Metamodernism Literature Review

Lene Rachel Andersen. (March 10, 2020). “Metamodernity.” Nordic Bildung. https://usercontent.one/wp/www.nordicbildung.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Metamodernity__paper__Nordic_Bildung.pdf?media=1663080550.

Metamodernity is partly a realization that human life needs all of it: science, skepticism, faith, individuality, connectedness, facts, feelings, and everything in between. The paths human history and the journey of philosophy have taken us down have impressed this upon us in this time of the meta-crisis.
Cultural codes have grown and changed with advances in technology and social structures: indigenous (tribal and spirit-haunted); traditional (hierarchical and religious); modern (democratic and scientific); and postmodern (relativistic and radically skeptical). Metamodernism is posited as the cultural code that encompasses and appreciates all these previous codes. “There is a transition phase between the cultural codes. New codes emerge in arts and aesthetics and in intellectual circles before they become manifest as shared norms.” Art is usually the canary in the coal mine at these transition points. The “ism” explored by art and philosophy later becomes an “ity” as it coalesces into a society-wide force.
The indigenous cultural code is important to my project, as the recovery of the idea of nature being animated by spirits and for gods being responsible for crops and other natural phenomena is part of what I think metamodernism is facilitating via the ongoing movement of re-enchantment. Knowledge was stored in myths within this cultural code, as I believe it should be again partially under metamodernism.
The proliferation of patronal spirits within agricultural societies is a recognition that every process, every product, is upheld by spirits (and ultimately the great spirit, God).
Religion in this setting allowed norms and rules of behavior to be internalized, thus ensuring cohesive societies.
In the West, Japan, and Korea, modernity removed religion from politics and science and replaced peoples’ hopes with medicine, technology, prosperity, and independence.
The West is currently caught up in the struggle between modernity and postmodernity. Postmodernism has proven to create very fragile societies and people: without an objective collective belief system, emotions and highly idiosyncratic constructed identities form the entire “truth” stratum for people, causing constant friction and psychological dislocation. If postmodernity calcified as a dominant cultural code, the ability to create shared narrative would further break down. “Cultural codes are about the core values of our moral fabric.” Andersen says later cultural codes are more complex and seen as amoral by previous ones, while earlier codes are less complex and seen as primitive by later codes. Transitions are very painful because some adopt the new code before others, and so deep conflict about core moral assumptions then occurs between people and even loved ones.
Postmodernism views the previous codes as all oppressive and hierarchical, and modernism maybe as the worst since it’s currently in power.
Lene Rachel Andersen has been at pains to argue that metamodernism is different from metamodernity. She defines the former as an artistic, philosophical, and cultural impulse that both integrates and juxtaposes modernism and postmodernism. The latter she puts forth as a new “cultural code” that integrates all the four previous cultural codes—indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern.
Metamodernism as described in the last few decades has not typically encompassed the indigenous and pre-modern cultural codes in its “oscillationist” model. Andersen’s “metamodernity” proposes integrating the best of all the previous codes based on an understanding that different truth regimes are appropriate for different circumstances, and that each code had valuable, enriching and/or emancipatory elements, alongside degrading or oppressive elements: wonder and connection with nature from the indigenous; virtue ethics, answers to existential questions, and societal cohesion from the premodern; individual rights and freedoms and technological progress from the modern; and self-reflexive criticism and the ability to countenance multiple perspectives and backgrounds from the postmodern.
“Oral stories within a ‘tribe,’ grand narratives passed down through the centuries and scientific facts all provide very different kinds of knowledge about the world, and we need all of them but for very different purposes and in different contexts… We can combine different kinds of knowledge to serve our questions in ways that are more complex.”
Andersen’s view is similar to mine, influenced heavily by postmodernism: “In the ocean of abstractions and millions of things I have no clue about, my simplest meaning making is OK, as long as I recognize that it is not the full truth about the world.” After all, we “need to be rooted in something.”
Each code also offers tempting “dead-ends”: the indigenous a tribal narrowness; the premodern a self-assured sectarian us vs. them cruelty; the modern an imperialistic scientistic dogmatism; and the postmodern an abyss of disconnected, idiosyncratic identity-making.
We thus need an increasingly complex and nuanced system of meaning-making to be able to apprehend and confront the increasingly complex and nuanced challenges of our technologically advanced society (e.g., “climate change, globalization, existing debt, marketization, and migration”).
All this will require life-long self-cultivation, or bildung.

Michel Clasquin-Johnson. 2017. “Towards a Metamodern Academic Study of Religion and a More Religiously Informed Metamodernism.” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 73(3), a4491. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v73i3.4491.

Metamodernism can almost be summed up by the term “knowingness.” It is a product of millennials, those born in the 1980s (2). Its value can be seen in the way that many people seem to be articulating principles who have no formal familiarity with it. The “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon, clearly widespread now, is just such an instance (3).
Clasquin-Johnson explains the difference between theology and religious studies: theology accepts a religious system’s tenets and works and reasons within that framework, while religious studies is the comparative study of religions from an academic standpoint (1). With metamodernism, it is now possible to use the tools of both disciplines without apology. It allows an openness in religious studies (currently modernistically committed to rationalistic “objectivity”), “an accountability that is now closed off by a rigid attempt to maintain an unattainable epoch.” And likewise a theologian can bracket his religious system and pivot to a “meta” view that allows him, in the end, a better perspective on his own system (4).
Metamodernism doesn’t have the cynical winner-take-all ethos that postmodernism does. It sees that overlap can almost always be found, and at least something can be achieved, according to Abramson (4).
[Metamodernism allows “local” truth. Modernism wanted universal truth, and postmodernism wanted no truth. But after postmodernism, we can understand that the limited nature of subjectivity creates “local” truth as the only possible way to understand the world. Now, under metamodernism, universal truth is not denied, but neither is it sought fanatically. Pragmatism is the name of the game]. This is illustrated in modernist religious studies, which couldn’t countenance the different senses in Scripture that are well attested in the Church Fathers, or the holding in tension of the mind of the believer things like the supposed contradictions between the Genesis narrative and modern science. Metamodernism is comfortable with paradox: it places different types of truth in different sectors, both existential and universal. It is okay with not always understanding how all of these vistas exactly relate (4-5). Metamodernism offers ways to constructively integrate the reality of the scholar-practitioner within the field of Religious Studies. After all, the supposedly detached nonbeliever is already implicitly grappling with the two poles of ironic detachment and earnestness when he supposedly objectively considers the religion he’s chosen to study but does not belong to! (5)
Metamodernism opens the possibility of discarding reductionistic one-way causality theories, so rife in modernism. An example: was postmodernism born of the age of radio: messages weakening and degenerating as they leave their originating sources behind, and was metamodernism born of the age of the internet, in which everyone is a stranger yet everyone is also a potential connection? In other words, do technologies determine which philosophies can arise, or vice versa? Isn’t it both? Metamodernism can recognize that paradox and live in it (6). In any case, it appears to be the internet of social media that is most akin to metamodernism (6).
It’s the metamodern structure of feeling which relieves the modern day “yoga-practicing, Kabbalah-studying and still occasionally church-going urbanite” to feel no need to label themselves with a new “ism,” even though they’ve clearly departed from these older established categories (6-7).
An oscillationist model has given way to a simultaneous model over the course of metamodernism’s short life span. But it would be very unmetamodern to overly insist on one or the other (7). Metamodernism’s oscillating simultaneity can better dialogue with the paradoxes at the heart of mystical experience (8).
Metamodernism puts forth an “as if” philosophical mode: we live as if positive change is possible, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. This has much in common with attitudes found in all the great religions. Religion is one “as if” possibility of metamodernism: living as if a religious system is true, despite doubts, could be a solution to certain problems, particularly personal and psychological ones (8).
Metamodernism implies “‘meta’-disciplinarity in which the boundaries between disciplines are softened and allowed to overlap” (9).
Metamodernism doesn’t have its own theory of religion yet. It’s too young and too Euro-American. Basically it just opens philosophy up to impulses that have always had a home in religion: “altered states of consciousness, the creative use of paradox, the provisional reconciliation of false dualisms,” etc. Religion by and large has not made its peace with modernism or even postmodernism yet, so don’t hold your breath waiting for metamodern religion (9). [My theory is that the Metamodern simply brings us back around to religion, but from a higher, meta viewpoint. Which is what it does with all subjects.] Clasquin-Johnson predicts that the most ancient, least changed religions will be the ones most adaptable to a metamodern world. Those religions that fought hardest against modernism, thereby becoming more modernistic themselves in their desire to engage with it, will have the hardest times (9).
He predicts “deep reserves of traditional spirituality” being balanced with “radical personal freedom” (10). [That’s suspect, in my opinion.]

Maria Engström. 2025. “The ‘Last Heroes’ of Perestroika (And Their Legacy in Metamodernist Russia),” in Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West. UCL Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.17102166.41.

Metamodernism has been a very popular concept in the ex-Soviet sphere, possibly because these states more than others have had to reckon with charting a path between a starkly modernist, materialist heritage (socialism) and the decadent postmodern haze they were presented with by the West in the 1990s when they began to open up (265).
Metamodernism is identified with a new cultural code that attempts an integrated pluralism and is evidenced visually in “Eastern Bloc Aesthetics,” such as the dress code of Gen Z (268, footnote 271).
Gosha Rubchinskiǐ is leading a global anti-fashion avant garde with a clothing and style collection meant to capture post-perestroika poverty and marry it to current Russian currents of metamodern assertion and hopefulness. It is almost this counter signal that gives the whole project its poignancy, paradoxically. Along with this he has bucked the fixation on Paris, New York, etc., and premiered his shows in Russian cities, defiantly declaring that he wants “to demonstrate the end of globalization” (269-270).
The new Russian cultural avant garde is distinctively metamodern in its sensibilities and tensions: “a critical attitude (anti-Western, anti-status quo), political ambivalence (both reactionary and progressive, or neither) and a geopolitical agnosticism (a commitment to modernisation without Westernisation)” (271).

Manuel Franco-Torres. 2021. “The Path to the New Urban Water Paradigm – From Modernity to Metamodernism.” Water Alternatives 14(3): 820-840. https://doi.org/10.1080/10643389.2020.1803686

Generally urban water systems (UWS) are thought of as advancing along technologically deterministic lines, which is itself a modernist assumption [and could be partially a relic of their being created during the heyday of the modern period], but Torres points out that they are actually involved in a co-evolutionary process as well with the underlying belief structures of society, which are often taken for granted (820-821).
Epistemes uphold cultural logics and structures of feeling that provide the foundation for paradigms, which in UWSs include governance, management, and infrastructures. With UWSs, modernity has been dominant since the mid nineteenth century. Postmodernism has challenged this since the 1960s, and metamodernism is heralding another shift since 2000. These are lenses that help us understand how UWSs have developed over the years (821-22).
Modernism as it relates to cities and UWSs was responding to impoverishment in central cities. It sought control through rationally ordered hierarchies within governments that efficiently and neatly allocated resources, siloed off bureaucracies, and mechanized and routinized as many functions as possible. Centralization allowed command and control at a hitherto unseen level. Uses were separated in the skyscraper, the social housing project, the strip commercial center, and the single-family home (823).
The trial and error nature of modern UWS engineering exhibited the chicken and egg problem of modernity being both the problem and the solution. Solutions to the problems of the modern city generated yet more complex problems, which were met with more modern reductiveness, control, and planning (824-25). Modernist assumptions went into the municipalization of UWSs, with ideas of universal rights and the simple belief that it was universally agreed what the problems were, what the solutions were, and why one public rational agent could make the “right” decisions in a new Hobbesian bargain (825).
In practice, postmodernism next lent itself to “flexibility in industrial production, labour, and the economy,” which was required for a situation of constant change as existed at the end of the twentieth century. It could be contrasted to “the rigidity and standardisation of modernity” (826). Some disagree that modernity ever ended (Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash). Giddens said it’s an “aesthetic reflection” and not an episteme. Indeed, it seems hard to imagine something radically different than modernism in our societal structures, practices, and processes (826-27).
Reflexive modernization next adopts the realist ontology of modernism but places limits on our ability to know it based on the lack in our methods, our limited minds, and our cultural baggage. Modernism is “naive” in that it assumes we can reach absolute knowledge and optimization, but reflexive modernism holds this to be impossible, but it does think triangulation can bring us close to this goal. It identifies modernity as the problem: “fragmentation and micro-categorization” are “an unavoidable solution to the continued production of (increasingly unmanageable) order and the elimination of (ever-growing) uncertainty.” Yet it believes that with self-awareness and caution that we can create a better world (826-27). [In many ways it’s very close to metamodernism, and could be a variety of it.]
Despite the emergence of postmodernism, UWSs did not substantively change. Instead, practitioners doubled down—more expert knowledge, more top-down control, more techno-complexity, while academics sunk into postmodern pessimism and saw many of the problems of UWSs linked to their rationalist presuppositions. Postmodernism critiqued the complexified attempts at sustainability as still viewing nature and water as commodities. Reflexive modernism saw sustainability as a challenge to tame nature still, but in a different way: make it “sustainable” so it doesn’t leave us high and dry! (827-28).
Neoliberalism introduced ideas that ran against the modernist current, such as the invisible hand of the market, dispersed pricing, and incentives. [These elements were somewhat postmodern in inspiration but were put to modernist ends disliked by progressives.] One unintended consequence was diminishing equity in water provision. Postmodern criticisms of modern methods have been voluminous but alternatives have been scarce and ineffective. The biggest change has been multi-perspective approaches that seek to spread decision making and information gathering in a more democratic way (828-30).
To describe the situation at the turn of this last century: chaos and disorganization swamping the rational and reductionist structures and theories of modernity, had led to several attempts at explanation: moderate postmodernism (Best and Kellner, 1997), liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000), and reflexive modernization (Beck et al., 2003). Metamodernism seems to encapsulate the gist of all these attempts (830). It proposes, as Umberto Eco said, a reason that was less harmful, geared toward “‘useful truths’ that provisionally ‘work’ under certain circumstances and for certain intentions. This practical truth is the only reality that humans experience or will ever get to know” (831).
Procedural sustainability thus emerges: “practical knowledge and satisfactory solutions” via “learning by doing.” It’s paradoxically more hedonistic (but not therefore more modernistic) because it focuses less on some potential future utopia and more on the little successes of the journey (831).
Despite polarization among water professionals, a metamodern negotiation has emerged: taking the services, rules, actors, processes, knowledge, etc., that were bundled under rational and simplified structures under modernism but unbundled in the late modern complexifying chaos, and rebundling the “still independent and continuously multiplying” UWS elements into an “infinite number of possible cluster configurations that hybridise with more traditional modern structures to adapt to particular circumstances and needs” (832-33). As a result of this type of thinking, UWSs still have large centralized infrastructure, such as pipe networks and treatment plants, while also integrating within the citywide system “a wide range of modular solutions at multiple scales” that work “as a living system.” [Bioretention ponds are a great example of such locally adapted and adaptable modular systems that work within an overall network that is comprehensive but sensitive to granularity (834). The oscillation between modernism’s “order, simplicity, and assertiveness” and postmodernism’s “eclecticism, fluidity, and uncertainty” results in “innovative methodological approaches like pragmatism, flexibility, distribution, and experimentation in UWSs” (834).

Will Franks. May 13, 2020. “Metamodern Municipalism: A New Theory of Change.” Phoenix Collective, Medium. https://medium.com/the-phoenix-project/metamodern-municipalism-aa158889408f.

Metamodernism seeks to address the mental health crisis, the sustainability crisis, and the inequality crisis. It aims to do this through humanizing politics: making “our relational, emotional, existential, and metaphysical lives are central to, and served by, our politics.” It’s meta because it seeks to step back and politicize the elements of life that could influence the quality of our politics. This essay uses Hanzi Freinacht’s six forms of metamodern politics to analyze possible solutions to municipal governance problems.
Democratization in metamodernism means lowest level face-to-face local engagement and control [or basically subsidiarity]. It’s not only the most important level, it’s the most accessible. Functionally we have to go beyond (modern) debate and (postmodern) dialogue. We need deliberation, which is aimed toward convergence through oscillation and simultaneity, a kind of compromise. Deliberative democracy. Metamodern topics, such as loneliness, should be injected into local political deliberations. Having the local authorities tackle lack of connection to neighbors and nature is much more effective and equitable than just having private organizations do it.
Fotopolous’s formula is metamodern municipalism in a nutshell: a “comprehensive program for the radical transformation of local [social], political and economic structures.”
Goals of the citizens of a metamodern city include, to “improve their democratic decision-making processes (engage in meta-democracy), to co-develop their Gemeinschaft (social fabric) and conceptions of existence, emancipate themselves from structural oppressions and dominance hierarchies, upgrade their science-literacy, and evolve their fundamental theories and (meta-) narratives.

Will Franks. June 2, 2020. “Metamodern Municipalism: Part 2: Collaboration, Scaling Up, and Tackling the State.” Phoenix Collective, Medium. https://medium.com/@will.franks/metamodern-municipalism-part-2-ef96752aa2f.

In Preston, UK, control of local government allowed the community to redirect local revenue away from multinational companies and towards local businesses. Funds could even be directed toward psychological or spiritual well-being.
Metamodern practices set up the potential for a meta-culture, a culture that“consciously and continually checks, updates, questions its own cultural dynamics (and the factors which influence it).”
The meso-level is that of municipalities and local organizations. This is where metamodern municipalism’s focus is new. But once those institutions are taken, pressure can be put on the higher levels of the state. The state, once successfully transformed, can then exert pressure on the lower levels. This is both bottom-up and top-down, a very metamodern approach.
The metamodern secret sauce that needs to be added to many ongoing efforts is this: “that democratisation must also be enhanced and balanced by development of our social relations, existential life, anti-oppression work, empirical politics and politics of theory.”
The Initiative Party in Sweden is directly influenced by metamodernism and has run workshops.

Derrick Peterson. (February 16, 2022). “A Few Thoughts on Jason Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism: The Life and Death of the Christian Use of ‘Worldview.’” Ad Fontes. https://adfontesjournal.com/member-exclusive/a-few-thoughts-on-jason-josephson-storms-metamodernism-the-life-and-death-of-the-christian-use-of-worldview/.

Worldview thinking emerged as a force among Christians in the twentieth century, with evangelicals leading the charge. Worldview thinking breeds an oppositional relationship between ideas. Even in its post-liberal form, worldview thinking doesn’t dispense with this oppositional, but merely ceases to give it any objective moorings: free-floating oppositional islands are the result. Thinking neglected under worldview-thinking, such as bodily or “gut-level” reasoning, has begun to be salvaged by thinkers like Charles Taylor. “Worldview has a tendency to absolutize and systematize in ways that escalate problems unhelpfully because nearly everything is elevated to necessary consequences or deductive starting points in a semi-timeless manner as if we are calling for the realms of Platonic forms to do battle.” Storm invites us to rather start with mobile categories like our place, culture, experience, etc., which may allow a fresh recovery of more of the Christian wisdom tradition.

Anita Pipere and Kristīne Mārtinsone. 2022. “Metamodernism and Social Sciences: Scoping the Future.” Social Sciences 11: 457. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11100457.

The multiple fronts of the meta crisis require a reorientation of science away from siloed specialization and toward coordinated, larger picture, multi-disciplinary thinking (2). They recount the history of modernism and postmodernism, defining their intrinsic features. They mention reflexive modernism as responding to the corrosive critiques of postmodernism, acknowledging the imperfection of knowledge and the confusion and lack of permanence that is the new reality, but attempting to salvage a workable reconstruction nevertheless (3-4). To their sources I would add Habermas’ communicative rationality, which seeks much the same thing.
The social sciences were largely born out of a modernistic desire to manhandle social life into data that theories could be hung from (5). Critical theory accepted this understanding of knowledge but used it toward revolutionary ends. Phenomenology took a step toward integrating the “play” inherent in value systems and the role played by human consciousness in investigating social systems; they are not the same thing as natural systems. Postmodern theories carried this to its logical conclusion by rejecting the objectivity of knowledge and vesting meaning in context and power relationships. This arose out of a disenchantment with modernism’s failures (6)
They give an overview of the development of metamodernism (7-8). Metamodernist ontology is transversal, or simultaneous between poles (9). “As-if” epistemology results from local “objectivity” (9). This is related to my idea of “true as far as you’re concerned.” Metamodernism embraced this. They say metamodernism creates the space for believing in grand narratives, though it doesn’t require them. It itself could be conceived of as a grand narrative (9). Different poles of knowledge can be rotated amongst and prioritized at different times (9-10). Epistemologically it’s a practice of metaxis, or integrating multiple poles by transcending them (10).
Axiomatically (i.e., relating to the theory of values), metamodernism values connection and reconciliation over “the individualism and isolated experience of (post)modernism” (10). Metamodern methodology is very much mixed-method, transversal. It’s a letting down of the walls and a mentality of using whatever is to hand to reach solutions. It also sees the “parallel universes” of modernism and postmodernism as still existing rather than being supplanted (11-12).
Monodisciplinarity fragmented knowledge to focus on and dissect specific problems, in a very left-brained way. Inter- and trans-disciplinarity, on the other hand, bridge gaps in trust and faith to try to holistically rise to the occasion of the complex problems facing us in the metacrisis (12-13). Transdisciplinarity, however, does not mean obliterating strong core disciplines, or else there’re no foundations to toggle between (13).
The ontology of metamodernism in social sciences “can be described as metaxis between different opposite realities, all of them retaining their significance in one or another context,” whether that be quantitative (modern) or qualitative (postmodern) realities (14). Metamodern epistemology in the social sciences must default to the polylogue between the various types and sources of knowledge (scientific, academic, artistic, spiritual, indigenous, sensory, etc.). Transcendence is what allows this mapping of complex relation and causality (14). The axiology of social science in metamodernism allows broad based and honest value disclosures and discussions (14-15). Practical utility and triangulation make up metamodern methodology in the social sciences (15).
They base all this on their “six transversal principles of metamodernist philosophy” (15-16).

Jonathan Rowson. (May 26, 2021). “Metamodernism and the Perception of Context: The Cultural Between, the Political After and the Mystic Beyond,” Perspectiva, https://systems-souls-society.com/metamodernism-and-the-perception-of-context-the-cultural-between-the-political-after-and-the-mystic-beyond/.

“The metamodern feeling co-arises through the perception of our context writ large; it is aesthetic in nature, epistemic in function, historical in character, and it serves to call into question the purpose of the world as we find it, and the meaning of life as we know it.”
“The meta prefix is distinctive, however, because it is generatively reflexive and tacitly humanistic.” Meta means it can reflect, and then generate a new vantage point. Meta is humanistic because it accepts our human vantage point: this is the only vantage point. It’s about “mixed feelings” because it grapples with the between-ness of our current moment: between hope and despair, between the various crises of the meta-crisis, between the spiritual and material exhaustion that modernism and postmodernism have trapped us into and the romantic yearning we feel that convinces us something different must be possible.
Technological advances and crises are outpacing our ability to perceive our contexts. And with a muddled understanding of our context, our ideas and theories cannot adequately graft onto the world. Rowson seeks to answer, “What distinct perceptions of context does the notion of metamodernism” create or support?
Habermas on what modernity is: “In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, he writes: ‘the concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: it is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future.’” “In a related sense, in Habermas’s later work, Modernity: An Unfinished Project, he argues that modernity is characterised by the separation of truth, beauty and goodness; of science, art and morality.” That separation is carried through in postmodernism, but part of metamodernism’s task is the attempt to reunite these spheres.
For postmodernism: “it is modernism turned in on itself: the tools of reason questioning their own reasonableness; the idea of progress noticing, as a kind of progress, that it is indeed an idea. This spirit of recursive awareness is present in the emphasis on the relationship between knowledge and power and social (de)construction of reality rather than its simple presentation; presumptions of depth and origin and authenticity are questioned, and there is even some reveling in superficiality as its own kind of profundity.” The 90s were the apogee of this paradigm socially, and the materialistic and nihilistic stupor they induced threatened to lull many to sleep.
Albert Borgmann (1992) theorized that postmodernism led to a runaway hyper reality that ended in technological servitude, and that metamodernism was the alternative future where instead humans via “focal attention” reclaimed the capacity to order their lives. This attention focuses on the nonacquisitve aspects of social life, such as art and culture, and on defeating the consumptive impulse.
Relating to liberation, Brent Cooper applies Justo L. Gonzalez’s characterization of metamodernism to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “A young female minority leader of a new progressive coalition … Pragmatic idealism is back with a playful vengeance.”
Some have posited a black metamodernism based on the hopeful resignation seen in the early civil rights movement and exemplified by this quote from Samuel Beckett: “Try again, fail again, fail better.” The internet, the human role in the ecological crisis, and 9/11 have all been potential drivers towards a metamodern awareness.
Metamodernism “oscillation” as proposed by Vermeulen and van den Akker could just as easily be called “juxtaposition” (Seth Abramson), “superimposition” (Daniel Görtz), “interconnections” (Alexandra Dumitrescu), or “braiding” (Greg Dember). For Dumitrescu, metamodern integrations occur “between masculine and feminine, rational and emotional and in ‘recuperating traditions.’”
Many researchers into metamodernism are not academic and seem unwilling to confine themselves to that world, which in itself seems emblematic of the metamodern approach.
Hanzi Freinacht’s main contribution to the field could be said to be his emphasis on meta-theory, which combines a metamodern sensibility with integral theory (Ken Wilber’s vision of an all-encompassing organization and categorization of human life, including internal and external, individual and collective). He attempts to use both to pursue a developmental politics that posits new normative solutions for society. Others quibble with this (Sarah Stein Lubrano called it “Hegel for hippies”) and emphasize metamodernism as a cultural phenomenon confined to individual consciousness and the individual’s relationship to cultural artifacts. Rowson says he’s incredulous toward the idea that one could be agnostic about normative theories for political organization and so comes down more on the side of Freinacht, it would seem. He has “incredulity towards those aspects of cultural metamodernism that insist they are not normative in nature.” Can Vermeulen and van den Akker really remain so aloof from prescriptive policies? Metamodernism itself seems to arise out of a feeling that “something must be done.”
Postmodernism itself was much more open to normativity and value-inspired action that most people give it credit for. In Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, and Foucault, there were always calls for responsible action, even in a somewhat hopeful, metamodern fashion. [This gets back to the idea of postmodernism not really being a thing, but a process, which immediately must collapse into metamodernism. Perhaps this has been happening all along.]
One problem with metamodern normativity, however, and this is what the criticism of Freinacht may be getting at, is that in practice it doesn’t really achieve a synthesis of any new thing: it has more taken the form of structural elements of modernism being overlaid with stylistic and discursive elements of postmodernism. Materialists would say it’s late capitalism trying to give excuses for itself, basically. This may support Vermeulen and van den Akker’s point that it doesn’t translate well to a program of action. [It also supports my project of resuscitating traditional religion: trying to create a new, metamodern one just ends up being an ad hoc postmodern-y theology without the humility to doubt itself. Maybe metamodernism can’t create, properly speaking? The thing it does it go meta on existing paradigms!]
Metamodernism has right wing manifestations: the alt-right flirts with it, in that ironic play is used to disrupt hegemonic left-liberal discourses. [The romantic tendency is also a clear conduit.] But that doesn’t mean metamodernism is post-political. It’s chiefly meta-political in that it seeks to recursively reflect on what politics should be about, and reframe accordingly.
Less directly political is Tomas Björkman’s (2019, The World We Create) idea that metamodernism can help us fashion a more desirable collective imaginary. “Lene Rachel Andersen uses the term to describe the construction of a new cultural code that works for our times, transcending and including prior cultural codes, including the indigenous, the premodern, the modern and the postmodern” (2018, The Nordic Secret).
Regionalism, regeneration, and dialogue are buzzwords pointing to metamodern strategies.
The features of the meta in metamodernism: cultural between, the political after or the mystic beyond. It’s between modernism and postmodernism, oscillating. It’s after postmodernism, temporally and logically. And it’s beyond everything else, seeking a higher vantage point, a new dimension.
We’re after modernism and postmodernism in that we’re no longer subject to them; they can become objects to us now. Hanzi Freinacht says metamodernism is the end of the road, and I’m inclined to believe him, just because it’s a never-ending process, according to Dempsey. Rowson disagrees with this, though.
Zachary Stein attempts a metamodern metaphysics in “The Metamodern Return to a Metaphysics of Eros” (2018). In this “structure of feeling” becomes a unit of analysis, giving it a place as a “generative feature of collective human life.” This allows the real to take center stage in the metaphysical scaffolding, as Bonnitta Roy indicates. [There is certainly room in this equation for premodern ways of knowing, particularly in the relationship to the land.]
Rowson puts forth a quadrant of touchstones that distills his metamodern program. Individual subjectivity is represented by interiority, which indicates the taking seriously of the unique interior experience of each person as valid for epistemology. Collective subjectivity is represented by intimacy, as this is the proper inter-subjective relationship between selves. It’s possible, pace postmodern distancing. The objective collective finds expression in historicity, which means a return of narratives, of meaning in history, though these narratives can never be as hegemonic again as they were under modernism. And the objective individual is captured by ecology, which means an acceptance of and a harmony with objective matter understood as Gaia. These touchstones have at their heart a playful paradox.
“Metamodernism, then, is not so much a word for a new historical epoch, but rather a new disposition towards the experience of history unfolding. It is not merely an idea but an invitation to an imaginary that seasons our taste for ideas…. it’s not merely one feeling, but a whole structure of feeling; and that structure of feeling matters because it is prior to the structures of thought and society, and the domains of the political and epistemological.”

D.C. Schindler. (February 16, 2022). “Metamodernism and Its Premodern Forebear.” Ad Fontes. https://adfontesjournal.com/member-exclusive/metamodernism-and-its-premodern-forebear/.

Storm began in postmodern deconstruction, and the space cleared has spurred him to try to create something new. His proposal is directed chiefly at the humanities, which is a field that has fallen most severely to the deconstructionist knife.
Storm affirms deconstructionism and postmodernism more generally in order to, not demolish, but transcend them. Skepticism doubting its own skepticism, for instance.
Schindler ventures that the pre-modern, Western/Catholic tradition contains many of the impulses that Storm wants his metamodernism to embody: virtue ethics, for instance, and also some type of intuiting of essences within things, without devolving into either straightforward essentialism or postmodern anti-essentialism (Schindler offers “analogy” as the better solution Storm seems to be seeking). Storm’s “zetetic abduction”—the notion that each idea is only prelude to another inquiry, and on and on—has precedence in Augustinian thought: “Let us therefore so seek as if we should find, and so find as if we were about to seek.” Schindler also points out that doubting doubt doesn’t by necessity produce a positive; there remains a positive act of reception to be assented to. This receptiveness could be to the gift of the ancient tradition.

Dina Stoev. 2022. “Metamodernism or Metamodernity.” Arts 11: 91. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050091.

Meta-irony is irony that has valences both ironic and sincere. It embodies both, deliberately. It never reveals which is its “real” meaning. “Standard irony is making a statement while inferring the opposite. Post-irony is making a true statement, the irony being the act of articulating it itself. Meta-irony is stating either the truth or the opposite and being ironic about it, and the meaning is muddled in the possible layers of irony. It is irony being ironic towards itself” (6). Meta-irony signals culturally that uncertainty is an acceptable fact of being (6).
Stoev located in Mas’ud Zavarzadeh the genesis of metamodernism, though he wrote in 1975 and has been generally accepted to be describing postmodernism (9). Stoev says postmodernism happened, but it was more like the dying gasp of modernism as metamodernism was being born (9-10). Namely, it’s his characterization of American culture as being neither meaningful nor meaningless. It just “is,” in its painful absurdity and strangeness (9).
Stoev points out the difference between the movement and the era: modernity started after the Renaissance and ended in the 20th century while modernism the movement began in the 1860s and ended around a hundred years later in literature and the arts. But Metamodernity and Metamodernism seem more deeply entwined because of the digital age’s instantaneous self-referentiality (10-11). Postmodernism, though, she says is just the last phase of modernism, when it was despairing of its ideals (11-12). She sees empathy and hopefulness in even Fight Club, and argues that true postmodern art, such as Andy Warhol, was a much more limited phenomenon (12-13).
The article is saying postmodernism was a brief episode of disillusionment with modernist ideals based on the earth shaking nature of the twentieth century (more so the first half) but that nearly simultaneously metamodernism was growing up alongside it, with its dare to hope mentality and healthy skepticism. Baudrillard’s dire predictions failed to materialize, Lyotards grand narratives are back (conservative and progressive) and Umberto Eco may have been metamodern in the Name of the Rose (12-13). [This thesis is undoubtedly somewhat true as there are no clean breaks with these kinds of things, but instead always gradual meltings into one thing and from another.]
In calling postmodernism modernist, she says, “The avant-garde is again in the form—the new media; the grand idea is present again in the belief that this beacon of new artistic expression, along with irony and poststructuralism, will prevail” (14). Metamodernism is actually less modernist than postmodernism: it actually truly does not pose a grand narrative, while postmodernism actually did: that there were none. Metamodernism on the other hand views the ideals of modernism as both doomed and necessary. It is humble in a way no modernism could be (15). Also when form is no longer an obsession (either the controlling of it through modernism or the eschewing and replacing of it in postmodernism), content can become the avant-garde, regardless of form (15).
Metamodernism could be thought broadly to be the official acknowledgment that life takes “belief” of some sort, even if it’s just Camus’s leap in the face of the absurd. And yet religion, science, and philosophy all seem to be converging somewhat around this idea (15-16, footnote). She links concern for the marginalized not with postmodernism, but with metamodern emphasis on empathy (16). She claims postmodernist art is overly rational while metamodernist art is emotional, human-centered (17). Postmodernism dealt with the absurdity and lack of meaning in reality through “shared skepticism and intellectualizing,” but this was found wanting (19).
The metamodern sensibility “knows itself and uses that fact,” and so “it can hardly be accused of really being what it seems to be” (20 footnote, 25). Metamodern art is “art capable of carrying epistemic value about contemporary reality not by way of explanation, but by simply containing the various ‘leaps’ we use to deal with themes of personal and collective nature in a post-absurd environment” (22). Absurdity is a background instead of a conclusion, which gives rise to empathy and hope (22). She traces metamodernism thusly: Kafka, to Camus, then as a conclusion in Beckett and Ionesco, then Zavarzadeh seeing it broadly, and growing widespread since then (22).

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm. (February 17, 2022). “After Metamodern Progenitors and Progeny.” Ad Fontes. https://adfontesjournal.com/member-exclusive/after-metamodern-progenitors-and-progeny/.

Storm takes issue with Schindler’s “search for origins” amid Storm’s grand project, and characterizes these searches as having more to do with the needs of a particular field in the here and now than they do with a true attribution of lineage or indebtedness to a new theory. Who the “progenitor” was can largely depend on (what amounts to) arbitrarily selected criteria.
Storm disagrees with Schindler’s comparisons between his epistemology and ontology with pre-modern schools of thought, but owns that his chapter on virtue ethics owes a great debt to the Christian tradition, especially via Alasdair MacIntyre. He ends with a call to end hyperspecialization and instead revive a broad understanding of the purpose of the academy that includes positive content related to how humans can flourish. But he denies there’s a static ideal to reach for, instead advocating for a process of becoming and striving that acknowledges our inability to ever achieve perfection. “We need diverse spiritual progeny who, embracing humble knowledge despite a mutual recognition of limitedness, are willing to struggle together to build a better world.”

Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker. 2010. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2:1, 5677. DOI: 10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677. https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677.

This essay contains their famous formulation, that metamodernism is “epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism” (2).
Gilles Lipovetsky, Alan Kirby, and Robert Samuels all theorized what came after postmodernism, but their theories seemed more to amplify elements of the postmodern rather than identify the real break that had occurred (3). Nicholas Bourriaud tried with the “altermodern” but seemingly confused the experiences of our current era with its causes: he didn’t see what underlying logic was responsible (3-4).
Postmodernism was contradictory, but what it had in common was opposition to the modern (4). “The metamodern discourse consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility.” Obama might be taken to be metamodern while the War on Terror might be taken to be a resurgence of postmodernism, with its dour turtling against a hostile and chaotic outside world (the outside being the “non-tolerant” non-West) (5 and footnote on 13).
“Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm” (6). Metaxis, the mystery of man’s being in-between the dichotomies of existence, is the best way to capture its epistemology, which posits an “as-if” strategy of living, and its ontology, which oscillates “between” poles (6).
Raoul Eshelman is describing a metamodern strategy when he defines performatism, which is “the willful self-deceit to believe in—or identify with, or solve—-something in spite of itself” (6). He says, “Metaphysical skepticism and irony aren’t eliminated, but are held in check by the frame” (6). [This relates to my concept of the hermeneutic of credulity—you’re not naively throwing yourself into belief of these ancient wonder tales—you’re fully, with complete self-possession, deciding to suspend disbelief because of a newfound openness to knowledge in all its forms, and with the acknowledged reservation that not all knowledge has to be apodictically proven, which is born of postmodern epistemic humility and only possible in the wake of the destruction of the Enlightenment straitjacket. Also, “I just don’t know if that actually physically happened” is an acceptable answer under metamodernism.] [“As-if” ontology also means it’s okay to think of things in the only way we can think of them, even if we know they must in actuality be in a form that’s completely beyond our understanding. For us, those forms are true, because they’re the only way we can grasp the reality. How does an inter-dimensional cosmic intelligence actually function in the world? Who knows; our image of angels and demons is “true” because that’s the only way we can understand them. It’s an “as-if” it’s true ontology.]
Metamodernism is tied to neoromanticism because it takes the banality that postmodernism lamented and elevates it to something greater than the sum of its parts, through a playful, willful hopefulness (8). Metamodern art draws “attention to what it cannot signify in its own terms,” usually some feeling of the sublime or mysterious. Its irony is linked to desire rather than apathy, as in postmodernism (10).
Metamodern architecture has chiefly expressed itself as a neoromanticism that attempts to negotiate between “culture and nature, the finite and the infinite, the commonplace and the ethereal, a formal structure, and a formalist unstructuring (as opposed to deconstruction).” These attempts are unsuccessful, but that’s part of the point: a striving and yearning for transcendence in the midst of the familiar (11-12). Its purses “a horizon that is ever receding” (12).

Dave Vliegenthart and Nadine Sajo. 2025. “Dialectical Thinking in Contemporary Spirituality: Reconciling Contradictory Beliefs through Metamodern Oscillations Between Two Ways of Thinking.” Archives for the Psychology of Religion 47(1): 80-98. https://doi.org/10.1177/00846724241245147.

The authors lay out the broad outlines of how human thinking is categorized by various disciplines. The general points of convergence are that there are two broadly defined categories of thinking, and they can be summarized as intuitive-mystical-Eastern and analytical-rational-Western, though some argue that these two styles are both types of analytical thinking (80-82).
Most people nowadays distinguish religion from spirituality, with the former being external and ritualistic and the latter being internal and psycho-mystical [my term] (82-83).
Hanegraaff (1999) rather posits that religion encompasses both vertical (hierarchical, social, structured) manipulations of symbolic systems and horizontal (personal, private, mystical) such manipulations (83-84).
Reflexive spirituality, a burgeoning concept, uses reason to point past reason, and envisions different ideas as pointing to the same reality of fundamental connection between all things and the transcendent (84). This dovetails with what Clasquin-Johnson (2017) and Ceriello (2018) have found, who directly link contemporary spiritually with the “both/and” logic of metamodernism (84). Clasquin-Johnson (2017) applies this as “an embrace of the paradoxical, a juxtaposition of elements that used to be considered separate, an allowance of multiple perspectives and identities, and an interdisciplinarity” (85). It doesn’t form a Hegelian synthesis, but rather performs an oscillation that leaves the truth claims of the various poles intact (85). [The resulting “position” is therefore something different than a straightforward truth claim itself.]
As Vliegenthart and Sajo summarize (2025), rationalization began the disenchantment of the world (Weber, 1919/2004), pluralization uprooted people from stable belief system-supporting cultures (Berger & Luckmann, 1995; Taylor 2007), and the resultant competition over knowledge and meaning has fostered a despair that there even is meaning (Froese, 2016) (86).
The study by Vliegenthart and Sajo demonstrated that “spirituality in a metamodern context reconciles contradictions by simultaneously entertaining or oscillating between holistic and analytic beliefs” (87). The dichotomy between change and stability, identity and contradiction, and interconnectedness and individuality are reconciled by “paralogical thinking,” which approaches a both/and way of thinking via oscillation (86-87). We are always “traveling and arriving”; life is a stable process of flux (86); contradiction is tolerated and lived in rather than altogether resisted (different levels of reality are posited, thereby leaving room for contradiction to just be an illusion) (87-88); and that individuality and fundamental unity are both true, both necessary (88-90).
“Ceriello (2018, pp. 61-88) explains that twentieth-century New Age resembles twenty-first-century SBNR [spiritual but not religious] spirituality, except that the former constructs universal grand narratives, while the latter oscillates between modern universalism and postmodern reconstructive relativism” (91).
The example of Tim Freke’s spirituality of unconscious oneness, to conscious individuality, to conscious oneness does sound Hegelian, but it’s still metamodern in that it posits both poles as essential elements of the system. Neither ultimately triumphs (91).
Huss (2014, 2015) maintained that the blurring of secular and religious is postmodern, but Vliegenthart and Sajo agree with Clasquin-Johnson (2017) and Ceriello (2018) that it is instead metamodern (92). Metamodern spirituality thus challenges many stereotypes about the dichotomy between the secular and the religious (93).