Metamodern Aesthetics as Apologetics
Hypo Modern Turns and The Methodology of a Meta Mythology
Everything you have and haven’t read about metamodernism is wrong, at least in that its all inaccurate. At the same time a lot of it is worth reading to varying degrees. You may find a little more accuracy here and there and yet the whole thing is still a myth. A meta-myth if you want, but its still largely inaccurate. Like MLK it seems we’re aiming for something magical, beyond humanities current capacity to give.
For example there is a story that most of the basics of the story of metamodernity haven’t been hashed out yet. The story I’m telling here is that that idea doesn’t pass through the courtroom of ideas we need to reform this broken marketplace. After all the marketplace of ideas is only as meritocratic and meretricious as our marketplace of commodities. Indeed believing the story that we live in a meritocracy may be bad for you.
The story we were sold of Market Place of ideas turned out to be as much of a meritocracy as the global capital market place dominated by questionable morals and infamous hoarding skills. The story of Heaven on Earth currently are the hidden jurisdictions and tax havens of the modern aristocracy. This brings me us to an unearthed the definition of metamodernism via its God Father Moyo Okediji et al.
We can consider a suitably accurate definition for metamodernism to be the building accurate Knowledge of Self, finding the divine other in the process. This can be done by building the most accurate stories (as myth) about everything, everywhere all at once. How else can we build Heaven on Earth on the “Hypermodern Highway to Hell”?
“Meta is referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre and myths are traditional stories of historical events that unfold part of a worldview or explain a practice, belief or natural phenomenon. Myth also refers to the unreal. In a society whose narratives tend to diminish the reality of the individual by focusing on generalizations, the majority of us become myths.” Ariel Jackson
Story time in its prime
All we have and ever have are stories. The idea’s human beings accept about themselves and everything they know are too. This is a story I’m telling you now about stories. Brene Brown reminds us that it is a therapeutic tool to say “The story I’m telling myself is that” as it can help us come to be aware of the stories we tell ourselves.
Your idea of who you are and who I am are stories. Science is full of stories, as is art and religion. Each of the stories in these genres are accurate and inaccurate to a different degree, and often the popularity of a story has little to do with its accuracy. In fact the story of science and magic go hand in hand as shown by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm. The idea that they are separate things is inaccurate. (Storm has also shown that the story that modernism and postmodernism are separate movements is an inaccurate one in his book Metamodernism: The Future of Theory
Myths are a form of story and as I’ve shown time and again under the eye of western academia we often miss the meanings of the myths considered to be from the foundation of western academia. In 1975 Mas’ud Zavarzadeh wrote a narrative about a new tendency he saw in the literary arts in response to post-modernity. (He did not mention oscillation, and did mention these moves as a response to post-modernity contrary to popular belief). Novelists had responded to the way reality had come to resemble the dystopian fictions of the past, and in response they changed the way they told their own stories.
Since about 1957 the year in which the Soviet Union put its first Sputnik. into space, shook America and suddenly changed the cold war of ideological opposition between two post-war superpowers to a planetary polarization between Man and Machine – the most radical narrative idiom for articulating the agitating content of today’s extreme situation has been developed in the forms of ‘ metafiction ‘ and the ‘ nonfiction novel” —The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narrative by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. Journal of American Studies, 1975
The two bifurcating responses he saw were the meta-fiction and the non-fiction novel. The Meta Fiction sincerely acknowledged the irony telling stories about storytelling. The Non-fiction novel accepted the ironic idea of attempting to tell a sincere story based on real events that was still as a fictional story. The story I’m telling my self is this may be the root of sincere irony and ironic sincerity. Later on Albert Borgmann observed that hypermodernism and metamodernism in 1992 as the possible bifurcations after postmodernism.
“Postmodern society may become “hypermodern,” a society in which the already pernicious influence of modern technology will become still more pervasive and dominating. Or it may be “passing through” domination by modern technology to a “metamodern’’ state, a state in which technological action will be “context sensitive and historically reverent,” carefully and respectfully (rather than aggressively) realistic, attentive to different “voices of reality.” — Introduction, by Steven L. Goldman, in Stephen H. Cutcliffe (on Borgmans contribution to) “New Worlds, New Technologies, New Issues.”, 1992
The path we took would depend on the stories we accepted about technology. The moment past in another metamodern false start and Kroker et al identified we had already entered hypermodernity in 1987. Perhaps the stories we were telling still believed in the myth of the inevitablity of technology.
“Narratives of inevitability have the effect of foreclosing thought and deliberation. If outcomes are inevitable, then there’s nothing to do but assimilate to this pre-determined future, to go along for the ride prepared for us whatever the consequences.” The Myth of Tech Inevitability L. M. Sacasas 2021
Meta Myth
In 2015 Ariel Jackson wrote an article about the meta myth, in relation to art, including literature and film, with no mention to metamodernity.
“Meta-myth means myths about myths. That is to say the myth about the myth of you. No one sees through our eyes but ourselves and as much as we’d like to see ourselves as individuals, society has historically bundled “individuals” into groups. And general stories are applied to those groups whether our realities are similar or not. To have a story applied to your reality diminishes your own thus causing your reality to be myth.” — Meta Myth by Ariel Jackson, 2015
Earlier in 2000 Moyo Okediji independently describes meta(mythic) modernism as the return of gothic divinity to urban normality. This return is fuelled by alternative stories of modernity fuelled by diasporisation yielding to imaginings of natural processes of growth and movement. A process that ends in possession, bifurcating into two meanings, one of technological ownership and another as spiritual connection.
“Metamodernism may be read as metamythic modernism, inclusive of and transcending all forms of modern myths, such as the metaphysical, geometric, gestalt, existentialism, postmodern, and late modern. While the modern scope covers a mere fraction of the activities of the twentieth century, the metamodern explores all forms of this era” Moyo Okediji, Black skin, White masks. 2000
In these times of hyper modernity with narratives of the inevitable technological it’s important we ground our story of tool use. Fortunately the meta(mythic) mode of modernity offers a hypo-modern perspective on this. The first tools used by humans were stories not rocks, or sticks or fire. Stories are tools themselves and our most ancient, consistent, sustainable and reliant tool. Like any technology a narrative can be used to build and destroy.
Mythology is a blend of fact and fiction. Even when myths aren’t based in fact whatsoever that are often vessels designed to share facts of one sort or another. The use of mythology applied to individuals and communities in the face of hypermodernity is a hypo-modern solution that allows us to reach divinity without the need for the imperative and dependence on technological inevitability. Hypo-modern as a complementary opposite, a prescription to the hypermodern technological intensification.
What’s a Meta For?
Meta(mythic) Modes of Modernity invite us to slow down. To relax into a spirituality that looks at external technology as a tool to refine internal technology. Meta Mythic Modernity invites us to look within, and discover new stories about the self and the other as a way to connect with ourselves and each other towards our shared inner divinity. Instead of seeking to know the self through scenes in screens reflecting our souls though the commodification of our dreams and imaginings; Metamythic modernity as hypo modernity asks us to see the divinity in those local to us, in order to create heaven on earth globally.
The story about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. America tells today is not the one it had around the time of his death. Stories change because stories are markers of change. Another way to view this is that stories are codes used to unlock new ways of being. In fact this was the ultimate plan for MLK to change the cultural code of america.
In the year of his Death Dr. MLK Jr was as popular as BLM was at the time of the George Floyd protests. That is 60 percent of Americans disagreed with them. There has been a revisionist history told and remembered of MLK reducing the man to a myth of one line from one speech. This story of the revised MLK is a societal code revealing a plethora of knowledge:
Cultural silence as violence
Ignorance as ignoring
Negative peace as performative power-play
Apathy as amnesia
Conceptual Incarceration as
Idea Prisons and Solitary confinement.
And Mentacide as Thought death
All this revealing the draptomanic urge as run away fever of the hotsteppers meta mythic mode. The diasporisation of the imagination as a container for the heart-mind and mind-body connections. The held space for the hypermodern negated ones with their divine burden of possession.
Stories are the underlying cipher, the code. Cipher also means zero, as such ciphers are the zeroth code. Without knowledge ciphers can seem like a mystery at best, and nothing at worst, with the appearance of non-sense somewhere in between. The cipher is balance, The cipher is a full 360 degree perspective. The cipher is the alpha and the omega. When we apply knowledge to the cipher can decode and recode and apply our knowledge as wisdom. This eventually leads us to better understanding of the underlying cipher of existence, from which we can derive the divine liberation of Knowledge of Self and others.
“Meta-myth describes a mythical process of using myth to refer to the myth that is the individual experience. Meta-myth is an idea that offers freedom – from a historical, social and political narrative of being a black woman in America – and survival amidst constant frustration, anger, confusion and despair.” Ariel Jackson Meta Myth 2015
