(Super-) metamodernism and You
The average, educated reader of critical texts is likely very familiar with the terms “modernism” and “postmodernism”. The slightly more well-read individual might also be aware of “premodernism” and the lack of an agreed-upon definition of the term (as well as the lack of a formal Wikipedia page). Before we proceed any further with this discussion, let’s agree on a few dictionary definitions of those words and how I’ll be using them:
Premodernism: is the set of ideas “of, relating to, characterized by, or being any of the artistic and literary practices and philosophies that preceded those of modernism” (taken from the second Merriam-Webster definition of “pre-Modern”)
Modernism: Modernism … [is] a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I… The publication of the Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 was a landmark event in the development of Modernist literature. (taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica article on modernism) (Let’s say that modernism is ascendant from the period following WWI in 1918 and continues approximately until 1968, for reasons described as the beginning of postmodernism below.)
Postmodernism: postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism. The term has been more generally applied to describe what postmodernists believe to be the historical era following modernity and the tendencies of this era…While encompassing a wide variety of approaches and disciplines, postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection of the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism[.] (Taken from today’s Wikipedia entry on postmodernism) (I shall take postmodernism beginning sometime around the student protests of 1969, the structuralist theorists gathering in France in the early 1970s, the Vietnam War protests 1964–1973, and the Woodstock concert of 1969, and I am going to take the end of postmodernism as to have occurred slowly over a period of time, beginning with the publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in 1996, receiving a fatal blow sometime between the fall of the Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 [largely viewed as the first major event of the 21st century’s “Great Recession”] and the election of Barack Obama on November 4, 2008, and finally being buried/put out to pasture/abandoned sometime in 2018/2019 with the resurgence of the enthusiastic “resistance” on the American left (2018 midterm elections) and the ironic “critique” of postmodernism from the right (Jordan Peterson, February 2019) )
Those who’ve done deep research of critical theory online in the past decade will also be aware of a description of a new way of describing current critical discourse:
Metamodernism: Metamodernism is neither a residual nor an emergent structure of feeling, but the dominant cultural logic of contemporary modernity. It can be grasped as a generational attempt to surpass postmodernism and a general response to our present, crisis-ridden moment. (1) Whereas postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism. (2) “ …this discourse, oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, metamodernism” (3)
What I will be proposing in my series Case Studies in (Super)Metamodernism is that instead of the current conception that we as a culture are caught in an “oscillating” cycle between “modern enthusiasm” and a “postmodern irony” a metaphorical grandfather clock, we are caught in a state that is not either/or but both/and, neither a simple “0” nor a simple “1” but a superposition of the two states. In quantum mechanics, measurements can be repeatedly made on “qubits” in identical states and yet they will not always give out the same measurement — a concept popularized via the lovable parable of Schrödinger’s cat:
Schrödinger’s cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor (e.g. Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.
I argue that in today’s culture, works of art (and its creators and consumers) are capable of being both “enthusiastic” and “ironic” at the same time, and when the consumer (observer) consumes (makes an observation of) a piece of media, they are not merely perceiving information but actively interacting with it (collapsing the superposition). Repeated observations of “qubits” (pieces of media) in an “identical state” (the same piece of media) will result in different observations (interpretations of the meaning of a piece of work).
I am essentially saying that it is not enough to term the current moment “meta”modern, but one must go further and describe the “super”metamodern aspects of the current cultural moment if one is to have any idea as to how we got here, where we are, and in what direction we are headed. I propose that Supermetamodernism is not just a framework for description or analysis of past and current culture, but a useful tool that can be used to predict likely cultural trends in the near future, with a possibility that it helps describe the end (and beginning) of a cycle of pop culture that our (Western-ish) world has gone through before and will go through again.
