Hi,

Thanks again for your comment and engagement.

First let me just accept your objection to the descriptive/normative language—all I meant by this was the familiar distinction between a cultural metamodernism (which aims to analyse an actually existing phenomenon, but may make value judgements as outputs of the analysis) and political metamodernism (which stipulates some prescriptions, but may recruit descriptions of existing cultural trends to support them).

When I said that cultural MM was implicitly normative (and I confess that perhaps this was not clear enough) I was making a stronger claim than that it outputs value judgements—I was saying that it seems to gerrymander its descriptive scope to ensure that it only ever outputs positive value-judgements. And furthermore, that this renders it inadequate as an analytic framework because it misses the full extent of the way in which the oscillation manifests in contemporary society (and here I am talking explicitly about the pomo/mo oscillation, not a general oscillation). The acid test here is whether cultural MM is capable of outputting negative value-judgements, hence the footnote point about a critical MM. You are saying it has done this—I have not encountered any of this work myself, but if it does exist, that’s wonderful! I’d love to see some examples—it would help to change my mind about cultural MM.

It’s worth noting that there’s plenty of this going on outside MM—Mark Fisher frequently described the defining characteristic of 21st century culture as a naturalisation of postmodernism which has flattened its ironic dimension, allowing the regurgitation of the same basic gimmicks (anachronism, pastiche, etc) to be presented with a revolutionary earnest that modernism reserved for formal innovation. I think this framework could be applied to many of the cultural phenomena that have been claimed as metamodern, though it would reinterpret their structure of feeling as one of mourning rather than yearning. This is basically the framework I am applying to BH.

But I do want to stand by my claim that the content of political MM and cultural MM are not nearly as distinct as you are making out. As you say in your article, “What’s metamodern is oscillation between multi-perspectival relativism and enthusiastic conviction.” Looks to me like this is exactly what political MM is aiming at—in itself, it is just an example of the kind of phenomenon that cultural MM analyses. The tension doesn’t arise from the fact that what political MM is aiming at is different to what cultural MM is analysing, it derives from the more downstream fact that aiming at this thing makes literally no sense whatsoever. This is why it can’t help but collapse into multi-perspectivalism at the level of discourse and uncritical conviction at the level of praxis. I agree that multi-perspectivalism is pomo—that’s exactly my critique! The combined point I am making in the first two sections is that pomo discursive norms + modernist politics does not amount to a developmental synthesis at either level. What it amounts to is the cultural logic of late capitalism writing itself an alibi.

I’ll just end by making a quick response to the point that political metamodernists like Hanzi and Abramson do not talk about oscillation as such. (A point which I appreciate was not made by you Greg, but I’ll put here for completeness.) In the first two sections, the argument structure uses the oscillatory model as a wedge. What everyone claims to be aiming at is something like a developmental synthesis between postmodernism and modernism—I am questioning the mechanism through which this is supposed to be achieved. If it is oscillation, then this has some problems. But if it is not, then it is….. what exactly? Abramson may not talk about oscillation, but he does talk about “juxtaposition of contradiction”, and this is vacuous for exactly the same reasons. Nothing in my argument hinges on people holding oscillation as an explicit value, only that they appeal to some equivalent of it or just leave an insubstantial gap.

In the final two sections I am contesting what I take to be cultural MM’s standard analytic plays, and I think it’s pretty clear that there I am talking very directly about the pomo/mod oscillation.

Sam