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

When seen in this light, whereby meta is a sincerely ironic ‘trinity’ of between, after and beyond, and metamodernism has four orienting touchstones of interiority, intimacy, historicity and ecology, what is on offer is a lodestar that helps to orient our perception of context.

We are now obliged to create meaning and fashion agency within the context of meta-crises of perception and understanding relating to ecological, social and institutional breakdown, where one world seems to be dying, and another is trying to be born.

In light of this sweeping scope and elastic structure, the test of the value of metamodernism is no less than this: whether it helps us feel at home in a world that might not be falling apart.

The point of metamodernism is therefore to help us better perceive our historical context by developing theories and practices that allow us to feel into what it means to be in a time between worlds, where meta-crises relating to meaning and perception abound and we struggle to perceive clearly who we are and what we might do;

Metamodernism, then, is not so much a word for a new historical epoch, but rather a new disposition towards the experience of history unfolding.

One way to grasp the value of the idea of metamodernity is to say it’s about focusing our attention on our subjective and inter-subjective relationship to these times we live in, when we stand, in some quaveringly uncertain sense, after, within, between or beyond modernity.[4]

The metamodern orientation towards meaning in that context is more soulful than propositional because it involves juxtaposing and reanimating concepts that have their own ambiguities, and it therefore relies on the dignity of paradox in which several things that are not mutually consistent appear to be true at once.