Metamodernism

Metamodernism is a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism. One definition characterizes metamodernism as mediations between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. Another similar term is post-postmodernism.

Origin and essence of the term
“Metamodernism: a brief introduction”
In 2015, in his article ” Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction, ” one of the authors of the project Notes on Metamodernism, the English artist Luke Turner argues that the prefix “meta-” comes from the term Plato metaxis, which designates the oscillation between two opposite concepts and the simultaneity of their use. The author associates the emergence of a new concept with a number of crises and changes since the early 1990s (climate change, financial recessions, the growth of the number of armed conflicts), as well as the proclamation of the so-called. end of history.

In the article, Turner describes the main features of postmodernism, which include the following concepts: deconstruction, irony, stylization, relativism, nihilism. Metamodernism revives common classical concepts and universal truths, while not returning to the “naive ideological positions of modernism” and is in a state of vacillation between aspects of the cultures of modernismand postmodernism. Thus, according to Turner, metamodernism combines enlightened naivete, pragmatic idealism and moderate fanaticism, hesitating at the same time “between irony and sincerity, construction and deconstruction, apathy and attraction.” In other words, the generation of metamodern is a kind of oxymoron, in which seemingly opposing things can be combined.

Metamodernism – the concept is not prescriptive, but descriptive. As examples of metamodernism in art, Turner brings the music of artists such as Arcade Fire, Bill Callahan, Future Islands, the work of artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Peter Doig, a movie directed by Wes Anderson and Spike Johns. By the way, as the cover of his article Turner uses a frame from the film Wes Anderson ” Kingdom of the Full Moon.” Also in the article, Turner mentions the previously published “Metamodernist Manifesto” (Metamodernist // Manifesto), which the artist described as “simultaneously defining and supporting the spirit of metamodernism, at the same time logically consistent and absurd, serious and doomed to failure, but still optimistic and full of hope.”

“Notes on metamodernism”
As noted above, the concept was based on the essays of Timothyus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akner, Notes on Metamodernism.

The authors talk about the end of the postmodern era and give two categories of reasons for this, noted by different authors: 1) Material (climate change, financial crisis, terrorist attacks, digital revolution); 2) Non-material (assignment of criticism by the market, integration of the difference into mass culture).

The article notes that most postmodern tendencies take a new form and, most importantly, a new meaning: “that history continues after its hastily declared end,” scientists note, drawing a parallel between the concept of the “end of history” and the “positive” “the idealism of Hegel. Metamodern “oscillates between the enthusiasm of modernism and postmodern ridicule, between hope and melancholy, between simplicity and awareness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, wholeness and splitting, clarity and ambiguity” – a sort of conceptual oxymoron.

On the appointment of metamodernism, scientists say the following:

Metamodernism replaces the boundaries of the present to the limits of a futile future; and it replaces the boundaries of familiar places to the limits of the infinite. In fact, this is the “destiny” of a man of metamodernity: to pursue endlessly receding horizons.

History of the Term
The term metamodernist appeared as early as 1975, when Mas’ud Zavarzadeh isolatedly used it to describe a cluster of aesthetics or attitudes which had been emerging in American literary narratives since the mid-1950s.

In 1995, Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon stated that a new label for what was coming after postmodernism was necessary.

In 1999, Moyo Okediji reused the term metamodern about contemporary afro-american art, defining it as an “extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism” with the aim to “transcend, fracture, subvert, circumvent, interrogate and disrupt, hijack and appropriate modernity and postmodernity.”

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 the idea that only in their interconnection and continuous revision lie the possibility of grasping the nature of contemporary cultural and literary phenomena.”

The Metamodernist Manifesto
In 2011, Luke Turner published on his website “Metamodernist Manifesto” (Metamodernist // Manifesto). It consists of 8 items:

We recognize that fluctuations are a natural world order.
We must free ourselves from the century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of his illegitimate child.
Henceforth the movement must be carried out by means of oscillations between positions with diametrically opposed ideas acting as pulsating poles of a colossal electric machine that drives the world into action.
We recognize the limitations inherent in any movement and perception, and the futility of any attempt to break beyond the limits indicated by such. The inherent incompleteness of the system entails the need for adherence to it, not for the sake of achieving a given result and slavishly following its course, but rather for the chance of accidentally indirectly peeking out some hidden external side. Existence will be enriched if we undertake our task, as if these limits can be overcome, for such an action reveals the world.
All things are captured by an irreversible slip to the state of maximum entropic dissimilarity. Artistic creation is possible only on condition of origin from this difference or disclosure of such. At its zenith affects the direct perception of the difference as such. The role of art should be to study the promise of his own paradoxical ambitions by pushing the extreme to presence.
The present is the symptom of the dual birth of urgency and extinction. Today we are equally given to nostalgia and futurism. New technologies allow simultaneous perception and play of events from multiple positions. These emerging networks, far from signaling its extinction, contribute to democratization of history, highlighting forks along which its grandiose narrative can wander here and now.
Just as science strives for poetic elegance, artists can embark on a search for truth. All information is the basis for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, regardless of its validity. We must accept the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivete of magical realism. The error gives rise to meaning.
We offer pragmatic romanticism, not constrained by ideological principles. Thus, metamodernism should be defined as a changeable state between and outside of irony and sincerity, naivety and awareness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in search of the multiplicity of disparate and elusive horizons. We must move forward and hesitate!.

Vermeulen and van den Akker
In 2010, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker proposed metamodernism as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate. In their essay Notes on Metamodernism, they asserted that the 2000s were characterized by the return of typically modern positions that 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 post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.

The prefix “meta-” here referred not to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato’s metaxy, which denotes a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them. Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a “structure of feeling” that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like “a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles”. According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this 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.” 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.”

Vermeulen asserts 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.” 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.

The Metamodernist Manifesto
In 2011, Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto 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!”

The manifesto formed the basis of LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner’s collaborative art practice, after actor Shia LaBeouf reached out to Turner in early 2014 after reading the text, with the trio embarking on a series of metamodern performance projects exploring connection, empathy, and community across digital and physical platforms.

Cultural acceptance
In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York acknowledged the influence of Vermeulen and van den Akker when it 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, billed as the first exhibition in Europe to be staged around the concept of metamodernism. 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 Rönkkö.

In his formulation of the “quirky” cinematic sensibility, film scholar James MacDowell 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 was dedicated to metamodernism and included a series of essay 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”, in discussing twenty-first century writers such as Tom McCarthy.

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 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 a 2017 essay on metamodernism in literary fiction, Fabio Vittorini stated that since the late 1980s, mimetic 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.”

Criticism of the concept of “Metamodernism”
In connection with the fact that the concept of metamodernism has appeared quite recently, most of the utterances are reduced to an attempt not to criticize, but to analyze the phenomenon of the postmodern epoch that comes to replace it.

Dmitry Bykov
The writer and journalist Dmitry Bykov refers to the explanation of the poet Ilya Kormiltsev, according to which, “overcoming postmodern irony, the search for a new seriousness is a task for the coming decades, which will be solved with the help of neo-romanticism and a new archaic.”

Concerning the very phenomenon of the Bulls, the following is said:

Metamodernism is another way. It’s like a more complex modernism, a return to modernism – I think, artificially interrupted, artificially aborted in the 1920s – a return to modernism in a mass society. The main figures of metamodernism are [Jonathan] Franzen and, of course, my great favorite David Foster Wallace. Of course, there is irony, but in general this is a serious and even tragic attitude to life. Endless complexity, complexity; network structure of narration; free navigation in time; neoromanticheskie installation, that is, the installation of the perfection of a lonely hero, to move away from the crowd, for a certain contra-dictation with it, probably. This is an interesting concept. I, in general, for metamodernism, that is, for the new smart, roughly speaking. I want postmodernist time to end as soon as possible. Yes, and it,.

Oleg Mitroshenkov
The scientist, Doctor of Philosophy Oleg Mitroshenkov singles out four components of the concept of metamodernism:

Virtualization of the space of social interactions, when the virtual world replaces reality and new opportunities arise for manipulating the mass consciousness both on the part of the authorities and the media, and on the part of individuals.
Creation of techno-images that are attractive for social interaction, created by users in the network space and modified by others. As a result, all become co-authors and subjects of social action, and the object itself, being the fruit of “collective intelligence,” lives independently of the author.
“Globalization” (global + local) communities in the context of globalization, where social uniqueness is emphasized within the global space: thus, all states are present in a globalizing space, while remaining strictly national societies with their own culture and identity.
Transsexualism, or a return to obvious, traditional values.
Mitroshenkov also briefly examines the phenomenon of a mass man. According to him, “today a mass person is an active dominant of all spheres of human activity”, which is not authoritative but authoritarian:

Authority gives the person respect; authoritarianism requires (in vain) respect. Personality goes deep; the mass man slides on the surface, taking for the discovery and truth the first born thought. Authority does not need extra decorations (awards, titles, reverence); authoritarianism can not do without them. Authority is open and sincere (therefore it is authority); authoritarianism is secretive and intriguing. An authoritative person puts principles above the rules, real achievements are higher than status; authoritarian – to the exact opposite. As a result, the inclination to the hypocrisy of a mass man has prevailed over openness and sincerity in the modern world, and freedom over necessity and responsibility, although it has not eliminated and is unable to eliminate them completely.
Here he criticizes not the concept of metamodernism, but analyzes the development of the phenomenon of a mass person. However, according to him, the era of metamodernism may well contribute to the positive development of the very essence of a massive man:

At the same time, the nature of a mass man has the potential of his own overcoming. The move towards post-postmodernism leaves hope for a successful solution of some of the few other problems of the modern and post-modern society discussed here. And since all these processes take place in a society that is not only self-governing, but also directly controlled (in different countries to varying degrees and with different efficiency), it would be a theoretical omission to not link these factors together.

Michael Epstein
Back in 2001, the journal “Znamya” published an article by the philosopher, culturologist and literary critic Mikhail Epstein “De’but de sieсle, or From Post-to-Proto-Manifesto of the New Century”, in which he speaks of the end of the epoch with prefix “post-” and introduces a new term with the prefix “proto-” – proteism. The essence of the new era, he said, is “the fusion of the brain and the universe, engineering and organic, in the creation of thinking machines, working atoms and quanta, meaningful physical fields, in bringing all existential processes to the speed of thought.” He does not talk about a cultural return to the origins and so-called. “radical openness,” replacing the popular in the era of postmodernism, opposition to the concepts of the past. However, it speaks about the technological aspect of the new era,

Vladimir Eshilev
In 1998, the Ivano-Frankivsk writer Vladimir Eshkilev, close to the “Crimean Club” Igor Sid, together with Yuri Andrukhovich and Oleg Gutsulyak, implemented the project “The Return of the Demiurge: The Small Encyclopedia of Actual Literature” (Pleroma, 1998, No. 3; the publication on the website of the magazine “Ї”), in which he proposed, as an alternative to postmodernism, the metamodernist method of “nuanced demiurgy”. It is realized in narrative texts such as the genre of “fantasy” or “detective”, where there is such a way of artistic creation, when the author determines the plot, concept and discursive space of a literary work by constructing a specific world. In the spaces of these texts, the effect of a miraculous, contain as a substantial and non-extinct element supernatural or impossible worlds, creatures or objects with which characters or the reader find themselves in more or less close relations. The writer and artist here is an inspired “mediator”, extracted his images from the ideal world and perpetuating them in the empirical. This realizes the modernist appeal of F. Nietzsche to create “ranks of life values”, so that their images grow into images of being, transforming the world. Not only to create peace in the world, but to make it real for others. With the help of “nuanced demiurgy” (the type of Borkhesov’s story “Troll, Ukbar, Orbis Tercius”) it would seem unreal, the worlds of “fantasy” are absorbed into reality and change it. There is a kind of “expansion of the surreal” into reality: man has not yet agreed with the new dimension, but he is offered to think in certain terms – and, in the end, the world of “Roses of the World”, “Matrix”, “Space Wars”, “Star Cruiser Galaxy”, “Sailormoon”, “Lord of the Rings” or “Brother / Brother 2 “And” We are from the future / We are from the future 2 “becomes a real world – its” life values “grow into images of being, make it real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the “nuanced demiurgy” is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the “firstframe” about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the “Great Meeting”. This “demiurgy” seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, the world of “Roses of the World”, “Matrix”, “Space Wars”, “Star Cruiser Galaxy”, “Sailormoon”, “Lord of the Rings” or “Brother / Brother 2” and “We are from the future / We are from the future 2” world – his “life values” grow into images of being, make him real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the “nuanced demiurgy” is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the “firstframe” about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the “Great Meeting”. This “demiurgy” seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, the world of “Roses of the World”, “Matrix”, “Space Wars”, “Star Cruiser Galaxy”, “Sailormoon”, “Lord of the Rings” or “Brother / Brother 2” and “We are from the future / We are from the future 2” world – his “life values” grow into images of being, make him real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the “nuanced demiurgy” is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the “firstframe” about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the “Great Meeting”. This “demiurgy” seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, “The Lord of the Rings” or “Brother / Brother 2” and “We are from the future / We are from the future 2” becomes a real world – his “life values” grow into images of being, make him real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the “nuanced demiurgy” is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the “firstframe” about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the “Great Meeting”. This “demiurgy” seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, “The Lord of the Rings” or “Brother / Brother 2” and “We are from the future / We are from the future 2” becomes a real world – his “life values” grow into images of being, make him real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the “nuanced demiurgy” is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the “firstframe” about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the “Great Meeting”. This “demiurgy” seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, The metamodernism of the “nuanced demiurgy” is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the “firstframe” about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the “Great Meeting”. This “demiurgy” seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, The metamodernism of the “nuanced demiurgy” is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the “firstframe” about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the “Great Meeting”. This “demiurgy” seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes,

Cosmological coordinates, putting the “golden age” at the beginning of the linear chronology, and the Day of Judgment at the end… Fantasy also restores Nietzschean amor fati, “the smile of fate” – the being’s promise of the miracle “as rewards for “and through this restoration – revives the ethos of the feat, buried by the postmodern era under the cemetery slabs ironic.”

So, while postmodernism insists on two types of tolerance – formal-linguistic and ideological-axiological, demiurges of metamodernism postulates “Credo” – the loyalty of the “Great Tradition” with its great heroes, travels, adventures and victories. And at a certain stage in mass culture, this practice of the demiurgy “works”. After all, if in the ancient times the Greeks were consoled-purified, “cathartized” in the theater, watching the collision of mythical deeds, and the Romans in the Colosseum, watching cosmogonic gladiatorial fights, for a modern man such a scene was television with its “soap / space operas” and ” political talk show “, where mythological subjects are played by the carriers of the archetypes of modern civilization – Good, Evil, Invincible Hero, Gallant Knight, Treason-Beloved, faithful Friend,

But in the recall of this concept, Y. Kagramanov warned that over time, “demiurgic practice” does not stand up to the confrontation of the “inertia of a distinctive being”.

Source from Wikipedia