Metamodernism — The Future of Theory: an interview with Prof. Jason Ā. Josephson Storm
Jason Ā. Josephson Storm Professor of Religion and Chair of Science and Technology Studies at Williams College, talks to Find Out Why about his latest book, Metamodernism: The Future Theory.
A thought provoking and inspiring revision of the current theoretical systems of analysis in humanities and social sciences.
His ideas enrich our understanding of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 implications in our social world as he paves a new way forward for theory.
You can listen to his interview here or read the transcript below.
Q: We started this interview by asking Professor Josephson Storm to explain the theory of Social Kinds and the need for this theoretical shift:
A: For a long time, the humanities and social sciences, were dominated by a model known as methodological individualism.
The idea was that any kind of description within the humanities and social sciences needed to default to the decision making or the attitudes of a particular individual.
That model of methodological individualism has run aground.
Q: Why?
A: It turned out to be hugely incomplete. Groups and companies were really hard to explain in terms of methodological individualism. There was no predictive power. The model only predicts societal change on the individual level and instead of grappling with big systems, it tended to try and change individual choices.
The only alternative on offer for a long time was holism.
Holism tended to imagine society is this grand organic whole, larger than the individual and almost like a layer or a structure over and beyond the individual, from which somehow the individual was being shaped or formed by.
That didn’t explain very much either. People tended to essentialize societies as big huge structures, or to imagine that economic shifts, for example, necessarily meant ideological shifts. An example of this approach is the older Marxist dogmatism about the superstructure being determined by the base.
Not wrong, but very incomplete and not very explanatory or predictive.
Q: So you propose a different level of analysis in your book: “Social Kinds”. What are Social Kinds?
A: Humans we have the capacity to create things that have powers and capacities that we ourselves don’t have.
We can create, not just institutions and organizations, but also artifacts and my minimal term for this is “social kinds”
Take for example the Supreme Court; you can’t explain the Supreme Court if you think that all of its attributes are just the features of nine people and their attitudes apart.
In fact, there’s a vast institutional structure that’s necessary to understand the Supreme Court that goes beyond any individual, and that includes objects as well as people, includes texts, includes organizations, it includes all these other things.
Q: What is the advantage of Social Kinds?
A: It lets us also understand nonhuman social animals and creatures.
We get to see how the social is not a social level up and over the material level, but it’s actually materialized.
Social kinds include social roles.
They include organizations and they include artifacts and what they share is that they’re social in a particular way, which is to say social, not in contrast to cultural or political, but social, as in socially constructed.
Q: When it comes to methodological holism that we mentioned earlier how social kinds theory shifts from that perspective?
A: The people who have tended to be methodological holists have imagined static social structures.
They’ve assumed that tradition is the norm and that the thing to be explained is discontinuity, is rupture, is change.
So I argue that social kinds are processes, but more than that they represent moments of temporary stability.
In this continual unfolding professional world that we’re all participants in, things are constantly changing, but we’re able to coordinate our conversations with each other because things are changing all at the same speed and all equally quickly.
So we can roughly agree, when we’re talking about for example Tesla automobiles that we’re talking about a shared set of object. Even if the properties of a given Tesla in terms of what it can do, how fast it can drive, how big its batteries are changed over time, even as the meaning and boundaries of the Tesla Corporation might change depending on who’s in charge, all those things are changing. But there are various sorts of things that stabilize them.
So Social Kinds are a way to think about those kinds of temporary stability that cluster together in what we could call the social world created by not just humans but other kinds of social animals.
Q: How did you reach that point to look at the contemporary social world through a complete new lens and and with such freedom ?
A: You know, I think it’s a two step process.
Sometimes we need to do demolition work at the very kinds and categories which we find ourselves caught or trapped in. I spent a whole chapter trying to teach how to do that kind of deconstructive work, precisely for that freeing purpose. The Social Kind theory that we talk about is part of that steps of building back outward.
Q: In the book you analyze the theory of knowledge. Can you talk to us more about this?
A: Hegel describes the movement of thought, what sometimes gets called the Hegelian dialectic, in terms of three phases: a limited abstraction, negation, and then the negation of the negation, which is the whole movement on which the system turns.
What Hegel got exactly right is to show a way out of a certain kind of “skepticism that can hurl anything into the void.” He calls it: suspending the contradictions unresolved and then rotating the system on it.
Yes, postcolonial theory was right to identify a whole range of suffering in the world. The question though is how to not merely terminate in the recognition of human suffering but start from human suffering and trying to figure out how we can build something better that can help the suffering that’s going on in the world.
By doubting doubt I want to argue it takes us not back to some artificial notion of confidence about true and certain knowledge, but rather to a kind of humble, emancipatory knowledge that lets us turn skepticisms into cautions and then allow us to move forward.
In one way the whole architecture of the book is broadly Hegelian.
It’s a negation of the negation. I’m not like trying to force us into a kind of cruel optimistic cheer, but rather recognize that even in the darkest days of the world we can find glimmers of better futures that we can steer towards.
In that respect the project is an attempt to look for those beacons and try to navigate according to them. That said there is not any attempt in the book to deny the darkness in which we find ourselves often in this world.
Q: What gives you hope?
A: Many people are coming to recognize the un-satisfactoriness of our societies as a whole, the reality of systematic forms of injustice. I’m heartened to see that that people are beginning to track that more. Also when people are recognizing anthropogenic climate change or the various forms of income inequality, both economic and otherwise, that go through all of our societies.
When I talk to folks, when I talk to my students, when I talked to some of my colleagues, especially people at my level and and younger, a lot of people are full of a passionate desire to make change and to build a better world.
And I think I feel more confident than I have in some previous years that this conversation about “how do we build better?” is actually happening in many different layers of the society. We’re not always coming to the same conclusions but I find that heartening.
There are these sort of glimmers of a more idealized, futures that I can see peeking out in our otherwise apocalyptic historic moment.
I’m a little bit hopeful that we can collectively, internationally, according to the new lines of communication that are made possible across the globe by things like Zoom by things like the Web that binds us digitally together, that different kinds of communities can be formed in different kinds of alliances and work together toward building better futures.
Q: What’s your view on technology and especially new technology, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 ?
A: This transformation of Web 2.0 made a better and even more dialogical relationship relationship possible with the so called consumers of knowledge.
The digital medium has allowed me to be more directly accessible to people. The public availability of information is one of the huge changes in our system and it has two sides to it. On the one hand, it makes people much more susceptible to propaganda because it allows them to cordon themselves off from the kind of information they don’t want to hear.
On the other hand, it permits a kind of openness and free flow of knowledge that I think is incredibly valuable and useful.
Q: Can you speak more about your understanding of digital fluency? How does it look like or should look like in terms of Media literacy and beyond?
A: I’m part of the very early computer generation and I think that there’s been a shift from a period of early Internet where there were these micro-communities of exchange and there was a plethora of information out there to now a point where you can produce more dialogical encounters on the Web.
But I think that the tools for educating students about those options haven’t necessarily kept up.
I find students have trouble distinguishing between good and bad sources of information that they find online and then also even the ones that are able to distinguish between good and bad information often are not being trained in how to produce content for these media, which are very increasingly important.
I would think of a kind of digital fluency as the capacity to have a sense of critical skill in assimilating data and vetting, skill in producing new content and the ability to formulate a kind of more grand reorientations to subject matter.
The other thing I would add is that a lot of the academic disciplines are based on models that are legacies of the 19th century or an early 20th century. Academic journals that are locked up behind paywalls that nobody can have access to. I think that we need to find ways to bridge academic silos, all these academic disciplines that are often considered separate but are treating similar kinds of subjects that are often overlapping. It would be much better if they could be taken in together in some more robust way.
Q: You deal a lot with the issue of the academic enterprise and the way knowledge is produced currently in humanities. What is the intention there?
A: In this book I want to make the case that we should understand the purposes of the humanities and social sciences, at least as being directed toward a kind of human flourishing, helping people figure out how to live a life worth having lived.
So I’m putting together a little bit of critical theory and virtue ethics to argue that the old academic disciplines don’t make sense anymore. Our historical moment needs a different set of skills than the historical moment in which the activity disciplines were formulated. The moment now is about helping people live a life worth lived.
Q: Can you share with us your future projects?
A: I’m working on two projects, the one is a new book about power.
In the process of writing that book I just discovered that I had to really deal with Michel Foucault in more detail, in particular because he’s the one that people name as the theorist of power. So I’m writing a short book at the moment where I argue that a good academic theory should be able to be applied to itself.
