A Simple Explanation of the Case for Metamodernism
How to transcend doubt and belief.
I've come across a concept growing in popularity recently that has really resonated with me, both as an accurate form of cultural analysis and as an approach which reflects the style of my own writing for the last 20 years:
Metamodernism
For a more in-depth, scholarly explanation, you can go here - they do a good job of it:
I'm going to try to lay this out more in lay-man's terms. I will fail but perhaps some of you will at least enjoy themselves some.
So "Modernism" refers to a style of art, literature, and philosophy relating to culture which gained prominence from the 1910s through the end of the 1930s. World War II sort of fucked it up, causing a shift toward "Postmodernism."
To understand what Modernism was all about, I encourage engagement with its two greatest authors, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In distinctly different ways, Woolf and Joyce pioneered the use of "stream of consciousness" writing in novels, wherein the author sought to replicate the actual thoughts of the character, of the way that particular human thinks. This was a rebellion against the Victorian novels of the past—like those of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen—which presented a seemingly objective, removed narrator telling a story from beyond.
Modernism was about pursuing truth, even if it meant breaking through the conventions of the day. In an ideological sense, this manifested in the political worldviews of the 1920s and 1930s—the isms that we're still dealing with today: the Far Left of communism, the Far Right of fascism, and their theocratic cousin blending both in burning pages of the Koran, Islamism.
The disasters wrought by these ideologies in the 1940s, with World War II and the Cold War, which followed in the 1950s and lasted until the end of the 1980s, birthed a pushback to Modernist idealism:
Postmodernism
Modernism could be boiled down to the concluding words of Joyce's Ulysses: “he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." It is a seemingly endless YES!
And Postmodernism is thus a loud, concrete, crushing boulder on a cracked skull NO! Postmodernism sets out to deconstruct all truth claims, to render the very idea of truth a joke.
It certainly can produce some very entertaining art, but in a broader political and cultural sense, ideologies that don't believe in anything have demonstrated similar destructive results as the ideologies that believed in too much. Now, too many people across the spectrum of beliefs will simply not believe or trust in anything at all beyond what can provide them their next meal ticket or dopamine hit.
And that is in many ways the toxic stew of our culture today—people who believe in ideas too deeply, and people who can't bring themselves to believe in anything at all.
But there is a way to transcend this contest that has dogged Western Civilization for the last 100 years:
Metamodernism
The hallmark of Metamodernism is the choice to jump back and forth between Modernism and Postmodernism.
The usual dualism that Metamodernists discuss is a key one here: jumping between sincerity and irony. The Metamodernist does believe in ideas sincerely and passionately like a Modernist, but they have taken the Postmodernist critique seriously, and recognize its frequent legitimacy against Modernist concepts. There is a lot of bullshit Modernism out there, and the BS-detecting Postmodernism is frequently correct to counter it.
However, the nature of Postmodernism is entirely destructive, and left unchecked, it becomes a snake eating its own tail. What happens when Postmodernism's need to deconstruct, ridicule, and break apart everything is turned on itself? Then it reveals that a Postmodern approach alone devolves into nihilism, confusion, chaos, and ultimate self-destruction.
We need beliefs to survive, and we also need the ability to chop down those beliefs when they start killing us.
Thus, Metamodernism: not an either/or approach to art, life, and culture, but a both/and. We don't need to choose between belief and doubt. We should take both and choose the courage to oscillate as needed.
Perhaps part of why this recently described current in culture and ideas appeals to me so much is that it previously manifested in the art and philosophy of my primary intellectual influence, Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007). In his books and ideas, Wilson perpetually performed this dance—of genuine belief and passion for ideas, tempered with a skepticism and sense of humor and willingness to interrogate those beliefs, to consider another person's reality tunnel which can teach us things of value "if we're willing to listen," in RAW's words.
This crystallized into the idea of "Maybe Logic." See
’s recent first-rate biography, Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson for an erudite narrative of these themes and an extraordinary treasure trove of original research. (Seriously: Kennedy even found the probable location of Wilson’s notorious July 23, 1973 mystery! I’m going to go for a visit! It’s only a day and a half’s drive away!)We need Yes, No, Maybe, and the daring, deadly, scary fourth: Meaningless!
“All things are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.” - RAW
The ability to dance among these four poles produces the greatest of art today, the most vibrant, most original, most surprising. In the future, I'll write more on this Metamodernist concept here at Oasis of the Desert, starting by exploring how it applies to the Xennial micro-generation of which I am a part (which I will say broadly runs from 1975-1985, as that's when the two generations have their bleed together: born in the 10 years before or after that, you’re clearly an Xer or Millennial.) Our age group's proximity to Gen X Postmodernism incarnate, with the Millennial generation's Neo-Modernist earnestness, lends us innately and naturally to this Metamodernist oscillation.
So you can look forward to some highbrow, literary discourses from me on the music of Lady Gaga, the comedy of Nathan Fielder, and the films of the Safdie brothers—each represents so far the best of what we have to offer, with the Metamodernist tendency much of the reason they're just so fucking good. As I dig into the concept more deeply, I'll find others in a variety of mediums and disciplines to consider in this context. Leave your suggestions in the comments, please.
Now, to conclude, how does this Metamodernist oscillation between belief and doubt apply to my own efforts in writing? For me, these seem to be the key examples:
I tend to use satire to launder ideas that I genuinely do believe, but know are a bit too wild for most “normal people” to take seriously. You'll see that in a lot of my pieces, and you'll get it on a broader level in the novels that I'm working on now. Provoking both the reader and myself to shift between that space of "is he serious or joking right now?" is Metamodernist.
This tendency is also showing up in this bizarre "Ibis Head People Planet" web comic series that I'm launching based on the encouraging reception to the images I've put out on Substack Notes. On the one hand, I genuinely am trying to evoke something meaningful and transcendent—it's inspired and dictated by the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, who now follows me around for at least a little while each day and whom I invoke to extract demonic worms clinging to my soul. (See—Metamodernism. Am I joking or being ‘Sirius?’ You get to choose: whatever makes you feel best.)
I tend to seek to eradicate the highbrow (Modernism) and lowbrow (Postmodernism) distinction. In my writing, this shows up with my engagement in serious subjects and contemporary debates, but the deployment of more lowbrow aesthetics with profanity, pop culture references, ironic YouTube embeds, and so forth. With the Ibis head people, it will appear in the use of highbrow references like quotes from Schopenhauer or Maimonides or John Adams, but then the lowbrow use of excessive profanity. George Carlin was one of the pioneers of this, discovering in his later stage of his career how to vacillate between powerful, difficult truth-telling and jokes peppered with the profane.
The Metamodern tendency likes to dance between the lines of fact and fiction. You'll see that in my work, in that I have the political science side and the creative writing side. I write both investigative journalism and avant garde poetry. I'll write about Yahya Sinwar and Vladimir Putin just as I'll write about Alan Moore and Virginia Woolf. At some point, the two tendencies blend together: a literary, creative spark infuses the nonfiction prose; an investigative, research-centered drive undergirds the fiction.
And last, my Psychedelic Zionism project is perhaps my most overt deployment of this tendency, an effort to float like a pendulum between two seemingly contradictory ways of approaching the world, with a unique transcendence to be found through the blending.
So now, I turn this tool and challenge to you, dear reader.
Where in your life are you stuck in too much Modernist belief?
Where have you wandered into excessive Postmodernist doubt?
Where will you inject some maybes and meaninglessness to save yourself?
Perhaps of relevance:
