2 Answers

  1. Metamodern is the most popular post-postmodern concept and a heuristic label for the culture of our era.

    To clarify where it came from, we need to start with the “end of postmodernism”. It happened in the late 90's, when various art historians and cultural philosophers began to notice that not all modern art meets the criteria of postmodernism. This gave rise to the term “post — postmodernism”, which, as you can see for yourself, does not sound very nice, and therefore in one of her essays, Linda Hutcheon stated that modernism and postmodernism are heuristic labels in the history of literature, and a poet would be nice to have a good label for post-postmodernism.

    From this point on, post-postmodernism became an umbrella term, within which work began to create such a heuristic label (a beautiful word that everyone will like) and at the same time the concept of a new era. All sorts of hypermoderns, digimoderns, pseudomoderns, altermoderns, and so on have emerged.

    The main point to note is that this whole discussion about modernity has arisen in view of the natural course of academic life, in which new theories and concepts need to be invented, and not because of any objective economic or social changes.

    In this blooming garden, the metamodern appeared, which initially did not stand out much. It was invented by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van Der Acker, and presented in the work “Notes on Metamodernism”. An attempt to enter from philosophical and epistemological grounds was not particularly successful, a detailed analysis can be found here. The cases with demonstrations of metamodern art were also not very convincing (especially the arguments based on the similarity of critics ' reviews). Nevertheless, the general artistic imagery of the essay appealed to the people of art. And a couple of years later, one of the loyal followers of metamodern made this term popular, which you can read about here.

    As a result, metamodernism is a word that denotes a part of modern art, and metamodern is the transfer of the principles of this art to culture. The authors of metamodernism are still trying to come up with some original philosophical justification and theory for their concept, but now they are only more involved in repeating the method of Frederick Jamieson, who is one of the largest postmodern theorists.

    In general, both the theoretical and media history of metamodernity are full of incidents and oddities. You can read more about this in the above-mentioned articles, because, in part, the audience with this term always fell into the trap when they wanted some kind of short and quick presentation, under the guise of which they were given a fairy tale about “either a transition, or not so much, or a period that has already come, or maybe not yet.”

    If anything, most of the questions and inaccuracies that ran through popular materials about metamodern were actually already resolved and not even raised. For example, about whether it exists or not. The authors themselves noted in their notes that in their opinion it exists and goes along with some cultural processes of postmodernity. The nuance here is that people are interested in whether there is such a cultural paradigm as metamodern, while there is rather a theory about a part of modern art, from the presence of which one can assume the potential presence of a cultural paradigm, if you are a supporter of cultural studies.

    To sum up, many people mistakenly perceive metamodernity as a kind of objective and legitimate description of the modern era, while this is a rather arbitrary and debatable concept, the essence of which should be understood, and not take the theses about oscillation and metaxis on faith.

  2. Metamodernism leaves a sense of uncertainty. This is an attempt to anticipate a new era, to say that it is approaching, but what it is, what it will be, is still not clear, only vague vague outlines. As such, there are no ideas yet. One of the ideas that I think is more distinct and has more potential is the Meta – renaissance.

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