[EN] Predefining "Metamodern"

Nottingham Contemporary - Caruso&StJohn

As for postmodernism, altermodernism, digimodernsim etc, and in a bubble system, as the one Sloterdijk advances, Metamodernism is another "Portmandteau term" where "meta" is the prefix.

1. In literature

As early as 1975, however, when University of Oregon professor Mas'ud Zavarzadeh published his "Apocalpytic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction" in The Journal of American Studies, we knew that such a reliable positioning of the Real was jeopardized by what Zavarzadeh called "the emerging realities of a technetronic [sic] culture." Zavarzadeh posited that these emerging realities constituted a "metamodern" condition in which authors' carefully appointed accounts of their own lived experience would necessarily "render all interpretations of 'reality' arbitrary and therefore simultaneously accurate and absurd.


By 1999, metamodernism was being described as an "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism" with the aim to "transcend, fracture, subvert, circumvent, interrogate and disrupt, hijack and appropriate modernity and postmodernity".In 2002, metamodernism in literature was described as an aesthetic that is "after yet by means of modernism…. a departure as well as a perpetuation."The metamodernists' relationship with modernism was seen as going "far beyond homage, toward a reengagement with modernist method in order to address subject matter well outside the range or interest of the modernists themselves."

In 2007 metamodernism was described as partly a concurrence with, partly an emergence from, and partly a reaction to, postmodernism, "champion[ing] the idea that only in their interconnection and continuous revision lie the possibility of grasping the nature of contemporary cultural and literary phenomena."

Guido Van der Werve

2. Cultural theory

In 2010, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker proposed metamodernism as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate. In their essay Notes on Metamodernism, they asserted that the 2000s were characterized by the return of typically modern positions that did not forfeit the postmodern mindsets of the 1980s and 1990s. According to them, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism", characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution. They asserted that “the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.

The prefix "meta-" here referred not to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them. Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles".According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne."

For the metamodern generation, according to Vermeulen, "grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed."

Vermeulen asserts that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophy—which implies a closed ontology—as it is an attempt at a vernacular, or…a sort of open source document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political economy as much as in the arts."The return of a Romantic sensibility has been posited as a key characteristic of metamodernism, observed by Vermeulen and van den Akker in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, and the work of artists such as Bas Jan Ader, Peter Doig, Olafur Eliasson, Kaye Donachie, Charles Avery, and Ragnar Kjartansson.


Consensus on what makes up an epoch can hardly be achieved while that epoch is still in its early stages. However, a common positive theme of current attempts to define post-postmodernism is that faith, trust, dialogue, performance and sincerity can work to transcend postmodern irony. The following definitions, which vary widely in depth, focus and scope, are listed in the chronological order of their appearance.

In 1995, the landscape architect and urban planner Tom Turner issued a book-length call for a post-postmodern turn in urban planning. Turner criticizes the postmodern credo of “anything goes” and suggests that “the built environment professions are witnessing the gradual dawn of a post-Postmodernism that seeks to temper reason with faith.”

In particular, Turner argues for the use of timeless organic and geometrical patterns in urban planning. As sources of such patterns he cites, among others, the Taoist-influenced work of the American architect Christopher Alexander, gestalt psychology and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s concept of archetypes. Regarding terminology, Turner urges us to “embrace post-Postmodernism – and pray for a better name.”

In his 1999 book on Russian postmodernism the Russian-American Slavist Mikhail Epstein suggested that postmodernism “is […] part of a much larger historical formation,” which he calls “postmodernity.” Epstein believes that postmodernist aesthetics will eventually become entirely conventional and provide the foundation for a new, non-ironic kind of poetry, which he describes using the prefix "trans-

[…] Subject is also taken into central account

3. "Meta","Metaxy" and the Architect

In my work on metamodern architecture, the first goal is to define meta, like others, meta here is based on metaxy, as do Van der Akker and Vermeulen state. But in the case of architecture what metaxy?Originally Meta means "after" in greek, but has evolved in english to "after", "beside", "with", "among" Other meanings include "beyond", "adjacent" and "self".


Oscillation therefor exists between two positions, for Plato it is an "inbetween", a "middle". If we interest ourselves to a more recent evolution political philosopher Eric Voegelin used the term to mean the permanent place where man is in-between two poles of existence. Such as the infinite (Apeiron) and the finite (the divine mind or Nous) reality of existence or between the beginning of existence (Apeiron) and the Beyond existence (ἐπέκεινα epekeina).


Voegelin taught that those who sought political power for its own end were sophists and those who were seeking meaning and truth in life or union with the knowable and true, were philosophers. Each of these positions manifests a different view regarding Plato's becoming and being; again the in-between each of these poles of experience is metaxy.


The architect is always in this position, he is dictated by the economy, but searches truth and knowable at the same time. The contemporary architect must meet budgets, deadlines, and must also survive and needs to be recognized, even if the last term may be debatable. Architects must be sophists and philosophers at the same time, and understandably the Post Modern Economic Globalization has led to an intensely competitive system where the power of the image overtakes the quest or "truth", many architects choose the road of sophism in a state of necessity, rather than the quest for "truth" that an architect would ideally hold.


And about Modern and PostModern? Minimalism made has recently made a surge burying the postmodern ornament that we could understand as an "iconography". These ten last years have been marked by " "generated building" and non composed buildings, or "monoliths" as Jacques Lucan puts it, what does this new value that minimalism holds mean?


Paul Valery states that the ornament has not gone, but has become an intellectual reference, position that Lucan has coined aswell. If we take the Eberswalde library the the ornament has become intellectual and has nothing to do with a library directly, in "Natural History" Jacques Herzog explains this serigraph.

Eberswalde Library - Herzog&DeMeuron

Many of the terms exposed here will be studied in further depth soon enough.