totesnottabot-blog

[totesnottabot-blog]

Disclaimer: This cultural perspective is still being developed, thus making it hard to fully capture in one blog post. The following is a musing on what I’ve come to understand is our modern culture and where I believe it to be heading, spurred by David Brooks’ recent OpEd, more specifically, this excerpt:

“…what comes next?

It’s clear that Trump is not just a parenthesis. After he leaves things will not just snap back to “normal.” Instead, he represents the farcical culmination of a lot of dying old orders — demographic, political, even moral — and what comes after will be a reaction against rather than a continuing from.”

I think Brooks is touching on the more broad idea that postmodernism has led us to this point where everything has become morally ambiguous (he even mentions Breaking Bad, the show of the last decade that exemplified moral ambiguity). There’s this new cultural meme that’s been emerging over the last 20yrs or so (with first academic mention in 1975 in Mas'ud Zavarzadeh’s The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose in The Journal of American Studies) that I’ve been interested in this past year called post-postmodernism or metamodernism (post-postmodernism just sounds silly and the reason this collection of ideas hasn’t quite caught on in the mainstream is because of the name lol, so I’m going to refer to it as metamodernism and I’ll go further into why in a min), because it seems to be a direct response to this ambiguity.

Modernism essentially ripped the mask off of the hypocrisies of traditionalism (avant-garde art like Dadaism is an example of this), which evolved into postmodernism and this broad culture of cynicism (the 60-70s counterculture in response to events like the Vietnam War and Watergate is emblematic of this and over the decades has developed into our modern culture). Trump in many ways is the culmination of this cynicism and Brooks does a fine job of laying this out in his brief description of Trump. What can be thought of as metamodernism then, is a recognition of this dichotomy between what modernism sought to destroy (think: tradition = bullshit) and postmodernism’s response to that destruction of tradition (think: everything = ambiguous).

What this new metamodernist perspective seeks to do is to recognize 1) that traditionalism and cultural ambiguity exist on the same spectrum; 2) that cultural expression can move to different ends of the spectrum in degrees; 3) that the mobility itself along the spectrum is of more value than where a form of expression chooses to land, though where the landing is made also contains contextual cultural value; 4) that the recognition and actualization of this dichotomy holds the most cultural value because it’s what allows us to explore different modes of human thought (from traditionalist optimism/pessimism [think Heaven/Hell] to postmodern ambiguity [read as nihilism)]), and emotion (traditionalism, as defind by modernism, is in many ways synonymous with the aesthetics of Romanticism, while again postmodernism has given us the other end in nihilism).

A broad but important component of metamodernism is this neo-Romanticism, which unlike traditional Romanticism of the 19th century, is firmly rooted in an ideal pragmatism; ‘quixotic youth’ is a description of 19th century Romanticism that I think most people typically think of. What metamodernism has that modernism repudiates and that postmodernism has responded with its morally ambiguous nihilism, is this sense of a more practical Romanticism that’s rooted in humanism and philosophical naturalism. That is to say, an acceptance of a general scientific outlook (modernist naturalism) but with a reverance and awe for the unknown/yet to be discovered and how that unknown informs what it means to be human (traditional romanticism) - all with the full knowledge that ultimately no matter what any individual does with their life, in the grand scheme of The Universe, it does not matter (postmodern nihilism). With the amalgamation of these themes we get neo-Romanticism (ie, a reverance for The Void*), and with neo-Romanticism we get both the forms of expression that modernism and postmodernism repudiated (ie a sense of quixotic optimism and a 'no love lost’ pessimism [think Shakespearean tragedy] for the human condition) and championed (ie naturalistic nihilism).

With this recognition of the dichotomy and our traversing capability, we get to the meaning of metamodernism. The prefix 'meta’ is in reference to Plato’s metaxy which describes a polarity and the ability to move between poles, but also the ability to move *beyond* the poles; the recognition that the dichotomy exists and can be traversed is an example of being beyond polarity, which is a concept we can, in a sense, thank postmodern ambiguity for showing what that looks like.

*in this post I’ve used Western terminology (metaxy, romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, etc), but the concepts of Eastern philosophy (eg The Void) very much play a role in metamodernism and neo-Romanticism because of the type of refutation of traditionalism attributed to postmodernism’s conception of culture (ie ambiguity; think the New Age movement and how it’s developed into an amalgamation of different themes of Eastern philosophy with Western mysticism). Interestingly enough, “Metta” meditation in Buddhism is a meditation on nonattached loving compassion for the whole of existence, and in a way metamodernism implicitly demands expression to come from a place of nonattached loving compassion in order to achieve an effective form of cultural expression.

David Brooks’ OpEd: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/opinion/getting-trump-out-of-my-brain.html

Zavarzadeh’s The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27553153?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Metamodernism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism?wprov=sfla1this post

Edit: Romanticism began in the late 18th century, but saw its cultural peak during the first half of the 19th century (1800-1850).