Metamodernism
Metamodern scholarship initially focused on interpreting art in this vein and established a foundation for the field, particularly through observing the growing blend of irony and sincerity (or post-irony) in society.
[7]Cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker published their essay "Notes on Metamodernism" in 2010 and ran an online research blog with the same name from 2009 to 2016.
[11] According to them, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism" characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution.
It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.
"[12] The return of a Romantic sensibility has been posited as a key characteristic of metamodernism, observed by Vermeulen and van den Akker in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, and the work of artists such as Bas Jan Ader, Peter Doig, Olafur Eliasson, Kaye Donachie, Charles Avery, and Ragnar Kjartansson.
Vermeulen asserted that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophy — which implies a closed ontology — as it is an attempt at a vernacular [or] a sort of open source document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political economy as much as in the arts."
Storm asserts that self-analytical, "anti-disciplinary" thought is needed to effectively engage metamodern ideas in the real world and has stated his work is more about creating a paradigm shift than describing an intellectual movement.
[15][16] Hanzi Freinacht is the pen-name used by author Emil Ejner Friis and sociologist Daniel Görtz who published The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics.
In The Listening Society, Freinacht attempts to describe how relationships between memetics (or units of culture), epistemology, and developmental psychology are integral to comparative politics and a metamodern lifestyle in general.
Thus, with the awareness of the full implications of “going meta” in eternal recursive reflection, metamodernism entails the necessary inclusion within it of all prior cultural logics (at least insofar as it contains representations of their information in its complexity from a higher vantage).
"[22]Explicitly drawing upon the work of Vermeulen and van den Akker, Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto in 2011 as "an exercise in simultaneously defining and embodying the metamodern spirit," describing it as "a romantic reaction to our crisis-ridden moment.
"[23][24] The manifesto recognized "oscillation to be the natural order of the world," and called for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child.
"[25][26] Instead, Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate!
[33] In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York staged an exhibition entitled No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism, featuring the work of Pilvi Takala, Guido van der Werve, Benjamin Martin, and Mariechen Danz.
The show featured the work of Ulf Aminde, Yael Bartana, Monica Bonvicini, Mariechen Danz, Annabel Daou, Paula Doepfner, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Andy Holden, Sejla Kameric, Ragnar Kjartansson, Kris Lemsalu, Issa Sant, David Thorpe, Angelika J. Trojnarski, Luke Turner, and Nastja Säde Rönkkö.
[39] Alison Gibbons has identified several novels as exemplifying a metamodern version of autofiction: Ben Lerner's 10:04,[40] Lance Olsen's Theories of Forgetting,[41] Chris Kraus's I Love Dick[42] and Friederic Biegbieder's Windows on the World.
Some of these are Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad,[43] Zadie Smith's NW,[44] Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,[45] Elif Batuman's Either/Or and The Idiot,[45] Tope Folarin's A Particular Kind of Black Man,[45] Suzanna Clarke's Piranesi,[45] Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,[46] Jenni Fagan's The Waken[47] and several by Ali Smith: How to Be Both,[42][48][49] and the four novels that make up her seasonal quartet—Winter,[50][51] Spring,[50][52] Summer[50][53] and Autumn.
[66] The 2013 issue of the American Book Review dedicated to metamodernism included a series of essays identifying authors such as Roberto Bolaño, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace as metamodernists.
[67][68] In a 2014 article in PMLA, literary scholars David James and Urmila Seshagiri argued that "metamodernist writing incorporates and adapts, reactivates and complicates the aesthetic prerogatives of an earlier cultural moment", specifically modernism, in discussing twenty-first century writers such as Tom McCarthy.
[69][10] In 2014, Professor Stephen Knudsen, writing in ArtPulse, noted that metamodernism "allows the possibility of staying sympathetic to the poststructuralist deconstruction of subjectivity and the self—Lyotard’s teasing of everything into intertextual fragments—and yet it still encourages genuine protagonists and creators and the recouping of some of modernism's virtues.
[76] In More Deaths than One (2014), the New Zealand writer and singer-songwriter Gary Jeshel Forrester examined metamodernism by way of a search for the Central Illinois roots of David Foster Wallace during a picaresque journey to America.
It contains both indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements and thus provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time."
