Metamodern

Broadly speaking, 'metamodern' is a term used to articulate developments in contemporary culture and society which are said to represent a move beyond modernism and postmodernism. It was originally coined in 1975 by Mas’ud Zavarzade, to describe an emerging cultural trend in American literature. 1 More recently, the related term 'metamodernism' has come into popular usage – although it has been defined and tends to be used in a number of different ways, which can make it rather confusing. Depending on the context, metamodernism is a philosophy; a worldview; a cultural sensibility; and a political, scientific, and social movement.

As a cultural and artistic sensibility, metamodernism is characterised by an oscillation between typically modernist attitudes and postmodernist ones – defined by its “ironic sincerity,” “pragmatic idealism,” and “informed naiveté”. The use of the prefix 'meta' derives from Plato’s metaxis, describing an "in-betweeness", an oscillation between diametrically opposed poles of experience. This usage was first proposed by Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in their 2010 essay, “Notes on Metamodernism”.2

In The Listening Society and Nordic Ideology, Hanzi Freinacht articulates a political vision and program that has come to be known as 'political metamodernism'. In the books, metamodernism is presented as a philosophy and view of life (or what some call a "cultural paradigm", "cultural logic" or "cultural code") that corresponds to the digitalised, post-industrial, global age. Its key characteristic is the combination of the modern faith in progress with the postmodern critique. This gives rise to a worldview in which "people are on a long, complex developmental journey towards greater complexity and existential depth."3

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