How Metamodernism Can Save Us All

Thaddeus Thomas on Postmodernism's Earnest Successor

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I like this piece a lot — one of the first things I’ve seen in a while that really tries to lay out a new direction for literature, if not for consciousness.

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HOW METAMODERNISM CAN SAVE US ALL

Contemporary culture has met the wizard, and if postmodernism was the tin woodsman before, metamodernism is the woodsman after. From a literary perspective, much survives the change. We carry over metafiction, the blending of genres, intertextuality, and unreliable narrators, but we also revive modernism’s heart, its sense of hope. It gives us what Vermeulen and van den Akker call an “informed naivety,” allowing us to understand complexities and yet still believe in transformative power, authenticity, and the relevance of the spiritual search in an increasingly secular society. Modernism was cursed and turned to tin. Having transformed into postmodernism, it lost the ability to sincerely engage with the bigger questions of the human condition. Metamodernism stands before the wizard and learns that its missing heart was there all along.

But if we’re going to understand this life post-wizard, we must begin with what came before.

The concept of meaning has been in decline since the end of premodern thought, a period that stretched from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. It’s a period that included the Enlightenment, an age of reason that was meant to be the evolution of man and instead lead him into world war, a disappointment that would define much of modern thought.

Modernism moved us from premodern to modern thought, and if we resist the temptation to view Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism as isolated eras, disconnected from what came before or since, we can see how they transform and build on each other. The cleanest break was between Romanticism and modernism for it coincides with that move into modern thought, but Romanticism was also an early rebellion against the limitations of the Enlightenment, and in that way was a precursor of modernism. Only, Romanticism sought its answers in a return to nature and a desire for the sublime, clinging to the foundations of a world it couldn’t yet see was coming to its end.

The Industrial Revolution transformed man from an agrarian creature to one of factories, assembly lines, and cities, while the First World War shattered the promises of man's mental evolution. Modernism reflected this, pulling away from the sublime to focus on the importance of an urban, everyman existence as exemplified by works like Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. In the muddled chaos of what it meant to be human, modernism still sought meaning.

The horrors of World War II severed our belief in the grand narratives that crafted those meanings. This birth of postmodernism was a continuation of modern thought and brought with it the literary tools modernism created, but what defined the era was an inability to look at our lives with the hope and dignity modernists had clung to. It introduced deconstruction and irony, tools meant to reveal a total lack of meaning.

By the early ‘90s, with the end of the Cold War, the cracks in postmodernism began to show. In his 1993 essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace wrote:

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things.

In their 2010 paper, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Vermeulen and van den Akker identified this new age by focusing on “deviations from the postmodern condition” that bring meaningful connections and sincere engagement rather than postmodernism’s ironic distance. What would have been an ironic exercise, deconstructing our structures and showing them empty, is transformed for the metamodernist. What the postmodern tore down, the metamodern rebuilds, creating new meaning from what was once proclaimed meaningless.

In “Notes on Metamodernism,” Vermeulen and van den Akker illustrate these differences with a metaphor:

Like a donkey, [metamodernism] chases a carrot that it never manages to eat because the carrot is always just beyond its reach. But precisely because it never manages to eat the carrot, it never ends its chase, setting foot in moral realms the modern donkey (having eaten its carrot elsewhere) will never encounter, entering political domains the postmodern donkey (having abandoned the chase) will never come across.

The postmodern donkey abandoned the chase because the carrot is meaning. For the modern, the pursuit is brief. Meaning is found in the mundane, in the life of any average person on any normal day. For the postmodern, there is no meaning and thus no pursuit. For the metamodern, the carrot is in superposition, being both a human construct and having the capacity for significance. It’s both real and unreal, worth the pursuit but forever beyond our grasp.

The metamodernist is freed from the rigid belief that a text must be one thing or another, having the ability to oscillate between contradictory states. It hobbles the postmodern notion of a consumer identity, that we buy who we are off the shelf, according to which brands we find most relatable. The consumerism that filled the postmodern void now must balance itself against a world discovering that the void is itself a construct, a psychological projection of generational disappointment, and that the meaning that we’ve made still has meaning.

If we consider the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once, we see the oscillation between absurdist comedy and genuine emotional stakes. Amidst the chaos of multidimensionality, the movie directly confronts the claim of meaninglessness and reconstructs meaning around family.

We see that oscillation again in The Good Place, the 2016-2020 television series that deconstructed philosophy while arguing for the importance of ethics. In 2021, Bo Burnham’s Inside was aware of its own artificiality but genuinely explored issues like mental health and isolation.

As a culture, we’ve grown weary of postmodernism’s detachment, and as modernism was cursed by the wicked witch of World War II, metamodernism’s wizard was the end of the Cold War and the turn of the new century. With it came 9/11, the financial crises, climate change, and political extremism. In this constant barrage of historically significant moments, we discovered a need for sincerity, just as David Foster Wallace predicted.

Our response to understanding the metamodern age should be freedom. Such era-defining terms are descriptions and weren’t meant as movements to adhere to, but that’s what they become. Postmodernism said there was no meaning, and eventually we could find no meaning because postmodernism said there was no meaning to find.

Bo Burnham’s Inside was a response to the isolation of COVID, and in his struggle to share his difficulties, we saw our own. Metamodernism is still in its early years, however, and no period is monolithic. In social media, cynicism and irony reign supreme, and some attempted to discredit Inside by labeling its artificiality. The little building where it was filmed was in the back yard of the house Burnham shared with his significant other, not only an expensive home of wealth and comfort but also of pop-cultural significance, being the very one used to film Nightmare on Elm Street. They asked how a man in a place of privilege could possibly speak to the struggles of his viewers. They claimed his isolation was a pretense, and by extension, any claim at meaning was fraudulent.

Where Burnham attempted to build meaning, others clung to cynicism.

Indeed, the twenty-first century is not a time to naively jettison our skepticism. AI has created the need to doubt evidence beheld with our own eyes. We need the informed naivety of metamodernism, oscillating between a healthy skepticism and the eager embrace of everything genuine. The more the times take from us, the more we need a mindset capable of engagement and of finding value in the man-made ideas that hold us together. This is not an age for nihilism.

The disconnect that once freed us from the despair of World War eventually became our prison. One day, that change will come to metamodernism, but today is not that day.

The central, defining deviation of this age from the last is the conceit that the constructed nature of grand narratives doesn’t render them devoid of meaning. We have stared into the eyes of our artificiality and seen in it the reflection of man’s own soul.

For now, that’s freedom.

Thaddeus Thomas is a literary fantasy writer. His Substack is

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