An introduction to metamodernism: the cultural philosophy of the digital age

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An introduction to metamodernism: the cultural philosophy of the digital age

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

• Reading time: 12 minutes

The term metamodernism was coined in 1975 by Mas’ud Zavarzade, a writer and researcher, to describe an emerging cultural trend in American literature. Since then, the term has become popular and is frequently discussed in every corner of the Internet. If you are active on Twitter, blogging, using filters and stickers to edit photos before posting them online, creating memes, you may be applying metamodernist principles without realising it.

When I ran a poll asking people if they knew what metamodernism was, 75% said they had no idea at all, and 20% said they had only a vague idea. Bear in mind this was an online poll on one of the most postmodernist places on the Internet: Twitter. So let’s fix this together. I promise no jargon, and no assumption of prior knowledge.

Grandeur and desillusion: the origins of metamodernism

To understand metamodernism, you need to understand modernism and postmodernism. Modernism is a philosophical movement in America and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. It’s often associated with the Age of Radio . The injunction "Make it new!" by poet Ezra Pound in 1934 captures the essence of modernism, which encouraged creators to leave behind the obsolete culture of the past and to re-examine every aspect of existence. It’s considered a maximalist philosophy, with creators thriving to transcend their own mortality by making History.

After World War II, postmodernism—approximately from 1945 to 2005—emerged in rejection of the grand narratives of modernism. Associated with the Age of Television , it’s usually defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, and moral relativism. You could see the postmodernist generation as disillusioned: they rejected the possibility of reliable knowledge, denied the existence of a universal reality, and framed aesthetics as arbitrary and subjective.

Many people criticised postmodernism for its negativity, the fact that it promoted obscurantism—why conduct any scientific research if nothing’s real?—and the fact that it was simply impossible for human beings to believe in nothing. “The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unliveable” said philosopher William Lane Craig. (who was Christian, so probably biased on the matter of postmodernism, but still making an interesting point)

Bear with me, but these conversations have come to be known as the post-postmodernism debate. Post-postmodernism is not the cultural philosophy that followed modernism and postmodernism. Instead, it’s the collective search for what should come next; a quest for a more balanced world-view which would take into account the optimism of modernism and the pluralism of postmodernism.

Out of the many answers to that big question, metamodernism has been the prevalent cultural philosophy since the mid 2000s. It’s associated with the Age of the Internet , and it’s about embracing the polarising nature of human beings. Doubt cannot exist without hope. Failure cannot exist without experience. Life can bring emotion and apathy, sincerity and irony, excitement and melancholy. According to cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, metamodernism "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism." For the metamodern generation, "grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed" explains Vermeulen.

To summarise, we went from modernism—”Make it new!” Let’s shape History!—to postmodernism—everything sucks! Nothing really matters!—to metamodernism: maybe things are not this black-and-white? Maybe there’s a middle ground?

How to define metamodernism

A common image used to describe metamodernism is that of a pendulum, constantly oscillating between creation and destruction, hope and doubt, optimism and realism. When talking about metamodernism in comparison with modernism and postmodernism, Fabio Vittorini described it as "a pendulum-like motion between the naive and/or fanatic idealism of the former and the skeptical and/or apathetic pragmatism of the latter."

Metamodernism stresses engagement, emotion, and storytelling. Yes, the planet is dying, but maybe we can do something about it. Yes, we will all disappear and ultimately nobody will remember us, but isn’t that freeing?

With metamodernism, you don’t need to make History for your story to matter. And making History doesn’t mean your story matters either. Metamodernism is about exploring the in-between.

As Pieter Levels said: “You can approach the nihilism of that in a positive or negative way. Negatively that means whatever you do, it doesn’t matter, so you can just as well...