Thread by @Jonathan_Rowson

“I had mixed feelings about metamodernism until I realised it is about mixed feelings.”

Of the 250 people at the @whatisemerging gathering this weekend, about a quarter said they were there due to interest in #metamodernism.

Here’s what that means 👇

systems-souls-society.com/metamodernism-…

“Metamodernism is a feeling, and all that constitutes the feeling and flows from it. When we consider the mystery of consciousness and the human drama playing out on this charming anomaly of a planet, feelings are far from trivial – they have cosmological significance…

…The metamodern feeling co-arises through the perception of our context writ large; it is aesthetic in nature, epistemic in function, historical in character, and it serves to call into question the purpose of the world as we find it, and the meaning of life as we know it.”

It is easily assumed or inferred that metamodernism emerges from within the early 21st century internet-infused cultural epoch of metamodernity, but the relationship between the two terms is more interesting than that.

Few doubt the validity of the idea of modernity as a grand epoch as such, nor that we are now in the latter stages of it and in some sense moving beyond postmodernity, or trying to, but what we should call this phase is contested, and mostly a matter of perceptual framing.

The other contenders like hypermodernity, supermodernity and even ecomodernity all focus directly on the implications of technological developments. The meta prefix is distinctive, however, because it is generatively reflexive and tacitly humanistic.

One way to grasp the value of the idea of metamodernity is to say it’s about focusing our attention on our subjective and inter-subjective relationship to these times we live in, when we stand, in some quaveringly uncertain sense, after, within, between or beyond modernity.

The point of invoking metamodernity is not to insist on this name for a chronological phase of time but to resolve to characterise a cultural epoch with a Kairological quality of time. The early 21st century *the* time, more precisely *our* time, to look within, between & beyond.

It’s time to reappraise our lives by grappling with the apparent spiritual and material exhaustion of what has passed as normal and normative for too long: the presumed progress of science, reason, bureaucracy & capitalism; the limitations of perspective and failure of critique.

We are now obliged to create meaning and fashion agency within the context of  meta-crises of perception and understanding relating to ecological, social and institutional breakdown, where one world seems to be dying, and another is trying to be born.

The point of metamodernism is to help us better perceive our historical context by developing theories and practices that allow us to feel into what it means to be in a time between worlds, where meta-crises relating to meaning and perception abound…

…and we struggle to perceive clearly who we are and what we might do; where meta-theories seem friendly because mere theory feels absurdly specific; where nostalgic longing feels like it is as much about the future as the past.

To be metamodern is to be caught up in the co-arising of hope and despair, credulity and incredulity, progress and peril, agency and apathy, life and death. I had mixed feelings about metamodernism until I realised it is about mixed feelings.