Metamodernism and the Perception of Context: The Cultural Between, the Political After and the Mystic Beyond

owing to the fact that behind the many interconnected problems of the metacrisis there is a deep ideological problem (i.e., a lack of unified narrative), metamodernism can be defined as a new collective value system1 that incorporates, contextualizes and transcends all previous value systems while resolving the conflict between them in an integrate

Amidst these many “candidates” to transcend modernity and postmodernity, what perhaps distinguishes metamodernism the most regardless of its different schools of thought within it, is its emphasis on an emerging or newly born collective sensibility or “feelings’’ pointing towards a new cultural milieu which reflects the current late stage of global

Also above and beyond other “candidates” – and in line with futures studies - metamodernism promotes an anticipatory and proactive thinking about alternative futures (Baciu et al., 2015), and is interested to convey a newly born optimist metanarrative that would unite and reconstruct the broken identity pieces after postmodernism (Abramson, 2015b).

Metamodernism is thus also more optimistic than modernism as it strives to go beyond its shortcomings, and thus inherently more optimistic than postmodernism, which lacks faith in modernity and its metanarrative of progress.

• post-tragic (meaning and agency on the other side of despair)

• post-extrinsic (driven by new societal purposes)

• post-rational (open to ways of knowing that transcend and include the intellect),

• post-exploitation (reflective about the uses and abuses of power)

• post-tribal (whole-hearted togetherness in a world of love and power; an expansive ‘W