'Chapter 6. Worldview' (from Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics)

Period? Episteme? Paradigm? Metameme? What is 'Metamodernism'?

A Comprehensive Approach

So, what is metamodernism? Having reviewed the various major strands of the web of discourse and offered a vision of what deeper patterns they’re all informed by, I’ve left this deceptively simple question for last. By asking what metamodernism is, I’m not inquiring about its characteristics, its qualities, its content. Those we have already seen, and I hope I’ve offered compelling evidence for recognizing a deep continuity between the various phenomena articulated as “metamodern” despite the diversity of approaches and aims. Rather, what I mean by the question is, What sort of “thing” is metamodernism? What category does it fit in? What is the class of objects (or processes) we are studying here, and at what scope does it operate?

We have seen metamodernism referred to as a period term, a cultural phenomenon, and a budding cultural paradigm (Dumitrescu); a cultural logic, a structure of feeling, a sensibility (Vermeulen and van den Akker); an episteme (Dember); a metameme, a symbol set, a philosophy, a stage of development (Freinacht); a cultural code (Andersen, Freinacht); a thought perspective (Björkman); a research paradigm (Storm); a justification system (Henriques); and a cultural worldview (Azarian). Ironically, despite the broad confluence in the descriptions of the metamodern, the greatest divide seems to be about just what the “metamodern” is exactly.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t address this issue, but simply skated by, comparing “metamodernisms” despite the fact these referred to quite different objects of analysis. To rehearse just a few of the meaningful debates, Vermeulen and van den Akker approach metamodernism as a cultural period emerging from a stage of late capitalism, whereas Freinacht adds a psycho-cultural developmental angle that they reject; Andersen is a developmental thinker, but apparently eschews the Piagetian framework used by Freinacht and critiques metamodernist art discourse for largely ignoring the premodern; Dember is mostly in the period camp, but calls metamodernism an “episteme” and does fold in the premodern while rejecting the notion that metamodernism is progressive; Storm accepts that metamodernism is a dialectical progression, but is skeptical of the idea of zeitgeists, epistemes, and worldviews altogether, and even deconstructs the concepts of both modernity and postmodernity. I could go on…

It would thus seem that “metamodernism” itself is ripe for deconstruction. Taking a page out of Storm’s cookbook, all we’d need to do is assemble these various definitions, show how they contradict one another, reveal their lack of essence, how they are contingent products of history (perhaps while emphasizing the predominantly privileged, white, and male identities of most of the theorists), and voilà: metamodernism in rubble!

Excellent. Now let’s go further.

Metamodernism itself is (as Storm himself acknowledges) a process social kind. It is the product of Humanities discourse. That goes for all articulations of metamodernism, not just Storm’s—though we can use Storm’s tools and, starting from his parsimonious narrowing of metamodernism to a social science paradigm, come to incorporate more of the other senses of the term.

We begin by acknowledging that metamodernism is a social construct—but real in the sense that it is tracking durable (though ultimately transient) property clusters in the world. Such properties exhibit causal powers, and the key is to find what Storm calls the “anchoring processes” by means of which such (relatively) stable systems of causal power emerge. This requires a process approach, which views phenomena not in terms of essential substances but as identifiable patterns with causal power. “To think of social kinds as processes,” he says, “is to emphasize their function as patterned activity and constant change.” Likewise: “Social kinds tend to have modestly stable (if ultimately dynamic) clusters of powers or common patterns of similarity and difference.”

This book has focused on just those patterns. Like any social phenomenon, an approach to metamodernism based on definitions is doomed to fail. “Metamodernism is a cultural period…” “Metamodernism is a justification system…” “Metamodernism is a developmental stage…” Approached this way, we lose our subject before we can even start our analysis. But this is to be expected. Process social kinds are undefinable, interdependent, and cross-cutting. As Storm says, “A given process or social kind will appear to be the same kind or a different kind depending on the level of analysis and the purpose of deployment.”[i] Given the different purposes and levels of analysis of different metamodern theorists, it’s not surprising that we get different definitions for the term. Our concern should not be to find the perfect definition of metamodernism, then, but to appreciate the different ways metamodern properties manifests at different levels of analysis owing to identifiable anchoring processes rooted in specific patterns.

The same holds true, I’d say, for all such broad cultural terms, including “modern” and “postmodern.” Recall that postmodernism, too, is a real social construction tracking real property clusters abstracted from different fields of analysis. As Vermeulen and van den Akker note, “[T]he initial heralds of postmodernity…each analyzed a different cultural phenomenon,” including

a transformation in our material landscape [Jencks]; a distrust and the consequent desertion of metanarratives [Lyotard]; the emergence of late capitalism, the fading of historicism, and the waning of affect [Jameson]; and a new regime in the arts [Hassan].[ii]

These, Vermeulen and van den Akker agree, all exhibit a deeper pattern informing them despite representing rather disparate phenomena.[iii] So, I would argue, can metamodern discourse also analyze different cultural phenomena—e.g., a new regime in the arts and a stage of late capitalism (Vermeulen and van den Akker), stages of psycho-memetic complexification (Freinacht, Björkman), shifting social imaginaries (Andersen), a new philosophical paradigm (Storm), an evolutionarily adaptive metanarrative of collective human information processing (Henriques, Azarian), etc.—and still reflect the same shared anchoring processes and patterns.

That is, I think we can see deep structural patterns manifesting themselves in different areas of culture simultaneously—from art, to psychology, to science, to philosophy, and beyond. That is what modernism did, and postmodernism, too. There are without doubt meaningful connections, for instance, between the academic postmodern philosophical paradigm Storm identifies as being oriented around “1) anti-realism, 2) disciplinary autocritique, 3) the linguistic turn, 4) a broad climate of skepticism, and 5) ethical nihilism”[iv] and postmodern art entirely independent of academia. Self-imploding, self-reflexive works (like the aforementioned “Title” by Barthes) are obvious aesthetic analogues to philosophical autocritique, and a broad climate of skepticism and ethical nihilism is likewise reflected in postmodern novels like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) or Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). The list could go on and on. Storm’s own metamodern paradigm, then, seems to gesture beyond itself, demanding to be contextualized within a broader social process view of cultural history. The processes that brought his philosophical system about are, I believe, reflective of the same patterns bringing about metamodern art, sociology, and science.

There is, to my mind, then, no need to radically compartmentalize the philosophical manifestations of metamodernism from, say, its aesthetic manifestations. Storm seems to presume the latter lack the kind of robust anchoring processes of the former. Rehearsing the postmodern paradigm, for instance, he is emphatic:

To be clear, there is a common philosophical substratum to the arguments above: they did not just happen as part of some ill-defined cultural zeitgeist, but rested on the discovery of a set of philosophical issues.[v]

Agreed. But, like the metamodern sensibility and its own philosophical grounding, the postmodern zeitgeist also emerged (at least in large part) out of deep structural relation to philosophical issues, which are themselves embedded in social contexts, emerging from institutional and economic systems, etc. In many ways, the excavation into the philosophical paradigm of postmodernism offers up just the sort of deeper anchoring processes and patterns that can help explain the property clusters of postmodern art. But the fact that we cannot ultimately reduce art to philosophy, or to stages of capitalism for that matter, means that still deeper structural issues are at work—deeper patterns—of which even these are emergent phenomena.

Storm’s critiques of periodization schemes are all valid, but his deconstruction of them gestures to how they might be successfully reconstructed. Specifically, their spatial and temporal boundaries are always deeply problematic, and easily challenged. At best, he writes:

If periodizations are ways of describing technological, political, cultural, or philosophical constellations, then I think we could adapt what William Gibson said about the future, and note: if metamodernity is here, it’s not evenly distributed.[vi]

This is very true, and reveals why we need to rethink the deeper anchoring processes behind terms like “modern,” “postmodern,” and “metamodern” altogether.  

I believe Freinacht’s analysis plays a crucial role in this regard, as he, too, critiques simple periodization approaches. In his essay “Metamodern Sociology” in the 2021 anthology Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and Emergence in Metamodernity, he writes:

There is, in my mind, a widespread misunderstanding of how this is to be approached – the fallacy of periodisation, a description of historical epochs that are taken to have certain properties: a modern period, a postmodern period and a metamodern period. Adorno famously wrote that ‘Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category (Adorno 1978). This comment incisively captures the crux of the matter: viewed from a sociological vantage point, there is little meaning in historical periods and years. …Vermeulen and van den Akker (2017) have suggested that metamodernism is a period shaped by certain events, but they cannot…provide any full description or explanation as to which pattern connects these events and this particular time period.[vii]

The pattern that connects, argues Freinacht throughout his work, is the pattern of hierarchical complexity, which shows metamodern logic operating at a Metasystematic level of memetic informational organization after postmodern logic’s Systematic and modern logic’s Formal levels. Though, as I have been arguing throughout this book, that pattern of hierarchical complexity is itself one of iterative recursive reflection. Modernization’s economic processes like industrialization and modern aesthetics practices like 3D perspective do both rely on the anchoring logic of a shared stage of complexity. Postmodernization’s likewise. To speak of the characteristically “modern,” then, is not to describe a time, or a place, but a degree of coordinational complexity achieved through recursive reflection. Distinctly “modern” phenomena of this sort will manifest and constellate based on developmental conditions (e.g., flows of energy and resources, political and institutional supports, etc.), not simply because the year changes to a round number.

In short, adopting a psycho-memetic approach resolves the problems that dog simple periodization schemas, explaining key anchoring processes behind cultural developments like modernization and its uneven distribution. As Adorno noted, the issue isn’t chronological, but qualitative, and is based on the sort of psycho-cultural logic Habermas uses in his reconstruction of dialectical materialism. Simply because Iran’s Islamic theocracy exists in the early twenty-first century doesn’t make it metamodern. Temporality by itself is hardly an anchoring process. Periodization approaches are forced to use terms like Williams’s “residuals,” “dominants,” and “emergents” to deal with these problems, but, to Freinacht’s point, they simply describe, they do not explain. Only once we see the deep pattern of recursive reflection and complexification as the historically conditioned driver of cultural development does the issue become clarified.[viii]

For his part, Storm is comfortable using the language of Hegelian dialectic to frame his metamodern paradigm shift, meaning he, too, sees metamodernism as a genuine advance, a development, a progression up the spiral. He is right. But a constructive shift in research methods and approaches is only one (albeit important) product of successfully working through postmodernism’s deconstructive logic to a higher logic. It proceeds by means of the patterns described in Chapter 1—but so do all cultural developments. Bo Burnham surely didn’t read Storm’s reconstructive deconstruction of deconstruction, yet he organically reenacts it in his comedy sketch. Why? Because metamodernism is a social kind activated and identifiable by a cluster of properties arising from deep anchoring patterns with causal power.

In the language of complexity science, metamodernism is an “attractor,” a pattern of behavior a system will gravitate towards based on deep structural relationships. But this is also what an “episteme” essentially is in Foucauldian terms! Indeed, most of the terms used to define metamodernism gesture to some version of this idea. It is what is suggested by words like “cultural logic,” “cultural code,” “structure of feeling,” etc. There is a pattern at play, the patterning activity by which we can justifiably speak of process social kinds and constructions. And, as Azarian notes, that pattern rhymes at various levels of analysis. So we see it operating in the arts one minute, in science the next, and so forth. My claim throughout this book is that metamodernism, as a cultural logic, is both a product of that pattern and about it. And the more it unfolds, the more it reveals the pattern, such that the pattern in turn becomes objectified, reflected upon, and eventually contextualized within a still more comprehensive pattern.

Of the metamodern theorists, Storm is certainly the most careful and meticulous in defining just what he means by postmodernism. This is because he has done the work of deconstructing “postmodernism” as a category, tracing its origins back, comparing seminal source texts to second-hand interpretations and reifications, etc. In the end, he concludes, postmodernism is only a meaningful term to the degree it manifests in academic discourse as a hegemonic set of research methods motivated by an identifiable set of philosophical issues. Yet Storm himself admits that this has other, very real downstream consequences that affect culture more broadly. Students shuffle from classes on non-religion to non-literature. Scholars have to presume postmodern presuppositions to enter their field. Meanwhile, whole academic departments are shuttering, unable to justify themselves even in the face of administrative budget cuts. The Humanities are in a state of crisis.

It would be naïve to think these issues remained siloed within the ivory tower and do not influence culture in more systemic ways. The education system is a vital pillar of the enculturation process. When it becomes mired in autocritique and intellectual aporia, what do we expect will happen to the generations of students that pass through its doors? Do they not go into the workforce, into the world—into the art studio? We cannot so easily divorce academic paradigms from cultural ones.

As I argued in Chapter 1, postmodernism has long since escaped the ivory tower. Its deconstructive tropes now litter cultural production in every sphere. It would be equally naïve to assume metamodernism, too, isn’t or won’t be more broadly dispersed. Call it a zeitgeist, call it a cultural logic, call it an episteme, whatever, there is indeed a “common philosophical substratum” to its cultural developments. Some may dive to their logical roots while others simply intuit their implications in aesthetic gestures. When the pattern is pervasively manifested enough, people start talking about “periods,” but this is a coarse-grained approach, forced to qualify with terms like “emergents” and “residuals.” Cultural logics manifest in time, but using time as the defining parameter of cultural logics is like mistaking correlation for causation. The deeper pattern lies in how people think and act in the world based on those thoughts. Metamodernism is a way of thinking, a highly reflective way of thinking—a way of thinking so reflective, it reflects even on the highly self-reflective postmodernist way of thinking, such that it reflects on the limitations and impasses of self-reflection itself, even to abandoning hyper-self-reflection entirely.

My point is that research paradigms are only symptomatic of broader cultural trends. That metamodernism, like postmodernism before it, manifests as an academic paradigm suggests its manifestation as a cultural paradigm, an episteme, a collective justification system, etc. The upshot of all of this is that we can be both meticulous and broad in our scope when talking about cultural logics. Metamodernism may indeed operate as a philosophical paradigm, but it is also much more than that. As a logic, a structure, a set of patterns, it is applicable to a wide sphere of life. Just as postmodernism manifests as a philosophical paradigm, that paradigm both informs and is informed by people applying its logic to all aspects of their lives.

Appreciating this justifies our speaking of metamodernism in expansive terms. The word I use, though imperfect—yet for which I have found no better substitute—is worldview, by which I do not mean a perfectly coherent set of beliefs, nor an arbitrary assortment of commitments. Rather, I use the term largely interchangeably with other terms encountered here such as “justification system,” “episteme,” or “metameme.” It is a constellation of working assumptions about the world acting as knowledge, by means of which people navigate reality in a relatively effective manner. In this sense, it is very much in accord with Azarian’s understanding of a “cultural worldview” that acts as a shared world model as part of collective adaptive strategies.

This does not mean worldviews are reducible to evolutionary biology. As Henriques shows, worldviews are part of symbolic information processing systems that build off of living and neuronal ones but are not reducible to them. A worldview is how we make sense of reality via collective representations we share with other symbolically-mediated, cultural, human persons. Working together, “thinking together,” we live out the universe’s propensity towards thermodynamic efficiency, which is to say the universe’s drive to process more information and create more structural complexity. It is how we, as a part of the universe, learn more about the universe in a manner that aids our viability. Worldviews, and worldview evolution, are part of the process of cosmic complexification. They are what recursive emergence looks like on the plane of Culture. They are patterns of information—i.e., clusters of powers or common patterns of similarity and difference[ix]—that arise out of the integrated insights of countless minds all reflecting on themselves, each other, and the world in which they finds themselves.

As both Storm and Freinacht note, drawing on the insights of developmental psychology, we do this by going out into the world and interacting and manipulating it. Human thinkers are not isolated from the world but emerge out of it, are parts of it, and metamodern semiotics and epistemology naturally reflect this. We are the parts of the universe that have proven exceedingly successful at self-reflection. For that is what the universe seems to be doing at every level: recursively looping back on itself to generate new emergent levels, which move further and further away from the boring predictability of “natural kinds” towards the ever-more exciting dynamism and novelty of social kinds, cultural kinds.

That is what transcendence is all about. An infinitesimal progress towards greater and greater dimensionality. An endless decentration towards deeper levels of complexity. An eternal recursion of reflection, allowing us to toggle between more perspectives and vantages as we bootstrap our way to greater knowledge of the universe.

These are the meta-patterns anchoring the properties of the metamodern worldview. But by reflecting upon them, our very notion of the world and our place in it is transformed. Postmodernism is also a worldview—but one that often suffers from nihilism and meaninglessness owing to the vertiginous relativism brought on by the realization of perspectival pluralism. It is the worldview of Rick Sanchez, of Jobu Tupaki, which says “Nothing… matters.” That may be a philosophical conclusion, I suppose, but it definitely affects the way people live their lives.

The metamodern worldview is different. It moves beyond the cultural logic of postmodernism, transcending it, to find something aspirational, hopeful, meaningful on the other side. It brings a logic to the chaos of the infinite. It offers a sense of home, a way to appreciate simplicity on the other side of complexity. It doesn’t mock but affirms single-entendre principles like love, care, and kindness. And it does so without forfeiting its reflective gains. It reclaims a sense of progress, of directionality, of purpose, yet does so without premodern dogma or modern totalitarianism.

 In all of this, clearly, a profound sense of optimism seems to obtain—or, like “pragmatic idealism,” a sort of metarealist positivity. While I certainly risk overstating the case, it seems that one thing all articulations of metamodernism have in common is its distinctly affirmational and productive stance compared to its postmodern predecessor. We see it in the earnest affect of metamodern aesthetics, in the reimagined sense of progress and purpose in metamodern political and social movements, in the switch from philosophy “under the sign of the negative” to the positive in metamodern philosophy, etc.[x] The dialectic is advancing, negation is being negated, and the reconstructive manifestations are appearing at the cutting edge of culture in aesthetics, social activism, philosophy, the sciences, religion, and beyond. 

The recognizable pattern across these domains helps us see metamodernism as more than just a new regime in the arts, an academic paradigm, or a period, but a conceptual structure with its own content, a cultural logic with its own logic. At present, it is indeed unevenly distributed, emerging chiefly in those vanguard areas where the structural parameters of the postmodern logic have already been assimilated, objectified, and transcended. But make no mistake: it is the next attractor point for culture. And the more postmodern logic spreads and permeates society (as it is currently doing at present), the more it lays the groundwork for metamodernity to emerge.

And by the time it’s clear that it has, well… it will have already given birth to its own successor, from whose vantage the preceding pages will then show quaint and limited indeed.

But hey—at least we’re a few steps closer to infinity.

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NOTES

[i] Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm (2021) Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (University of Chicago Press, Chicago), 141.

[ii] Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010.

[iii] Specifically, say Vermeulen and van den Akker (following de Mul), “what these distinct phenomena share is an opposition to ‘the’ modern” (i.e., critique through recursive reflection).

[iv] Storm 2021, 21.

[v] Ibid., 82.

[vi] Ibid., 17.

[vii] Hanzi Freinacht/Daniel Görtz (2021) Metamodern sociology. In Jonathan Rowson and Layman Pascal (eds) Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and Emergence in Metamodernity (Perspectiva Press, London), 137-138.

[viii] Indeed, it is precisely this appreciation of cultural logics as free from temporal constraints that explains the metamodern Ungleichzeitigkeit Jörg Heiser describes in his essay “Super-Hybridity: Non-Simultaneity, Myth-Making and Multipolar Conflict” in van den Akker, Gibbons, and Vermeulen’s (2017) anthology (pp. 55-69). Cultural logics are blending and hybridizing in today’s culture because there are various cultural logics of varying degrees of self-reflection all interacting at the same time. Indeed, Bloch himself referred to this plurality of logics as a “multiverse” (see pp. 61-69).  This doesn’t make ISIS “metamodern,” since its close-minded and absolutistic religious ideology precludes it from even being able to reflect beyond premodern sensibilities. One does not need to understand modernity in order to make use of its technology. One does not need to appreciate pluralism to employ postmodern marketing tactics. Metamodernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. Metamodernism/the future are here, but not evenly distributed.

[ix] As Gregory Bateson defined it, information is “a difference that makes a difference,” meaning a pattern that has causal powers.

[x] This is a difficult thing to square if we attempt a purely economic or material analysis of cultural logics. Why should the fat times of the centrist, suburban, neoliberal 80s and 90s have given us the dark cynicism and hopelessness of postmodernism, while the millennium that began with terrorism and war only to progress through economic meltdown and climate catastrophe give us hope, sincerity, and a new-found idealism? Obviously, this is not to suggest that cultural logics emerge to float above their material and political contexts completely untethered. Just the opposite, of course. Yet reducing cultural logics to logics of capitalism or other material substrates is too simplistic and, well, reductionistic. There are other dynamics that must be taken into account, as we have been discussing. In any event, I take it as felicitous that the hard times facing the world today are occurring at the same moment a new paradigm is appearing that does indeed emphasize care, productive action, and idealistic engagement. Bobby Azarian speaks of “Popper’s Principle” behind the learning-as-complexification process in the cosmos: problems create progress. If postmodern apathy, nihilism, and decadent extravagance helped exacerbate our ecological precariousness, the evolution of a new worldview like meta-modernism may be the sort of adaptive response you’d expect—and, dare I say, hope for.