Metamodernism is a cultural discourse and paradigm that has emerged after postmodernism. It refers to new forms of contemporary art and theory that respond to modernism and postmodernism and integrate aspects of both together. Metamodernism reflects an oscillation between, or synthesis of, different "cultural logics" such as modern idealism and postmodern skepticism, modern sincerity and postmodern irony, and other seemingly opposed concepts.
Philosophically, metamodern advocates agree with many postmodern critiques of modernism (for example, highlighting gender inequality); however, they often contend that postmodern deconstruction and critical analytic strategies fall short in facilitating desired resolutions. Metamodern scholarship initially focused on interpreting art in this vein and established a foundation for the field, particularly through observing the growing blend of irony and sincerity (or post-irony) in society. Later authors have explored metamodernism in other disciplines as well, with many frequently drawing on integral theory in their approach.
The term "metamodern" first appeared as early as 1975, when scholar Mas'ud Zavarzadeh used it to describe emerging American literature from the mid-1950s, and later notably in 1999 when Moyo Okediji applied the term to contemporary African-American art as an "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism". It wasn't until Vermeulen and van den Akker's 2010 essay "Notes on Metamodernism" that the subject garnered broader attention within academia.
Founders of metamodernist theory
Alexandra Dumitrescu In 2007, writing for the Australian art journal Double Dialogues (Issue Seven), in an essay titled "Interconnections in Blakean and Metamodern Space," the New Zealand writer Alexandra Dumitrescu envisaged a "budding cultural paradigm" that "concurred" with postmodernism, and partly "emerged from it and as a reaction to it."See "electronic book review," 4 December 2016, https://electronicbookreview.com/publications/what-is-metamodernism-and-why-bother-meditations-on-metamodernism-as-a-period-term-and-as-a-mode/ Dumitrescu was the earliest theorist to link the term "metamodern" to a paradigm shift. She began using the word "metamodern" to describe the transition from postmodernism as far back as 2001, and developed her thinking in an article about James Joyce in 2005, following her earlier studies on Finnegans Wake. Her work suggests a move beyond post-modern cynicism toward a more engaged, "metamodern" sensibility found in modern literature.See, e.g., More Deaths than One, The Legal Studies Forum, Volume XXXVIII, No. 2, West Virginia University (2014), a metamodernist novel that examines the Central Illinois roots of the late David Foster Wallace and his gradual shift to metamodernism, emphasizing Dumitrescu's role in developing the fundamental concepts of metamodernism. Postmodernism, in Dumitrescu’s analysis in Double Dialogues, was hapless and dying – especially because of its dependency on fragmentation, individualism, and "the preeminence of analysis over synthesis"; in her essay, she described metamodernism as a continuum of revision and interconnectedness: "a boat being built or repaired as it sails, or a palace under continuous construction."
Vermeulen and van den Akker Cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker published their essay "Notes on Metamodernism" in 2010 and ran an online research blog with the same name from 2009 to 2016. Their work is often considered an attempt to explain post-postmodernism.
According to them, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism" characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the 2008 financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution. They asserted that "the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a sensibility that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling through "ironic sincerity". The prefix "meta-" referred not so much to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between (meta) opposite poles as well as beyond (meta) them. Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging... between two opposite poles".
"Ontologically", they write, "metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern."
For the metamodern generation, according to Vermeulen, "grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic; hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed".
The return of a Romantic sensibility has been posited as a key characteristic of metamodernism, observed by Vermeulen and van den Akker in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, and the work of artists such as Bas Jan Ader, Peter Doig, Olafur Eliasson, Kaye Donachie, Charles Avery, and Ragnar Kjartansson. They claim that the neo-romantic approach to metamodernism is done in the spirit of resignifying "the commonplace with significance, the ordinary with mystery, the familiar with the seemliness of the unfamiliar, and the finite with the semblance of the infinite". By doing so, these artists seek to "perceive anew a future that was lost from sight".
Vermeulen asserted that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophy — which implies a closed ontology — as it is an attempt at a vernacular [or] a sort of open source document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political economy as much as in the arts". They asserted that the 2000s were marked by a return to typically modern positions, while still retaining the postmodern sensibilities of the 1980s and 1990s.
Luke Turner Explicitly drawing upon the work of Vermeulen and van den Akker, Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto in 2011 as "an exercise in simultaneously defining and embodying the metamodern spirit", describing it as "a romantic reaction to our crisis-ridden moment". The manifesto recognized "oscillation to be the natural order of the world", and called for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child". Instead, Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons", and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate!" In 2014, the manifesto became the impetus for LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner's collaborative art practice, after Shia LaBeouf reached out to Turner after encountering the text, with the trio embarking on a series of metamodern performance projects exploring connection, empathy, and community across digital and physical platforms.
Hanzi Freinacht Hanzi Freinacht is the pen-name used by author Emil Ejner Friis and sociologist Daniel Görtz known for publishing The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics in 2017. Written as a polemic device, Freinacht plays into common metamodern themes like ironic-sincerity vis-à-vis his performance as a philosopher. Freinacht centrally argues that metamodernism is the natural successor of postmodernism and earlier developmental stages in history by advocating for stage theories.
Freinacht attempts to broadly describe the world under the framing of "symbolic development",Freinacht (2017), pp. 211-212 arguing that societies can most effectively address their issues through better understanding how developed its people and places are. Broken down at the individual level, inner-personal growth and trends follow patterns that can be found in relation to increasingly complex stages. (Complexity, of which he notes, builds upon Michael Common's definition set out in his Model of Hierarchical Complexity.)pp. 175-210 Then at the broader societal level, a parallel scale of complexity mediates the relationships between memetics (or units of culture), epistemology, and developmental psychology, ultimately forming the basis of our political systems and everyday lives.
In the collective anthology: Metamodernity: Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds, Görtz describes the concept of stages in his own name:"It is a tenet of metamodern sociology that perspectives are not arbitrarily ordered, but that they emerge in recognisable patterns... These sequences are, in turn, always dependent upon social and material – ultimately, even biological – conditions, with which they interact. Postmodernism did not emerge before modernism, nor could it have. For this reason, metamodern sociology always looks for meaningful explanatory developmental sequences, putting them in relation to one another on some kind of developmental scale. This developmentalism thus accepts at least some minimal form of stage theories... Each stage must be, in clearly definable terms, either more complex than the former, or, at a minimum, be derived from the former and qualitatively distinct."
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm In 2021, American academic Jason Josephson Storm published Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. In the book, Storm argues for a metamodern method of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities which requires a "revaluation of values" and a new analytic process. He incorporates Hegelian dialectics to negate what he argues are reflective negatives in postmodern thought, including general skepticism, antirealism, ethical nihilism, and the linguistic turn.
Notable concepts detailed by Storm in the book include his proposition of metarealism, "process social ontology", and "hylosemiotics" (see: process philosophy and semiotics). Storm describes metamodernism in brief as follows:"Metamodernism is what we get when we take the strategies associated with postmodernism and productively reduplicate and turn them in on themselves. This will entail disturbing the symbolic system of poststructuralism, producing a genealogy of genealogies, deconstructing deconstruction, and providing a therapy for therapeutic philosophy."Storm, 15-16In 2024, Storm also launched the academic journal: Metamodern Theory and Praxis as Chair of the Science and Technology Studies department at Williams College. Storm asserts that self-analytical, "anti-disciplinary" thought is needed to effectively engage metamodern ideas in the real world and has stated his work is more about creating a paradigm shift than describing an intellectual movement.
Brendan Graham Dempsey
In 2023, Dempsey wrote Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics, in which he attempted to synthesize the various strands of metamodern discourse to date (e.g., Vermeulen, Storm, Freinacht, etc.) into a single coherent framework based on the idea of "meta" as "recursive reflection". For Dempsey, what all forms of metamodernism have in common is the attempt to move beyond postmodernism by means of postmodernism—a move which requires progressively "decentering" from the postmodern vantage in order to reflect on it as an object of analysis (i.e., "going meta" on postmodernism). This reflective move creates a new orientation that is able to critique the previous perspective from a higher vantage.