Notes on Metamodern Arts Festival and Emerge Gathering 2019 in Kyiv
Throughout the whole thing, I kept getting deja-vus from the past-life. In the summer of 2017, me and my friends organised a big techno-party in the same exact location, iZone on the Dnipro riverside. We set in the same chairs, ate the same food, conversed with the same staff. But music was different. The participants were different. And what was really different is the teleology of where we were heading to: if the raves are the symptoms of the meaning crisis, a gathering like this is its medicine. What might come up as resemblance is both crowds’ slight interest in the psychedelics. It seems that certain things just never change in my dear Kyiv.
On the last day of the events, Oskar, a young philosophy student from Sweden related to me his first impression of the gathering. When he entered the big hall he had a feeling that it “was full of gods”. The lights on the floor were directed upwards, facing from below the figures of the participants, all of whom were deeply engaged in small group discussions. They seemed to populate another dimension, one of the warm connectedness and meaningfulness. In another candid conversation I had on the final day with another student from Sweden (Niklas), he confessed that he felt quite insignificant during one of the workshops where all other participants were CEOs of one kind or another. This is how it might look when you’re a newcomer to the whole thing. You feel to be out of place and out of sync. But those were just the first impressions. Even though there is a certain truth to them, eventually they proved to be wrong. It was my first festival of this sort, my first festival of any sort, actually, but from the moment I entered the first conversation, I new that I belonged here. There was a room for everybody (except for some of my Ukrainian compatriots who wanted to attend but could not afford a ticket [with a reasonable €75 price by European standards] for which they would have to be saving money for more than a year).
There are four main trains of thought I follow in this text, all of which are enkindled by what I saw at the Gathering and unfurled further with the help of Rowan Williams’ excellent book Being Human. The proposed text may also be read as an attempt at a review of a former archbishop’s book.
Edit: But why involve an ex-archbishop in this affair? Because I have reasons to think that Rowan Williams is an epitome of metamodernism.
Not because he coined the term metacrisis or because he often finds himself at pains of explaining why metaphysics lies at the foundation of thinking as such.
He was an archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. This is the time that formed our current predicament. September 11, the death of the “Third Way” politics, market collapse have structured and fractured contemporary culture. But all the rampant divisions that were taking place during those times had a special presence inside the Anglican Communion – one that Rowan presided over. Anglican Church was and stays a place where these polarising tendencies tend to find their articulated grounding, not least because of the characteristically Anglican cultivation of political involvement and sustained intellectual climate.
Rowan Williams repeatedly found himself at the crossfire between conservative and liberal forces, between traditional and progressive values. Despite all this, throughout his ten years of being an archbishop, Rowan stayed a determined peacemaker. He always aimed at creating a common ground for all the sides involved in the conflict. For a certain space where the non-zero-sum game could be actualised.
In his lecture titled “Encountering the Other”, Rowan presented a vision of the structure of how any conflict is transcended. That is, of how any conflict is transformed or metamorphosed into something that has a relationship of meta to its previous form. What is this structure? It is something like “standing before the face of God (Lat. coram deo)”, something like coming together as we find ourselves in relation to something infinitely bigger. To find oneself is such space means to leave the domain of competition and enter the domain of co-living. Leave the domain of control – be it othering and annihilation or marrying and assimilation. Both do not let the other be other. And enter the domain of relationship, in which difference is not subjected to annihilation or assimilation, but is embraced as a sign of God’s diverse fecundity.
1. The power of term ‘metamodernism’, of the way of thinking that offers things that postmodernism is bereft of, such as cultivating real meaning and connecting to the shared forms of engagement.
Meeting young people from mostly northern Europe whose lives were transformatively enhanced by the language of metamodernism was a key to understanding what metamodernism really means. You see, while the question of whether metamodernism is ‘real’ concerns some of the older folks who want to be pointed to some new forms of art or whatever, it is basically removed from the agenda of these youths. Something that has a real impact on your life cannot be ‘unreal’, because this impact is what should define ‘realness’ in the first place. They are grateful to and ignited by what the language of metamodernism opens up in their day to day lives: the new ways of connecting with others with a new sense of purpose and shared meaning in the engagement in societal, political, and cultural issues. Modernism gave us welfare, yet it is the most prosperous Nordic countries that suffer most from the suicide epidemics with its roots in technological alienation, loneliness (25% of millennials don’t have a single friend), absence of meaningful belonging, and lack of leisure (the average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant). No wonder that what is emerging now from these countries is grounded in the most pronounced and profound understanding of the problems that modernism and postmodernism leave unaddressed. At the core of this new sensitivity lies the idea that human beings need more than enough good food, money to buy the latest technology, and time to have lush pleasure. And that, in order to achieve more than these material pursuits can grant us, we have to embrace a developmental framework, one that sees human beings as capable of reaching new heights of wisdom and personal growth throughout the life-span. Postmodernism, whatever it is, creates many suffering souls, souls that could otherwise be beautiful and selfless. It does so by not allowing the language of transcendence, the language of audacious horizons. Its deconstructive language stifles idealism, and by doing so it stifles the core of what it means to be human. So, most of all, metamodernism frees us from the need to pay ‘postmodern condition’ its due, which opens up a new dreamspace of possibilities (and, putting it in a way that is even more provocatively abstract, this metamodern alleviation of postmodern constraints allows for a playground that is vaccinated from the dangers of modernist constructive zeal precisely because it has learned postmodern lessons by heart and is now able to grow from its protective caveats). In general, people perceive the importance of using the word ‘metamodernism’ because it connects a lot of lines that need to be connected. This is how emergence operates — at some point there is just no other choice but to embrace what is being born organically. So what does (this string of) metamodernism stand for? At its core it is a vanguard philosophical articulation of the intuitions and aspirations that mainly emerge in Scandinavia.
In his books The Listening Society and Nordic Ideology Hanzi delineates what are the next issues on the agenda of our civilization’s development. One way or another, there seems to be no way around the tasks that are listed in these books. The idea that the next frontier of human growth has something to do with nurturing loving relationships between otherwise alienated persons seems to be at least intuitively obvious. Hanzi is just the first one who is making us conscious of it by articulating it in a palatable form. Love him or hate him, he is the first one who cleared and mapped the path ahead of us in terms of its logic and narrative.
2. A sense of intimate connection between the participants.
When strangers come together there is a sense of uncertainty, a nervous urgency to break the awkward silence by saying words, an urgency to order the chaos with a logical structure. It makes it easieer, but the potential of communication is almost a living thing that often gets stifled by explaining it away. This is why in our little group sections we have continuously refused to reduce the living connection between us to just knowledge (which is the same thing as recognizing this communicative anxiety as more than just a problem). We refused to verbalize this life-form that was organically emerging through us as if it could be completely accounted for by a certain set of propositions. Only in this case, only in maintained silence, there might be a room left for the sacred, for that which is not reducible to explanations. True intimacy and true friendship are born when there is a willingness to not be in control of the form that relations take and not to be in control of each other, from a willingness to be vessels of something bigger than ourselves.
“The more our humanity falls in love with this strange idea of domesticating, absorbing and controlling, the less human we actually get… If we believe that our humanity is something constantly growing, then there have got to be moments when we are taken beyond the familiar and the controllable.
Rowan Williams connects this urge to control with framing something as being merely a problem.
“The more we are fixated on problem-solving, the more we are fixated upon control, the more lack of control and frustration at the failure to solve problems create personal challenges for us, and the more we’re inclined to lash out. There is a fair bit of evidence from the neurological world about the connections between violence, obsession, and control… We repeatedly act as if control and digestion were the only things that mattered; and this of course explains a lot about the ecological crisis that we currently face”
According to Rowan Williams, we have a “pervasive, mysterious, nagging sense that there is always something about the other person that’s to do with what I can’t see and that can’t be mastered.” But what does this openness towards others might afford for us? It has afforded the eye contact, smile, greetings, and gratitude in a kind, sincere, and open way during the gatherings — every time someone passed by another person, even if they were complete strangers. It also affords vivid and bold frontier intellectual discussions.
But how do we allow others the freedom they deserve? How do we let them be as strange as they could be? It was
“Edith Stein, who was the first to remark that it’s philosophically interesting that we can’t see the backs of our heads. That’s to say, she argued that for us to have an image of ourselves as a body, as a three-dimensional unit in space, requires us to listen to and attend to what other people are doing with respect to us. There’s something the other knows that I absolutely can’t; that is, what the back of my head looks like ‘head on’, so to speak.”
It seems that to allow others be others we have to learn acceptence and dependence, we need to let ourselves into the
“dependence on God” which is “radically unlike yielding to someone else who is like you. Depending on God is utterly unlike losing a struggle for power, losing your control, losing your autonomy. To be unconditionally dependent on another human subject is to be in deep danger of repressive, dehumanizing patterns of relation. To depend on God in the context I have outlined is precisely to be delivered from this. God is not another ego greedy to control”.
It is only within this (meta)relationship that we are taught the humility we need to treat others as ends in themselves.
Something is “meta” if it consciously references or comments upon its own subject or features. The question is what is this place or ground from which one is now able to come from in order to make such reference or comment. When narrating a communication between a Tutsie survivor and a Hutu perpetrators’ family member, Rowan Williams said that
“If there was any way forward out of this almost unimaginably bitter and difficult kind of otherness that they represented, it had something to do with how they were to create between them a space that belonged to neither of them but could give room for both. They were exploring how to encounter an invited otherness and far side of bitter standoff a zero-sum game of suffering and reproach and guilt. Asking what a new space could be that neither of them owned. I think we all came away from the conversation with a very much intensified sense of how encountering the other becomes truly gracious when we at last learn how to say goodbye to the fantasies of ownership. Perhaps that is what faith finally has to offer in the world of walls and ditches and wires and border controls.”
A zero-sum game of reproach and guilt is metamorphosed into a space that belongs to neither but gives room for both, when we learn how to say goodbye to the fantasies of ownership.
What intrigued me the most about the Emerge is that at its core it is a community of spiritual nurture in shared transformative practices, a community of people who are willing to both teach and learn from each other. Considering this, it is not a coincidence that so many of the participants are deeply involved in running manifold personal growth initiatives.
3. An emphasis on personal development.
What strikes me as important about the metamodern perspective is that it comes from a place of hope and confidence. A hope that as human beings we can do more than we are expected of in the modern setting. A confidence that human development does not have to come to a halt with reaching adulthood, but that it might continue throughout the life-span.
There was a broad proliferation of representatives from different developmental initiatives at the gathering, such as the folk schools, the Bildung projects, the Integral projects, the co-living spaces (an island, for example), the cultivation asylum (my own initiative), and so on.
Development occurs on a continuum, obviously, but communications between people often uncover a real stage discordance. That is, a difference that presupposes that a certain x has everything y has and also something on top of that, and that there is a qualitative difference between the two, not merely quantitative.
But, in terms of development, it is not that much that the particular content of practices matters, rather, what matters is whether their form facilitates a sincere and meaningful dialogue between the participants and curators. If there is no such open interchange, or if there is nothing for the participants to learn from their curators (enter stage differences), then there is no point in the practice in the first place. People are not eager to learn from those they do not aspire to. And who we aspire to are exactly those on the higher stages of… what exactly? This is a problem. There are many different scales and people aspire to those that are salient to them here and now. Often people aspire to bullshit (something that celebrities are willing to promulgate). So one of the tasks of developmental projects is to make sure that what is salient to people is something that is good (…true, and beautiful).
People can only ‘grow’ together with other people, with those whom they inspire and with those whom they aspire to. But there comes a point when we are not enough. When the burden of our growth begins to require more than just our willingness and good company.
As wrote Ernest Becker,
“prolonged beyond a certain developmental stage”, the project of self-creation “becomes the source of all kinds of pathologies”.
This is the stage where we need humility on top of fervor and confidence. This is the stage where spirituality comes of hand, for
“one of the proposals of religious faith and religious language is that we are empowered, emancipated, to use the transforming energy we can exercise by acknowledging our dependence on an unconditional source of affirmation.”
And this is when religious dogma might prove to be useful. For at the core of religion lies an intuition that
“Human dignity, the unconditional requirement that we attend with reverence to one another, rests firmly on this conviction that the other is already related to something that isn’t me.”
That is, that the other is already related to God.
4. An openness towards transformative techniques, religious bonding, and mythopoetic metanarratives.
a. Embodiment.
Seeing Jan and Laurence present and demonstrate the Glass Bead Game was mesmerising. The way that they moved with their bodies, the way they were organically flowing and leaning towards and from each other on stage might have seemed strange at first, but eventually it had a liberating effect even on those who just watched it from a distance (including me). It makes one come at peace with the idea that there is no possibility of human existence without being incarnated in this fragile and awkward flesh. But accepting this limitation is not something you learn, rather, it is something you act out with your body. It is not a propositional knowledge, it is a perspectival one. You just have to accept the cringe of the fact that the only vessel of your engagement in the world is this klutzy organism. It also leads to a realization that
“we as bodies belong in a world where bodily processes connect us to a material world to which we are not superior. This in itself imposes on us a more patient, a more attentive, perhaps even more ‘reverent’ approach to the environment we live in.”
So there is that, a growing understanding that to actualize the fulness of what it means to be human we have to come to terms with our bodies:
“Learning how to ride a bicycle or how to sing a song is learning a set of habits which your body activates. You learn to respond or resonate to your environment in a particular way. You learn that if you lean over this way on a bicycle, you fall off. You learn, in all sorts of very elusive ways, that when you try to activate your vocal chords in this manner rather than that, the sound that comes out is not a sound that anybody wants to hear. You learn habits; you learn to accommodate yourselves to a complex set of stimuli which you probably couldn’t ever tabulate in full. People who learn crafts learn very much in this way. They learn by imitation, they learn literally by feeling their way, and a book like Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman3 spells out something of what it means to learn a craft in ways in which he argues have very serious and very significant implications for the kind of humanity we grow into.”
a. Fasting the ego.
There more ego you have the more ‘spiritual’ work has to be done with it. There is a certain power that comes from wrestling with a ‘big’ ego which might not come from the wrestling with the ‘lesser’ ones. Bigger ego requires more radical fasting.
It is not easy to dump the ego from its pedestal. To do so we often require the work of framing:
“I can’t dig deep enough in myself to find an abstract self that’s completely divorced from relationship… Before anything else happens I am in relation to a non-worldly, non-historical everlasting attention and love…”
Before any identity can be taken on, I am already recognised and identified by others. It does not just mean that I’m secondary, peripheral, and subordinate to this recognition, it is also that my coming into existence itself is an unconditional gift of something that is bigger than me, of undeserved unconditional love that lies at the ground of any other love I can experience or give. For me personally, the “god language” is just the fastest route to explain the way we can let the ego dissolve and allow ourselves to be the instruments of love that is far greater, far more complex than anything we can come up with. On my part, I was glad to confirm my intuition that many Europeans are quite interested in what eastern orthodox Christianity has to offer in terms of fasting of ego, framing techniques, and psychotherapeutic symbolism.
c. Silence.
One thing that might have surprised a newcomer was the easiness of the participants towards silences. Rowan Williams associates acceptance of and placidity in silence with spiritual maturity.
A growing humanity, a maturing humanity, is one that’s prepared for silence, because it’s prepared at important moments to say, ‘I can’t domesticate, I can’t get on top of this.’ And of course it’s hard work. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s been on silent retreats where you watch either yourself or somebody else in a group gradually becoming more and more alarmed that there is nothing they can say to make this ‘normal’. (I remember a retreat where one unfortunate member of the group couldn’t cope with silent meals; he’d bolt a mouthful of food, staring wildly around him, and then run from the room.)”
In a very important way, letting silence unfold means allowing the novelty to emerge without conflict and enmity. Allowing space and time for silence is the same thing as allowing space and time for the mystery.
“the bare prose of our humanity is, by God, turned into poetry by that constant urging to grow. God is that environment, that encounter, that we will never get to the bottom of and that we will never control, and that, try as we may, we will never absorb, because God is God and we are what God makes and loves and works on.”
After all, for Rowan Williams, silence is the place where God occurs.
“So often we try to convey or communicate the character and work of God to others by stepping up the noise and the activity; and yet for God to communicate who and what God is, God needs our silence.”
Appendix:
Metamodern Philosopher Hanzi Freinacht in Flesh in Kyiv, Who Could Have Thought?
I was very surprised to find out that the great metamodern philosopher Hanzi Freinacht actually came to the festival in Kyiv.
I talked to him. In fact, many conversations were started and sustained by his sparks. Common ground was found because we shared his informed naiveté. New bridges and novel types of connections were established due to his insights. I looked in many young eyes, ignited by his fervor. I listened to many trembling voices, elated by his vision. I stepped into the territory, bridged by his sincerity and opened by his provocations. I made friends with bodies, animated by his ethos, bodies that just a few months ago were suffocated in the miasma of postmodern meaninglessness and irrelevance. I detected his tonality in the mindful and self-effacing ‘Holy Fools’, whose tragedy is ripe to be reborn as play.
