Metamodernism: A Prayer for 2018
This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge
First, friends, before I even get to bringing you glad carols and wishes for a fine New Year, I must justify this work’s title. The evocation of prayer is not mere ironic embroidery, using an action unit from an institution (the church) that seems laughably archaic relative to the abiding institution of the Early Digital age, the university (for those who find such things funny, that is).
Conversely, the presence of the word ‘prayer’ in this work’s title is not either an earnest invocation, is not an ontological modifier of my work; prayer to me seems, at its best, a means of clarifying the best of our intentions, in our own silent company, that they might be better and more clearly pursued. At its worst, prayer seems to me the metaphysical version of the willing abdication of responsibility, the will to be passive and infantalised. As it is so used by many, Prayer, to this writer (whose most candid religious self-designation would be that of the ‘impersonal Spinozan agnostic’), seems a vote of no confidence in the human constitution.
Those loyally among us who read Wonk Bridge regularly may have noticed that a certain draft has been blowing through its corridors lately. In the midst of the fates of the start-up — that mother who both squires and buries 200 outlets in its own image every day, and who has done for almost two decades, and yet who can count barely a handful of its children in the ranks of household names — we’ve found our fortunes of the year in the middle: misfortune hasn’t found us, doesn’t even seem to be looking for us, and what ever existed of our personal student-esque finances have not been krakened by the pitiless laws of search surfacing. We have grown, we have moved forward, and perhaps most hearteningly and vitally of all we have stayed true to the essence of our foundational principles; indeed, our essence proved sturdy in both leaner months and in times where the big and the important sought to get in on a piece of it. There are rich, promising tidings on the near cliffs of 2018 for us; on behalf of everyone at Wonk Bridge, I hope there will be for you too.
The adenoidal state and rate of discourse in our time of the Early Digital is such that great intentions in discourse are often pursued with questionable or even actively compromised motivations towards change. The presupposed condition for change, for which people seem to thirst harder now on a daily basis than Heraclitus ever did, is the presence of dialectic; the active posed competition of contrasting factors, views, beliefs. The pre-supposedly preferable outcome of dialectic, which people seem to be either horrified by or else forgetful of or otherwise intentionally forgetful of, is the end of the fight with the finely reduced presence at its end of a core, often spare but always hard as diamond, of fundament: call it wisdom, call it truth, call it by whatever name might least offend your own particular sensibilities.
In other words, a reconciliation. A reconciliation is not merely an agreement to cease or suspend an argument; seen in such a way, it can be looked at derisively, the course of action preferred by those lacking the minerals to press an argument to the point of its proper conclusion. Reconciliation is more profound than this; it is the understanding of what has just passed, one tended to at a distance and with the highest degree of impartiality that the participants can muster, and a further understanding of how the pieces left whole by the exchange fit together. History will, in my estimations, mock the early offings of our century; we are yet another generation who, by happening across their own methods of delivering pleasure, believed that they invented pleasure itself; who believed that intemperance was the stuff of a miserable puritan past and not for them; who believed that to the gene-and-meme-rooted and conquerable flaws of human nature they are the first Israelites. It seems that for many among the young, the conclusion of conflict is not even so much a trifling consideration as the problem, for the true glory is in the fight. Arguments need never result in ceding, in quiet negotiation, in modified and faithfully re-pursued priorities of support, often to former opponents; no, those arguments should press on forever more.
Part of the cause for this generational hubris is, to my mind, the outdatedness of our philosophical frameworks. A year whose labours can boast hours of conversation with the likes of Willard McCarty is a year when one has had at least a few reminders of the absence of public philosophy. For generations now has our society been abdicating its preference for grand narrative, for the idea of the universal applicability of certain ideas; for as long as undergraduates have been mispronouncing ‘Foucault’ have ideas of objective measure, reason and morality been thought passé. Irony is this mode of thinking’s alpha, and trenchant scepticism its omega; the absence of philosophy is its philosophy. Listen to any cache of voices around you and hear them lament the visions of palpable destruction to which we are heir, hear them howling into the famished spaces of the human spirit guernica’ed by living-as-an-ironic practice. In over-pursuit of postmodernism we’ve razed so many things that once, flawed and in need of reform or not, held communities firm; and now we have the gall to despair of the way things no longer fit together. The root of endlessly pursued postmodernism is this, is the world that you see around you, the world that, chances are, you are not happy with, whether that unhappiness and unease is personal or impersonal in seated dimension.
One of the downs of Wonk Bridge’s 2017 is that among the names whose words we courted we could not count Timotheus Vermeulen’s. He, alongside such theorists as Linda Hutcheon and Gilles Lipovetsky and Alan Kirby and especially Robin van den Akker, is one of the philosophical cartographers of our time. In a report Vermeulen co-authored with van den Akker, Vermeulen quotes Hutcheon, speaking to the effect that:
“The postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on…”
What follows in the report is a list of proposed titles for postmodernism’s successor, ones that are ascribed various roots, from Kirby’s privileging of digital Textuality to Robert Samuels’ view that automation is what most pervades the tenor of our _____-modern times. My preference to fill that gap is for the suggestion made in the work’s title. “Notes on metamodernism.”
We need not labour the proof of our common thought and speech’s relation to philosophy, as we might need to labour to prove that the governments we get are the ones we deserve: the word ‘meta’ is not scarce even in our ‘low’ culture, and is frequently used to refer to demonstrations in pop- or meme-culture of works interrogative of their own natures. The word does, however, have a multi-dimensional meaning, one that is hard to define; relative to Vermeulen’s philosophy, it refers to the state of being at once ‘with’, ‘between’ and ‘beyond’. Laified, the philosophy of metamodernism itself is something of a reconciliation. In not wanting to break with postmodernism in an entirely fiery, iconoclastic way; in wanting to preserve valuable elements of the past, it proves that it is an ideology that has learned from the postmodern way, and from its predecessor’s shortfalls. The metamodernism of the report in question appreciates that postmodern irony widened the valleys of collective consciousness, that a greater multitude of voices might find their way into a given dialectic arena; but it also vouches for the value of engagement, of ‘sincerity’.
Postmodernism is, because it has wrought so much, something rich with lessons. We have seen the drawbacks of coveting pretence, but postmodernism also has accentuated to us the value of certain human pretences for action: for instance, the onset of metamodernism as a cultural value may have taken root in the West with Obama’s election, and yet didn’t. While this would appear to argue that human moral development is nonlinear, and thus is not dependable and has no credit, we can see even in an extremely localised timeframe the kind of privations of sense and logic — “Let’s elect a reality TV star with no policy spectrum to office!” “Let’s make comedians our foremost political philosophers, and win our opponents to our cause in debate by calling them Nazis!” — we fall to if we are not invested in our moral and humanistic development. The long reign of the postmodern, along with the vast increase in the size of the global student body, means that critical modes of thinking now exist in more minds, and condition more acts, than they ever have done before; the extremely hostile intellectual climate of our day stems from the fact that most of these modes are ‘critical’ in the keenest sense, meant for posing towards an opposition, for destroying what is erroneous and ill-placed. I disagree with the qualifier that immediately follows in the text, that the philosophy acts despite its own “inevitable failure”, but the seed of Metamodernism is encapsulated in Vermeulen’s statement that the ideology “moves for the sake of moving.” In other words, we are more able at thinking ‘critically’ than tends to be mooted; our problem is not there, but in thinking ‘generatively’, in being imaginative enough to build on the space we proverbially bulldoze.
Before we continue to our conclusion, it may be thought of as latecoming to first consider why this kind of thing is even being featured through Wonk Bridge. It is not related to big data, has no discernable relation to Finisar erotica, CRISPR terrorism or whether Samsung’s latest advances in android AI means that your phone will be able to predict the winner at 8:32 based on the count from 29 constituencies. The key erroneous notion that underpins all of our interactions with technological media in the Early Digital age is that ours is an time of passivity, with all philosophical character being ascribed not to the users responsible but to faceless, abstract sub-communities, or even devices themselves. Far fewer technological publications investigate the nearside hypotheticals of the various advances going on around us than need to:
What does this invention’s probable footprint means for human development?
What avenue of progress should that invention be categorised in?
What it will take for this brand spanking new advance to be used responsibly?
We are too far down the path to regress into a state of pure naivete, but pure knowingness is not a viable independent recourse either. As Vermeulen and van den Akker posit, it is no good on the third-hand to have a wicked pendulum of social thought: it is no more amenable to progress that we simply swing on social whimsy from seriousness to comic nihilism, from purity to ambiguity on a given topic; all this would engender is an even more colourful, even purer sense of partisan conflict for its own sake than we already see. What the two philosophers advocate in the body of metamodernism is a form of philosophy that is really rather Eastern in its character, more in line with the kind of yin-and-yang principles of what people with beards would call dialectical monism than much of what old Western philosophers liked to use to impress one another. We in Western thought only tend to consider the interactions of opposing essences when the subject of consideration is really vast, like an ecology or a parliament; according to metamodern thinking, axioms — ways of thinking about things — must come from a ‘both-neither’ approach and be applied to individual entities. Our idea about, say, the value of spacefaring must be countenanced as much from each side as the other; the individual must carry in them all the customs of the debate hall, not merely their particular side. At the same time, the consideration must not be one of wholly distinct, existentially separate sides to an argument, but contrasted as a means to discover the underlying interconnecting natures of those things, even things that seem to have no obvious interrelation. Reconciliation comes naturally from a recognition of these deep-seated relationships, and in theory differences in being are much easier to live by, and much easier to contrast in order to mine their value dichotomies, if they are understood in terms of their common sum, of their likeness in nature or purpose.
From difference comes understanding of the shared.
The many tools of critique revealed to us by postmodernism can be purposed to this effort. You may see this kind of metamodern thinking exhibited, in extreme microcosm, in the prior paragraph’s sentence about yin-and-yang; all of the necessary hard stuff, the stuff that requires acquired good attitude towards difficult reading, was included therein, but could be found to coexist easily enough alongside gently satirical strokes about the manner and behaviour of philosophers. There was a brief mention of the way in which Western and Eastern schools of philosophy differentiate themselves from one another; and yet, easy as you like, a means of their combination was outed and identified. Both traditions suddenly seem the richer, the outlines of their potentialities more brightly lit. The same principle was applied to my essaying of prayer in this work’s opening inning: it was both an evocation and an invocation and neither. It was a concept understood for its strengths and its drawbacks, and how the concept’s broader nature gave root to them both. Through this was parsed the concept’s utility to us, both in its intellectual and its spiritual appeal.
I suppose what I’m trying to say here, in this lonely office on Christmas Eve, is twofold; or, it would be truer to say, it is of a master point and a junior one. The junior point is that Vermeulen and van den Akker’s piece is worthy of your time, written in remarkably clear-eyed and well-grounded prose and told with that kind of barely contained excitement that carries guys and gals of the intellectual tradition when they know they’ve struck on something of value.
The greater point is that we have been found wanting as human beings in the last several years; the ironical moral guilt that is the awful preserve of the over-comfortable is one of the least effective panaceas imaginable for this. There are means, there are precedents for the way in which we may change our social philosophy, our ways of thinking, to make sense and beauty of divergent matters reconciled: I was reading “Infinite Jest”, I was enjoying a little vaporwave, during the Christmas holidays, both of them works or genres of art that reconcile, that use intellectual reconciliation’s…
‘Language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness, between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence;between amor Dei and amor sui, l’ame ouverte and l’ame close’
Vogelin
My prayer, such that it is, is that it will not merely be those gifted individuals capable of seeing for themselves both the sickness of our time and its waiting remedies, but the broader mass too, whether or not we come to call that movement ‘metamodernism’ or not. My prayer does not share some prayer’s lack of faith in the ability for wider learning in humanity, which is self-evident, as self-evident as humanity’s wider petulant slovenliness in getting there, to that point of learning. I do not feel the need to refer to particular events, or particular media here as I would often prefer to; I’m sure of my vote of faith in the reader to illustrate with subjects pertinent to their own lives. That provocation of self-application is, after all, part of the point. All there is for me to offer is the fundament of an idea. My prayer is not from hands laced and clasped; my prayer is this piece, and what there is of that lone, spare, hardy crystal. Call it truth, call it wisdom, call it waffle and nonsense if you like; it may be both, it may be neither.
Happy New Year to you all.
