The Metamodern False Start

if you're not familiar with metamodernism you might want to skip this one

In 2017 Hanzi released The Listening Society, and while not the first, nor the last characterization of the metamodern philosophy, to me this was the beginning of the coalescence of the “metamodern” subculture, the deepening and broadening of a discourse on a serious level coincided pretty cleanly with this.

In the years since a number of thinkers, philosophers, activists, artists have donned the metamodern label and worked to build theory, built movements, build out the metamodern future.

Yet from lofty initial dreams, we now have a series of paid courses, a number of paid subscriptions to services, conferences, retreats, and a number of other metamodern themed blogs, podcasts, and content of various sorts with deep and cutting divisions in the community that have siloed it into a large number of small, splintered fractions.

Meanwhile the dreams of a listening society grow more distant as the war drum beats in our ears, neoliberalism deepens it’s grasp over the “Nordic” countries that were supposed to be creating the politics that would take us into the next stage of history.

The city once becoming a “metamodern hub” now a warzone.

This is not the philosophical revolution bringing us away from the coming dark age. We are not winning the hearts and minds of the people. Our reach and it’s impact has been absolutely trivial, despite the immense efforts poured forth by passionate and brilliant people.

While I can already feel the burning resistance and hear the furious typing of keys of metamodernists ready to shut me down for this, I think this very clearly requires us to perform a material analysis of how our models have diverged from the material reality in which we live. I think this very clearly is a point in time when we must reexamine the direction and structure of not only our efforts but of the core ideas of our movement. To stop examining and reexamining the fine details of our models and to face full on the material reality that our models are supposed to be emergent from.

Questions such as: What is integralism going to tell you about how to design streets and roads? What is spiral dynamics telling us about setting zoning law? How do our models of human development help us design and advocate for economic policy and the details of property rights? These are the fundamental constraints which determine the nature and structure of community and the opportunities for and context within which communication and behavior take place, but our theories only tangentially mention them in the most abstract of ways with an intense focus on the development of the individual without the context of the development of many individuals who are living in an overlapping space and time. Our discussions of communication and our strategies at attempting it so divorced from human reality and tradition they seem alien and alienating to so many who have tried them and which have lead to such a simple entrance of cults and cult like movements to our space.

Even when we discuss society, it is in the abstract, entirely within the world of forms, of identity, of the interaction of identity, of labels and the strength of labels, of the generalized statistical impacts of broad conceptions of policy. However, society very much does not work in such a fashion: there is enormous variability and variation, that is profound and significant difference that comes down to the fundamentally local. The specifics of the material reality, the day to day way of living, and how society continuously emerges from this process is just not a practically or deeply considered area within our theoretics, outside of writers like Brent Cooper who has made this sort of analysis a much greater focus of his work. This has been especially evident in a couple of the protracted arguments within the community.

I think this comes down to three core problems with our movement. The first is of course the context from which we emerged, that of the “end of history” that is so reflected by Hanzi and other’s models of “gradual improvement” of this “end system” until we can imagine or build a new one by degrees, to focus on human development to optimize our humans performance. While I’m sure many of you will have a problem with this characterization, I implore you to consider the substance of what I am saying and understand that my choice of labels outside of our lexicon to describe it is intentional and with purpose. Whether or not that was the internal perception, that is the context out of which we arose and to which the ideas can be seen to have emerged from, along quite clean and straightforward paths.

While it is hard to fully appreciate the nature of a context from within it, this is why we must look from without the context, to those who have a different perspective on the state of history as it is, to develop at least a comprehension of our own lenses. This means diving into the writings of people from economic systems unlike our own, to their understandings of our systems, to witness their perceptions and consider them so that we can see ourselves through others eyes. To give us as many perspectives on where and when we are as possible so we understand the idea space within which we are operating.

That isn’t to say some aren’t trying to reach across cultural divides and understand alternative contexts, it’s just not going very well. All together the context from which we emerged has many living as precariate, many striving to survive and developing material interests in their specific interpretations, teachings, and practices within the movement, itself not the most productive front for advancing our ability.

Which brings us to major problem 2: our horrendous inability to productively engage in criticism. Both in dishing it out and in accepting it. This is a crippling problem for any movement but the extent to which we fail at it is astonishing. Instead of lively and productive conversations we have either extensive fights that boil down to disagreements in terminology and in the precise nature of how each of us thinks about human development, or we have some sort of in person, audio, or visual discussion where the terminology is boiled down and everyone agrees but again nothing major is accomplished and no advancements in theory or in praxis are developed. Instead of a healthy and functional dialectic continuously advancing, we have an every complexifying mess of jargon which says and does less, that requires more effort to navigate for ever diminishing returns.

Developing healthy critical methodology and strategy with each other is necessary if we want this movement/subculture to be anything besides endless pointless bickering about what it means to be what color in spiral dynamics and what different color communication systems look like in a fashion so distorted it’s spawned literal cults hierarchically organized by “developmental level”

This entire dynamic also makes interacting with the community a high effort activity, the heavy reliance on what is now an enormous base of minor variations on theory each with it’s entirely different lexicon of terminology means pretty easy deflection to this or that variation on another development theory that doesn’t get us anywhere.

Which brings me to the third major problem, which is fundamentally a result of the first two: that our core ideas and perspectives are missing an entire branch of perspective, that we’ve achieved a “false start” on metamodernism precisely because we incorrectly labeled the phenomenon, that we were so deep within our context that we could not even imagine or understand what we were going through. The perception that metamodernism is the transcendent both, and, beyond of modernism and postmodernism.

The process of reintegration and development of the modernist mindset and the use of this reintegration to transcend postmodernism sure sounds great, and I’m sure my wording will be picked apart on that but generally speaking that’s basically what we’re all talking about. But that reintegration process is a critical process, and as I’ve noted: we suck at critical dialogue. The branch of perspective is the entirety of the dialectical and historical materialist traditions, which provide both a robust critical tradition at this point in history as well as an exterior and wide ranging set of perspectives on community, society, relationships, family, economic and productive relations.

This tradition is a scientific tradition but it is very different from the western academic philosophical tradition, taking ideology as fundamentally emergent from material conditions, and there is quite a lot to be said for this perspective, given the depth to which metamodernists embrace the concept of emergence and emergent complexity, taking the material world as ultimate and our ideas about it as merely ideas, abstract and unreal conceptions that are useful and practically applicable within the world of forms that emerges from our material bodies that live within the material context of society.

If we are to properly contextualize, criticize, and analyze our ideas, the only robust way to do so is up against a material reality and a materialist analysis. Therefore the primary oscillation upon which metamodern development is achieved is not the oscillation between the modern and the postmodern, but between the neoplatonic world of forms and concepts, and the material reality and materialist analysis of those forms and concepts, an oscillation between having ideas and living/testing/building/simulating the contexts of them.

However to date, most of our analysis has been an oscillation between modern and postmodern and an occassional transcendent conception beyond them, such as the beautiful and brilliant concept of “the listening society” or the short excerpt regarding sex, politics, love on metamoderna - this perspective on game denial, game acceptance, and game change is amazing, until you read Alexandra Kollantai’s “Love and the new morality” that predates it by nearly a century and captures the same concepts with much greater flow and relatability. The listening society sounds profound and amazing until you realize the local pub, bookstore, cafe, neighborhood grocery, local church, local parks once served these functions and that we’re looking for a half cocked series of replacements rather than comprehending how to heal these systems broken by disgusting and depraved incentive structures and brutal material conditions.

Many great thinkers, from Van der Akker to the Hanzi duo, have looked out and felt the wrongness of our world, the incongruency between perception and reality that hung like the matrix over our minds, like the constructed reality of The Truman Show, and instead of seeing the robots or the cameras we constructed strange and elaborate explanations for the seeming unreality around us. Neoliberalism 3.0 under a human development priority to better optimize long run growth/profits where the question of human right to life, dignity, and joy is posed as a question to be answered rather than an implicit reality does not save us from the perverse material incentives of the investment bank whose power grows the greater a share of housing it outcompetes workers for and then rents back to them, nor from conglomerates derailing and blowing up trains in our cities and towns and along our watersheds. It lacks the mechanisms to do so, even over a long time scale. It is time for us to grow beyond this false start, and to aid in this process I’m going to do what’s been done to me by so many in this community and offer a reading list of texts you don’t get to consider yourself truly metamodern until you’ve begun to comprehend:

PJ Proudhon - What is Property? (for perspective, Henry George’s “Progress and poverty” for the western attempt at realizing the same lessons within academia, complete with oligarch conspiracy to suppress his work)
Karl Marx - Capital 1, 2
Vladimir Lenin - Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Michael Parenti - To Kill a Nation
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - John Perkins
Imperialism in the 21st Century - John Smith
Mao Zedong - On Practice, On Contradiction

This is just the beginning of obtaining the missing section of perspective necessary for true metamodernism, there are countless essays, columns, pamphlets, and books from every culture discussing with intricate details the ways people have tried to develop and live under alternative systems that can begin to provide a context and a perspective on the emergence of our own false start.

I look forward to your scathing attempts at criticism.