Brendan Graham Dempsey, Metamodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics (Baxter, Minnesota: ARC, 2023).
Why a world view? “Certain ways of looking at reality come with profound implications for how we think, value, and act in the world.” They affect ontology, normativity, epistemology, and teleology (v).
Linda Ceriello and Greg Dember say metamodernism is an episteme, or structure of knowing, as Foucault would say. Freinacht and Andersen say metamodernism is “a stage in culture’s continual ‘complexification’ of symbolic ‘codes’” and is thus able to include and transcend postmodernism. Storm says it’s a paradigm of thought and research (2).
To “go meta” means to transcend something in a way that is critical and reflective: “recursive transcendence through iterative self-reflection” or stepping outside of something in order to deal with it and the things related to it (4-6).
The postmodern practice of decentering oneself is used in metamodernism not to relativize or destabilize all knowledge but to see over all knowledge and gain higher knowledge. It’s a quasi-postmodernist means turned to quasi-modernist ends (6-7). There are traditionalist or modernist critiques of post modernism; these do not incorporate postmodernism. But metamodernism integrates PM and transcends it. “Going meta” always increases scope and incorporates more (8).
Postmodernists saw that there were many contradictory “cultural logics” at play in the world. Metamodernists start with this and discern the logic of cultural logics: their patterns and the larger web they are a part of (11).
Metamodernism seeks a receding telos. There is no end to recursive transcendence. All steps are relative, but relative to one another they are absolute (11-12).
Metamodernism can toggle between paradigms. It doesn’t do this un-self reflectively; the paradigms are not the same as they were before metamodernism. But this higher level of reflection can even be used to dispense with reflection itself, at least in a new, knowing way. A second naïveté is possible, a naïveté only possible “on the other side of being informed.” (14-15). “Yet, because postmodern skepticism remains an open window to which one can always toggle, the dangers of naïveté are mitigated by the broader context of multiple perspectives” (15).
The reflexivity of metamodernism evident in this statement: “Theory is no longer an abstraction to explain the concrete; it is now what makes up the concrete artifact itself” (17).
Why is relativism now relative? Why can it now be judged as just one choice among many: “Recursive reflection allows the metamodernist to contextualize different contexts by the ordering and relating of perspectives—including the postmodern one” (18). It basically calls postmodernism’s bluff. We can be “skeptical of its skepticism” (20).
You can’t reach final knowledge, but you can iteratively reflect and encompass more data each time. It’s relative and absolute at the same time (18-19). “The postmodern is still employing a particular lens uncritically as an absolute and has not yet decentered enough from its perspective to take it as an object” (19). Metamodernism has modernist direction and progress “but without its totalizing impulse” (19).
Dumitrescu (2007) was the first to argue metamodernism in this way: taking the incommensurability of postmodernism and building this multiplicity into “an interconnected network” (26). One can “toggle” to postmodernism to use its strengths when the epistemological need arises. Bootstrapping is the process of connecting these integrated networks (26-27).
With modernism we sought absolute knowledge. Under postmodernism we despaired of knowledge itself and basked in radical multiplicity. Under metamodernism we embrace “the never-ending approximation of reality’s diverse terrain through continually adding to and updating one’s various maps of it” (28).
Story (as a “grand narrative”) is rejected by postmodernism. But it’s this very rejection that creates the pluralism which metamodernism takes as the constituent pieces for its new weaving of a transcendent story web (29).
Dumitrescu (2013): “Metamodernism is the search for roots in times of uprootedness… the search for the meaning and beauty of the present” (30-31).
Metamodernism oscillates or toggles between not only modernism and postmodernism, but any residual cultural logic. It is between, with, among, and beyond them all (38).
Dempsey clarifies that the “modern” which metamodernism toggles with includes all the premodern, because naïveté and belief were certainly somewhat destroyed by modernism. It’s actually a spectrum from “less reflective” and self-aware to “more reflective.” Metamodernism is more reflective than even postmodernism, then (39-41).
Metamodernism doesn’t expect an absolute destiny, but it doesn’t give up the search either. Its progress is both real and relative: “infinitesimal progress” (44).
[Metamodernist re-enchantment knows absolute assurance is impossible, and it’s okay with that. The application of the one lens of scientific reductionism is no longer necessary, and so different burdens of proof standards can be employed for different contexts. It’s also that, from our limited standpoint and limited ability to gain ultimate knowledge, it is really of no concern to us in most cases—that apodictic certainty sought by modernism, that is.]
Postmodern art tears apart to expose meaninglessness. It’s too literal: see all these pieces? it says. They actually mean nothing. Metamodernism though uses the lack in a work, the incompleteness or suggestion, to intimate the sublime and the “beyond.” For postmodernism this just means imperfection and lies, but for metamodernism it means a higher, never fully realizable goal (46-48).
Metamodern art uses the aesthetic frame to transcend the frame. It undermines the world shown by means of the world shown, but in a way that invites the audience to a higher vantage point, from which a more comprehensive and satisfying state is possible (48-49).
It’s “the impossibility of a certainly right narrative act” that “allows for the very possibility of such acts” (Toth) (52). [By relativizing all knowledge, the space opens up for assertion of a new transcendent vision encompassing all of them, held to by faith and will.]
Metamodernism brings “felt experience” to the forefront and “braids” between the premodern, modern, and postmodern by using self-reflection to empower the audience as meaning makers rather than using it simply to self-consciously expose the non-ideal foundations of a thing (54-56).
Metamodern art asserts the willful choosing of some thread that provides stability and direction amid the flotsam and jetsam of maddening diversity the postmodern world presents. Having surveyed the landscape of conflicting worlds and worldviews, metamodernism is the higher vantage point from which we grasp hold of meaning once again through jaded experience and the wisdom that comes from it. It’s not absolute but it’s not meaningless relativism either. It’s precisely because “nothing matters” that we can discover what matters. We are not constrained by false ideologies anymore. Our subjective experience is all we have, and therefore, for us, meaning is possible (as far as we’re concerned) (61-69).
Progress returns under metamodernism, so it really might be more modern than postmodern. But it’s not absolute progress. Relativizing relativism allows one to [intuitively] recognize the deeper threads holding everything together. A different “logic” is initiated when one steps “above” pluralism. But it’s a humble logic, and the progress is therefore never complete, as modernism envisioned it could be (76-77).
Decentration: that which was subject becomes object on the part of a new coordinating subject (Robert Kegen) (78, 200).
Escalating levels of decentration have driven philosophical paradigms. The premodern said there was a universal abstraction behind the physical world we see. It extrapolated this absolute from its understanding of the world, and its answer varied across cultures; [because of the nature of spiritual knowledge], not everyone arrived at the same “universal” truth. So modernism decenters from that perspective and says that the truly universal is universally verifiable, which leaves only empiricism as the way to this universal knowledge (Freinacht) (82-84). But then postmodernism decenters from that and exposes how “universal” verification is anything but, and how escaping one’s subjective context in an attempt to gain a “God’s eye view” is impossible. We are universally bound to our particular subjectivities, and so universal knowledge is impossible (85). But postmodernism embarrassingly asserted this truth, with its own values, and hierarchy, while denying those things existed. And the truth behind it all was decentration (86-87). Instead of “unmoored fragmentation,” then, metamodernism gives us the possibility of “integrated pluralism” (88). [The very concept of decentering BY DEFINITION entails a metamodern vantage point. Because what is decentering? What is being decentered? The unifying perspective!]
Lene Rachel Andersen: metamodernism is “the integration of all of the previous codes, the cultural logic in which cultural logics become consciously related and deployed according to context” (90). She says: “different kinds of knowledge in different places for different purposes” (91). The postmodern had to break down our hubris so that we could see our “epistemologies.” But now that we can do that, the networking and toggling of metamodernism is possible (92).
Metamodernism is inherently unstable, thus the oscillation and “return of history,” and talk about the meta-crisis (footnote 200-201 from page 99)
Björkman: metamodernism is about reconstruction, or “putting together the many criticized and deconstructed parts of reality into new entireties… the conscious creation of overarching, partially fictive narratives.” (100) [This “partially fictive” nature is acceptable after postmodernism because of our newfound humility when it comes to our capacity for apodictic knowledge.]
[Eternal recursion and complexification just are how the world works. Culture is no different, and that’s what metamodernism represents: the acknowledgment of the never-ending fractal reality of reality] (104-106).
Storm: “move beyond the postmodern yet by means of the postmodern” (111). “Radical skepticism finished by doubting itself, rendering provisional knowledge possible” (114).
The modern-postmodern dichotomy of real-fake is transcribed by metamodernism. We are not naive realists but neither are we naive skeptics: there is a “spectrum of ontic modalities,” and things can be real in different senses. Mind-dependent and socially constructed realities are only unreal when viewed from a modernist/positivist vs postmodernist/relativist binary. Using the standards of a different register can give different answers to the question of what is real (115-118) [I say laying out knowledge sources equally allows us to partake of them all from a meta vantage point. Different rules apply to different games but we are the place where they are reconciled and a harmony is reached. Might be something here going back to the foundations of modernism and relying on our limited subjectivity?]
Postmodernism judges the flux of the world negatively against the essentialist standard, while metamodernism judges the flux positively by its own standard. Change and fluidity is monolithic (121-122).
It’s no longer about “finding nonexistent essences,” but rather about noticing the deep logics of process and patterns, the “order within the chaos of dynamic flux.” This could only be done by relativizing relativism and rising above the fray to seek these patterns (123).
Process ontology, or the idea that social kinds are fluctuating processes, means human sciences are more like biology than physics. From this we can start “to see the profound continuity that holds through the discontinuous ontological modes in a spectrum” (123-124).
Human meaning-making is not some uniquely meaningless and ad hoc process. Our knowledge of it will never be absolute, but we can make “infinitesimal progress toward relatively more knowledge of the world’s diverse ontological modes” (124).
The postmodern despair of meaning comes from accepting the terms of modernism’s requisite of absolute knowledge. Yes, from that perspective, we are doomed. But metamodernism rises above postmodern radical confusion and nihilism and says this process is coming from the world. It is in process with the world. No, it’s not perfectly capturing the world as the modernists would have it, but it is still in process with it, entangled with it (126-127): “The external world is interiorized, and the interior world is externalized” (127). Storm: “Many skepticisms can be avoided if we become skeptical of the presumed link between knowledge and unshakeable conviction” (134).
Postmodernism’s supposed value nihilism masked an unconscious bias of its own. It was “a moralist program presented in negative terms” (130). “Critique frames in negative terms a set of values by attacking instances where those values are absent” (132). “The metamodernist simply owns the types of values the postmodernist held covertly, risking reflective critique in the process” (133).
Real skepticism doubts the doubt of postmodernism (133). Humble, incomplete but really progressing knowledge is possible (135).
STEM operates under modernistic reductionism and chugs away at progress but untethered to human values (it follows its own logic) while the humanities have stalled under crippling postmodern self-autocritique, and been cut and slashed from budgets (136).
In metamodernism, “real” means “mapping more or less effectively to enduring property clusters in the world” (148). This allows us to see each justification system, from science to postmodern deconstruction, as using certain tools fitted for more or less accurately describing certain phenomena. But we can step outside these systems and construct a meta theory for how they relate, as Gregg Henriques has done. They then appear as ontological modalities on a spectrum with all the other such systems in reality, from physics to rudimentary biological sensation and on up. They are informational systems and sets of rules. It’s no good to try to fit one or other of them completely into another one’s set of rules (142-148, 151). [Each justification theory can be stepped outside of and reflected upon, potentially leading to an even more comprehensive vantage point.]
Metamodernism itself is a “collective justification system.” It’s “a form of public semiosis producing collective representations, by means of which people ‘think together’ about the world” (150).
The grand narrative is back, but it’s now a meta narrative. It no longer tries to force everything into one set of rules (151).
“The humanities, while based on reductionistic phenomena, are not reducible to them, and the STEM fields produce social constructs of knowledge that map to real aspects of the world but can only speak to the most rudimentary forms of reality with any significant precision or predictive power” (151).
Developments in the sciences (“non-equilibrium thermodynamics, cybernetics, information theory, and computational neuroscience, among others” [Azarian, at 154]) are telling us that reality is a fractal system of loops and levels. Azarian’s “poetic meta-naturalism” tells us to step outside these levels and reflect on them, abstracting their patterns and gaining a new metaphorical understanding of the structure of reality (153-157). For instance, “self-consciousness emerges as minds recursively map themselves by referencing other minds” (157).
Metamodernism “is a strange loop indeed, a cultural level at which the collective world model maps the meta-patterns that produce world models and knowledge of all kinds. It is the cultural logic that has learned to see itself as a cultural logic that is itself the product of a cosmic logic” (162).
John Vervaeke, he, and Henriques say we need a religion that isn’t a religion, a site for “ecologies of practice” that aid in wisdom accumulation. Meaning to Vervaeke is “transjective”; that is, it really exists as a relationship between meaning makers and their environments. It’s not a thing like an atom but it exists and exerts force on the world. A meta-religion could come about [something like perennialism] that looks down on the religions and understands their intrinsic features and structure (165-166). The idea is to use religion to get above religion, to experience transcendence “based on an entirely naturalized understanding of teleology” (167).
Hanzi Freinacht: “So after ‘deconstructing’ and picking apart the many tricks played upon us, we can now ‘reconstruct’ new tricks for the sake of magic and direction in our lives, and in the world around us. We can become our own wizards of Oz (and of one another) and begin to deliberately run the machinery of our own illusions, re-enchanting reality” (169).
“The Headless God” of metamodernism is always transcending himself through iterative self-reflection and -recursion. He is this fractal pattern everywhere at work but nowhere actually present, known therefore only in a sort of apophatic way (173).
Metamodernism is a “process social kind,” a social construct that really tracks “durable (though ultimately transient) property clusters in the world,” which have causal power. Not an essence but an identifiable pattern that affects things in the world. “Process social kinds are undefinable, interdependent, and cross-cutting”—they look different and can be defined differently based on the task at hand and level of analysis used (175-176).
Dempsey critiques simple periodization schemes. We’re not in the metamodern age in the sense that everything now acts in a metamodern way. Metamodernism is a “degree of coordinational complexity achieved through recursive reflection.” We will still see modern and postmodern phenomena in this age because those process social kinds generated phenomena that still exist (180).
Metamodernism is so self-reflective that it reflects on the limits of self-reflection and then abandons it, but still knowingly (183).
Worldviews are not reducible to neurons and are not explained away by biology. But they rest on it and they emerge as something greater than the sum of their parts. They’re also not ad hoc or unrelated to reality. They are recursive complexifiction, which is the pattern of the universe, applied to culture (185).
Don’t reduce philosophies to material substrates, like Jameson and Vermuelen/Van den Akker do. That’s a modernist reductionistic move (210, footnote from 186).
Metamodernism is a new “attractor point for culture” (186).
Lyotard said we now have “incredulity” toward grand narratives. I say that after the equalization of all epistemes under postmodernism, we are free to choose a hermeneutic credulity.