Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism

Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).

Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen, “Periodising the 2000s, or, the Emergence of Metamodernism,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 1-19.

The end of history proclaimed by Fukayama seemed sure from the vantage point and vernacular of postmodernism. Modernism’s project, liberal democracy, was recognized as bringing history to its dissolution, and postmodernism was that dissolution: the hazy, irresponsible dream that we had essentially escaped the human condition (as it had been known to prior civilizations) or were on track to do so (1-2). Postmodern culture spread a cynical “sense of the end” across culture: a shrug, as things were deconstructed. It sneered at modernism while growing fat off its leftovers (2).
Metamodernism has beginnings in Dumitrescu (2007), and Furlani (2007), who “propose some kind of synthesis or harmony between modern and postmodern modes” (5). To this Van den Akker and Vermuelen oppose oscillation (6). They do see an opening for nationalism and fascism in its neoromantic tendency (6).
Metamodernism is a “structure of feeling,” per Raymond Williams in 1954. But there are “residuals and emergencies” from past structures (8). Structure of feeling irreducible to any element of a period, more like just what’s in the air. They all savor of it (7).
Postmodernism bracketed the past and future out of disdain. It recycled the past, taking a substantial thing and then making pastiche, refuse out of it. It played with the past. Metamodernism also self-consciously picks from the past but not with an eye to ridicule, but to do justice to and add value to (8-10). It oscillates between modernism and postmodernism, but it doesn’t take “the best of both worlds” (11). 1960s is transitional period for postmodernism; 2000s is for metamodernism (12).
Postmodernism had produced the “third way” centrism of the Clinton years: end-of-history endless growth consumerism, enriched by easy, ever-increasing diversity (13). The mall as a political phenomenon.
Neoliberalism is basically elites’ search for profit amid stagnating productivity gains. So for example, you ship a job to China to increase the return by shrinking labor costs. Deregulation the main strategy (15-16). Debt has made up the gap for people and nations. Neoliberalism did not retreat after the Great Recession (16-17).
The book seeks to follow Frederic James in its project of conceptualizing and periodizing metamodernism (18). Dumitrescu is actually describing postmodernism when she says it’s like a ship sailing between islands, modifying itself at each (2007). Instead, Akker and Vermuelen say metamodernism is like, you know each island has value, but then your boat sinks and in your doubt and uncertainty you pick one, finally (19).
Akker: end of history is postmodernism because it’s the defeatism of the progressive left applied to the sense that history had been transcended by modernism’s spawn, liberal democracy. Postmodernism is outside of it all, so they judged that moment to have been outside of history.
What happened was capitalism both reached its spatial limits (it took over the globe and invaded all of cultural life. It removed depth and created free-floating immediacies. This means titillation and euphoria were packaged and pumped into human life, constantly. You became connected to these “hits,” not to grounded, real life (22). Metamodernism is an “emerging structure of feeling” (28, quoting Vermeulen and Akker, 2010, 2). Garria[?] (2008, 724): at any time “there are multiple of these structures of feeling in operation” (28).

James MacDowell, “The Metamodern, the Quirky and Film Criticism,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 25-40.

Part of this is “the quirky” per Akker, characterized by “a continually conflicted tonal register of simultaneous amused distance and affectionate sympathy” (29). I think this is easily recognized in Napoleon Dynamite: flawed, absurd characters that are serious and human enough, however, to care for and identify with. Mayshark calls it “self-conscious meaningfulness” (2007, 5) (30).
Tonally, the three films he looks at say, but in different ways “an attitude of emotional and intellectual commitment (or affirmation, hopefulness, sentiment) in the face of a nonetheless-present potential for skepticism (or irony, consciousness of absurdity, affected distance)” (34). For example, filmmaker Anderson’s (of Mr. Fox) style gives “a detachment from a naïve investment in the fiction and a sense of wide-eyed wonder at an aesthetic of the orderly and the miniature” (35). Can also be, not “a naïve retreat from” but “more a radical refusal of the requirements of despair” such as in Glory at Sea (36). That film achieves the neo-romantic straining against impossibility but the result is a heartwarming success rather than pathic failure (as we would’ve seen in postmodernism movies like In Search of the Niras[?]—a bus from 1975) (37).
Postmodern queer theory: subject is fractured, tragically cut off from the social realm it desires and that could give it mooring, according to Lynne Huffer (2013). Nothing can even “fit” just right. But metamodernism consciously bucks this. Shortbus instead asserts the transcendental possibility of radical togetherness and communality, willfully asserting this against all negativity, hoping against hope, but believing it in the end to be the true bottom layer of reality (39). Maybe call it “sweet sadness utopianism”? [my term]

Josh Toth, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Rise of Historioplastic Metafiction,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 41-54.

Lacan: structures of crisscrossing networks and “roles” determine us and keep us from “freedom.” Zizek: that structure of roles is itself determined by everything else and is not “free”: there is interpenetration and a continual play (41-2). Postmodernism’s corrosive undermining (“perverts playing pointless games”) is seen as something to move beyond (especially with the populist right picking up on its arbitrariness), but Toth says we affirm the “inescapabilty of the symbolic and tactics” as a construct when we do this. We say we’re enmeshed in an arbitrary web of rules and roles. Toth seems to want to get us to some affirmation of a really real Real (423).
“The past is grasped when the shape it is given signals (also) its potential for future reformation.” Basically, though the past births the present temporally, it is always at the same time “plastic” in the hands of a present that is casting it with some eye to the future (45). There is no final or correct answer in this process because decision is a limited definite action imposed on an infinite possibility but without the intimate [and infinite] knowledge that could justify it, as Derrida (2000, 255) says (46).
“The desire to fix the plasticity of the past (by exorcising the spectral) clearly results in a stifling state of timelessness, a state in which temporal movement (narrative, interpretive, ethical) is simply impossible.” It creates “a timeless present” (184). Toth saying the past can’t and shouldn’t be fixed without destroying it as a past (50). It may be that its nature requires plasticity because of the infinite nature of reality: by necessity no narrative or mind can capture and fix it. But metamodernism is arguing that unlike postmodernism, which wants to forget the “informing restrictions of the plastic,” or modernism, which believes in an absolutely real presence that precludes my “re-formation,” that that process must be necessary by the infinite nature of things (51). Metamodernism therefore oscillates between the two. (All this postmodernism and metamodernism yes and no is not just irrational madness—it’s trying to get at the infinite nature of reality.) This Beloved novel critiques postmodernism’s “increasingly dogmatic and irresponsible emphasis on the inescapability of an arbitrary and fictitious symbolic universe” yet it also accepts and endorses this universe (52-3), otherwise it would lapse back into modernist ideology. It negates “postmodern irony while negating its negation” (53) “it stresses the absoluteness of a plastic Real by presenting its sincere movement towards final apprehension as traumatically infinite (53). Metamodernism “renews the possibility of the objective, the absolute outside limits of the Real while insisting upon the inherent plasticity of those limits” (53). It’s “virtuality authorizes essence in its free interpretations” in the same way the ‘type’ legitimizes the sculptor’s improvisations (Malabonzoos, 74).”

Jörg Heiser, “Super-Hybridity: Non-Simultaneity, Myth-Making and Multipolar Conflict,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 55-68.

Heiser: super-hybridity comes out of the digital age when a dizzying array of influences can be assembled to create art. Thus all production in some sense flows out of an existing web. But manipulation of this web by the powerful is a fact (55-6). Non-simultaneity or asynchronicity: “a clash not of civilizations, but of different stages or periods of progress in social, economic and technological terms within what are of the same civilizations.” This is from imbalances of powers and manipulation by power. It replaces the previous geographical assumptions taken for granted (56-7).
Islamic State showcases super-hybridity by their amalgamation of various influences across cultures and non-simultaneity in their pastiche of ancient barbarism combined with futuristic technophilism (57-8). A commitment to purity usually comes with self-entitlement to plunder cultural imagery shamelessly (61-2). Through technology this goes viral/virulent (62). “An idiosyncratic mix of historical facts and sources is seemingly magically transformed into a purist cause for separatism” (64). Hollywood elides effortlessly into real war and battles with the pastiche of allusions (65). “No technology of decentralized digital circulation and no hybrid cultural technique is safe from being incorporated into political stratagems geared exactly towards diverting them from their inherent emancipatory and liberating potentials.” This is “debased” super-hybridity (65-6).
We can’t reduce events to one underlying structural cause: “Oh, it’s just love of money.” Purist, dogmatic answers like that ignore the aesthetic web these events situate themselves in (68). Dialectics of Enlightenment: modernist purity opposed by postmodern diversity. But now, in metamodernism, diversity sucked into fantasies and power games spawned by super-hybridity (68).

Sjoerd van Tuinen, “The Cosmic Artisan: Mannerist Virtuosity and Contemporary Crafts,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 69-82.

Tuinen: We’re in an “a-synchronous” present where material, tech, social, political, digital, etc., “express and construct the contemporary” in “their hybrid togetherness.” We’re “meta” (“among”) this “heterogeneity” (69). Mannerism is about uniting art and craft. The artistic genius (intellect) needs the manual skill (the hand) to create art. They are inextricable, unlike what Michaelangelo believed (71-2).
Deleuze and Guattari: modernism gives us the “cosmic artisan,” who weds abstract, ideal forces (cosmic) to matter. He is not bound by culture or history in this mission (70). Tuinen wants to show latent versions of this at the point of beginning of mannerism, when the matter-form cleavage in art began (16^th century?) (71).
Extend mannerism to our new technologies. The line between form and matter disappears as these technologies introduce new ways of doing art. To him it becomes clear that ideas don’t inhabit art, other material does, which is shaped by new techniques (72-73). This type of focus on art brings out the alchemical aspect, as it emphasizes bringing forth the raw materials of the earth for transformation (74-5).
Like in metallurgy, there’s no clean break between the mold and the molded. The techniques of contemporary artists are “not representational, but constructive; they mediate and effectuate what they are about.” (76). The process of making is part of the genius of making. The process is not some dumb instrument.
There is a return to materialism in metamodern craft. It is tired of postmodern ideology, or the reduction of objects to their anthropocentric power games milieu. Object-oriented ontology says to experience these objects in their sheer existence: an experience that is akin to the sublime. These objects are mind independent, and so they can impress themselves on us and “exist” in a realer way than they could under postmodernism, which explained away things to subjective and relative realities (77-78).
How to express the sublime interrelation between humans and the world, between user and object? He says the alchemist could see this because he had magic, whereas we must posit instead a techno-social solution. Object or technology should be chosen, maintained, and owned by the user. A total relationship to the object. That is why people today like handwork. Not because they are like the romantics of the industrial age, who wanted to turn back the clock on mass production. No, it’s because they see this total relationship as getting them closer to an organic relationship with the outside world, one not distorted by ideals that impose themselves on matter (78). Perhaps the sublime can shine through in this new conception, and a true experience can be had?
He describes beauty as relating more to finitude and to how composition is by definition born of the resistance of the material to one’s tools and advances. The area between the infinite sublime experience of the unbounded moment and the defining limits that give us beauty is the space the cosmic artisan must inhabit (79).
Breaking out of the guild model made the artisan into an individual, and his relation to his work and even himself broke down amidst the pressures of originality, which was a destabilizing force. The artisan needs the discipline of craft in order to both realize himself but also to adequately birth the results of honed craft that come from outside him and which he must be somewhat subject to (80-81).
Making is being re-singularized through craftsmanship these days, which means all aspects of making are being returned to the hands of the maker. It’s the opening for the rejection of the modern and postmodern tabula rasa mentality regarding design, which was based on an overly cerebral and disconnected-from-matter idealism. No, now matter matters, and a new sobriety is taking hold that could form a nexus between the ideal and the mundane. It could potentially chart a more sustainable course that deftly navigates between grounded beauty and soaring sublimity (82).

Alison Gibbons, “Metamodern Affect,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 83-86.

Frederic Jameson attempted to show the loss of “affect” under postmodernism by contrasting a Van Gogh painting with a Warhol painting. The Van Gogh painting pointed to an ultimate truth and assumed a unified self that could form an emotional reaction toward it (one of sympathy and thus social justice). The Warhol painting assumed there is no unified self and therefore no meaningful emotion, and it is aimed at simply stirring the free-floating emotions that may be occurring in the viewer. It is intended to do different things to different people (83-84). There has been a recent trend back toward affectivity and it’s either because it was part of postmodernism all along or because postmodernism is dying. (84).
It seems that what Jameson was saying was that postmodern affectivity was non-cognitive rather than hermeneutic. It wasn’t a key to understanding external stimuli. In metamodernism, the idea of a self that can process meaningful emotions is returning (84-85).

Lee Konstantinou, “Four Faces of Postirony,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 87-102.

Seinfeld and Beavis and Butt-head are exemplars of postmodern irony, which corroded public life for many decades. Irony can be defined as “symptomatic, sceptical, or paranoid reading” of the world (87-88). Post-irony is the movement not against irony but through it, preserving its insights but finding some form of sincerity still on the other side (88).
In contrast the New Sincerity either ignores irony or assumes the opposition of irony and sincerity in a more binary sense (89).
Postmodern irony does still reign supreme. “‘Generalized irony, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, formal play, pastiche’ have ‘become standard features of many movies and television shows.’ (41).” (This from Green, 2005.) Late postmodernism or motivated postmodernism intensifies the irrealism and pastiche of postmodernism but does so in an environment where it is no longer subverting or parodying but simply attempting to represent reality in the postmodern age (90-91).
Current postmodern strategies are more aesthetic than critical. If everyone is doing postmodern art now, what are we critiquing? Ourselves? Postmodern art has become just a more neutral representation of what is, especially in the digital age (91). Power and empire have even absorbed the critical functions of postmodernism. Motivated postmodernism is this form of “neutral”[!] and sober description of a postmodern world. Postmodern criticisms no longer work to undermine it (92).
Credulous metafiction subscribes to postmodernism’s core truth: that metanarratives are not and cannot be binding, and that power orders human existence. But it hopes against hope from within this paradigm for “faith, conviction, immersion, and emotional connection.” It no longer employs irony to foster a skeptical world. It thinks we can link incomplete systems of knowledge together to create something that may be able to accomplish this (93).
Similar to performatism, credulous metafiction assumes a reader’s postmodern incredulity and skepticism and then uses postmodern tools to try to reconstruct belief in the viewer. To change what they believe (94). Credulous metafiction uses the tools of self-aware metafiction to draw the reader out of his naive acceptance of the narrative world of the book while conversely attempting to inspire belief in the possibility of breaking free of the injustices that live in the critical and skeptical worldview necessary to engage in such critique (95).
Postironic Bildungsroman are fictional or autobiographical journeys from naïveté through irony and cynicism to ultimate belief and sincerity. Obama’s book [and mine] are examples. Realism is the end result, sometimes disillusioned but still non-cynical (96-97).
“Relational art gives us postmodern reality by means of non-postmodern form.” The Office is a good example. It exposes postmodern, ironic and awkward reality but uses these elements to portray real affective feeling (98-99). It uses flat and uninflected narrative with seemingly disconnected sequences to create a type of oscillation in the reader’s mind between interpretations, which could be described as its primary aesthetic (99-100). The “discourse analysis” of postmodernism becomes an “ontological register” as relational art teases out meaning and affect from meaninglessness and haphazardness. (100).
Neoliberalism is “privatization, deregulation, financialization, and capital mobility.” Previously in embedded capitalism, when the state, labor, and capital were allied, irony could be an effective response to the fakeness required of the organization man in his multidecade career with the same firm. Now, temporary project-based teams come together then fall apart and require sincere commitment and belief—at least for a little while. Thus the oscillation of postirony and how it fits the dominant economic model now (101-102).

Nicoline Timmer, “Radical Defenselessness: A New Sense of Self in the Work of David Foster Wallace,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 103-116.

Timmer almost finds in David Foster Wallace’s work an “outline of a new ethics” by his “reaching beyond language, with language”: trying to say the mystical (104-105). He casts metafiction and postmodern witting as conduits for the horror of solipsism, or the philosophical tendency to retreat to a navel-gazing belief that one’s own mind and experiences are all that can be known. (105-106). Metafiction was meant to be “upfront, within the text, about the artificiality of textual construction” but “ended up being easily appropriated” by the machines of artificiality and profit that the postmodern authors were originally critiquing (106). It also becomes a “hey look at me looking at you looking at me” tired trope that becomes very performative and manipulative (106).
Metafiction is a manifestation of the insecure self, constantly checking its existence and its supposed audience, seeking confirmation and affirmation neurotically (107). These people construct their identities and so find validation in the constructed nature of metafiction. Wallace says this is solipsistic and lonely and must be combatted by all means, even cliches (107).
Best and Kellner: postmodernism dispenses with the individual while making him more isolated and individualistic than ever: he becomes an amoral “desiring monad” (108). 1990s postmodernism: “it hurts; I can’t feel anything.” It is “an inability to appropriate feelings, while feeling them nevertheless.” Empty people feeling intensely (108).
Jameson said no room for anxiety and alienation in postmodernism because no self left to do the feeling. That’s generalizing a little. Difference is now it’s hard to understand how the fake selves of postmodernism could feel these things in the first place, but feel them they do (108-109).
Psychologistic (modern?): “I hurt therefore I am.” Postmodernism: self is evacuated, “death of the subject.” Metamodern oscillation of Wallace: “it hurts” (109).
Getting beyond the performativity that came with postmodern metrication requires a nakedness toward another and toward the important, unutterable experiences of life in their sublimity and pain. A type of defenselessness (109-112). It’s more threatening than just sincerity. It’s a price you have to pay, a type of death, for actual relationality with another person. This hearkens to Levinas’ ethical demand. It comes from outside you and turns you inside out. We could be detached from the “slippery just-out-of-reachness” of postmodernism, but not this. A solution may be thinking of this exposure time as taking place instantaneously, moment by moment in a transactional relational space between interlocutors and the relational space between them. But in a disenchanted world, that space is still empty, which adds to the challenge (112-114).
Self no longer “alone and kept from itself but instead acutely aware of the proximity and presence of others.” These others destroy solipsism, which is good, but are also a danger to one trying to break through the unspeakable quality of life via radical defenselessness. One is disarmed, unable to articulate in this posture (115). But it’s the only way forward and the only way to live more authentically.

Alison Gibbons, “Contemporary Autofiction and Metamodern Affect,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 117-130.

Starting in the 2000s, memoirs are big business. Some say this is just late capitalism co-opting personal emotion and experience into a fabricated commodity or an arbitrary narrative-forcing power move, but Gibbons says this misses the “structure of feeling” that makes “historicity, affect and depth” meaningful again. It doesn’t dissolve a fragmented self into confused disassociation with reality but rather locates the self in a particular time and place and body, with a truth (regardless of how subjective that “truth” may be) (117-118).
Postmodernism killed the text, the subject, and depth/affect. The subject was a constructed ball of heteronomous influences, the text was a constructed assemblage of narratives created by anyone having contact with it, and representation was flattened in art to no more than surface images and impressions because art was trying to convey the lack of substance in everything (118-119).
In modernism, there was a clear concept of a unified subject that could communicate with other unified subjects. Alienation happened to subjects. Truth might still not be universal, but it was ultimate: it had a definite meaning I could experience (119).
Metamodern subjectivity allows for true feeling, true connection and enrichment and attachment while not discarding the insights of postmodernism, such as how identities are constructed and conditioned by power in many ways, some of them arbitrary. But this is done not in an individualistic way but in a situational way. It’s therefore “relative” more so but also truer to its context, and aware of this context. It’s contingent but bravely so (119-120).
Autofiction and metamodernism: fiction no longer false or true, that question is ignored, and the question that is answered is, how are we to live? This “disrupts polarizing accounts of ontology, self-hood, and truth” and correspond to metamodernism’s “situated affect” (121). “Subjectivity is linked to an external reality through personal connection and situatedness” (122).
Chris Kraus in I love Dick explores how “hermeneutic, interpersonal actuality” actually drives person construction, not just postmodern reflexive shell games (123). History “does set the parameters for and work to shape subjectivities in some way” (125).
By going from the third person to the first in her autofiction, Kraus “acknowledges fragmentation as a postmodern insight but tries nevertheless (perhaps in vain) to integrate it with a grounded sense of self, a necessary thinking, feeling subjectivity in search of meaningful identity” (125-126).
Frédéric Beigbeder wrote Windows on the World about the last moments of those in the trade towers before they collapsed. It is autofictional and hyperreal. Baudrillard said hyperrral is when reality is so funneled through representations that it itself becomes a strange exaggerated caricature of itself. Exemplified by the extreme and grotesque horror of 9/11 (126-126).
The book is ultimately against postmodernism because it says the hyperreal asserts itself into life unignorably and forces the mirage like quality of postmodern culture to evaporate. When that happens, affective, sincere connection and empathy are all that remain of life (127-128). The book uses postmodern techniques like crass self-reflexivity to skyline actual human experience and connection. “By locating the embodied self in an external socio-political world, such grounding has ethical force: it reinforces the corporeality of bodies, of the self in the body and in connection with others, and the potentiality of personal affective experience.” “The fragmented and constructed postmodern mode of being is shown to be inadequate precisely because it fails to account for lived experiences” (129).
The metamodern “affection for affect” lives in tension with postmodern fragmentation and skepticism, but it finds from experience that it can only make sense of the world and satisfy its longings for connection by grounding itself in the particular—this body, this place, this time (130). [That is why I must understand the world in a premodern way but with the tools of modernity such as science and postmodernism, such as credulity toward all sources of info.]

Gry C. Rustad and Kai Hanno Schwind, “The Joke That Wasn’t Funny Anymore: Reflections on the Metamodern Sitcom,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 131-145.

Humor had tracked most closely with societal change in the form of the sitcom. Postmodernism manifested in anti-authoritarianism of the 70s and irony of the 90s. Metamodernism manifesting in the mockumentaries and self-reflexive vibes of the oughts. [Not sure about conservative(?) 80s.] (133-134)
Metamodern comedies use parody, pastiche, and irony just like postmodernism (because that’s the only way to talk in our era), but they do it to different purposes. Postmodernism portrays apathy and blankness; Metamodernism conveys emotional realism and meaning, albeit with “ironic knowingness.” The two are not defined by style but the “specific comic tonality” (135-137).
Seinfeld the postmodern sitcom par excellence: audience gets to relate the meaninglessness of their own lives to the nothingness that the show is about and get a laugh out of it. “Humor is first and foremost observationally distanced, highly judgmental and very often serves as an end in itself” (139-140).
One feature of the metamodern sitcom is “warm performance style”: this refusal to sacrifice deeper, more serious difficulties and values on the altar of a cynical laugh or joke. The jokes aren’t the be-all end-all of the experience like they are in postmodernism (142).
Metamodernism: commitment to the impossible possibility. Hope against hope. Believe in spite of disbelief. It’s a different tone (144). Postmodernism: deconstruction, irony, nostalgia, nihilism. (144). Metamodernism oscillates “between parody and sincerity, apathy and desire, naïveté and skepticism” (145).

Timotheus Vermeulen, “Metamodern Depth, or ‘Depthiness,’” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 147-150.

Modern: there is a numinous realm of meaning behind art, there is some objective meaning. Postmodernsim: there is only surface level euphoria. There is no depth (147). Doesn’t matter what the “ground” of the image is (148).
[Look up object-oriented philosophy (Wolfendale 2014).]
Modernism excavates depth from the surface and says it’s really down there; postmodernism flattens depth with the surface and says it’s an illusion, it’s social conditioning; Metamodernism adds depth to the surface and says we can feel this depth even if we can’t find or prove it (149). Could be joked about as “depthiness” or the personal simulation of depth. It can be shared but it is by no means necessarily shared. Metamodernism is the desperate groping for historic, spatial, and corporeal embededness (149).

Irmtraud Huber and Wolfgang Funk, “Reconstructing Depth: Authentic Fiction and Responsibility,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 151-166.

Metamodern fiction still features many times “postmodernist aesthetics of playful self-consciousness and subversive criticism of master narratives,” remaining “highly conscious of its textual status” (152). But it doesn’t do this to open up and expose the depthlessness beneath the surface of everything; rather, it attempts to reconstruct “some kind of meaning that allows for intersubjective communication, for human connection and for a paradoxical authenticity” (153).
Metamodern literature has a different form that elicits reconstruction. Similar to how deconstruction transforms what it interprets according to Derrida, reconstruction calls forth something that might not be there. But yet there is something external to itself (in the text) that it is recognizing, and Huber and Funk want to get at that (153-154).
Metamodern literature subverts its postmodern depthlessness through several strategies. It pokes holes in the boundary separating the text from reader (154).
They argue form both “connects and disrupts”: it allows matter or the particular to be perceived and understood but also cuts off said matter from what is around it. They cite Iser (1993) and his concept of the fictive as similar: it must connect the real and the imaginary while also breaking them so as to tell something original. They link these to literature, which also has meaning which “might not be quite what we expect— which is not to say that there is no meaning at all” (154-155).
Authenticity is an impossible concept: here and no longer here. To label the authentic is to destroy it, for then its “immediacy” is lost (because authenticity is going for unmediated direct fresh immediacy). Metareference in literature does the same because by becoming self-conscious the literature loses some of the effect its going for in order to paradoxically highlight that effect. But it’s not a total loss; it opens up a place of real unreality or knowing unknowingness. It’s not all scrambled unreadability like postmodernism would say, but instead vibrating back and forth between surface and depth, and something really experienceable is created in the process (155-157) [my interpretation].
How to Be Both is metamodern literature that uses metareference (self-conscious breaking of the fourth wall, which simultaneously creates a deeper space: Who is this narrator who knows he’s a narrator?) to throw the reader into suspension. It uses dual narrations that have unclear relationships to one another. Instead of creating a sense of hopeless meaninglessness, as postmodernism sought to do, it instead calls the reader to reconstruct a vaguely perceptible depth. It makes the reader a participant in excavating himself out of meaninglessness (160-161). The novel attempts to cultivate the reconstruction of depth by the reader. It presents a shattered surface, not shy of paradoxes, that elicits meaning from inside the reader. Postmodernism’s ruins are to be put back together within this metamodern exercise 162-163).
Modernism concerns itself with representation as such. Postmodernism wants to “endlessly postpone or even entirely disqualify meaning.” But metamodernism “interrogates the way in which fiction may serve to suggest meaning beyond the surface of representation.” It’s “withdrawal that doubles as a new departure towards the possibility of authenticity” (165).

Sam Browse, “Between Truth, Sincerity and Satire: Post-Truth Politics and the Rhetoric of Authenticity,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 167-182.

Post-truth politics requires depthiness, which is the performance of authenticity and sincerity (168). This started with Tony Blair in 1997. He was carefully packaged and curated to exude authenticity and sincerity, ironically (169-172). Mimetic authenticity has a shelf life, though. It eventually gets uncovered as depthless. (176).
Jeremy Corbyn represented a metamodern shift after the depthlessness of Tony Blair. Corbyn refused to emote about his own experiences—or about what he thought those experiences should be based on a calculation of what those of the people were—as Tony Blair did, and instead focused on the experiences of real people. Paradoxically, not emphasizing his own “depth” demonstrated a depth that was lacking in Blair. This is a postmodern flatness but turned to the purpose of excavating authenticity and real feeling (178-179).
Postmodern politics performs a “let it all hang out” persona but only creates another fake, depthless surface. Metamodern politicians perform the highlighting of other authentic experiences and do not claim authenticity for themselves, but this paradoxically gives them authenticity (181).

Raoul Eshelman, “Notes on Performatist Photography: Experiencing Beauty and Transcendence after Postmodernism,” in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism, edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017): 183-200.

Modernist photographic art said look at the world in new ways with technical rigor and see the heroism and beauty. Postmodern photography said look at this ugly banality and see that transcending it is fake and impossible. If you try to transcend it you’re not being honest. Honesty is flat deadpan depthlessnes. Metamodernism, however, starts with the banal, doesn’t shy away from it, and forces a movement to some type of beauty or transcendence nevertheless through form. Eshelman calls this performatism (183-184).