Lovely article, thank you.

Very interesting point you make about the hypermodern oscillation between meaning and meaninglessness being so similar to the metamodern framing (where the same oscillatory structure is celebrated as a way of moving beyond the cynical apathy of postmodernity).

It reminds me of some points Baudrillard made, someone who I think can fairly be placed in the postmodern camp, as long we understand this to refer to those who critiqued the postmodern situation, as opposed to those who held 'postmodern values' (a phrase metamodernists have been fond of that has always seemed a bit baffling). According to Baudrillard oscillation is exactly what is produced by the postmodern reduction of the real to its representation (or the assimilation of the symbolic by the semiotic). Stable oscillation replaces synthesis, which is why the postmodern condition becomes a kind of frenzied stasis - all speed, no acceleration.

On this analysis a structure of feeling typified by irony is no more characteristic of postmodernity than one typified by self-aware sincerity. What is characteristic is, rather, that both trade as equivalents in the symbolic economy, frequently reversing their significations (i.e. they oscillate freely, a sort of performative antagonism devoid of any real dialectical tension). For these reasons it has sometimes felt like the so-called New Sincerity in culture celebrated by metamodernism actually represents a deepening of postmodern stasis, rather than any kind of move beyond it, as they seem to claim.

Along similar lines perhaps it could be argued that hypermodernism and metamodernism represent something similar - not a destabilising bifurcation of postmodernism but a stable bifurcation within postmodernism, two aesthetics that relate to each other in a kind of stable antagonism, like intellectual variants of cyberpunk and solarpunk?