Hi, thanks for the expansion!
I’ll try to keep this *reasonably* brief, partly because Medium is a truly horrible discussion platform but also because I think we’re largely converging on agreement—certainly I have no beef with cultural MM as you describe it. We seem to be on the same page about what a good cultural theory should be able to do, and it’s been cool for me to discover that there’s a load of stuff going on that does just that, or at least creates the space for it to happen. (Also I should have read your Sideview article more carefully—sorry about that.) I also agree that if cultural MM is delimited this way then it does seem to have some fundamental disagreements with transformational MM (I’ll say a few more words about this below). And yes I’m aware that the specific quotes you point to do not necessarily apply to what you’re talking about—most of those are quite context dependent, and even where they are not I have deliberately used the word “metamodernism” in an amorphous way to try to reflect the broader discourse in all its amorphousness. This piece is a polemic, and there is nothing in this world more pointless than a really long and pedantic polemic! I appreciate the usage may not reflect any area which has thought carefully about what it is doing, as yours clearly has. If its only effect is to (in some tiny way) help foreground the kind of work that you are involved in, then I would be very happy with that!
But there is also the overarching fact that—for whatever reason—these potentially quite different discourses have become clustered around the same signifier, bleeding into and feeding back on each other in various complicated ways. This whole tangle is governed by its own structural dynamics, and these dynamics are partly what I’m taking aim at in this piece. Part of its rhetorical gamble is to try say something out loud which I suspect many people might already be familiar with, at least in vibe. Like, my complaint with Hanzi is primarily that once you boil it down to its residue what you are left with is weaksauce liberalism in a shiny hat. I don’t think there’s any internal inconsistencies in Hanzi—the much more interesting question for me concerns the wider structural dynamics in play that have allowed it to become established as a significant reference point in a discourse that (in many if not all areas) thinks of itself as working against the status quo. There is something very weird going there!
Just to back up to try to say something constructive—I think one of the factors that can create a lot of confusion is that there’s really three things sometimes labelled as “metamodern”: cultural products, political/transformational prescriptions, and something more nebulous which we could tentatively call “the metamodern condition.” Irrespective of how cultural MM delimits its scope, there is this wider thing going on in contemporary life which has the form of an oscillatory indeterminacy both at the level of communication (which is encapsulated in phrases like sorry-not-sorry, and lies behind the post-truth phenomenon) and the level of action (like in attitudes to environmentalism where one is bounced back and forth between a kind of catastrophic universalism—waking up sweating at night dreaming about ice caps melting—and a kind of complacent self-interest—fuck it I’ll just make the Amazon order, nothing I do is significant anyway—which very often co-exist in individuals*. ) All of this displays metamodern characteristics (in that these could be conveyed as oscillatory indeterminacies between sincerity/irony, earnest/cynicism, etc), and there are interesting questions to be asked about whether they point to a *new* condition that is distinct from the postmodern condition, or whether it is simply a deepening of it (for example Baudrillard was thematising this kind of oscillatory paralysis as early as the mid-70’s, and explicitly predicted it as a mechanism of decentralised social control that would emerge directly from the commodification of the symbolic economy.)
Someone like Seth Abramson sees this condition, points at it and says “people like Trump are using this for bad, let’s use it for good!”—but this tacitly mobilises a diagnosis which attributes a neutral status to the primary oscillation itself—and it is *this* impulse I take issue with. Hanzi may not make any explicit reference to oscillation in content, but the performative aspects of the project are very obvious attempts to leverage this state of play. Etc etc. A cultural MM is orthogonal to this *in theory* in the sense that it can support different diagnoses of the metamodern condition, but in practice it has to make SOME diagnosis in order to have an analytic frame for making value judgements about particular cultural phenomena (otherwise it is reduced to a purely taxonomical enterprise). E.g. if we think this condition is bad—i.e. it signals a diminishment of human agency—then a good MM cultural product would be something that resists it, or carves out interiority despite it; if we think it’s good then a good MM cultural product would be one that potentiates or amplifies it. Where e.g. LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner seem to respond to irony with irony-not-irony (which is a bit like responding to Kurt Cobain with Kanye West), something like BoJack Horseman seems to me to respond to irony-not-irony by representing the way it doubles down on meaninglessness to create an even deeper level of alienation, and thereby resists it. Certainly a MM cultural theory could support an analysis which identified the first as bad (or a failed attempt at) MM and the second as an authentic or good MM, but the point I’d make is that supporting such a judgement requires taking a stance on the metamodern condition. And this is the point at which the cultural theorist reveals their political hand!
Anyway I won’t go on—very grateful for the discussion, and if it’s been helpful for you to articulate your own thoughts that’s wonderful!
Sam
*Campbell Jones has a wonderful essay about this called The Subject Supposed to Recycle.
