Voyage to the Middle Pole: Metamodernism Revisited
This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge
We last spoke about Metamodernism a year ago, and it feels considerably longer and shorter than that, for a year is often more and less than a year. It strikes one how physical and tactile is the presence that time’s relativity takes on us, and how sure we seem by a certain point in our lives that we have a second-natural grasp of time’s authentic divisions. Of course, we don’t, and event sees to it.
Most often the feeling of dilated time results from us having bounded through it, collecting miles and being subject to great change. Principles of relativity would suggest to us that time is in thought as it is in a physical body; the more rapid the movement, the slower the time.
But my own theory is that time can seem so amorphous when find that our centre is determinedly lacking; just as physical gravity causes dilation of time (as those of you familiar with “Interstellar”, one of those marvellous works of the imagination that makes the brilliant palatable, will know), so too does an abstract or metaphysical object of weight within our minds govern our experience of time. If, like me, you’ve sat periodically trying to figure out how to fit the fractured facets of our last year — one that, despite the noise, was rather slow, neither transitional exactly nor full of vaulting forth — , you may also have been searching for maps, for a paradigm or school of thinking that would allow sense to be made of the distended mess of event we are made aware of during our every waking hour, a new way of conceiving of the world that, on a purer and more emotional level, can either stem our feeling of being part of a disintegrating orbit in a deadened system, or else actively help us orientate around a nourishing centre again.
Last year, I believed I’d found one such system in that which calls itself the Metamodern. And yet like some tragic sailor of the stars I, like many others, set a course for the point of origin of this faint but unmistakably promising garble of a transmission, was throwing parsecs behind my mobile as if those parsecs were yards, and arrived to find not a bountiful, solar system of perfect stratification and Goldilockean abundance, but one that was itself in a state of fragmentation and non-functionality.
Time to despair and drift away again? Wrong. It was an opportunity to begin to build, or at least assist in building, my part of what had been sought.
To revisit Metamodernism a year on — having since spoken with one of its two chief progenitors directly for the entertainment of this very establishment — is to acknowledge that we’re still in the raw, uncertain and, let’s be honest, fun period in which the philosophy is yet to truly crystallise, just as its ancestor Postmodernism has yet to become truly vestigial. What is certain, what is evident [1] is the profuse excitement that we can now see begin to surround the notion of The New Philosophy, and the breadth of version we can see potentiating from it.
But this is a serious thing; there are already more than a few Metamodernisms. Which one, if any of those we’ve seen are up to scratch, should be the right one?
What Metamodernism needs as much as we do now is a centre; it is frankly no good to have an episteme that gathers up the neoromanticism of Herzog & DeMeuron and Luke Turner with the straight-no-chaser-single-entendre-instantiating of David Foster Wallace and the Vaporwavers, as if they were all kindred. The first group, as well as those who would position themselves as self-conscious ‘metamodernists’ (and they have thus far tended to be artists), work aiming, broadly summarised by Moyo Okediji, to “transcend, fracture, subvert, circumvent, interrogate and disrupt, hijack and appropriate modernity and postmodernity.”
The other group, epitomised by Foster Wallace (who himself was not known to have expressed any knowledge of metamodernism as a discrete concept, so nascent was it when he died) sought The New Philosophy as a means not merely to escape fracturing and incessant subversions but to redeem and prime the victims (or ‘victims’) of postmodernism’s incessant flow for renewed use. They would likely posit a metamodernism of fracturing and subversion as more of the same, not least in the sense that it once again embalms alive a perfectly good episteme with fiery self-aggrandising jargon. We are already fragmented; excessively individualised (though atomised would be a better word); minded to analyse in excess and in a way that ultimately reduces clarity of thought, and often to analyse that which needs it not,; and over-specialised. No philosophy that takes any of these as a positive fundament can call itself revolutionary.
Postmodernism suspects anything with a vertex, and although it has dismantled hierarchies that stood historically, there could not have been more than a few thinkers in the 20th century who truly believed that mankind could flourish intelligently without some kind of replacement mechanism that gives intelligible order to the inner space. Theodor Adorno’s post-war model of the horizontal hierarchy, one that has informed the lateral organisational structures of our digital age, stemmed not merely from a disinterested fascination in a system that categorised in three dimensions (something more nuanced than rich vs. poor or black vs. white) but from an imperative of moral authority: it was an unquestioning belief in the veracity of both tradition and up-and-down hierarchical organisation, not to mention in an over-investiture in naturalism and Darwinism as ideas that held morally as well as biologically, that led to the perpetration during that century of such abominations as the Holocaust and the hecatombs of the Congo Free State.
It’s put luminously by Alexandra Dumitrescu in her work “Interconnections in Blakean and Metamodern Space”, which I’ll quote at length:
Refusal to endorse interconnectivity renders a theory or a system less creative, less intuitive, and potentially dangerous. This is a lesson that the twentieth century had to learn the hard way: not only that metanarratives are doomed to failure, but that any outlook that claims to be the only valid one — and refuses to relate to other ways of conceptualising the world — breeds pestilence, suffering and death.
In some sense, apart from its intent, this seems a naïve station to keep: the refusal to recognise fundamentals, or else designate them if they do not ‘naturally’ exist is surely the foremost guarantor of conflict and immiseration. It would seem to be founded on a fundamental belief in the ‘apartness’ of human nature, in the idea that our demographafiable differences are not surmountable; it’s an assumed foundation that seems to have been conditioned by the interpretative paradigms of 20th century thought (postmodernism itself), as well as the non-interpretables of 20th century history we spoke of just above.
Nevertheless, Dumitrescu is spot-on in what she prescribes that the New Philosophy, whether or not it is the Metamodern, must be capable of.
One certainly needs something to express. We express contents, not the mere vacuity of nothingness. Life itself is an expression of something[…]. The fact is that, obviously, giving life means giving shape: to an idea, when it comes to the creation of ugliness or beauty, to a feeling such as love, or an impulse such as desire: life is the shape of something.
…between these islands, between these fragments that should by their very broken nature be parts of something, there can be interconnections that make them all parts of a network or of several networks, connections that redeem the forgotten nature of these islands as places of meaning, wonder and delight.
Plato’s metaxy, Metamodernism’s binding epistemological technique, can be defined as a movement, a voyage if you will, between opposite poles as well as beyond them, to identify the middle ground or ‘interval’. It is metaxy, the state of existing simultaneously in more than one state, which above all else suggests that Rorty was in essence correct when he said that philosophy can be no “mirror of nature” (at least as ‘nature’ can be experienced), that it is not in fact natural at all, though it might concern itself with nature; that philosophy’s utility, as well as its splendour, is proof that what is synthesised can have a surpassing quality equivalent to that which is natural. This is important in our days that, despite their avowed atheism, have an Augustinian, pre-scientific view of man as scrofulous, bent thing beyond beauty in deed or creation, one who can only be redeemed through wailing submission to abject penance or victimhood.
The metaxy of metamodernism cannot be pursued without a will to resolution, which is the hard part; this needn’t, shouldn’t be a Darwinian-as-conventionally-understood situation, a zero-sum-game in which one side flourishes as one is left to want. After all, our paths of understanding needn’t abide by the ultimate principles of biology. Rather, going to both poles as metaxy suggests is key, but so too is devising a compromise that can be lived with by the parties involved, and so again too is a willingness to be governed by the subsequently refined principle, the ‘Principle of the Interval’. After all, it’s the child, not the adult, that will thumb its nose at any and everycomer to its independent republic, and whose only principle is the refusal to be governed by principle. And it is only someone so obstinate or thoroughly misguided that, as much as we may profit from that which is not necessarily natural, humans must for all their defiance and self-construction still be able to connect to that which is.
One of postmodernism’s principle gains was the revelation of the voice; there are so many multifarious perspectives to be recorded and contended with in this world, a vastness that contemporary Identitarianism can only faintly capture and even then only in its width, not its depth. We needn’t go very far to see exhibited the fact that such voices are bound to cross and conflict. One of metamodernism’s key images, alongside that of the bi-polar voyage of thought in metaxy, is that of the ever-expanding map; one that Dumitrescu identifies with Borges’ famous image of the map that continues to grow in specificity until it is ultimately as big as that which it would represent. Mapping and making sense of the great melange of voices uncovered during the postmodern period is one of metamodernism’s avowed priorities; but if it simply makes detailed inventory of our differences then shrugs and steps back so as not to risk further conflict, then metamodernism will be as fit for the public’s use as a map that is no smaller than that which it represents. The variables we have uncovered demand that we rethink the way we understand and express correlation and patterns of interdependence in these entities that, while abstract, are non-empirical.
That’s where the digital humanities come in.
Why Metamodernism needs the Digital Humanities
The digital humanities’ main coup, or the principle evidence of its insensibility if you prefer to think of it like that, is that it applies methods used for empirical reading to humanities abstractions. Critical thinking, as it has been in the trad humanities, comes to the party with its frameworks already bagged up, leering about for a formal pattern to apply them to. The digital humanities reverses this sensibility and ends up at the scientific method: to quote Stanley Fish, “[the digital humanists] run the numbers, and then…see if they prompt an interpretive hypothesis.”
The fragmentation through which we now suffer, from which we have now begun to desperately seek reprieve, stems from the basic discontinuation of a network, the network, between the two aspects of human knowledge and understanding that cannot be divorced: science and the humanities, though even two such mighty descriptors cannot but seem quaint and, in their separation, misleading in representing the weight of that which they do. The stratification and separation of that which is scientific and that which is humanistic is a false dichotomy that starves both from opposite sides of the divide; to demonstrate that the schism is synthetic and not natural, observe its lack of natural symmetry, that the cultural, abstract aspect has atrophied the more severely of the two. Break down a given, common-or-garden cultural ‘method’ now and, despite the degree to which it demonstrates analytical mania, find it tending towards the a priori, the emotionalist; an analysis of intuition cannot reach further than the hypothesis stage. The insights it would then go to uncover cannot be nourished and sustained, creating a despairing sense of futility and instability that, it’s fair to say, sums up our current intellectual climate.
The digital humanities are in themselves metamodern to the core — reaching to IDLE as to Microsoft Word, suggesting that only by making a seemingly paradoxical return (to science, to history) can we arrive at our next slated destination, avoiding the pulpy, enervating seductions of futurism in favour of tangible progression. In its promise of reconciling two houses that are at reluctant war, the digital humanities would pledge that manifold other necessary conciliations can be made as well; that heterogeny can exist without vitally muting the nature of the combined elements. It is founded practically on networks — and if you’ve ever taken a dip in lakes of beauty like Wikipedia, Earth 2050, or Zooniverse, you’ll be familiar with how — and its scholarly humility (I’d use words like positivism and a posteriori, but perhaps that’s your weariness I can feel creeping) dignifies that which it would connect.
On the most prosaic level, the digital humanities scores out affinities in the innocuous; further up, it welcomes the unity and co-operation of the disparate; on the highest level, it as good as cries out that the separation of humanism and science, the separation from which all other unjust separations follow, is a false one. It looks like Metamodernism itself, reflected. If change could be motivated entirely by the platitudinous, if the school of reform belled in and out with the moment of realisation of error, then we’d now live in the most reformed of all times; but we don’t. We need to radically rethink our tendencies to action, to draw considerably fleshier lines of cause and correlation between our desires and their broader outcomes; this can only come with the recognition of affinity.
That is the calling to which I hope the Metamodern will rise to meet. The horizon is smiling with mischief at our skiff. Let’s see what the year will bring.
- In 2018 there were some 52 “long-read” (> 5 min) posts on this very site tagged Metamodernism, up from 18 the previous year, and a slightly higher volume of scholarly articles too, as recorded by Taylor & Francis Online and JSTOR.
Further Reading:
-Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth After Postmodernism, by Alison Gibbons
-Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold
