. It is the result, it is the paralysis. It is the phenomenon that unites the smart and the dumb in passive deference to the forces that exploit and consume us. Wise people know how little they actually know, smart people know they know more than dumb people, and dumb people know that they’re harmed by things they don’t know. Everyone practices deference in their own ways, but we have stopped properly examining those to whom we defer. This leads us to:
2. Analysis, the abstract domain where academics attempt to use language to map reality so they can harness logic to make sense of life, which has literally never worked out.
This is the domain where arguments about questions like “are Trump supporters deplorable?” “should you vote Blue no matter who?” “does a person’s opinion matter more or less depending on which identity demographics they belong to?” spin in circles.
They aren’t totally ineffectual, only ineffectual in achieving their objectives. They certainly create ends: slivers of evidence and rhetoric from this domain scatter across news crawls and cyberspace, and every dumbfuck with a twitter handle with a bunch of numbers in it can shoehorn a quote by a scholar into their own empty bloviating.
Anyway, here’s famous depressed dead white writer David Foster Wallace to explain for me why irony is a problem.
“Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.”
― David Foster Wallace
And here’s most of a comment by a random person whose education and intentions are unknown to me, from under a youtube video, on what this means:
“[Wallace’s] main problem is not with irony/irreverence/self-referentiality itself but with the fact that where these were effective literary techniques in the 60s and 70s, by the 80s they had been completely co-opted by television and marketing strategies (also on television). The critical force of irony is hollowed out because we’ve been trained in the arts of thinking ironically by television. By aiming to convey sincerity (the gooey and embarrassing and frankly unfortunate but honest aspects of living) he doesn’t turn away from irony but rather passes through it, to the other side, where ‘lived experience’ shines through again. Maybe Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a good example: where he uses irony as a form of speaking to allow the shittiness of everyday decisions/actions gain relevance/relatability. The Office and Community may have similar objectives insofar as both are ironic and sincere. But isn’t this just another example of exactly what he was originally arguing against: that television has the power to co-opt ways/modes of thinking/experiencing the world, where we always experience that world in absolute solitude, completely alone and by its mediation, always at a distance, never IN it. At least with shows like arrested development, it’s always sunny and seinfeld, the void is recognizable as a form of experience. With the ‘sincere’ ones you mentioned, the soft irony and self-referentiality, are techniques used to draw the viewer towards a false sincerity which, in the end, just covers up the emptiness of our lives in world conditioned by total connectivity and total isolation. Pretty sure DFW just wants us all to make friends and be nice to them.”
This takes us to the solution, a little light at the end of the tunnel.
Metamodernism: The Way Out
Post-postmodernism didn’t have a ring to it, and doesn’t communicate the needful: this isn’t just the next thing, it is the solution.
Where postmodernism goes “all binaries are false dichotomies, all things are spectra (and we can’t tell you where their poles are or make precise claims about where individual things fall along them, because such speculation is ultimately contextual and subjective),”
Metamodernism is all like, “you can traverse a spectrum or you can sublimate from one pole to the other, so really spectra are actually horse-shoes or circles, and really the spectrum of any issue is actually one 2-Dimensional slice of a layered, holistic sphere of 3D meaning.”
This isn’t an affirmation of reductive political horseshoe theory, it’s a larger claim that the idea that there can be more or less distance between ideas is an entirely false perception based on our schema of categorization.
This is why we elevate smart-seeming, non-contributing speculation grifters like Nate Silver and the crew behind the NYT election needle, and allow them to obsess over demographics and statistical analyses, and then also allow them, when their analysis or projection inevitably turns out to be reductive bullshit, to wring their hands and shake their heads in aghast disbelief that their model didn’t work out. Forget the real consequences, forget individual accountability, it’s the system that didn’t work, and we need the system, because we’d be left only to our own judgment otherwise.
“Does the economy or the environment matter more to you, if you had to pick one?”
This is a question I got during an application to canvass for an environmental advocacy organization. Do you see how I might have found such a question frustrating? It’s not just silly. I don’t think there’s such a thing as mere innocent, idle misuse of language. It is abuse. How can meaning move forward from such a place?
I said that I viewed economic forces as the primary impediments to real environmental sustainability — that without attending to our economic problems — wild and escalating income equality, loose campaign finance regulation, corporate lobbying — we would never attend to the obviously technically larger, superseding problem of climate change.
Was that a right or wrong answer for an interview at Environment Oregon? Metamodernism allows for a better answer:
“Yes.”
The environment is a thing we inhabit while doing our economics, it is a thing we harvest and damage for economic benefits. It’s naive to imagine that we could ever unfuck the entire economy, and it’s naive to imagine that we will ever take the tangible, radical steps we need to mitigate climate disaster.
But so what?
Does that mean we should wallow in nihilism?
Or, can we accept the complex and overwhelmingly grim results of our analysis without succumbing to despair?
Is it possible to proceed as if we have a chance of surviving, knowing that doing so is the only chance we have, however remote? Can we understand that informed naivete, the undertaking of efforts toward the good, the pursuit of honest self-expression and earnest creation, despite their probably ultimate futility, are not pointless outlets for passion, but actually engines for creating meaning, the thing that makes life worth living?
I can’t think of a more helpful piece of advice to give anyone than “live a life doing things that feel meaningful to you and helpful to others.”
Of course there are infinite better ways of wording that, and of course there are readings of it that could be abused.
Cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker describe metamodernism, which is sometimes called New Sincerity, as “a ‘structure of feeling’ that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like ‘a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles.’
In his 2011 Metamodernist Manifesto, Luke Turner describes our current nihilistic, cynical quagmire as “inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child.” He defines 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 concludes with the call to action: “go forth and oscillate!”
What All of This Means
Haha.
I couldn’t tell you. I just know it’s the only thing that has felt right for years to me in this world of ever-escalating dissonant noise.
The good news is that we don’t have to be passive or crippled by uncertainty. We don’t have to prove everything we know to be true. That’s actually a relief, because we couldn’t if we tried.
We can, however, proceed boldly, advocating and undertaking for ourselves, “by that right which a firm spirit, planning vast designs, has o’er the loutish minds of common men,” while also working constantly to avoid harming others.
You know who you are. I know who I am. We are both being lied to, but I am not lying to you. I don’t expect you to believe me. I wouldn’t believe me.
Still, maybe we can behave more than amicably toward each other — not as allies, wary, temporary compatriots of circumstance, but as friends, cousins, siblings in our humanity. Metamodernism says it’s worth a shot, even though it won’t work out a lot of the time.
What Does That Look Like?
It’s an individual project for all of us. Only you know how you can best help the collective without losing yourself.
Here are some ideas of what metamodernist engagement looks like:
- Being kind to people who are being unkind, not, cynically, to win an argument in the public eye for your superior civility, but purely because the chances are greater that you will generate better future contingencies for everyone by practicing kindness
- Allowing yourself to feel and believe the powerful emotions and perceptions you experience without projecting them onto the world outside your head, without assuming their self-evidence to others. You can keep your own worldview even when others cite evidence that appears to render it incongruent. You can adhere to your personal creed even as you watch yourself violate it, so long as you also watch the violation and treat it as a step on your path toward honesty. Watching yourself or others speak or act wrongly is way less debilitating when you are aligning your effort toward forgiving others and improving your ability to match your results to your intentions, rather than avoiding having such inconsistencies found out.
- Believing things that aren’t literally, factually true, because they are useful.
We already do this with Santa, unless you’re of the belief that Santa Claus is a cynical and exploitative consumerist lie. I don’t think that’s entirely untrue, but we don’t have to die on such a bummer of a hill. That Santa Claus brings toys to well-behaved children can be a joyful cultural myth we participate in without destroying the fabric of our language.
It’s a different thing than allowing or expecting politicians to lie.
One example is: I believe it is bad luck to talk about someone when they are away from a table. I don’t literally believe in luck, but there are a series of possible negative outcomes that emerge when someone returns to find a hush coming over a group that has just caught itself gossiping. The rule “don’t talk about someone when they are up from the table” cannot function absolutely, because there are times when accommodating someone correctly requires discussing their situation briefly and discreetly. It’s better to operate under the assumption that you will accumulate some kind of intangible negative energy if you handle the power to gossip irresponsibly.
Do you see?
Already I can feel myself making less sense. The clarity of metamodernism dissolves as you try to pin it to examples. It’s not a whole car, it’s an engine. It is not a steering wheel, it is an engine. Do you feel me?
I am going forth to oscillate. I invite you to do the same.