Metamodernism
Based on Wikipedia: Metamodernism
The End of Irony (Sort Of)
Imagine you're at a party and someone makes a heartfelt toast about friendship. Twenty years ago, the cool response would have been an eye roll, maybe a sarcastic "touching." But something shifted. Now you might find yourself genuinely moved—while also being aware of the cliché, while also not caring that it's a cliché. You're sincere and knowing at the same time. That uncomfortable, liberating, contradictory feeling? There's a name for it: metamodernism.
This isn't just about party toasts. It's a fundamental shift in how we relate to meaning, hope, and truth itself.
What Came Before
To understand metamodernism, you need to understand what it's reacting to. Picture a pendulum.
On one side sits modernism—the worldview that dominated roughly from the late 1800s through the mid-twentieth century. Modernists believed in progress, grand narratives, universal truths. They thought science and reason could solve humanity's problems. They built skyscrapers that reached toward the heavens and wrote manifestos about creating utopia. They were earnest, ambitious, and sometimes catastrophically naive. The horrors of two world wars, colonialism, and various failed utopian experiments revealed the dark side of all that confidence.
So the pendulum swung.
Postmodernism emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century as a corrective. Postmodernists were skeptical of grand narratives, suspicious of claims to universal truth. They deconstructed everything, showed how power structures hide behind seemingly neutral ideas, highlighted the voices that modernist confidence had silenced. Irony became the dominant mode—if you couldn't believe in anything fully, at least you could be cleverly detached about it. The postmodern sensibility gave us important critiques of gender inequality, colonialism, and the pretensions of Western thought.
But something got lost.
The Exhaustion of Irony
By the 2000s, pure irony started feeling hollow. The endless deconstruction, the reflexive skepticism, the inability to commit to anything without quotation marks—it left people adrift. Climate change demanded action, not just critique. The 2008 financial crisis revealed that "it's all relative" wasn't much comfort when you'd lost your house. Political instability made detachment feel like a luxury. The digital revolution connected everyone while leaving many feeling more alienated than ever.
A new generation found themselves in an impossible position: they'd absorbed all the postmodern critiques, they couldn't unsee the problems with naive idealism, but they also couldn't survive on irony alone.
They needed to hope. They needed to mean things. They just couldn't do it the old way.
Enter the Oscillation
In 2010, two Dutch cultural theorists named Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker published an essay called "Notes on Metamodernism" that gave this emerging sensibility a name. Their key insight wasn't that we'd moved beyond postmodernism to something entirely new. It was that we'd started oscillating.
Think of that pendulum again. Metamodernism doesn't park it on one side or the other. It swings—between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naiveté and knowingness. The metamodern person doesn't choose between sincerity and irony. They hold both, sometimes in the same breath.
Vermeulen and van den Akker called this "informed naiveté" and "pragmatic idealism." You know the problems with grand narratives. You've read the critiques. And you decide to hope anyway—not because you've forgotten the critiques, but because you've integrated them. You pursue meaning while acknowledging its contingency. You commit to values while knowing they're constructed.
The prefix "meta" in metamodernism doesn't mean what you might think. It doesn't refer to self-reference or reflection (like "meta" in "meta-analysis"). Instead, it comes from the Greek philosopher Plato's concept of metaxy—a state of being between things, of moving among positions rather than settling into one. Metamodernism is the space between and beyond the modern and postmodern.
The Return of Romance
One of the most striking features of metamodern culture is what Vermeulen and van den Akker call a "neoromantic" sensibility. This doesn't mean sappy love stories. It means something closer to the original Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a turn toward wonder, toward finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, toward emotional authenticity even in the face of absurdity.
You can see this in the architecture of the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron, who design buildings that are simultaneously conceptually rigorous and emotionally evocative. You can see it in the performance art of Ragnar Kjartansson, an Icelandic artist who creates works that are at once absurd, beautiful, and genuinely moving. In one piece, he hired a band to play the same song for twelve hours straight. It's a joke. It's also transcendent.
The goal, as Vermeulen puts it, is to "perceive anew a future that was lost from sight." Not to return to modernist naiveté, but to recover the capacity for hope and meaning that postmodernism's necessary critique had temporarily disabled.
"Go Forth and Oscillate!"
In 2011, a British artist named Luke Turner published what he called "The Metamodernist Manifesto." Writing a manifesto is itself a deeply modernist gesture—the early twentieth century was lousy with them—but Turner did it with full awareness of the irony. The manifesto called for "an end to the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child."
What did Turner propose instead? Metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt."
The manifesto concluded with a deliberately ridiculous yet somehow stirring call to action: "Go forth and oscillate!"
Three years later, the American actor Shia LaBeouf—yes, that Shia LaBeouf—discovered the manifesto and reached out to Turner. The resulting collaboration, LaBeouf, Rönkkö and Turner (the third member being Finnish artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö), produced a series of metamodern performance art projects. Perhaps the most famous was "#IAMSORRY" in 2014, where LaBeouf sat silently in a gallery while visitors could interact with him one-on-one. It was simultaneously a critique of celebrity culture, a genuine emotional encounter, and an absurdist spectacle. In other words: metamodern.
The Listening Society
While Vermeulen and van den Akker were developing metamodernism as cultural theory, other thinkers were exploring its political and philosophical implications.
In 2017, a book called "The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics" appeared under the pen name Hanzi Freinacht. The name itself is a metamodern joke—Freinacht presents himself as a fictional philosopher, complete with biographical details and personality quirks, while the actual authors (Swedish writer Emil Ejner Friis and sociologist Daniel Görtz) operate behind the mask. The performance embodies the very "ironic sincerity" the book discusses.
Freinacht argues that metamodernism isn't just an aesthetic sensibility but a stage in human development. Drawing on developmental psychology and what he calls "symbolic development," he suggests that individuals and societies move through recognizable stages of increasing complexity. Postmodernism emerged from and transcended modernism; metamodernism emerges from and transcends postmodernism.
This might sound like a progress narrative of the kind postmodernists rightly criticized. But Freinacht—through the very act of presenting it through a fictional persona who comments ironically on his own arguments—demonstrates the metamodern approach: you can believe in development while acknowledging the constructed nature of your categories. The "stage theory" is offered not as absolute truth but as a useful map.
Politically, Freinacht advocates for what he calls "Nordic ideology"—combining environmental sustainability, economic liberalism, and robust social programs. It's a politics that tries to hold multiple values simultaneously rather than collapsing into a single ideology.
The Academic Turn
By the 2020s, metamodernism had moved from artistic manifestos and cultural blogs into the academy.
In 2021, American scholar Jason Josephson Storm published "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory," a rigorous philosophical treatment of the concept. Storm's approach is more technical than the earlier cultural theorists. He draws on Hegelian dialectics—the idea that opposing concepts can be synthesized into something higher—to argue that postmodern insights can be preserved while moving beyond postmodern paralysis.
Storm proposes several neologisms that sound forbidding but capture real ideas. "Metarealism" suggests that reality exists but our access to it is always mediated by concepts and cultures—neither naive realism nor pure relativism. "Hylosemiotics" combines matter (hyle in Greek) with meaning (semiotics), proposing that the physical world and the world of meaning are not separate domains but intertwined aspects of the same reality.
What makes Storm's work distinctly metamodern is his insistence that the goal isn't just to describe a cultural moment but to create a "paradigm shift"—to provide new tools for thinking that enable productive engagement with real problems. Theory, for Storm, should be therapeutic: it should help us navigate the world, not just analyze it.
In 2024, Storm launched an academic journal called "Metamodern Theory and Praxis," institutionalizing the field. The title is telling: not just theory (thinking about things) but praxis (doing things). Metamodernism wants to matter.
The Logic of Cultural Logics
The most philosophically ambitious recent work on metamodernism comes from Brendan Dempsey, who in 2023 published "Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics." The subtitle is a deliberate echo of Fredric Jameson's famous essay "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," which helped define postmodernism for an earlier generation.
Dempsey's key move is to identify what all the different versions of metamodernism have in common: "recursive reflection." Each cultural paradigm, he argues, emerges by stepping back from and reflecting upon the previous one. Postmodernism reflected upon modernism; metamodernism reflects upon postmodernism. But metamodernism also becomes aware of this very process of reflection—it's a cultural logic about cultural logics.
This might sound abstract, but it has practical implications. If you understand that you're always operating from some perspective, and that perspectives develop through this kind of recursive reflection, you gain a kind of meta-flexibility. You can "toggle in and out" of different viewpoints, holding multiple perspectives simultaneously without collapsing into relativism (which would say all perspectives are equally valid) or dogmatism (which would say only one perspective is right).
Dempsey calls this "multi-perspectival perspective." It's not the view from nowhere (which doesn't exist) or the view from somewhere specific (which is limited), but an awareness of how views develop and relate to each other.
What Metamodernism Looks Like in Art
Abstract philosophy is one thing. What does metamodernism actually look like in practice?
In 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York mounted an exhibition called "No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism." The following year, a Berlin gallery staged "Discussing Metamodernism" in collaboration with Vermeulen and van den Akker, featuring artists working in the metamodern mode.
The British artist Andy Holden offers a particularly clear example. In 2003—before the term "metamodernism" had gained currency—he wrote a manifesto calling for art that would be "Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity!" at the same time. A decade later, he staged an exhibition examining his own manifesto, telling its history and demonstrating how that both-at-once sensibility had become a broader cultural phenomenon. The work is funny about being serious about being funny.
In literature, scholars have identified metamodern qualities in novels that combine postmodern formal experimentation with a new emotional directness. The American writer Ben Lerner's novel "10:04" is frequently cited: it's a novel about writing a novel (very postmodern) that's also genuinely moving about friendship, fear of mortality, and the experience of living through Hurricane Sandy (decidedly not ironic). Dave Eggers' memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" performs similar tricks—the title itself is simultaneously a joke about pretentious memoirs and an accurate description of what's inside.
The British novelist Ali Smith has become a poster child for metamodern fiction. Her "seasonal quartet"—four novels named Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer—combines experimental structure with warmth and engagement with contemporary politics. They're clever without being cold, aware of literary history without being paralyzed by it.
The Metamodern Structure of Feeling
Vermeulen and van den Akker borrowed the phrase "structure of feeling" from the Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams to describe metamodernism. A structure of feeling isn't a philosophy or an ideology. It's something more diffuse—a shared sensibility, a way of experiencing the world that emerges at particular historical moments before anyone has fully articulated it.
This captures something important about metamodernism. Most people who exhibit metamodern sensibilities have never heard the term. They're not following a program. They're responding to the same historical conditions—climate crisis, political chaos, digital transformation, the exhaustion of irony—and arriving at similar places.
You can see this structure of feeling everywhere once you start looking. The popularity of sincere-but-knowing comedy shows like "Ted Lasso" and "Schitt's Creek." The resurgence of folk music and cottagecore aesthetics among people fully aware of their artificiality. The way younger generations approach activism—passionately engaged while sophisticated about the constructed nature of political categories. The embrace of "cringe" culture, where earnestness itself becomes cool precisely because it's uncool.
Metamodernism doesn't ask you to give up critical thinking or pretend the postmodern critiques never happened. It asks you to integrate those critiques and then move forward anyway. To hope intelligently. To mean things provisionally. To oscillate.
Criticisms and Tensions
Not everyone finds metamodernism convincing. Some critics argue it's just postmodernism with better marketing—that the oscillation between sincerity and irony was always present in postmodern work, and calling it something new doesn't add much. Others worry that the emphasis on "stages" and "development" in thinkers like Freinacht risks reintroducing the hierarchical thinking that postmodernism rightly challenged. Who gets to say which stage is "higher"?
There's also a geographical bias worth noting. Most metamodern theorists are European or American, and the examples they cite tend to come from Western art and literature. How the concept applies to non-Western contexts remains underexplored, though it's worth noting that one early use of the term came from the scholar Moyo Okediji applying it to contemporary African-American art in 1999—describing it as "an extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism."
Perhaps the deepest tension within metamodernism is whether it represents a genuine advance or just a mood. Storm explicitly wants to create a paradigm shift; Vermeulen and van den Akker are more modest, describing their project as "an attempt at a vernacular" rather than a philosophy. The difference matters. A mood can dissipate; a paradigm structures thought for generations.
Why It Matters
Metamodernism matters because it offers conceptual tools for navigating a world that postmodernism understood correctly but left us unequipped to act in. We know that grand narratives can be oppressive—and we need to tell stories anyway. We know that truth claims are tied up with power—and we need to distinguish truth from lies anyway. We know that sincerity can be naive—and we need to care about things anyway.
The climate crisis is the clearest example. Solving it requires coordinated global action based on scientific consensus—a deeply modernist project. But we undertake it knowing that science is a social practice, that global coordination is politically fraught, that our categories and solutions are culturally shaped. We don't have the luxury of naive modernist confidence. We also don't have the luxury of postmodern paralysis.
We have to oscillate.
Whether metamodernism as a term survives doesn't matter much. What matters is whether the sensibility it names—that both-at-once, knowing-but-caring, ironic-but-sincere orientation—can help us address the crises of our historical moment. Early returns are mixed but hopeful.
Go forth and oscillate.