Meta: A Critique and Defense of My Own Article

Some rights and wrongs within "How Metamodernism Can Save us All."

A few weeks ago, I had an article published in The Republic of Letters. I’d given it the dry title of Meaning and Metamodernism, but they changed it to the catchier How Metamodernism Can Save us All. It’s a much more inviting title, I have to admit.

If you haven’t already read the article, I’d love for you to click over and have a look. I was thrilled when they reached out and asked me to write on the subject, and since then, it’s stirred up a lively conversation. You’ll find links to additional Substack articles at the bottom.

To introduce the topic, I began with a brief overview of the time periods that led up to metamodernism, for it isn’t a movement or a manifesto but an attempt to define the time in which we currently find ourselves.

In my overview of our modern time periods, I focused on meaning and grand narratives, which was a dangerous choice as the potential was ripe to carry over old prejudices from the church. Postmodernism’s supposed abandonment of grand narratives was a threat to our beliefs which hinged on grand narratives. I’ve little doubt that some of that old condescension and mischaracterization carried over.

My article serves as an introduction and has been praised for it brevity and clarity, so if metamodernism is new to you, it’s not a bad place to start. There’s much to explore from here, and I don’t come to this pretending to be the expert. The folks at The Republic saw where I’d enthusiastically talked about the subject and, being unfamiliar with the term themselves, asked me to write about it.

As part of the ongoing discussion, questions have been raised about my focus on meaning and grand narratives. For one, does metamodernism have anything to say about grand narratives, as my article suggests? In an interview with Tank, Vermeulen, one of the authors of the defining article on the subject (Notes on Metamodernism) said this:

The metamodern generation oscillates between a postmodern doubt and a modern desire for sense: for meaning, for direction. Grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed.

Timotheus Vermeulen talks to Cher Potter

There are many ways one could approach a review of the time periods from modernism to metamodernism, but the search for meaning both in life and in literature is the approach that interests me the most. We’ll get more into that in a moment, but let me first quote a line from the article that seems to has caused some confusion:

The cleanest break was between Romanticism and modernism for it coincides with that move into modern thought, but Romanticism was also an early rebellion against the limitations of the Enlightenment, and in that way was a precursor of modernism.

It’s the last half of that line that’s caused some stumbling, and I’m not surprised. Most of the article is me reporting on the ideas of others. I don’t recall a direct source for this particular notion, but when I recognized the pattern, it struck hard because we focus on the rebellion of the modernist against Romanticism to the point where we talk like one had nothing in common with the other. That’s proved to be an oversimplification, for the shared thread is the failure of rationalism. Yes, modernism is a reaction to and against Romanticism, set against the world-shifting backdrop of industrialization and WWI, as I say in the article, but modernism was also a reaction to and against the whole of the Age of Reason.

Perhaps it was unfair of me to toss this nuance into an article that’s meant to be an introduction, but the primary failure that modern man must grapple with is that a rise out of superstition and ignorance and into rational thought didn’t lead to our salvation. Instead, it created a world war, twice, and with that second conflict came the threat of nuclear annihilation. Romanticism may not have seen that coming, but it was still a reaction against man’s faith in his rational nature. Romanticism went in the opposite direction to that which modernism would eventually take, in part because Romanticism was a moment born in the agrarian world that had always been, and its solution (in part) was a renewed focus on nature and emotion.

Modernism, on the other hand, came to be as humanity was stripped from that old life and thrust into the life of the city.

“Modernist literature often turns to the fragmented, impersonal rhythms of urban life as a means of locating meaning in the everyday existence of the anonymous individual. Writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce invest the ordinary city-dweller with symbolic and existential significance, rendering the modern metropolis not only as a backdrop but as a central character in the search for identity and meaning.”

— Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973)

It can be much easier to say what something is than what it isn’t, for if I say that modernism placed meaning on the everyman in his new city-centered existence, that doesn’t preclude it from being many other things as well. If, however, my focus is elsewhere, and I attempt to say that modernism wasn’t about meaning, that’s a claim that attempts to carry the weight of an unknown universe. In this case, it fails. Meaning absolutely was an aspect of modernist literature.

“Whereas modernism still held out the hope of finding depth, coherence, or meaning beneath surface appearances, postmodernism is marked by a skepticism toward such totalizing impulses. It does not lament the loss of meaning, but celebrates the play of surfaces, the collapse of distinctions, and the fragmentation of the subject.”

— Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (1989)

In the article, I say that eventually we could find no meaning because postmodernism said there was no meaning to find. Some of that old church taint seeped into the way I discussed it, but the broader meaning of that particular thought was how these time-focused descriptions become prescriptive burdens that time eventually shakes loose. Still, my brief overview of how that happened within postmodernism was less than fair.

After all:

Lamenting the “loss of meaning” in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative.

— Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979)

I also said that deconstruction and irony were tools meant to reveal a total lack of meaning. Even if we replace skepticism for a total lack of meaning, deconstruction is still a delicate subject to raise. However, in contemplating this, something has occurred to me; I’d accepted the idea that our contemporary use of deconstruction was at odds with Derrida’s meaning, and I’m sure this may still be true in ways I’m not considering here. Even so, the argument I remember depended on defining our use of deconstruction as separating a concept into its pieces, but even a cursory glance at the pop-culture love affair with deconstructing superheroes reveals the failure of that definition.

The “evil Superman” trope is a deconstruction of the myth in which a binary concept is taken so that the privilege is moved to the marginalized counterpoint. The myth of Superman focuses on his goodness, and so in deconstructing Superman, privilege is placed on a self-centered or dictatorial nature within the Superman figure. It’s a simplified version of the concept but very much in line with Derrida’s intent.

Getting back to a postmodernism defined by skepticism instead of a total rejection of meaning, where does our time fall on that path, now that we’ve moved past postmodernism?

“Metamodernism oscillates between a modern desire for sense and a postmodern doubt about the possibility of meaning. It is characterized by a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, and a moderate fanaticism. It is a structure of feeling that attempts to reconstruct meaning after postmodernism’s deconstruction.”

— Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker, Notes on Metamodernism (2010)

Tracing our approach to meaning is a legitimate and understandable way to note the history of modern thought through these three eras. The impact and influence of capitalism has also been suggested as an approach. I touched upon that when I said:

It hobbles the postmodern notion of a consumer identity, that we buy who we are off the shelf, according to which brands we find most relatable.

However, I’ve taken issue with this sentence of mine in the weeks since publication. The claim that metamodernism has hobbled consumer identity is based less on fact than hope. I believe it can and should lead us away from a dependence on consumerism as a replacement for meaning, but I don’t know that it has. I can’t even promise that it will.

The skepticism of postmodernism toward grand narratives had us defining ourselves by what we bought and owned, and I’d very much like to see a reduction in our dependence upon consumerism for a sense of self. Metamodernism won’t destroy it entirely, but it can allow us to move between consumerism and grander narratives of meaning.

Speaking of which…

One of the more difficult sentences in my article—and this time, I mean for me as a writer, not necessarily for the reader—was that metamodernism finds meaning in grand narratives while recognizing their constructed nature. I’m not sure what it means for a person of faith to believe in a religion that they think is a construct of man. It’s a meaning I’m attempting to explore, however.

Perhaps the answer is a belief in God which recognizes that much of what we use to approach Him is a creation of humanity. One of the errors of the church, in this approach, would be putting too much faith in the construct instead of in God.

I could attempt to discuss the ways that familiar focus has caused psychological harm, but that’s not the point of this article and probably beyond my current capabilities. These are questions I’ve asked, not answers to which I’ve arrived.

Let’s close this off with links to the ongoing discussion on metamodernism, and until next time…

—I’m Thaddeus Thomas

How Metamodernism Can Save Us All

Meta-Modernism In Action

A Vibe-Based Critique of the Substack Scene

Craft Pathology Report: Metamisframed