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It has been five years since our essay-cum-opening statement ‘Notes on Metamodernism’
was published in the Journal of aesthetics and culture, about six and a half years since it
was written, and sevenish years since it was conceived late at night in a student dorm
room in London, discussing, not entirely sober, the financial crisis, the rise of populism and
New Romanticism with our dear friend Niels van Poecke. We’ve since finished our studies.
We both left the UK, though for different countries – which means that we today
collaborate via Skype, if we manage at all. We also started our academic careers, learning
the ropes of teaching and marking, and focusing on the research projects that fulfill the
requirements of today’s …ahum… ‘interesting’ academic ranking systems (by ‘interesting’
we mean, of course, neoliberal, cost-effective with ‘cost’ a denominator of monetary
value and ‘effective’ a byword for market-competition). In between, in fits and starts, we
maintained this website alongside others like Nadine Feßler, Alison Gibbons, Hila Shachar
and Luke Turner, hoping to provide a platform for others to develop their own, often
rather different understandings of the present structure of feeling.
Perhaps as a result of all these developments, we have not yet developed the notion of
metamodernism as much as we would have liked. Sure, we have written one or two rarely
read follow up articles for academic anthologies and journals, trying to develop further
our conceptions of History and Utopia. We organised symposia and meetings and
attended conferences where we toned our ideas in discussions with scholars that inspired
us, even if, or rather especially when their theses were diametrically opposed to ours – we
learned a lot from talking and listening to the likes of Rosi Braidotti, Francis Fukuyama,
Laura Marx, Walter Benn Michaels, Jennifer Ashton, Nina Power, Christian Moraru, Raoul
Eshelman, Camille de Toledo, and Michel Bauwens. But we have yet to write an extensive,
detailed in-depth account of the metamodern structure of feeling as we see it, tracing the
links between socio-economic changes and cultural tendencies, expanding on, updating or
perhaps even discarding notions such as “structure of feeling”, “metaxy”, “as if” and
“both-neither”: a book. As it happens, we have recently picked up our pens and set
ourselves some deadlines to finally finish this book. We have no idea whether anyone is
actually keen to read it, but we plan (or hope…) to write it nonetheless. A quick browse on
Amazon suggests that this is how many authors approach their writing nowadays
anyways.
1
Metamodernism, as we see, it is not a philosophy. In the same vein, it is not a movement,
a programme, an aesthetic register, a visual strategy, or a literary technique or trope. To
say that something is a philosophy is to suggest that it is a system of thought. This implies
that it is closed, that it has boundaries. It also implies that there is a logic to it. To say that
something is a movement, or indeed a programme, suggests that there is a politics to it, a
belief as to how our environment should be organised. To propose any one “–ism” as an
aesthetic – register, strategy or trope – is to suggest that it is a figure that can be pinned
down and picked up from a text or painting and inserted elsewhere. The notion of
metamodernism we have proposed is neither of these. It is not a system of thought, nor is
it a movement or a trope. For us, it is a structure of feeling.
When we say that metamodernism is a structure of feeling, we intend to say, very much
like Fredric Jameson and, later, David Harvey when they describe postmodernism, that it
is a sensibility that is widespread enough to be called structural (or as the cultural
historian Ben Cranfield recently paraphrased it in a brilliant talk about the “emergent” in
art at UCL, a “feeling that structures” (2015, unpublished conference paper), yet that
cannot be reduced to one particular strategy. For Jameson, for instance, postmodernism
was the structure of feeling of endings – the end of History, the end of “ideology”, the end
of the social, the end of art; one that was expressed in many different forms: pastiche,
eclecticism, the nostalgia film, photorealism and so on. For us, metamodernism is a
structure of feeling associated with the increasingly widespread sentiment that each of
these debates are kickstarted, not as project perhaps as much as a projection, the premise
on which new projects may be endeavoured. This structure of feeling, however, too, finds
its expression in many different formal languages that have been described in detail by
others: the new sincerity, quirky, freak folk, New Romanticism, new materialism,
speculative realism, to name just a few. In any case, the 2000s are the defining period for
the shift from postmodernism to metamodernism to occur (just as the sixties were the
defining transitional period for the shift from modernism to postmodernism).
For us metamodernism does not propose any kind of vision or utopian goal. It may
describe the prevalence of such a goal in contemporary culture, but it certainly does not
prescribe it. Indeed, as cultural theorists, our aim is to be descriptive rather than
prescriptive (which doesn’t preclude a critical reception of contemporary developments,
to be sure), and our use of the term is born of our attempts to articulate developments in
aesthetics, culture, politics and economics that we consider can no longer be understood
simply, i.e. exclusively, in terms of the postmodern. Ultimately, therefore,
metamodernism is a term used, by us, to periodize the contemporary and think the
present historically.
In the studies of other literary theorists like Andre Furlani and Alexandra Dumitrescu, we
would argue, metamodernism is used to signal another modernism, though here, too, we
feel it is not necessarily the modernism we see emerging presently. What is interesting
here, is that the adjective ‘meta’ in metamodernism is used in both instances less to
indicate, as in Zavarzadeh, a rumination upon, than a situation between. In Furlani’s
thorough, evocative study Postmodernism and After: Guy Davenport, he discusses the
oeuvre of writer Guy Davenport in terms of complementarity and “contrasts absorbed
into harmony” that aspire to transcend the postmodern disorder (2007: 158).
Similarly, Dumitrescu interestingly describes metamodernism as a “budding cultural
paradigm” – one with a long history but accelerated as a result of developments in science
– that is characterized by holism, connectionism and integration. In both cases, we are
very sympathetic to a number of the initial observations – such as for instance
Dumitrescu’s spot-on reading of Blake’s poem “The Song of Experience’ as “loop-like
movement that isolates the nook of dogmatism and establishes connections between
patterns of thought that the priest would deem irreconcilable” (2007) – and appreciate
some of the metaphors and models employed to put those observations into perspective
– Furlani’s complementarity, Dumitrescu’s bootstrapping and revisionism. However, we
do not necessarily, or indeed, at all, agree with the arguments they infer from these
observations and models, nor with the relations of causality that are proposed.
To be sure, our disagreement is not a disagreement about the use of the term
metamodernism. Each should be allowed to use the term however they feel like. Since we
were late adopters, we increasingly feel we definitely have no say in this. Our dispute is
about how we understand the present conjecture. This dispute comes down, we would
suggest, to three, or maybe four, arguments. 1. Contrary to Furlani, we do not understand
what we call metamodernism, i.e. the contemporary structure of feeling, in terms of the
absorption of contrasts into wholes. Furlani may well be correct in arguing that
Davenport’s work surpasses postmodernism in that it creates harmony – indeed, there is
nothing to suggest otherwise – but we would argue that this harmony is not the dominant
sensibility of present culture. Indeed, we would very much press the point that in its
stead, the prevalent sentiment is one of irreconcilability; of the awareness that one
position is irreconcilable with another in spite of one’s need to occupy them both at once
– hence our emphasis in that first, flawed essay, on New Romanticism’s tragic desire.
Second, in line with this, we also disagree with Dumitrescu’s assertion that contemporary
culture’s attitude’s to irreconcilability – one of the key tropes in postmodernism, to be
sure – is integration, one that takes place through an appreciation of complementarity
and interconnectedness. Our reaction to Dumitrescu’s claim is threefold, the first of which
questions its premise, the latter two responding to the argumentation. Our problem with
Dumitrescu’s premise is above all its reach. She does not convincingly show the
prevalence of integrationism: the very small selection of novels, written across a very long
period (over 200 years), seems to be more wishful thinking than anything else. We are
equally unconvinced here by the cause for this “budding” paradigm shift: an early
twentieth century discovery in physics, which marks the development from a hierarchical
model of the world (“going down from complex to simple, from molecule to atom and
further still until the building blocks that make up the physical reality are identified”), to a
network model (“that aims to grasp the interrelations between various forms of matter
organization”). On the one hand, we wonder whether advances in the realm of life
sciences directly influence developments in social discourses. On the other hand, if they
do, it seems these are exactly the kind of developments – non-hierarchical, relational
modalities in thought – that Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze were mapping in the
seventies.
Most obviously, we do not, as we have already stated above, use the term
metamodernism to put forth a programme, as Dumitrescu seems to suggest, a description
of a paradigm masquerading the prescription of a paradise, in which “unmediated”
“connections between individuals, the ability of humans to create emotional, social, and
theoretical networks, and to relate across ontological levels, may prevent the race from
falling into the abyss of meaninglessness” (2007). For us, metamodernism is a structure of
feeling, a mood, if you will, an attitude “dependent”, as philosopher Noel Carroll (1976)
has brilliantly put it, on the overall state of the organism, its level of energy, the level of
resources at its disposal for coping with environmental challenges, and the degree of
tension it finds itself in as a result of the ratio of its resources to its challenges”, a global,
protracted sentiment pulling all “ambient detail into its orbit”, that relates to economic,
political and perhaps above all ecological crises encouraging alternative modalities of
thought, to the democratization of computer-technology that returns the possibility of the
public sphere to collective consciousness as much as it enables unprecedented levels of
surveillance, and to demographics, in particular the coming of age of generation Y or the
millenials, desiring another life than the one set out for them by their parents.
The term metamodernism has been used with more and less success elsewhere as well,
ranging from cultural theory in Brazil to philosophy in the low lands (the brilliant Henk
Slager preceded us on our home turf!), a mindset in India and mathematics and network
theory in the US. The term also has currency in economics. Most recently British literary
scholars James and Seshagiri (2014) have interestingly proposed metamodernism to
describe distinctly modern literary tropes in contemporary novels. In a sense, the
existence of all these different and differing uses is to be expected when using such a
generic prefix as meta-, which, as we have previously stated, conveys first and foremost a
moment after or beyond another moment (in our particular case the moment after the
postmodern moment of and within the development of western capitalist societies). It is,
in fact, so generic, that in Greek the notion of postmodernism should be translated
as metamodernism. Still, our usage of the prefix ‘meta-‘ is intended, too, to convey
something rather more specific. We chose it in order to express an oscillatory dynamic
that was, and still is, observable across the arts and in culture. For us, this dynamic should
be seen as a reflection or a mediation of a social situation in which History—and its
dialectics of praxis (i.e. labour vs. capital) and dialectics of reason (i.e. dominant ideas
about institutions vs. the materiality of daily life)—kick-started after that relatively brief
‘pause’ of the dialectic at the End of History.
Therefore, the point we wish to make here, as we wrote in a note to our 2010 essay as
well as on this website is that
Although we appear to be the first to use the term metamodernism to describe the
current structure of feeling, we are not the first to use the term per se. It has been used
with some frequency in literature studies in order to describe a post-modern alternative
to postmodernism as presented in the works of authors as far apart as, amongst others,
Blake and Guy Davenport. However, we would like to stress that our conception of
metamodernism is by no means aligned to theirs, nor is it derived from them. It is in so far
related to these notions that it too negotiates between the modern and the postmodern;
but the function, structure, and nature of the negotiation we perceive are entirely our
own and, as far as we can see, wholly unrelated to the previous perception.
The reason for our engagement here as well as these annotations is twofold: on the one
hand, we want to gratefully acknowledge the history of the term, one that far precedes
our use and will surely outlive it; on the other, and in relation to the above, we want to be
sure to distinguish our project from many of these earlier practices employing it,
especially, perhaps, those for whom ‘metamodernism’ intended a programme, in which
literature or philosophy appeared to be read normatively, as a prescription for another
modernism preferable to the postmodern outlook. To be sure, this is by no means to
suggest that we disapprove of these prior arguments, that we want to challenge or discard
their assertions – they may well be exceptionally useful in specific contexts, or even, we
hope, our context; but rather that we did not conceive of metamodernism as we
understand it in line with these conceptions, but rather through different theoretical
frameworks (Kant’s as-if, Voegelin’s metaxy, de Mul’s and Schlegel’s oscillation) and in the
tradition of other debates like Alan Kirby’s digimodernism (2009), Nicolas Bourriaud’s
altermodernism (2009), Eshelman’s performatism (2000;2008) and Jorg Heiser’s romantic
conceptualism (2007), as well as, more recently, Svetlana Boym and Christian Moraru’s
inspiring research into off-modernism (2010) and cosmodernism (2010), respectively, and
Jeffrey T. Nealon’s excellent study Post-Postmodernism or the cultural logic of just-in-time
capitalism (2012). Our lineage here, we believe, is well-documented.
We have gathered that there seems to be some confusion around the relationship
between metamodernism and New Romanticism. Our argument in the 2010 essay, where
we explicated this relation, was not that metamodernism can be reduced to New
Romanticism, nor that what is generally referred to as New Romanticism is exclusive to
the metamodernist structure of feeling. What we were trying to convey by discussing
metamodernism by way of New Romanticism, or New Romanticism in the context of
metamodernism, was that the former, New Romanticism, was but one possible expression
of the latter, metamodernism. In other words: a number of works recognized as New
Romanticism exemplified the metamodern structure of feeling. All these years later, we
have no difficulty in pointing out other developments observed by others that are
stylistically very different from New Romanticism yet express the same structure of
feeling: the return of History, not as project but as projection, a possibility: the Arab
Spring, Syriza, the Indignados, Speculative realism, OOO, New Sincerity, New Normal,
Quirky, Freak Folk, Post-Internet, and so on. We feel that this confusion, too, may well
have been our mistake entirely, as we developed our discourse around metamodernism
from earlier ideas about the return of Romanticism in culture in relation to societal
developments; that is to say, we only began thinking about metamodernism as a structure
of feeling because we started perceiving the returning sensibility of the Romantic. We
hope to have set the record straight here.
In a very interesting essay entitled ‘Poetry and the Price of Milk’, published on
NonSite.org, literary scholar Jennifer Ashton concludes with a remark on metamodernism
that we both agree with but also want to nuance: “metamodernism, in this respect, is
nothing if not capitalism’s fantasy of the market, one in which what we “like” can also
masquerade as a politics.” (2013). In line with our contention that metamodernism is the
description of a structure of feeling – and not, to state it again, a programme – we, too,
would argue that it resonates with a particular moment in capitalism, namely global
capitalism or what Anatole Kaletsky (2012) has called capitalism 4.0. Where we differ from
Ashton is that we do not necessarily believe it always, inevitably, conforms to the interests
of that capitalism; in postmodernism, too, after all, certain practices opposed the very
model of capitalism to which they were related.
It is true that, thus far, we have theorised the metamodern structure of feeling in
‘western’ culture predominantly. The reason for this is not, evidently, that we feel that
there isn’t anything of interest happening outside of Europe, the US and Australia. Indeed,
it is obvious, both politically and in terms of arts production, that there is exceedingly
much happening in countries like China, Brazil, Lebanon, Morocco, Congo, South Korea
and Turkey. One might even say that the so-called crisis of the West is nothing less than a
crisis of dominance, where the class bully suddenly realizes he has lost his allies and his
victims no longer put up with his crap. What we speak about when we speak about
(geo)political instability, after all, is that we, in the west, is the realization that we never so
much appeased conflict as that we displaced it. Similarly, our current problem with
capitalism is not that it shows its real face; our problem is that we, in the West, now see
this face much clearer than during the postmodern years– like conflict, it was there all
along, we just looked away. The reason for focusing on phenomena in Europe and the US
is that the both of us are most familiar with those contexts. Assuming that these
observations have currency outside of these contexts, we feel, would be arrogant at best
and old-school hegemonic at worst. This is not to say that they definitely are of no help in
countries like Lebanon and South Korea; just that we do not know whether they do, just
as we do not know whether our observations in the arts make sense in the context of
classical music, or public administration, or the natural sciences. Part of the plan putting
together this website was to include voices from across various contexts and disciplines.
Han pasado cinco años desde que se publicó nuestra declaración de ensayo
'Notas sobre el metamodernismo' en el Journal of aesthetics and culture,
aproximadamente seis años y medio desde que se escribió, y siete años desde
que se concibió a altas horas de la noche en un dormitorio de estudiantes en
Londres, discutiendo, no del todo sobrio, la crisis financiera, el auge del populismo
y el nuevo romanticismo con nuestro querido amigo Niels van Poecke. Desde
entonces hemos terminado nuestros estudios. Ambos salimos del Reino Unido,
aunque para diferentes países, lo que significa que hoy colaboramos a través de
Skype, si es que lo hacemos. También comenzamos nuestras carreras
académicas, aprendiendo las cuerdas de la enseñanza y el marcado, y
enfocándonos en los proyectos de investigación que cumplen con los requisitos de
los sistemas de clasificación académica 'interesantes' de hoy ... ahum ... (por
'interesante' nos referimos, por supuesto, neoliberal, costo -efectivo con 'costo' un
denominador de valor monetario y 'efectivo' un sinónimo de competencia en el
mercado). En el medio, en momentos de crisis, mantuvimos este sitio web junto
con otros como Nadine Feßler, Alison Gibbons, Hila Shachar y Luke Turner, con la
esperanza de proporcionar una plataforma para que otros desarrollen su propia
comprensión, a menudo bastante diferente, de la estructura actual de los
sentimientos.
Supongo que la razón para compartir todo esto con ustedes es que en los últimos
años ha habido algunas interpretaciones erróneas sobre lo que podríamos haber
pretendido en esas primeras notas sobre el metamodernismo. Algunas de las
6,000 palabras iniciales se han sacado de contexto o incluso se han tergiversado
para sugerir que dijimos cosas que ciertamente no dijimos. Sin duda, no tenemos
ningún problema con las personas que critican nuestro argumento; de hecho,
nosotros mismos vemos cuán defectuoso es, cuán equivocado en algunas de sus
evaluaciones e incompleto (y quizás demasiado apresurado) en su teorización; ni,
obviamente, nos importa que la gente use nuestro ensayo como un trozo explícito
o una inspiración implícita para desarrollar sus propias tesis, sin duda mucho más
avanzadas. También entendemos que una vez que sus palabras están anotadas,
ya no son suyas, que pueden ser recogidas por otros. Pero es importante para
nosotros que nuestra investigación sea criticada o elogiada por lo que realmente
concluye, no por lo que no concluye. Por lo tanto, hemos decidido, antes de este
proyecto de libro eternamente retrasado, abordar algunos de estos problemas.
Muchos, si no todos, de estos reclamos ya los hemos hecho en otro lugar, por
escrito o en un registro, pero deseamos repetirlos aquí en un solo lugar para evitar
nuevos malentendidos.
La razón de nuestro compromiso aquí, así como estas anotaciones, es doble: por
un lado, queremos reconocer con gratitud la historia del término, uno que precede
mucho a nuestro uso y seguramente lo sobrevivirá; Por otro lado, y en relación con
lo anterior, queremos asegurarnos de distinguir nuestro proyecto de muchas de
estas prácticas anteriores que lo emplean, especialmente, quizás, aquellos para
quienes el 'metamodernismo' pretendía un programa, en el que la literatura o la
filosofía parecían leerse normativamente, como una receta para otro modernismo
preferible a la perspectiva posmoderna. Sin duda, esto no significa en modo
alguno que desaprobemos estos argumentos anteriores, que queramos desafiar o
descartar sus afirmaciones; bien pueden ser excepcionalmente útiles en contextos
específicos, o incluso, esperamos, nuestro contexto; sino más bien que no
concebimos el metamodernismo tal como lo entendemos de acuerdo con estas
concepciones, sino más bien a través de diferentes marcos teóricos (como el caso
de Kant, la metaxia de Voegelin, la oscilación de De Mul y Schlegel) y en la
tradición de otros debates como el de Alan Kirby digimodernismo (2009), el
altermodernismo de Nicolas Bourriaud (2009), el performatismo de Eshelman
(2000; 2008) y el conceptualismo romántico de Jorg Heiser (2007), así como, más
recientemente, la investigación inspiradora de Svetlana Boym y Christian Moraru
sobre el modernismo (2010) y cosmodernismo (2010), respectivamente, y el
excelente estudio de Jeffrey T. Nealon Post-postmodernismo o la lógica cultural
del capitalismo justo a tiempo (2012). Creemos que nuestro linaje aquí está bien
documentado.
Hemos deducido que parece haber cierta confusión en torno a la relación entre el
metamodernismo y el nuevo romanticismo. Nuestro argumento en el ensayo de
2010, donde explicamos esta relación, no fue que el metamodernismo puede
reducirse al Nuevo Romanticismo, ni que lo que generalmente se conoce como
Nuevo Romanticismo es exclusivo de la estructura metamodernista del
sentimiento. Lo que estábamos tratando de transmitir al discutir el
metamodernismo a través del Nuevo Romanticismo, o el Nuevo Romanticismo en
el contexto del metamodernismo, era que el primero, el Nuevo Romanticismo, era
solo una posible expresión del segundo, el metamodernismo. En otras palabras:
una serie de obras reconocidas como Nuevo Romanticismo ejemplificaron la
estructura metamoderna del sentimiento. Todos estos años después, no tenemos
dificultad en señalar otros desarrollos observados por otros que son
estilísticamente muy diferentes del Nuevo Romanticismo pero que expresan la
misma estructura de sentimientos: el regreso de la Historia, no como proyecto sino
como proyección, una posibilidad: el árabe Primavera, Syriza, los indignados, el
realismo especulativo, OOO, Nueva sinceridad, Nueva normalidad, Extravagantes,
Folk, Freak, Post-Internet, etc. Creemos que esta confusión también puede haber
sido nuestro error por completo, ya que desarrollamos nuestro discurso sobre el
metamodernismo a partir de ideas anteriores sobre el regreso del romanticismo en
la cultura en relación con los desarrollos sociales; es decir, solo comenzamos a
pensar en el metamodernismo como una estructura de sentimientos porque
comenzamos a percibir la sensibilidad de retorno de lo romántico. Esperamos
haber dejado las cosas claras aquí.