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You may be familiar with the idea that there are different forms of capital in society.

Karl Marx argued that the logic of economic capital is what drives modern society and explains large parts of its social and political relations. Pierre Bourdieu argued that in modern French society, there is not only economic capital, but also cultural capital. The hommes de lettres, the cultural elite, were powerful and had their own ways of expanding their form of capital. Bourdieu also added social capital to the model – how well connected and cool you are. Political scientists, like Robert Putnam, have discussed social capital in a somewhat different sense, namely that some societies have more of it and some less – that people trust each other, etc. Later on, other forms of capital have been tried out and developed, such as sexual capital (that you’re hot etc. – a term coined by Catherine Hakim). I would perhaps like to add other forms, such as emotional capital (that you have more energy and make people feel happy etc.) and physical capital (being vital and healthy or being an athlete, this has also been discussed by sociologists, like the Danish masculinity researcher Martin Munk). There is also symbolic capital, which I will get back to.

Exchanges of capital – a Hollywood example

Oh, and you can exchange these forms of capital for one another – in different contexts, in different ways, at different rates. It’s not like Swiss francs and British pounds, where the rates are set at any one time. But if you are learned or sexy, likelihood of you having really rich or well-connected friends increases. Think about that ‘romantic comedy’ where Jennifer Lopez is an Hispanic cleaning lady from Brooklyn and falls in love with a rich member of congress. She is hotter and more overbearing than his other (upper class) girlfriend, which wins her the wedding ring and access to the upper echelons of society. In the happy cut-scene ending, she gets to run a business of her own, and her cleaning lady friends (who were not as hot) get to work there as well. The friends have enough economic and social capital to be close to the hot chick at work, which grants them a share of her dividend. If they were unemployed or less companionable, they would have missed out. Economic capital, in this case, ‘trickles down’ through sexual and social capital. Exchanges take place. Society stratifies into male power, female beauty and side-kick friends.

Maid in Manhattan (2002) is of course a lousy movie, not only for its predictable and dumb story, but primarily for its gender and class biases. 13 years later, we are still waiting for the movie where a hot male Indian immigrant cleaning man called Sandeep has sex with a powerful, good-natured, WASP older female politician and wins socio-economic success as a result – a success he generously shares with his somewhat less sexy ethnic buddies Siddhart and Kareem. I’m sure it would do better than two out of five stars on IMDB.

But then again, both plots are equally unrealistic. In reality, the politician would have dumped the cleaning lady after sex and gone after someone better culturally and socially equipped to be his partner in the social arenas in which he must compete and show results. The reason that these plot-lines remain Hollywood fantasies is that they look at financial, social and sexual capital, but miss out on cultural capital. In any real situation, the Brooklyn lady, her interests and tastes, her conversation topics, her general educational refinement, even her way of moving her body, would have been an embarrassment to the congressman. She lacks cultural capital – something made invisible in the movie by the strangely middle class demeanor displayed by Jennifer Lopez in her role (and her kid is also strangely and neutrally middle class). The powerful politician would appear to others not as magnanimously class-blind, but as sexually perverted, using his position to get a woman who can offer him a beautiful body, but cannot be his equal.

Ours is a cruel world, when viewed with sociological goggles. What I aim to show with this excursion into cheap Hollywood fantasies is that different forms of capital are exchangeable with one another – and how naive we must be to view the world without understanding cultural capital and its growing power. If you want to live in a Hollywood fantasy, that’s fine. But if you want to see what’s going on in the world and change the social games of life towards being more fair, transparent, forgiving and abundant, you need to see what capital is and how it runs the world. We are going from a world run by economic capital, to a world run by cultural capital.

Capital – a general definition

So what is a capital, a general definition that goes for both money, fashion, book-smarts, sex, trust, coolness – the whole shebang? Here is a definition, Hanzi-style:

CAPITAL:
Something that creates a positive feedback loop
which changes social relations
so that power is accumulated
for the person or organization to which the feedback loop is linked.

Okay? So anything that makes you more powerful vis-à-vis others, and that can grow and expand itself by proper management, is capital. The positive feedback loop means that you tend to get more of it once you have a certain amount, it creates an advantage from which you can get more of the same or more of similar. It would be possible to add another dimension: capital must have some kind of psychological lure or desirability. There must be something we can fetishize, something we can crave, possess, call our own, and/or be possessed by.

This general definition lets us know something more about cultural capital. It is not the same as being intelligent, having a high IQ or a high cognitive stage of development. It means that you have better mastery of more symbols, i.e. words and ideas (or names and references); that these symbols are more generally relevant and applicable to the world around you; that you know and understand more creative and abstract ways to put these symbols together; that you know which names and references are seen as ‘good taste’, in which social contexts and why; and that you have a more intimate relationship to the fine and subtle dimensions of the symbols and how to use them. The more you get the drift of the world around you, the more new cool and useful symbols you tend to come across and master.

Simply: cultural capital means to be intimately in tune with the society you live in. It takes different forms: knowing authors like Hannah Arendt, Aldous Huxley or Theodor Adorno, knowing the culture of the Burning Man festival (and understanding its values), knowing arts and international relations, knowing the logics of various indigenous cultures, knowing many brands of music and being able to see how they make a difference in society, knowing the Silicon Valley culture, knowing the major ideas of the major philosophers and who contends to be a great philosopher today, understanding the Internet Age, understanding sarcasm, irony and sincerity, understanding different religions, political movements and spiritual traditions, knowing about fashion and understanding what drives it, speaking more languages, knowing organic gardening and cool ways to work out … You get the picture.

Who has cultural capital?

In today’s society, especially in countries that epitomize the social structures emerging in our time, like Denmark, a certain pattern is becoming increasingly evident.

High cultural capital is most concentrated to educated young people, especially young women. These are urban, liberal, post-materialist, cosmopolitan, environmentally oriented, individualistic, digitalized, artistic and often have other practices than monogamous heterosexuality.

Low cultural capital is being concentrated at the opposite end in Danish society (and similar societies): older, lower education and often male. These are more rural, conservative, nationalistically inclined and see themselves as ‘good honest folks’ as opposed to those snobs. The snobbishness of those rich in cultural capital can be derided in class terms, terms of being ‘real’ and normal or respectability/decadence or lacking responsibility and realism, in nationalistic terms and sometimes in sexist, hetero-normative and homophobic terms.

And while it may appear, on a superficial level, that the lower cultural capital side is winning all the votes – we see nationalist parties storming ahead all across Europe and parallel tendencies in the US and in Denmark the populist Danish People’s Party is second largest after the social democrats – we must not be fooled into failing to see the power structure that is crystallizing: the people with the highest cultural capital are increasingly running the show. If nothing else, the demographics work strongly in favor of cultural capital. The uneducated, smoking male has a much harder life and much less time left to live than his anti-racist, yoga-practicing fellow gay citizen with a PhD.

Cultural Capital ruling politics

So a chief reason that Denmark has this new progressive party called The Alternative who want to transform political culture into friendlier deliberation, listen more closely to citizens and use open citizen ‘idea labs’ and playful performances to engage the public in transition to environmental sustainability, is that there has been a sufficient accumulation of cultural capital. Cultural capital has accumulated to a sufficiently large group for a distinct ‘creative class’ interest to emerge in society, now being clearly articulated and manifested. In other words, enough people are equipped with an intuitive understanding of our time and with all manners of artful, playful and psychological toolkits to create this kind of organization.

Initially mocked by the media as star-eyed idealists, the movement soon became the media’s discretely held darlings. The people working in the media themselves largely share the same class interests and tend to be sympathetic to the values of the new party. They understand the friendly winks of irony and the idea of not taking oneself too seriously and generally return in kind with a friendlier tone in their criticisms and caricature images in printed papers. Organized cultural capital can automatically get ahead in the media – it doesn’t even have to buy it like financial capital does.

But it’s not only that. The party’s move to speak in a friendlier and more transparent manner – a skill that arguably can require more nuanced world-views, greater abilities to take the perspectives of others and better mastery of the spoken word (i.e. cultural capital) – is paying off. When the party entered parliament their first speech, held by Rasmus Nordqvist, was one that commended all the other parties for their different contributions and perspectives. When conservative politicians criticize the party for being weird, sect-like dilettantes and take their different playful offices and meeting rooms as an example, they appear small-minded and silly. The Alternative seem all the more magnanimous by not responding in kind.

Already during the elections, the party showed that their members’ higher cultural capital was useful. They refused to put up their election posters before time, and instead designed smaller, cheaper posters that would fit in the off-hand spots left over from the other cheating parties. This was a media event and a young, kind looking man barely 20 years old calmly reported on TV that there’s room for everyone.

When the party was called ‘a bunch of circus clowns’, their members quickly produced this video, with party leaders pretending to partake in all manner of clown acts while discussing serious political issues such as sustainability, welfare and entrepreneurship:

This should be contrasted with the Danish Conservative Party, who have humongous financial means, so many contacts to the industry, and a very established electoral tradition, and miserably failed to produce any positive response in the electorate or the media. Enough cultural capital in one place simply beats financial capital in today’s media-centered world of displays and surfaces.

The party also hi-jacked media events in different ways, for instance by means of their glowing green color showing up everywhere and people standing in the background as audience during TV-interviews, displaying a big textile ‘Å’, the party’s symbol. To create events that are fun and engaging like this without involving sports or military parades is also something that requires cultural capital, including an understanding of today’s media landscape.

By having the most inclusive and idealistic agenda, party representatives are generally asked questions about how doable their ideas are. But because the party is in opposition, their chief mission is to remain symbolically, rhetorically and morally on top. Given that their more politically correct opinions are generally easier to defend, they have all the guns on their side in the long run.

The main challenge is not to dominate the political dialog or to rule Denmark – but, indeed, to include also those segments of the population that are feeling confused and estranged by their sudden success and growing impact.

Cultural Capital ruling Economic Capital

But the rabbit hole goes deeper. And yes, this really is Alice in Wonderland, a world turned upside-down. Because what we are seeing is a symptom of a greater and more profound change that is global and irreversible (unless we have ecological crises etc.).

The deeper reason that The Alternative shows up is that we now live in a globalized economy with vast post-industrial geographic zones and transnational social groups that economically dominate the rest of the world. In this global system of information technology and abundance, resources and information are no longer as scarce (at least not in the post-industrial zones). What is scarce is instead the ability to navigate this great, chaotic system – i.e. knowledge and ideas for combining the information and resources in beneficial ways.

This means that out of two groups, where one is very rich and the other very high on cultural capital – the latter group will dominate the former. Cultural capital will be able to dictate the values and ideas of economic capital, and will be able to trade its own value at a very favorable rate. The cultural capital will be able to better capture the hearts and minds of people, making them work harder, for less money, towards more critically informed and productive ends. This is because there is enough abundance to let people get an education, a computer and a flat, and from there extra riches simply make much less difference than better, more sensitive and more inspiring ideas. Even if China has the assembly lines, Europeans trade their cultural capital at a very good rate and become richer.

… Which creates a new class structure. It is no longer very cool to be rich. In fact richness increasingly has an air of ridicule to it. And to flaunt wealth is considered bad taste. Cultural capital creates the highest form of social prestige. It is this prestige that makes it symbolically more valuable, being imbued with more symbolic meaning, making the old masters of the world – the wealthy – feel like silly brutes in its presence. Cultural capital is taking over economic capital as the main source of symbolic capital, as well as the main source of total capital. The young creatives are really more privileged and powerful than the rich magnates. It is a part of their self-image that they are romantic underdogs, but nobody is fooled, really.

This creates a deep frustration, a lot of violent reactions from otherwise pretty calm and normal middle and working class people. But their angry reactions reveal them and they unwittingly contribute to the slow and psychologically painful – but politically necessary – revolution of cultural capital.

I insist that you view and listen to today’s song, ‘The Perverted Dance’ with Klemen Slakonja as Slavoj Žižek.

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on his facebook profile here, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

The chief trait of the literary “metamodernism” identified by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh in 1975 was its resistance to the dialectics of both Modernism and “anti-modernism” (postmodernism). Metamodern literature, wrote Zavarzadeh, “refuses simplistic either/or approach[es] to the experiential situation and establishes, through its dual fields of reference, a double perspective” that is neither exclusively “self-referential or out-referential.” We hear in this statement by Zavarzadeh the assignation to metamodernism of the “both/neither” status (or, as I’ve theorized it, “both/and”, as to be two very different things at once is to be a new thing altogether) that Vermeulen and van den Akker have likewise attached to metamodernism in replacement of the “either/or” reasoning of the dialectical.

Other “aesthetic and ideational approaches to the art of narrative” Zavarzadeh associates with the metamodern are:

1. A philosophy of “zero degree of interpretation,” meaning that an artwork does not seek to either construct a private or universal metaphysics nor deconstruct any existing private or universal metaphysics. According to Zavarzadeh, metamodern authors do not seek to offer any explicit, conspicuous interpretation or critique of reality because reality has become so indistinguishable from fiction that attempting to speak of “reality” at all is a non-starter. We can distinguish this immediately from the view of (say) neo-Marxist postmodernists, for whom the question of how to deconstruct reality into a series of cogently analyzed dialectics is not merely a parlor game but the entirety of their enterprise past and present.

2. A belief that art ought aim to be neither “significant” (as we often saw was the ambition of the High Modernists) nor “absurd” (the sort of pejorative we might associate with work like Warhol’s “Pop Art”). Metamodernists eschew both the “significant” and the “absurd” because, as Zavarzadeh put it in 1975, “daily experience…simply is.” What this suggests, in the work of individual metamodernists, is that idiosyncratic daily experience can and should be presented “as if” it is merely workaday data—no matter how strange it might seem to a casual observer. This idea of treating the extraordinary as ordinary, and vice-versa—aligning the two not in a dialectical relationship but a juxtapositive one—calls to mind the “as if” reasoning of Kant that would later be mentioned by metamodern scholars Vermeulen and van den Akker. The idea here is that even that which seems impossible or uncanny or otherworldly can be treated “as if” it is simply daily experience: neither significant or absurd, merely what “is.” Likewise, daily relationships and occurrences can be rendered and indeed experienced as if they were, in a sense, sublime.

3. An interest in treating facts—at both the “international, national, and personal levels,” per Zavarzadeh—as simultaneously eternal and unstable. Whereas postmodernism underscores the contingent nature of “facts” by dialectically presuming that the end of facts-qua-facts means also the “end of history” (that is, an inability to, using facts, construct any ongoing metanarratives whatsoever), Zavarzadean metamodernism presumes that fact-dependent metanarratives continue to exist (and must continue to exist) and be given practical import by their creators, but are nevertheless necessarily “unstable” at the international, national, and personal levels. Easily read into this Zavarzadean principle is that the instability of metanarrative is caused primarily by the tension between how metanarratives operate at the international, national, and personal levels. For instance, an idiosyncratic, fact-based metanarrative may remain “stable” at the personal level for quite some time—even a lifetime—even as it has virtually no purchase whatsoever, or simply an exceedingly brief lifespan, at the local, national, and/or international levels. We can contrast this view of metanarrative to the critiques of capitalism inherent in postmodernism, which critiques do not so much presume either the death or the multiplicity of metanarratives but rather that the single culturally dominant (“neo-liberal”) capitalist metanarrative was and is simply wrong—and that a new, neo-Marxist metanarrative (say) offers an adequate replacement. This is why we find, in postmodern scholarship, not the embrace, as in metamodernism, of simultaneous and multiple/infinite metanarratives, but rather promulgation of a discrete number of passionately defended and resolutely counter-institutional metanarratives (like those offering resistance to colonialism, white supremacy, misogyny, and transphobia). To be clear, nothing in metamodernism seeks to invalidate any of these critical metanarratives; metamodernism merely conjoins them with others—international, national, local, and, yes, entirely personal and idiosyncratic—and in turn complicates their public valences.

4. While Zavarzadeh observed, in 1975, that themes of “alienation, deracination, and victimization” have often been “symbolically incorporated into the concentrated experience of modernist fiction,” he also noted that these conditions—ubiquitous thematically in Modernism—have become the lived (not merely fictionalized) experience for most people. In writing that alienation, deracination, and victimization had become “universal conditions” by 1975, Zavarzadeh correctly observed the operation of late capitalism in American culture by the time of the Ford Administration. What was new, however, in the analysis—in other words, what permitted Zavarzadeh to project this state of affairs forward to the production of literature in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond—was the scholar’s belief that this “alienation, deracination, and victimization” would be fed back into literature as a sort of invisibility. A controversial claim, Zavarzadeh’s belief that alienation, deracination, and victimization were registered as “no longer realistic” in metamodern writing (simply because universal, and thus no more “realistic” than anything else) pushes against even the postmodernism of today—which remains typified by its formal instantiation, in literature, of alienation, deracination, and victimization. The idea that popular culture (e.g. the Internet Age) might so alienate, deracinate, and victimize all persons subjected to it—not merely discrete classes of persons—and that literature might therefore, in metamodernism, no longer be able to register that state as an isolated phenomenon, was in 1975 a radical submission. It remains so today. Moreover, it’s one that not only surprises but deeply offends the postmodern sensibility. Yet this is the very reason why, say, the metamodern animated programs on The Cartoon Network (e.g. “Adult Swim”) do not investigate or ruminate upon alienation, deracination, or victimization but rather baldly demonstrate how life is when these conditions are always-already fully internalized and thus environmental.

5. Per Zavarzadeh, metamodern literary art implicitly responds to “the continual upheavals and the ongoing crisis in values in recent times [of] our total environment…an extended ‘extreme situation.’” As the “ongoing crisis of values” described by Zavarzadeh is clearly not a Modernist invention—indeed, the very purpose of the Modernist novel discussed by Zavarzadeh was to resolve values crises using purportedly universal, fully-interpretive metanarratives—it is clear that he is describing an “ongoing crisis” which, by 1975, was conspicuously the product of the postmodernism of the late 1950s and much of the 1960s. In this respect metamodern writing is a response to the “crisis of values” produced by postmodernism’s relativistic-yet-dialectical relation to truth. Moreover, Zavarzadeh situates metamodernism as a direct response to “a technetronic reality that defies human moral understanding,” referencing “computers” (and even something as specific as the then-unheard-of oddity of “cybersex”) as one particular culprit of our contemporary “ecological and demographic environment.” No postmodernist worth his or her salt would call the dialectics of our computer-driven ecological and demographic environment “beyond moral understanding,” as in fact postmodernism strives to use moral relativism and deconstruction as tools to tame into cogency—not spin into ambiguity or literal impossibility—a moral understanding of our world. Zavarzadeh’s position in 1975 thus remains, again, every bit as radical today as it was in the 1970s. It was, and remains, a rebuke of what has come to be thought of as the postmodern position.

6. Zavarzadeh describes literary metamodernism as a series of “empirical fictions” constructed of contradictory elements (“empirical fiction” being itself, of course, just such a paradox). Specifically, Zavarzadeh does not identify metamodern literature as “ironic”—for to say so would have been merely to describe postmodernism—but as an interplay between “heavy symbolic load” (a vestige of Modernism) and “ironic overtones” (an appearance or sense—but not necessarily the reality—of irony that we even today associate with early metamodernism rather than postmodernism). A word Zavarzadeh specifically used in 1975 to describe metamodern art was “uncanny”—precisely the term used today by cultural critics like Jerry Saltz or Vermeulen and van den Akker to situate work we might consider metamodern. Postmodern artwork, such as Warhol’s visual art, was neither uncanny nor a defiance of any/all moral understanding; it was both literally and figuratively “canny” inasmuch as its critiques were material, relevant, and, to any trained eye, conspicuous. One cannot enter into a dialectic with capitalism, or with Modernism’s artificial separation of High and popular culture, without staking out a position that is anything but ambiguous. Metamodernism, in contrast, not only abides in but derives its strength from a series of ambiguities that are particular to it as a cultural paradigm. (Other terms and phrases used by Zavarzadeh to describe metamodern art, all of which are still used today for the same purpose, are “weird,” “constantly unfamiliar,” “extravagant in its contradictions,” “almost escapist,” and attributable in large part to “science-fictional technology.”)

7. As a “post-postmodernism,” metamodernism asks, “What happens when postmodernism has not only crystallized in the arts but become so ubiquitous and saturated in the culture—so terrifyingly universal—that art can only respond from ‘outside’ this condition by somehow transcending it?” What was clear in Zavarzadeh’s 1975 analysis was that he was describing “emerging” phenomena in literature that responded to an ongoing and in fact worsening condition: as he wrote, “the perplexing fictivity of the real increases as the century wears on.” Those who misread Zavarzadeh’s essay as a “retrospective” of some kind grossly misstate the ambition behind the scholar’s coinage of metamodernism, which was, simply, to imagine how literature might continue to develop for the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond. While Zavarzadeh did identify early adopters of what he referred to as an “historical and cultural period”—for instance, Thomas Pynchon—many of those novelists who are now universally acknowledged as metamodern, such as David Foster Wallace, not only self-describe as being in the mold of Pynchon but indeed in some instances began conceptualizing their metamodern work (such as Wallace with Infinite Jest) in the early to mid-1980s, just a few years after Zavarzadeh coined the term “metamodernism.” To the extent that at least one prominent metamodernist who demurs from Zavarzadeh’s reading of the term insists that “no work prior to 1990 can properly be termed metamodernist,” it bears repeating that Wallace—avowedly metamodern in the view of this and nearly all other metamodernists today—began writing his metamodern magnum opus in 1984 and (by his own admission) began experiencing the cultural logic that informed his later work in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This too is consistent with the timeline envisioned by Zavarzadeh—as opposed to those who now affix metamodernism to a post-9/11 world (if not a post-9/11 mentality).

8. Finally, critical to Zavarzadeh’s metamodernism was the juxtaposition of “supposedly antithetical elements” in a central space: for instance, per Zavarzadeh, “the fictional and factual, critical and creative, art and life.” This notion of juxtapositive ambiguities residing in a central space between poles—which ambiguities force us out of any single received construction or deconstruction of reality (whether Modernist or postmodern)—is one we also see in Furlani’s ascriptions of metamodernism in the 1990s, or Alexandra Dumitrescu’s research into metamodernism in the aughts. More specifically, Zavarzadeh presaged the ambiguous “affects” of metamodern artists like Wes Anderson, Miranda July, or David Foster Wallace by noting that in today’s “fluid, heterogeneous society…subtle personality markers are not always easily recognizable.” The reason for this ambiguity of affect is the same as for the ambiguity of position Zavarzadeh associates with metamodernism: where the nature of reality is forever in doubt, the comforts of demographic association or moral authority, much like the comforts of readily readable affect, are mere Band-Aids atop the irreconcilable condition of a non-extant reality-fictuality interface.

Despite all of the above, Zavarzadeh, like most contemporary metamodernists, saw certain contrivances—particularly the personal metanarrative—as an ongoing necessity, even in the face of the impossibility of choosing individual affects or moral positions to the exclusion of all others. To repeat, one of the most important observations of “The Apocalyptic Fact” was Zavarzadeh’s contention that “each individual in our time is…a knight errant engaged in a bewildering quest of the self in an atomized society.” By noting this confluence of Modernism’s “bewildering quest of the self” and postmodernism’s “atomized society,” Zavarzadeh set the table for the metamodernism of today—still, as ever, an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate.

Importantly, however, Zavarzadeh’s reaction to all of these developments was not a cynical one. Zavarzadeh described metamodern literature, in 1975 and going forward, as a “radical response” to current crises that exhibited not only “volcanic energy” (suggesting a propulsive and creative rather than merely reactive postmodern mode) but also “by no means implies the death of the imagination. It means narrative energy is finding new channels.” As and when we hear of metamodernism as a “romantic response to crisis,” this valence of the metamodern echoes—rather than supersedes—what Zavarzadeh offered in his seminal essay on metamodernism. Today, as in 1975, our best response to crisis remains the radical, imaginative, volcanic narrative energy (call it “hope”) that Zavarzadeh witnessed exploring new channels in the seventies. This original energy continues to explore new channels today, now with the aid of the same “technetronic culture” Zavarzadeh envisioned with surprising clarity.

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The misreadings we’ve seen of Zavarzadeh in recent years are obviously not willful, even as some may seem, to certain proponents of Zavarzadean metamodernism, clearly—if benignly—negligent. For instance, Vermeulen and van den Akker propose that when Zavarzadeh mentioned black humorist Thomas Berger in 1975, this citation was intended to offer “black humor” as itself metamodern; this, as with other misreadings of “The Apocalyptic Fact,” is merely unfortunate. In fact, Zavarzadeh mentions Berger not as an example of a metamodern writer, but rather for a much more esoteric proposition: the fact that Berger was chosen by the New York Times to be its serious political critic in the 1970s was a sign that the Times had given up on “serious political criticism” (my phrase) as a possibility—not that it believed postmodern “black humor” to be an effective response to crisis. Indeed, in “The Apocalyptic Fact” Zavarzadeh specifically rejects conscious “parody” (like black comedy, a subgenre of satire) as metamodern, as parody—like black comedy—presumes a space of ironic detachment from which a critical analysis can or must be delivered. Instead, wrote Zavarzadeh, “mere quotation” of personal experience and/or empirical observation serves the same function in metamodern writing. Here another comparison with Andy Warhol’s visual and performance art is apt: if Warhol executed a postmodern critique of fast-food consumerism by parodying such consumption—for instance he once filmed himself, inside his art studio, eating a fast-food hamburger—a “metamodern Warhol” would have merely “quoted” the behavior he wished to comment upon. That is, he would have filmed himself sitting in a McDonald’s eating a hamburger. Just so, the late-postmodern poet Robert Fitterman is known for delivering lengthy sob-story soliloquies that seem earnest but maintain an ironic remove by virtue of the fact that Fitterman puts on a hat—a hat he never normally wears—before delivering his address. Again, in metamodernism the mere quotation of facts (whether they are personally derived or broadly environmental) is sufficient; therefore, a “metamodern Robert Fitterman” would deliver the very same soliloquy without donning a new hat first. The collapse of distances is endemic to metamodernism, and it’s precisely this sort of collapse that is forestalled by black comedy and ironic hat-donning. Postmodernism created the appearance of collapsed distance by (for instance) combining High and popular culture, but its maintenance of dialectics to “absolve” the postmodern artist of this collapse distinguishes it—eternally—from the cultural paradigm that superseded it, metamodernism.

So what artforms did Zavarzadeh explicitly associate with metamodernism? His 1975 essay gives us several examples, all of which are analogous to artforms we today consider metamodern. For instance, Zavarzadeh imagines an entirely fictitious story upon whose front cover the author has written simply, “What I Believe.” This paradox—an author claiming as a “true” personal metanarrative a story impossible for anyone else to believe—calls to mind the metamodern fiction of Tao Lin, whose simultaneously workaday and unreliable narratives are associated with “The New Sincerity.” How can Lin be considered to earnestly “believe in” the experiences detailed by his unreal fiction? Zavarzadeh well understood why. Just so, the reverse of this phenomenon, the “nonfiction novel,” is cited as metamodern by Zavarzadeh. Nonfiction novels manage to be received by their readers as fictitious even when they are entirely true. If forms of critical and creative writing that assume what Zavarzadeh called “moral and metaphysical certitude”—for instance, the postcolonialist critical tract or the black-comedy novel—are postmodern, Zavarzadeh identified as metamodern work that “denies…an integrated view of reality and the innocence of moral or metaphysical certitude.” No Literary Studies doctoral student studying postcolonial studies, or surveys of white supremacy in America, would say that such tracts demur from “an integrated view of reality” or “moral certitude”—it’s merely that they demur from conventional metanarratives in constructing their own (integrated, and, non-pejoratively speaking, highly moralistic) new ones. If augmented reality, virtual reality, and manipulations of reality like fan fiction, “cross-over” TV episodes, and wholesale re-boots are now considered metamodern, these align with the suspicion of reality and “impossibility of interpreting the actual via the fictive” described by Zavarzadeh in 1975. For instance, any hope that a given television program is a viably discrete interpretation of reality is lost when a wholly different reality (from another television program) intrudes violently via a “crossover episode.”

In view of all the foregoing, it must be said that to analogize Zavarzadeh’s “metamodernism” to Jameson’s “postmodernism,” as Vermeulen and van den Akker have done, is an impossibility. Likewise, we can see Zavarzadean metamodernism as both paving the way for and participating in the reorganization of philosophical terms and relations hypothesized by Dumitrescu, Furlani, and (not to put too fine a point on it) nearly every Literary Studies scholar who looked at “metamodernism” in the 1990s and 2000s—before Vermeulen and van den Akker had entered the conversation at all. The further exploration of Zavarzadean metamodernism, as well as its consequential expansion into new realms (such as the political and economic) now lies before us all as metamodernists—if only we will embrace metamodern discourse as global and heterogeneous, and clear our collective decks of unhelpful defensiveness, pretension, and vitriol.

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The offensiveness and intent of art like Alison Gold’s “Chinese Food” and Cameron Carpenter’s “Birth of the International Touring Organ” are complicated by their uncertain status as earnest expression or parodic treatment of similar (vanity) projects. Metamodern art either eliminates or dislocates the “sincere grin” or “ironic wink” to the audience that lets us assess a work’s intent:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLzgFkouSmc&w=560&h=315

In 1983, Frederic Jameson, the quintessential postmodern scholar, began writing an article for The New Left Review. The article aimed to crystallize “postmodernism” as a discrete cultural paradigm which, in Jameson’s view, had become manifest by the beginning of the 1960s at the latest. By the time Jameson began conceptualizing the ideas that would inform this 1983 article—presumably, in the late 1970s and early 1980s—postmodernism had, per Jameson, reached its “late” stage. While his seminal work on postmodernism, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, would not be published until 1991, Jameson’s 1983 article formed the basis for this latter work and his observations of American culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s its conceptual backbone.

To Jameson, both in 1983 and 1991, postmodernism constituted above all else an erasure of the line between High culture and popular culture that Modernism had fetishized. This erasure consequently put aesthetic production in America (previously restricted to the sphere of High culture) squarely in the midst of the workaday capitalist machine. Pop Art, as typified by the visual art of Andy Warhol—think of the late artist’s paintings of Campbell’s soup cans—was an exemplar of postmodernism, in this Jamesonian view.

Of course postmodern art, under Jameson’s and every other reading of the postmodern, is also infused with poststructuralist literary theory; this means that whatever its situation in the midst of popular culture, postmodern art is always, necessarily, also a “deconstructive” critique of that culture. This idea of critiquing something one is in the very midst of would be a paradox—as how could Warhol be simultaneously deconstructing and critiquing consumer culture if this very culture was the primary vehicle for his artistic expression?—if not for the importance, in postmodernism, of “dialectics.” By virtue of dialectics, which means simply an abstract positioning of opposing ideas against one another, a literal artwork like a painting can simultaneously be an abstract gesture quite apart from the artwork itself. In other words, while Warhol’s physical media often suggested he was wallowing in contemporary capitalism, the animating principles of his conceptual art suggested, more significantly, a dialectical (and thus oppositional) relationship with consumer culture. In this way Warhol could have his cake and eat it, too. (Of course, this paradox of a single artist exhibiting different physical and abstract relationships to consumer culture also enabled many misreadings of Warhol’s work over the years; to those not steeped in postmodern, e.g. neo-Marxist, dialectics, it could easily have seemed as though Warhol was merely uncritically celebrating capitalism’s “popular” culture.)

It’s for the above reason—this disconnect between physical product and conceptual motive—that postmodernism is often associated with “irony.” Understanding how artists and thinkers achieve ironic detachment from discrete phenomena goes a long way toward understanding postmodernists like Warhol. If we think of Warhol as ironically commenting on consumer culture “from within,” we can see that postmodern subgenres like “Pop Art” constituted not so much the actual embrace of consumer culture by postmodernists but rather an ironic embrace of it to entrench a dialectic with (for instance) Warhol on one end and the excesses of capitalism on the other. So when Jameson wrote in 1991 that postmodernism had erased the line between High culture and popular culture he meant, in fact, that it had both erased it and, simultaneously, re-drawn it in permanent marker.

Not so many years before Jameson began writing his crystallization of postmodernism—about six years, i.e. an eye-blink in the history of critical theory—Zavarzadeh was in Oregon attempting to determine whether a new cultural paradigm would dominate the “technetronic culture” he saw on America’s horizon. Writing in 1975, Zavarzadeh both looked back upon the literature of the 1950s and 1960s and considered how the events of the early 1970s seemed to propose the early stages of a larger “historical…and cultural phase” that would be distinct from what had preceded it. What Zavarzadeh saw, and what Jameson, several years later, would not, was that the different strains of culture and critical thought that had followed in the wake of “modernism” could not, in fact, be grouped under the single heading of “postmodernism.”

While Jameson has routinely acknowledged postmodernism and the artifacts of postmodernism as heterogeneous, he has also consistently insisted on the usefulness of “postmodernism” as a collectivizing term. Zavarzadeh never did, and still does not, share this confidence. And so it was that when Zavarzadeh wrote “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives” in 1975, he made a decision Jameson might have done well to make when he began writing his magnum opus on postmodernism six years later: he divided into multiple discrete tendencies the several cultural logics that had succeeded (i.e. were “post-”) Modernism.

For Zavarzadeh in “The Apocalyptic Fact,” the quintessential literary Modernists were James Joyce (artistically active from approximately 1915 to 1940), Virginia Woolf (1915-1945), and Faulkner (1925-1960, though he’d published nearly all his major work by the time of America’s entry into World War II, making his period of “Modernist” literary activity almost identical to Joyce’s and Woolf’s). Zavarzadeh designated as exemplars of the literary “anti-Modernist” camp—those whose literary poetics “reacted against” the Modernists—a trio of authors from the “1950s”: Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and C.P. Snow. “1950s” was, here, an evident shorthand for Zavarzadeh, as in fact all three authors enjoyed their heyday between the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, i.e. around the time Jameson considered postmodernism to have crystallized. In describing these latter authors as having “reacted against” the Modernists, Zavarzadeh seemed to echo the language Jameson would later use in describing what we now think of as “postmodernism.” Indeed, the very first page of Jameson’s 1991 book typified postmodernism as an “implacable critique” of Modernism (cf. Zavarzadeh’s “react[ing] against”). We see, then, in Zavarzadeh this timeline for the Modern and postmodern paradigms:

• 1915-1945 (approximate): Modernism.
• 1950-1967 (approximate): Anti-Modernism.
• 1968-1975 (approximate): Continued ubiquity of anti-Modernism and patches of proto-“metamodernism” (the latter identified in his 1975 essay “The Apocalyptic Fact”).
• 1976-thereafter (speculative): Further development of metamodernism as a full-blown “historical and cultural phase.”

Meanwhile, Jameson’s timeline looks like this (due in part to his redefinition of the decades-long, nineteenth-century Victorian era as “Modernist,” which Zavarzadeh would likely have demurred from, I imagine, only by terming it “proto-Modernist”):

• 1850-1950 (approximate): Modernism.
• 1950-1969 (approximate): Postmodernism and crystallization of postmodernism.
• 1970-1980 (approximate): Late postmodernism.

And for comparison, here’s the twentieth century in literature as imagined by (universally acknowledged) seminal metamodern novelist David Foster Wallace (per his interviews):

• 1915-1950 (approximate): Modernism.
• 1950-1967 (approximate): Postmodernism.
• 1968-1975 (approximate): Postmodernism and patches of proto-“metamodernism” (though Wallace did not use the latter term, he identified the same authors as belonging to this latter trend as did Zavarzadeh).
• 1976-1995: Dominance of late (in his view boring and exhausting/self-exhausted) postmodernism because no one had yet followed up on the work done by the proto-metamodernists. In
• 1985, he began the metamodern novel Infinite Jest to remedy this.

As is now widely known, Zavarzadeh also coined, in 1975, two new categories for literary output: “metamodernism” and “paramodernism.” In a nod to many Modernist scholars’ insistence that, well into the 1950s and 1960s, supposedly “postmodern” authors were in fact merely perpetuating subtle variations of the Modernist ethic, Zavarzadeh termed as “paramodernist” a slew of hard-to-categorize authors like Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov. Beckett’s “black comedy” aligns with our present understanding of postmodernist writing, though at the time he was receiving critical acclaim he was often referred to as one of the “last modernists”; Zavarzadeh’s taxonomic term “paramodernism” thus rescued Beckett (and others similarly situated, like Nabokov) from the limbo of being only debatably Modernist or postmodernist.

The most abidingly important term coined by Zavarzadeh in 1975 was, of course, “metamodernism,” though in his circumscription of its particulars we find evidence of a cultural paradigm that, as of 1975, only a handful of authors could yet claim to have explored. (This is one reason that Zavarzadeh’s analysis as much looked forward to the authors an emerging “technetronic culture” might produce as looking around in the mid-1970s to see who was already producing “metamodernist” writing.)

If postmodernism would come to be aligned with “neoliberalism,” Zavarzadeh in 1975 explicitly aligned metamodernism with “post-liberalism,” which distinction regrettably has led to some confusion (particularly for Vermeulen and van den Akker) regarding which 1970s authors Zavarzadeh saw as early metamodernists—and why. For instance, while Zavarzadeh did identify certain “metafictional” authors, like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, as metamodernists, the specific quality of their late 1960s/early 1970s work that Zavarzadeh associated with metamodernism was “a baroque over-interpretation of the ‘human condition.’” While any such baroque gesture naturally contains an element of parody, Zavarzadeh was clear that any parodic element in such works was not a parody of reality itself, but rather an implicit parody of the writing practices of other (whether Modernist or “anti-Modernist”) authors. This “inside baseball” brand of parody was not, in Zavarzadeh’s view, an attempt to set forth an alternative, e.g. neo-liberal, view of or key to reality (or, for that matter, fiction-as-genre) but rather to “demonstrate the confusing multiplicity of reality and thus the naiveté involved in attempting to reach a single synthesis of reality”—again, whether that synthesis was to be, say, Modernist-interpretive or postmodernist-Marxist (or in some other way neo-liberal). Note the use here of the word “demonstrate”—as in “perform without commentary”—whereas we find in Vermeulen and van den Akker’s analysis of Zavarzadeh a claim that the latter favored “ruminations” on (for instance) “the confusing multiplicity of reality…”

The metafiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s of which Zavarzadeh was writing offered “nothing between the lines,” to use Zavarzadeh’s own words, and in this respect blithely assigning to it the adjective “parodic”—as Vermeulen and van den Akker have done—is a misunderstanding of both its form and its function. It was, instead, a reaction to “anti-modern” (or, as we think of it now, “postmodern”) neo-liberalism, which is precisely why, for Zavarzadeh, it was “post-” and not “neo-” liberal. (Confusing, I know, but “postmodern neoliberalism” is not “metamodern postliberalism,” howsoever the prefixes may confuse us.)

David Foster Wallace, hailed by Vermeulen and van den Akker’s research project as a metamodern novelist, not only produced fiction answering in every way to Zavarzadeh’s description of metamodernist fiction—“a baroque over-interpretation of the human condition…demonstrating the confusing multiplicity of reality”—but also explicitly linked his own work to the same early metamodernists Zavarzadeh had discussed in 1975, particularly Pynchon (an author often mentioned by Wallace by name).

In a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace tellingly said the following:

“The way I am as a writer comes very much out of what I want as a reader and what got me off when I was reading [in the mid-1980s], and a lot of it has to do with, “Good Lord, I’m really stretching myself, I’m really having to think, and process, and feel in ways I don’t normally feel….ten years ago, [in the mid-1980s], I was reading a lot more avant-garde stuff, and I thought it was very cool. One of my complaints right now [in the mid-1990s] is that, because I think commercial entertainment has conditioned readers to want more easy fun, I think avant-garde and art fiction have relinquished the field. Basically I don’t read much contemporary avant-garde stuff because it’s hellaciously un-fun. [By comparison] the stuff I was reading ten years ago was avant-garde stuff from like the 60s and early 70s which, as far as I can see, was the heyday of contemporary avant-garde stuff. But these days a lot of it is very academic and cloistered and basically written for critics and college teachers and PhD students and I feel a lot more strongly about that [in terms of disapproving of it] than I do TV.”

Interestingly, scholars now find in Wallace’s Infinite Jest not only the same “baroque over-interpretation of the human condition” Zavarzadeh saw in the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., in Wallace, ornate over-descriptions of twelve-step recovery philosophies) but also the tendencies of the “nonfiction novel” that Zavarzadeh likewise associated with “metamodern” literature. For instance, Wallace’s lengthy lists of drugs and their effects, secondary-school pedagogies and their peculiarities, and mental and physical conditions exhibited by real people (and in many cases experienced in real life by Wallace himself) “enact[ ] the zero degree of interpretation of the ‘human condition’…by means of neutral registration of the fantastic actualities” spoken of by Zavarzadeh in 1975. Just so—and asking for a moment for the reader’s indulgence—when I wrote and published a lengthy metamodern poem entitled “White Privilege” which did no more than list 600+ surprising but true facts about my life as a non-Anglo (Jewish) Caucasian, the primary reaction from readers was that what they had just read could not possibly be true. What most metamodernists understand, including Zavarzadeh and Wallace, is that one can achieve metamodern effects in literature equally through the baroque and the neutral, in part because the two are—in Zavarzadean metamodernism—one and the same.

In other words, Vermeulen and van den Akker have gravely misread Zavarzadeh’s approach to parody. Whereas in their recent essay the two cultural theorists charge Zavarzadeh with terming “parody” metamodern, in fact the scholar was quite clear in 1975 that metamodern fiction “acknowledges…an extreme situation where ‘parody’ and ‘analysis’ become equally impossible…” Moreover, if we replace “parody” and “analysis” here with the phrases “conventional poststructuralist deconstruction” and “conventional Modernist rumination and interpretation” we understand precisely how Zavarzadeh saw metamodern literature as a negotiation of and between Modernism and postmodernism. Even the quality of “sincerity” that contemporary metamodernists now align with metamodern literature was registered by Zavarzadeh via his 1975 claim that the “nonfiction novel” found in metamodernism was an “authentic reaction” to contemporary living—“authenticity” being a byword of contemporary discussions of “sincerity.” (Meanwhile, Zavarzadeh excluded from metamodern operations any vestiges of the “judgmental voice” that sometimes seeps into conventional metafiction.)

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The sixth and last entry in the series can be read here: #6 Transcendence of the Dialectical in Zavarzadean Metamodernism

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In Zavarzadean metamodernism, the unreality of “real things” (and vice versa) is a creative force. Fanciful but strategic North Korean propaganda redefines terms like creativity and reality, as does the work of Karl Faberge, who unites conventional painting and virtual reality:

It must now be stated rather baldly that Vermeulen and van den Akker’s circumscription of Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s metamodernism bears no obvious relation to either the views of the man or the manner in which he articulated those views in “The Apocalyptic Fact” in 1975.

For instance, Zavarzadeh’s clearest and most oft-repeated circumscription of his own reading of metamodernism is that the term denotes creative and cultural phenomena that contain “zero degree of interpretation”; yet in dismissing Zavarzadeh as an only slightly idiosyncratic postmodernist, Vermeulen and van den Akker attribute to him a diametrically opposite usage of the “meta-” prefix: they claim, that is, that his metamodernism aims for “a rumination upon” contemporary culture in the manner of postmodernism. The text you’re reading right now—a six-part, blog post-like essay—is a reasonable exemplar of rumination; texts that aim to achieve “zero degree of interpretation” are manifestly not.

How Vermeulen and van den Akker read “zero degree of interpretation” as an invitation for “rumination” we cannot say, nor do we actually find in Zavarzadeh the assignation of metamodern intent to “black humour and parody” that Vermeulen and van den Akker claim to have uncovered. Both black humor and parody—discussed in more detail below—constitute precisely the sort of ironic, satiric rumination upon present affairs that Zavarzadeh explicitly, repeatedly, and forcefully distinguished from anything to do with the metamodern. Just so, though Vermeulen and van den Akker locate a postmodern bent in Zavarzadeh’s belief that contemporary culture precludes a single interpretation of reality, in fact Zavarzadeh’s metamodernism has nothing at all to do with (as Vermeulen and van den Akker imply) “a discrete number of competing interpretations of reality,” and everything to do with the absence of reality and the impossibility of unifying interpretation(s) acting as co-extant, generative cultural activators. This is an entirely different premise. I believe that part of the problem faced by both Zavarzadeh and the Vermeulen/van den Akker partnership is that in order to discuss metamodernism one must first internalize certain basic principles of postmodernism—the former being a transcendence rather than a rejection of the latter. The issue with this is that Vermeulen and van den Akker seem to treat as a terminal logic even Zavarzadeh’s barest acknowledgment of postmodern thought as influential to metamodernism’s circumscription. This, despite the fact that the same sort of necessary acknowledgment is present throughout the research of Vermeulen and van den Akker themselves.

Even more confusing, Vermeulen and van den Akker find in the metamodern philosophy described by Andre Furlani in the 1990s “another modernism [other than postmodernism]”—something they do not see in the presumptively postmodern Zavarzadeh—by virtue of the fact that Furlani, presumably unlike Zavarzadeh, locates in metamodernism “contrasts absorbed into harmony.” Yet those who have read Zavarzadeh at length know that the most critical passage in the seminal text of Zavarzadean metamodernism, indeed the one that best summarizes the whole of the paradigm, is this one:

“The fusion of fact and fiction blurs the dichotomy between ‘life’ and ‘art’ and indeed such a sharp division between the two does not exist in the emerging aesthetics which I shall, for lack of a better term, call ‘Metamodernist.’ [Metamodernism in literature]…combines such allegedly antithetical elements as the ‘fictional’ and the ‘factual,’ ‘critical’ and the ‘creative,’ ‘art’ and ‘life.’”

One wonders why Furlani’s “contrasts absorbed into harmony” heralds a “new modernism” for Vermeulen and van den Akker, while Zavarzadeh’s “fusion of…allegedly antithetical elements” does not. Just so, Vermeulen and van den Akker locate in Furlani the ambition of “transcending postmodern disorder,” yet somehow this cannot be equated to Zavarzadeh’s understanding of metamodern reality as “non-selective” but “inclusive.” Much like Furlani’s “transcendence of postmodern disorder,” Zavarzadeh’s metamodernism proposes a sweeping away of chaos-inducing designations like “significant” and “absurd” in favor of a harmonized “empirical fiction” that simply “is.” This sanguine acceptance of (in Zavarzadeh’s view) a now-nonextant reality/fiction interface is, as in Furlani, effectively a transcendence of postmodern disorder.

Alexandra Dumitrescu’s mid-aughts writings, too, dovetail with the work of Zavarzadeh and Furlani rather than that of Vermeulen and van den Akker. For instance, in conceding that Dumitrescu is invested in a new modernism—just not the one they are—Vermeulen and van den Akker note that Dumitrescu’s “metamodernism” is typified by “holism, connectionism and integration.” These three principles are, of course, endemic to the research of both Zavarzadeh and Furlani as well as Dumitrescu. Meanwhile, in direct contradiction of the past writings of Zavarzadeh, Furlani, Dumitrescu, and (in full confession) myself as well, Vermeulen and van den Akker argue that “harmony is not the dominant sensibility of present culture…[but] irreconcilability,” a phrasing that could be the mantra of every contemporary postmodernist both inside the academy and without. The one addition made to this perspective by Vermeulen and van den Akker—not coincidentally, an addition none of the foregoing metamodern scholars would disagree with—is that in contemporary culture individuals nevertheless feel a “need to occupy [multiple positions] at once.” This is the same reason why Zavarzadeh saw, in the nonfiction novel, an attempt to conjoin the attitudes of the fabular and the mimetic; this is why, in Dumitrescu’s now iconic metaphor of metamodernism as a boat being rebuilt and repaired as it sails, the metamodern sailor wants both a) to sail in the boat she presently has, but also b) to sail in a very different boat that’s a rebuilt and repaired version of the current one. (Separately, we might also note that this idea of “occupying multiple positions at once” is, metaphysically, a direct contradiction of Vermeulen and van den Akker’s oscillatory and dialectical “snap-back” metaphor. “Oscillation” is not simultaneous occupation—it wasn’t in Plato’s time, it isn’t today.)

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While it is true that we find more conspicuous evidence of individuals’ “tragic desire” to simultaneously occupy disparate positions in the writings of Vermeulen, van den Akker, Furlani, and Dumitrescu than we do in Zavarzadeh, this is in part because of readers’ unfamiliarity with the metamodern literary genre at the very heart of Zavarzadean metamodernism: the nonfiction novel. The nonfiction novel is, to be clear, a sincere autobiographical text which the author knows can and will be read as fiction (and/or simply an irony-laden monologue) by its audience. Yet the author of the nonfiction novel inescapably bears a “tragic desire” to tell the story of her life while acknowledging that the conditions no longer exist for her history to be read as resolutely empirical. Indeed, Zavarzadeh’s most notable citation of the sort of “tragic desire” Vermeulen and van den Akker identify as metamodern is actually the second most oft-quoted sentence from “The Apocalyptic Fact”: Zavarzadeh’s observation that “each individual in our time is…a knight errant engaged in a bewildering quest of the self in an atomized society.” What better statement of “tragic desire” could there be than this one? What better example of the need to occupy two positions at once than to be simultaneously a) a Romantic quester, and b) a clear-eyed resident of an atomized society, i.e. one in which quest-like truthseeking is evidently futile?

Vermeulen and van den Akker have now, five years after their first published article on metamodernism, settled on metamodernism as “an attitude dependent…on the overall state of the organism, its level of energy, the level of resources at its disposal for coping with environmental challenges, and the degree of tension it finds itself in as a result of the ratio of its resources to its challenges…” This reference to organic energy appears to be an implicit citation of the scholarly concept of “entropy,” which, too, was critical to Zavarzadeh’s 1975 essay “The Apocalyptic Fact.” There, Zavarzadeh posited that metamodernism’s response to contemporary crises features both a) “local viewpoints…imposed on narratives” (with these “local viewpoints” analogically similar to Vermeulen/van den Akker’s stranded swimmer, who must develop a “local” strategy in the face of a non-selective pantheon of options), and b) “entropy,” which Zavarzadeh defines as synonymous with what we now understand to be “personal metanarratives.” (Zavarzadeh’s specific phrasing, in describing entropy, is “a shaping factor of contemporary realities…[that is not] a controlling metaphor”). One is hard-pressed to see between these two perspectives the gulf of distinction Vermeulen and van den Akker posit as being so vast that their metamodernism is a difference not just of degree but of kind to Zavarzadeh’s (in their view) oddball postmodernism.

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As we have seen, the distinctions drawn by Vermeulen and van den Akker between their own views and those of others who have used the term metamodernism do not withstand much scrutiny, even as the ways in which they distinguish their approach to the topic from those of others suggests that what is being described by them is in fact not a “paradigm” in the fashion of modernism or postmodernism at all. This is all to reiterate that metamodernism has, since 1975, consistently been defined by theorists on multiple continents as constituting a) a mediation between modernism and the direct reactions against it (whether we call these reactions “postmodern” or “anti-modern”) as well as b) an attempt to generatively juxtapose opposing poles in a central space. This juxtaposition is then seen—by Zavarzadeh; by Furlani; by Dumitrescu; and, for what it’s worth, by myself—as actuating or at least making conceivable the future transcendence of entrenched dialectics, such as, for instance, those which were found (albeit in very different forms) in both Modernist and postmodernist philosophy. In this view, the “snap-back” quality of metamodernism described by Vermeulen and van den Akker is merely a re-entrenchment of postmodern philosophy by way of confirming that opposing positions are in fact irreconcilable.

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The next entry in the series can be read here: #5: Reading Frederic Jameson Against Mas’ud Zavarzadeh

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Metamodern mash-ups and remixes like Robot Chicken’s “Star Wars” and Bad Lip Reading’s “Medieval Land Fun-Time World” create idiosyncratic narratives out of existing public ones—without destroying their original sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhKbuCgreys&w=560&h=315

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Krz-dyD-UQ&w=560&h=315

In their most recent essay on metamodernism, Vermeulen and van den Akker analogize metamodernism to a man or woman who has been thrown overboard roughly equidistant from a large number of disparate and discrete islands. These islands in many instances represent opposing forces like irony and sincerity, cynicism and optimism, or knowingness and naiveté. In this view, the metamodernist’s inclination is to swim toward one island on the basis of it being (seen as) preferable to the others, even as the swimmer acknowledges the value of the islands not selected for approach. Vermeulen and van den Akker add to this metaphor for metamodern operations the idea that as the swimmer closes in on the preferred island, or perhaps at the very moment that that island has been reached, he or she is “snapped back” toward another island or islands by an unseen force—one whose very presence suggests, implicitly, the impossibility of finally choosing one island over another. (It should be noted that the metamodern swimmer of Vermeulen and van den Akker’s imagination is nearly always swimming, in the first instance, toward a neoromantic pole: e.g., sincerity, optimism, or naiveté.)

On the one hand, this idea of being constantly pulled between poles—regardless of the inclusion that, too, one prefers one pole more than another—is “classic” postmodernism. If we look within Literary Studies, for instance, we find in nearly every poststructuralist specialization evidence of a series of dialectics with a “preferred” pole. Whether it’s neo-Marxism, postcolonialism, studies of white supremacy or misogyny, or ecopoetics, a dialectic or series of dialectics is present as well as a pole toward which the postmodern scholar is themselves naturally drawn. Being drawn toward, say, the advance of the proletariat (or its contemporary equivalent) in Marxism does not mean that one can escape confronting—and indeed being in part defined by—capitalist means of production. So this “snap-back” motion so relied upon by Vermeulen and van den Akker is not only largely missing in the discrete metamodern phenomena they describe but also fails to justify their ongoing claim of “paradigm shift.”

In another sense, however, the “snap-back” metaphor is, in Literary Studies terms, a perfect circumscription of the psychic positioning and well-developed metanarrative operative in the literary work of High Modernists such as Ezra Pound and James Joyce. For instance, both Pound and James Joyce overlaid atop their personal metanarratives a “mythic” method of composition that sought to resolve personal experience with an abiding yearning for universal truth. As Pound found in his Cantos, however, and later on in his radio broadcasts for the fascists of the Axis, when one seeks repeatedly to swim toward one’s particularly derived island of truth, one is constantly snapped back to the feeling—whether it is a just feeling or not is another matter—that the many different worldviews that make up common culture are finally irreconcilable. As Pound once put it in one of his later poems, he ultimately found that he could not make “cohere” his attempts at using the mythic method of composition to create a totality—at least not one that also embraced his personal metanarrative. This is why, for the final years of his life, Pound stopped speaking altogether: he had struggled to land on his preferred island so many times that continuing to proclaim himself or his values in any fashion seemed futile. And yet, for all his High Modern investigations into the mythic, Pound was never so obtuse as to be incapable of seeing the value (if, in his view, the much lesser value) of other approaches or “islands” of truth; in this respect one struggles to distinguish between Poundian subjectivity and metamodernism as Vermeulen and van den Akker would have it. Meanwhile, one struggles to find any overlap at all between Zavarzadean metamodernism and either Pound’s Modernism or Jameson’s postmodernism—on which observation there is much more discussion hereafter.

There do remain, however, some linkages between Zavarzadean and Vermeulen/van den Akker’s metamodernism. For instance, for Vermeulen and van den Akker the question of “selection” is central to metamodernism. The latter duo’s abandoned swimmer selects a given island pursuant to a private metaphysics, but is unable to stay on—or perhaps even reach—the island he has designated as his best, if not the only possible, hope of self-promulgation. In Zavarzadean metamodernism, selection plays an equally critical role and, it seems, an almost identical one. In his essay “The Apocalyptic Fact,” for instance, Zavarzadeh distinguishes “selection based on the private metaphysics of the [individual]” from the operation of metamodern reality, which is “non-selective” to the extent that, as is the case in Vermeulen and van den Akker’s conception of metamodernism, it neither entirely permits nor entirely precludes a private metaphysics. In other words, for both Zavarzadeh and Vermeulen/van den Akker the swimmer is empowered to select an island but not empowered to find there a permanent controlling metaphor and haven. Other islands always exert their influence on the swimmer, too.

If the Vermeulen/van den Akker swimmer finds—to maintain the pair’s somewhat confusing metaphor—that he or she is “rubber-banded” (as it were) away from a chosen island and toward another or others, the difference in Zavarzadeh is merely that the swimmer has arrived at his or her chosen island only to find that it offers no clearer rescue or respite than the others. Indeed, per Zavarzadeh the new island is difficult to distinguish at all except through the deployment of a highly personalized metanarrative. The engine behind the “snap-back” force identified by Vermeulen and van den Akker is the irreconcilability of other (including opposing) options with the one that the swimmer has selected; for Zavarzadeh, this irreconcilability is present but is simply the result of a map-wide conceptual indistinguishability.

The idea that a totalizing equivalence of the sort envisioned by Zavarzadeh is not just culturally operative but dominant would be horrifying to any Literary Studies scholar now researching postmodern specializations like postcolonialism, third- and subsequent-wave feminism, or ecopoetics. Meanwhile, Vermeulen and van den Akker’s notion of the inescapability of opposing positions—if indeed we think of it as an “inescapability” rather than merely an “influence”—would be no less horrifying. Neither perspective is, in this respect, discernibly postmodern. In short, while indistinguishability and irreconcilability are by no means co-equal, if they result in an identical inescapability as between opposing poles—as they seem to do in both Zavarzadean and Vermeulen/van den Akker’s philosophy—the dramatic distinctions the latter wish to draw as between themselves and the former become unsupportable.

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The next entry in the series can be read here: #4: What Zavarzadean Metamodernism Is and Is Not

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Metamodern personalities like Donald Trump and Rachel Dolezal call into question, in very different ways, what it means to be earnest in environments that are “always-already” cynical:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG9Q2_Hv83k&w=560&h=315

Much of the disconnect between Vermeulen and van den Akker and their peers in metamodern scholarship may be attributable to disciplinary pathologies. That is, Vermeulen and van den Akker, as cultural theorists, are looking at temporally elongated phenomena which can in fact exhibit discernible signs of “metaxic” oscillation. For instance, one might find a sort of oscillation in the near-simultaneous rise of the far-right Tea Party and far-left Occupy movements in America in the 2010s. The two seemed part of a push-pull dynamic that a) for a time had all America in its grip, and b) was slow enough in its movements to qualify as an “oscillation,” albeit rapid enough to signal something more contemporary than, say, the push-pull of the Cold War.

Of course, it’s not so clear of what utility the phrase “metamodernism” is if it portends merely that dialectical tensions evident in the era of postmodernism (which was also, not so coincidentally, the Cold War era) are now cycling more rapidly than before. This would be no different, and no more helpful, than observing that the dialectical struggles of Modernism were more frenetic in the years immediately following World War II than they had been in the 1850s—the decade no less an authority on “modernisms” than Frederic Jameson has declared the beginning of the Modern era. So is metamodernism merely rapid(ish)-cycle postmodernism, as Vermeulen and van den Akker seem to posit?

It’s perhaps no surprise that in recent Continental fora, Vermeulen and van den Akker have been accused, cordially and not unfairly, of offering their readers either a paramodernistic extension of modernism (inasmuch as they imply that metamodernism is a repeated thrust toward the poles of sincerity, optimism, naiveté, neo-Romanticism, and the like) or a warmed-over postmodernism (inasmuch as they imply that the push-pull dialectic inherent to their iteration of “metamodernism” suggests that it is always-already impossible to reach escape velocity from postmodernism’s irony, cynicism, knowingness, and detachment). More broadly, some have seen in Vermeulen/van den Akker’s “metamodernism” merely the same cultural steady-state—not a balance, but a hard-fought stand-still—that has always been with us. After all, such online critics opine, every ironic moment is of course infused with some sincerity, and vice versa; every moment of collective cynicism leaves more than enough daylight for a modicum of cynicism’s opposite. They wonder aloud how any of this amounts to a new cultural paradigm.

The debate over how to read metamodernism is a much more complicated one for Literary Studies scholars like Alexandra Dumitrescu, David James, Urmila Seshagiri, and myself, or even for those, like me, whose case study-oriented cultural criticism focuses first and foremost on individual artifacts of contemporary culture rather than years-long cultural trends. To the extent Vermeulen and van den Akker’s metamodernism is focused on what they perceive as an “oscillation” between opposing poles, we must note how hard it is to find even a whisper of conspicuous “oscillation” in the individual artworks Vermeulen and van den Akker have identified as metamodern. What we find, instead, are sometimes reflexive and sometimes non-reflexive juxtapositions of opposing poles—“juxtaposition” being, not coincidentally, the concept most active in metamodernism in the view of nearly every metamodernist of my acquaintance other than Vermeulen, van den Akker, and the several editors of their research project (or those who submit essays to the project in the hope of synthesizing its central claims).

Committed metamodernists are also likely to be confused by the recent announcement, by one of the editors of Notes on Metamodernism, that “everyone today is a metamodernist unless they’re out of step.” On the one hand, Vermeulen and van den Akker seemed—at least prior to their most recent essay on the topic—to have doubled down on a metaphor (oscillation, derived from Plato’s oscillatory “metaxy”) that ill-describes individual metamodern artifacts, while on the other hand those associated with their research now risk defining metamodernism out of any consequential existence whatsoever. Indeed, if everyone and everything is ever and always metamodern, then nothing and no one ever discretely is, surely. This may explain, too, why Vermeulen and van den Akker have been stuck describing their view of metamodernism in a fashion modernists term “Modernist” and postmodernists “postmodern.”

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As a Literary Studies scholar myself, I suppose it’s not surprising that my own views on metamodernism stem from the writing of a fellow Literary Studies scholar who a) was the first ever to discuss the term in academic literature, and b) applied his analysis of the term first and foremost to individual authors and artworks—as Literary Studies scholars are wont to do. I therefore consider myself a “Zavarzadean metamodernist,” after the American scholar, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, who coined the term “metamodernism” in his 1975 essay “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives.” I also find myself in much agreement with the Literary Studies analysis of metamodernism offered in the 2000s by Alexandra Dumitrescu, which in my view is sympathetic with—if not directly derived from—that of Zavarzadeh. The same could be said of Andre Furlani, another Literary Studies scholar whose 1990s research into metamodernism can be readily networked with my own, Zavarzadeh’s, and Dumitrescu’s. So if the Vermeulen/van den Akker reading of the term is increasingly an outlier that is hard to cogently attach to specific artworks in the present, it may be, again, that Vermeulen and van den Akker are less interested in discussing artworks than cultural epochs. While I might argue that Literary Studies scholars researching metamodernism are every bit as invested as Vermeulen and van den Akker are with reading metamodernism as a cultural paradigm, I do think our manner of proceeding is more inductive than the deductive approach native to cultural studies. That is, the literary scholar is more apt to look at a single artwork and ask “How is this new?” and “What does this herald?”, while the cultural theorist (more like a Comp Lit scholar) looks at an enduring volume of phenomena and asks, “What happened?” and “How are all these related?” I find Cultural Studies not quite as facile when it comes to the synthesis of individual artworks, but I also concede that’s likely a disciplinary bias.

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To understand some of the current disputes between and among metamodernists it is useful to review some basic features of their two paradigmatic predecessors, Modernism and postmodernism. To begin with, Modernism and postmodernism are both correctly regarded—as they are described in Wikipedia and everywhere else—as “twentieth century movements.” Both Modernism and postmodernism were in their day widely instrumentalized as artistic programs by artists of every background, genre, and aesthetic inclination. Metamodernism is, like Modernism and postmodernism, a cultural paradigm. This means that, like Modernism and postmodernism, it can be construed as a movement, a philosophy, a system of logic, a structure of feeling, and a cultural dominant that both is reflected in existing cultural activities and can be channeled (due to it being a movement, philosophy, system of logic, and structure of feeling operative in individual creators as well as cultures and subcultures) into new creative endeavors. Modernism and postmodernism, like metamodernism, also have necessarily political dimensions that are played out in spheres in which the terms Modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism are not themselves used in any conspicuous way. What Frederic Jameson wrote of postmodernism may also be true, then, of metamodernism: “Every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance…” This is the case even as/when the politics attendant upon metamodern structures are still being worked through by scholars of metamodernism.

Recently, Vermeulen and van den Akker suggested that metamodernism, unlike Modernism and postmodernism, is neither a movement nor in itself especially or uniquely ripe for programmatic treatment. Moreover, though as recently as 2010 the two men had described metamodernism as a “system of logic” as well as a structure of feeling, they now decry the former assignation and refer to metamodernism as simply a “structure of feeling.” In addition to these recent clarifications of their now widely read 2010 article on metamodernism, the two have now also addressed (or perhaps re-addressed) the usage of the term metamodernism by others. Though they acknowledge that their own employment of the term is not one of the first (or even an early) usage, they do insist, at least, that it is largely unrelated to all others of note since 1975. Some of these other usages they decry as being mere re-orientations of postmodern thought, others as possibly new modernisms that nevertheless bear no significant association to the term “metamodernism” as they discuss it.

The problem with the above analysis—indeed the larger problem with the Vermeulen/van den Akker reading of metamodernism—is that for all its reference to its own historicity (and even to specific political and ecological precursors and enablers), it is finally ahistorical. The published uses of the term by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh in the 1970s, by Moyo Okediji, Andre Furlani, and more than a dozen others in the 1990s and early 2000s, and by Alexandra Dumitrescu in the mid-2000s all share such a raft of common features that we can, while still drawing distinctions between individual perspectives, nevertheless recognize in their totality a general sense impression of metamodernism that is shared by all. By comparison, Vermeulen and van den Akker’s current approach to metamodernism as neither a movement nor a system of logic removes metamodernism, it would seem, from the post-postmodernism debate altogether—by terming as “cultural paradigm” what appears to be, instead, a phenomenon lacking paradigmatic features. This is especially so now that terms like “movement” and “system of logic” (as well as much of the language long employed to describe the instrumentalization of cultural paradigms) has been removed from the Vermeulen/van den Akker discourse. That metamodernism as they describe it is, per this article and the Continental fora referenced above, merely a new take on old-fashioned postmodern dialectics is another significant complication.

(For what it’s worth, I will say here that I think Vermeulen and van den Akker do not so much preclude the instrumentalization of metamodernism as stand in such suspicion of it that their rather hasty denial of terms like “movement” and “system of logic” is more reactive than dogmatic. As noted, these phrases are clearly applicable to metamodernism, even if what we do with them is up for debate and disagreement.)

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The next entry in the series can be read here: #3: Developing a Guiding Metaphor for the Metamodern.

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Metamodern musicians like Holly Herndon and Donald Glover redefine terms like “voice” and “tone.” Is Herndon’s music voice-driven or synthetic? Is Glover’s “Sober” romantic or creepy?

Recent years have seen metamodernists from around the world struggling to create an international dialogue around the topic due to disagreements over what the term “metamodernism” could or does signify. In some respects this is no different a state of affairs from that faced by early postmodernists in the mid-twentieth century, and is endemic to any dialogue about an emerging cultural paradigm. In other respects, the persistent fragmentation of metamodern discourse is an unnecessary and damaging condition that remains—for a little while longer, at least—capable of redress. If there are, going forward, to be international convocations of metamodern scholars at conferences and symposia, one thing that will have to change, and soon, is this: different readings of the term must no longer be recast as entirely different conversations, whose participants would no more naturally expect to engage one another than would car salesmen and cheesemongers.

While metamodernists in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia may disagree on certain important questions—e.g., can metamodernism be instrumentalized, and if so, how? Does metamodernism permit the transcendence of postmodern dialectics, or merely change our relationship with postmodernism?—these are the sorts of inquiries that can and do get discussed at conferences and symposia convened for and by (for instance) scholars of postmodernism. What can no longer be indulged or tolerated, however, especially in discussions of a term that naturally engages both Modernist and postmodern principles, is the claim that some metamodern philosophers are participating in an entirely different discourse from their peers.

From wherever they hail, and howsoever they approach the term metamodernism, all those publicly exploring the topic of metamodernism seem to concur on a number of points:

• • • The term was coined in 1975, by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. It thereafter appeared in a variety of contexts, albeit mostly academic journals, in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
    • The term did not enter common parlance until the early 2010s, and when it did so it was owing in substantial part to essays (and a website) authored by Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker.
    • While certain trends and events in the nineteenth and preceding centuries may have exhibited qualities now popularly termed “metamodern,” as a discrete and reflexive cultural paradigm metamodernism is best and currently discussed as having manifested sometime in the last half-century. While some see proto-manifestations of metamodernism in the early 1970s, and while nearly all agree that the great metamodern novel written thus far in English (Infinite Jest) was begun in the mid-1980s, metamodern cultural detritus did not become ubiquitous until the late 1990s or early twenty-first century.
    • The Internet is a significant inflector of metamodern phenomena.
    • Metamodernism is a mediation between principles of Modernism and postmodernism.
    • Metamodernism is a cultural paradigm discrete from Modernism and postmodernism.
    • Metamodernism proposes a system of thought and feeling—for both individuals, groups of individuals, and even institutions—that is distinct from the systems enacted by the Modernist and postmodern paradigms.
    • As was the case with Modernism and postmodernism, there will be those who seek to “instrumentalize” metamodernism for artistic, political, or other ends. Metamodernism can also exist in a purely scholarly or retrospective sphere that is not invested in instrumentalization.
    • Manifestations of metamodernism are ubiquitous; there is no sphere of human activity in which we do not presently find the metamodern.
    • Metamodernism arises from a yearning; that yearning most commonly relates to the dissatisfactions produced (or simply maintained or exacerbated) by postmodernism.
    • Metamodernism is a global phenomenon with local but necessarily interconnected manifestations.
    • Metamodernism will be read and/or actuated differently by different scholars, artists, activists, et cetera; having a different reading of the term’s minute valences does not make one a liar, “hoax artist,” troll, or “closet postmodernist,” provided that one accepts most or all of the exceedingly basic presuppositions listed here.
    • Metamodernism (and research into metamodernism) is still in its very, very early stages.
    • Research into (and investigations of) metamodernism may manifest differently depending upon the discipline in which the scholar or artist is working. For instance, literary metamodernism may diverge in some respects from metamodernism in the visual arts—simply because the cultural philosophy is interacting, in these two cases, with different media.
    • Metamodernism does not so much signal a wholesale rejection of either Modernism or postmodernism as a subsuming of principles endemic to each for a new purpose and structure. In other words, postmodernism has not so much “ended” as it has been subsumed within and then superseded by a new cultural paradigm.

In reading (and speaking with) metamodernists from Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, I’ve found the basic outline of the term offered above to be consistent. What has not been consistent is a willingness to further explore specific valences of metamodernism as part of an international dialogue.

Recently, some associated with the longstanding website Notes on Metamodernism have sought to distinguish their consideration of metamodernism from all others with the claim that they are discussing an entirely different term and concept from other metamodernists. In some instances they accuse other metamodernists of being closet postmodernists; in other instances they call them liars or hoax artists; in still other instances they concede their peers are discussing a new “modernism” but reject the idea that this modernism has anything whatsoever to do with metamodernism as Notes on Metamodernism discusses it—so much so that the idea of regular international conferences or symposia of metamodern scholars increasingly seems unlikely. While the position of Notes of Metamodernism toward other metamodernists internationally would normally be immaterial, at this vulnerable early stage of metamodern discourse it matters because—the times being as “early” as they are—a single website, no matter how provincial, can still wield substantial influence. This won’t be the case five years from now, but it’s where things stand today. The result is that while conferences and symposia relating to the readings of metamodernism found in Notes on Metamodernism have already been held, prerequisites for attendance have been set which insist on common readings of the term “metamodernism”—for instance, a belief that “oscillation” is at the center of the concept because it is and must be at the center of the concept’s “meta-” prefix.

Within the last two months, however, there has been a breakthrough of sorts, and this six-part blog-like rumination on where metamodernism stands today is related to that breakthrough. The breakthrough came in an essay recently published by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in which the two Dutch cultural theorists a) concede that the first consequential usage of the term pre-dates 2010, and in fact harkens to 1975; b) allow that “metaxy” (and thus “oscillation”) may not, in fact, be an intractable feature of metamodern philosophy, thus opening up the possibility that those who demur from “oscillatory metamodernism” may also be metamodern scholars worthy of serious and ongoing engagement; and c) situate at the center of their own view of metamodernism an analogy for the paradigm—a complicated one involving an abandoned swimmer and several islands offering possible rescue—which is not, in fact, far removed from the paradigm as understood by metamodern scholars elsewhere in the world.

The idea now accepted by Vermeulen, van den Akker, and their website Notes on Metamodernism—that metamodernism constitutes not so much a dialectical operation as a yearning to escape one’s present, postmodernism-enabled circumstances, and a concurrent difficulty in doing so—offers new hope of a heterogeneous international dialogue about metamodernism. It suggests that we can finally move beyond the false accusations and false distinctions (along the lines of, “your term is not my term, so we’ve nothing to discuss”) that have plagued this budding scholarly dialogue in the past.

By accepting Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s place in the history of metamodernism-qua-term, Vermeulen and van den Akker have invited, too, a response from those who believe Zavarzadean metamodernism to be one important reading of the paradigm—if not (still) one that Vermeulen and van den Akker accept as constituting a new modernism. Because I find Vermeulen and van den Akker’s reading of Zavarzadeh not just thoroughly unconvincing but indeed a dramatic misreading of the scholar’s seminal text on metamodernism (1975’s “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives”) and because I myself have come to approach metamodernism primarily through the lens first offered by Zavarzadeh, I’ve written this rumination to attempt a sort of reconciliation. In the future my hope would be to do the same for metamodernism as discussed on Metamoderna, for metamodernism as discussed by Alexandra Dumitrescu and Gary Forrester (and many others) in Australia and New Zealand, and for metamodernism as discussed by artists such as American poet/filmmaker Jesse Damiani and Spanish poet/novelist Vicente Lopez. By “reconciliation” I mean here only a better situation of these readings with respect to one another, not a paving over of differences. Again, beyond the basic principles articulated above I think the term “metamodernism” offers ample room for spirited debate and disagreement among peers—including, importantly, over how to read the “meta-” prefix itself.

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The next entry in the series can be read here: #2: Metamodernism Across the Disciplines.

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Bo Burnham’s “what.” and Reggie Watts’ “Why Shit So Crazy?” are tours-de-force of metamodern performance art:

With a touch of self-irony, Harris entitled the exchange “The Limits of Discourse: As Demonstrated by Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky”. On Facebook alone, the post has attracted over 4000 likes and 1500 shares. The discussions rage on as people take stands and assess their discussion. These two famous people, who Harris estimates have about a million readers in common, are at each other’s throats.

They are trying to resolve some issues of mutual accusations in the public debate and to understand each other’s position to clarify their own points and moral assessment. I will try to give my input into their discussion, leaving out assessments of who did best (or worst) in their mail exchange. I believe that there is a position that is analytically superior to that of both Harris and Chomsky, and that a person adopting this position can avoid the problems raised by both authors. Such a position concedes that both writers are partly right, but also holds that they are both partly wrong.

What their quarrel is about

Basically, the two authors are arguing about whether or not war crimes perpetrated by the US, the Clinton administration in particular, are as bad as Al Qaeda’s attack during 9/11.

Chomsky holds that the crimes of the US are perhaps not equivalent with Al Qaeda’s attack on 9/11, that they are of a different kind and character, but that they are nevertheless just as morally appalling. He exemplifies this with the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan 1998, the Al-Shifa plant. This factory seems to have been bombed as a retaliation for the bombing of the US embassy. The results were catastrophic as Sudan, already a country in deep crisis, could not replenish the vital medicines and thousands of innocent people died from curable diseases as a result. Chomsky draws the conclusion that President Clinton must have understood these consequences and acted callously to reach his political goals, ignoring the fates of so many innocents simply because they were Africans.

Harris holds that the US is morally superior to Al Qaeda and that the chief difference is that Al Qaeda hold irrational beliefs derived from their religion, Islam. He concedes that the US is guilty of many crimes, but that there is a severe difference of degree and intentionality between these and groups like Al Qaeda. He believes that the Clinton administration must have accidentally caused the deaths of so many innocents while having more morally viable intentions, like believing that the Al-Shifa plant was in fact producing chemical weapons.

Chomsky in turn sees Harris’s position as offering an excuse for aggressive and tyrannical foreign policy. He means that Harris is not using the same yardstick for US aggression as for the terrorists. If US aggression caused more deaths – and crueler, slower deaths by diseases – it must be just as bad, or worse, than 9/11, and it is the duty of citizens of a democratic society to speak out against and condemn such actions. He feels that just because the US government may not have acted following the word of God, it doesn’t make its crimes any less serious.

When Harris insists that there is a difference of intention, that the intentions of the US government was almost certainly not to cause harm to innocent people, Chomsky retorts that he is not interested in such benign intentionality because all kinds of bad guys have “nice intentions”, like when the Japanese attacked China filled with the conviction that they were creating the foundations for an earthly paradise.

This is about as far as the two authors get in their exchange. I would like to add some notions to develop their points towards a common understanding – but also towards a metamodern critique of both.

Intentionality vs. consequence

The first point is the simplest. There are four different schools of ethics, four major ways of ascribing moral value (or lack thereof) to actions: intentionality, consequence, virtue (personal character of the individual) and principle (universal, logical moral principles).

We can use all four, or combinations between them, to resolve the dispute. But let’s stick with the two that the authors employ in this particular mail exchange. (Note however that both authors have used all four forms of ethics in their earlier works and thought).

If we look at the intentionality it arguably seems that 9/11 is more murderous than the bombing of Al-Shifa, because people are directly targeted as victims. It simply seems implausible that Bill Clinton’s mind and heart were filled with hatred and mayhem when he ordered the bombing. This is the same guy who tried to get health service to the US population and stop the Rwanda genocide and today is an advocate of an equitable, green global community. Of course, we cannot know for sure. But it seems likely that he must not have been able to grasp the full human consequences. It seems likely that he cognitively failed to realize the abstract notion of so many lives at risk through his actions in a pressed situation. This can be contrasted to the 9/11 bombers who worked hard for years to inflict very direct and tangible harm to people. That requires a quantity of malign intention that we’d be hard pressed to find in Mr. President even if we squeezed his deep psyche dry of every drop of repressed anger. In this school of thought Harris is right – unless we adopt a conspiracy theory induced worldview where we honestly believe that the US is run by murderous psychopaths.

If we look at consequences, US aggression is way worse. More people killed, more lives destroyed, greater messes made. So from a consequence ethics perspective, Chomsky is right.

So far so good. But it doesn’t really resolve the conflict. Is Chomsky correct to let actions and consequences speak for themselves, ignoring stated “benign” intentions? Is Harris excusing cruel US aggression by adding a spiritual, vague factor like “intentionality”?

Beyond Chomsky and Harris is Jürgen Habermas

If we look at this question from the perspective of another intellectual giant, Jürgen Habermas, the field clears. In his theory of communicative action he distinguishes between three fundamental requirements of statements or other actions.

• • • Truth value – is the statement correct, compared with “objective reality”?
    • Moral value – is it morally justifiable?
    • Truthfulness – is the speaker honest about his/her intention?

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If you break down 9/11 and Al-Shifa into these three parts, it becomes much easier to distinguish between them and the intentionality behind them.

In terms of truth value, the crucial question becomes if the US government fully realized the consequences of their actions. Again, this we cannot know, but it is less clear that they did than Osama bin Laden and friends.

In terms of moral value, they have different justifications. The US government believes that they are upholding a certain political order or system; let’s call it a modern democratic capitalist world order on which large parts of the world population depend. Al Qaeda terrorists believe that they are fighting oppression and bringing a holy kingdom into the world. More people would buy the moral grounds of the US government, as the order they are defending is more inclusive and ethically defensible than that of Al Qaeda, even if it is far from the highest conceivable moral principle.

The real action happens at truthfulness. To what extent are they perpetrators of these different crimes deluding themselves, emotionally and intellectually? How much are their respective justifications just “excuses” for acting from hurt, hateful emotions that wish to harm and degrade others? The US government seems guilty of many such ideological excuses and manipulations, but compared to Al Qaeda, they would pass the truthfulness test with flying colors. It is simply much less believable that Al Qaeda acted, in all honesty, from the love of their hearts or from a wish for peace and stability. The intention to harm is so obvious in their ideology and activity that their project must be seen as a much greater lie than the US bid for world power.

With Habermas then, Harris takes a solid lead over Chomsky. Chomsky collapses these three dimensions of communicative action and fails to see that Al Qaeda act from a less generalizable moral system and that they are less truthful in their intentions.

The answer is moral development

What both authors miss, even if Harris mentions it briefly but seems to lack the theory to explicate what he means, is that Al Qaeda and the US government act from two distinctly different stages of moral and psycho-social development. In the light of this part of the argument Chomsky comes out ahead of Harris, but only somewhat, as you will see. Here’s what I mean.

There are specific moral systems and social orders in human societies that can be ranked according to complexity and inclusiveness. They have been described in many forms, the simplest one being Spiral Dynamics based on the developmental psychology of Clare Graves. Here are some simplified stages:

• • • • Tribal values
      • Warrior-king imperialist values
      • Traditional values
      • Modern values
      • Postmodern values
      • Metamodern values

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Now, Al Qaeda is a radicalization of traditional Islam. They don’t only seek to achieve a peaceful albeit somewhat medieval order like most traditional Muslims (like the Saudi government, etc.), but put holy war, sacrifice and killing at the heart of their religion and ideology. In a psycho-social sense, this is a regression to an earlier stage – from the relatively stable traditional stage to an earlier one: warrior-king imperialist values. When societies break down or experience great pressure and instability, parts of the population may regress to earlier stages and the simpler cognitive frames, interpretations of the world.

Regressions of these kinds are often very destructive. Imagine having Genghis Khan running a modern bureaucracy – and you get the Nazis. When modern global networks use the internet to achieve a holy war for the sake of the struggle itself – you get Al Qaeda. Originally this stage emerged when some tribes grew in strength and began conquering surrounding tribes, taking slaves and imposing their power gods linked to a strong leader. They were aggressive, but also achieved the first centralized, urban societies.

The US government is largely working from modern values. They believe themselves to work for a universal, enlightened and fair order of economic competition, democracy and free speech. They at least attempt to uphold and defend human rights.

What happens with Harris is that he takes the modern values for granted and does not offer due respect to earlier or later stages of moral development. He simply believes that large parts of the world population are under the influence of some strange spell he calls “irrational religious beliefs”. He believes that, if only this strange spell were broken, people would reason like himself, like a modern mind. He fails to see that the world and the manifold of constructed meaningful universes within it are under development. He thinks that if you just criticize and ridicule God enough, people will snap out of it and start acting normal. In fact, people are responding to whole psychological worlds that they encounter, and they take the explanations at hand that speak best to their emotions given the social settings they are in. He fails to see that Al Qaeda fighters are not primarily Muslims, but hurt souls with regressive psycho-social development. And you must see the specific historical events that caused this harm – in which US foreign policy played a large and often unfortunate part. Harris does not sufficiently distinguish between traditional Islam and the regressive warrior-king imperialist version of Al Qaeda. Nor does he concede that there can be modern and postmodern forms of much more up-to-date Islam (which do exist).

Here Chomsky is better. He understands that strange beliefs and social, political and structural pathologies are not contained within religion. He understands that modern ideologies can be just as irrational, sectarian and oppressive – and often much less innocent than believing in the odd miracle or that Jesus walked on water. He sees that Al Qaeda and others like them are reacting to real, political issues that have messed up their lives and made them who they are.

Where Chomsky goes wrong is when he does not admit to Harris that there is indeed a great – vast – difference of quality between the terrorism of Al Qaeda and US aggression. The US is working from a modern set of values where all humans are seen as equal. They often fail to live up to those values and sometimes colonial or traditional religious values sneak in and cause regression or hypocrisy, but their general set of norms are just much higher and more developed than those of Al Qaeda.

This is because Chomsky himself, an intellectual anarchist, operates from postmodern values, which themselves emerge by critiquing modern values and the inconsistencies of modern society. Doing this, he fails to offer due respect to the real progress made in societies like the US, which is what seems to tick Harris off.

Oh Harris. Oh Chomsky

US atrocities exist, but they are a much smaller part of the US than terrorism is of Al Qaeda and they happen in a completely different moral universe. Compare the two institutions, US government and Al Qaeda. The US has much, much greater power and budget. This means that whatever they do in the world, it is amplified thousandfold for good and bad. Consider the US budget. It has a solid percentage of its expenses in the military, but still a small percentage. Out of this military power only a fraction is actually employed in very aggressive or harmful ways. Now imagine that Al Qaeda had that power. Would they not be doing stuff that is much, much worse than what the US has been up to the last decades? Would not Chomsky be a much busier man writing about their foreign policy? Wouldn’t we expect, like with ISIS today, mass deportation, rampant aggression, oppressive laws on women and genocide left and right?

There’s the difference that Harris is looking for. And as far as the moral difference between the US and Al Qaeda goes, Harris is right and Chomsky is wrong. But Chomsky is right in criticizing the US government for not being postmodern enough. Harris is doing something considerably less fruitful and insensitive to historical context: criticizing Al Qaeda for not having values modern enough, without looking for what part the US may have played in the creation of such pathology.

My five cents is to critique Harris and Chomsky, both – for not being metamodern enough. Metamodern thought and sentiment are sensitive to the multiple dimensions of ethics, to historical context and to the crucial role of moral, psychological and social development.

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on his facebook profile here.

The answers to these questions are, in order of appearance: yes, there is a such a thing as Karmic law; no, nobody gets what they deserve because we always deserve something infinitely better; no, power precedes morality, so being powerful and successful counts for more than being good (and this is so by mathematical necessity); yes, kindness and morality have inherent rewards (and sins have automatic punishments); yes, the world is a cosmic order of morality; no the world is not indifferent – its fundamental principle is love which is the same as non-indifference, which means that the universe itself cares.

But let’s not rush things. All of these answers are part-time poison; they need to be qualified and put into context in order to be meaningful and correct. We’ll get around to answering all of it. Or rather, we’ll cut right through this knot and dissolve the questions. We will, if you like, reveal how stupid these inquires really are. We’ll catch our left hand in the cookie jar, take a deep breath, look up at the sky and let out a dry philosophical chuckle at ourselves.

I here propose a fully, thoroughly, uncompromisingly and unapologetically secular and rational understanding of Karma; that is, our purpose here is to propose an understanding of the moral nature of the universe, life and existence. This understanding is that, yes, Karma is as real and universal as light, matter and space. A rational understanding of Karma is fundamentally incompatible with traditional religious beliefs East and West – as well as it is incompatible with the idea of an indifferent universe; the ‘indifferent universe’ being an irrational belief system of today’s confused atheists. I offer you spiritual reason. If reason’s your game.

A Karmic Stage Model

First of all we need to understand a simple stage model in relation to the understanding of Karma. It can be described in more detail, but let’s keep it simple. The four stages would be 1. pre-Karma, 2. traditional religious Karma, 3. secular nihilism, and 4. secular Karma.

The first stage has no real conception of universal morality and simply confounds might with right. It also does not differentiate between self-interest and common or universal interest. Thereby the question of Karma doesn’t arise.

The second stage is to believe in Karma as a religious belief system. This is what the vast majority of today’s Buddhists and Hindus do – as well as Christians, Jews and Muslims, who have personalized theistic conceptions of punishment and reward. The traditional belief structure is just that: a belief. People think that there is actually a huge cosmic piece of machinery out there that, in the light of universal truth, judges each action of each person and then sums up the score, and then dishes out punishments and rewards, in this life or the next. They believe that this is a mechanism separate from the normal workings of the universe, that is has its own explanatory power, and that it frankly gives a damn about who did what, with whom, to whom and when.

I should stop here, before we go along, to point out that this traditional conception of Karma – in all its irrationality and harmful consequences – is also what is currently being taught at most modern Western yoga studios. Such teachings are generally expressed in vaguer (and cuter sounding) terms than say teachings of traditional Tibetan Buddhism, but the general idea is still basically the same: there is a huge machine out there counting every step you take, and it wants you to be a good boy/girl, and it will give you candy if you are, and kick you in the face with high heels if you are naughty. And remember, he sees you when you’re sleeping.

The third stage is to go beyond Karma and simply not believe in it. There is no reason to think that any such huge cosmic machinery would be out there, let alone care what we are up to, or have a universal measure of the respective “moral” merits of each of our doings, or have the means of dishing out punishments and rewards in proportion, or identify us as individual souls based on our DNA in the first place. The universe is out there blaming us for being scared, having needs, having limited perspectives, or just for being born with inherent limitations? And you want us to believe in this without any shred of evidence? Naaahh… Come on! This is quite obviously an anthropomorphization of the universe, as if the natural world would follow the conceptions of right and wrong present in this particular human society in this particular time.

At this third stage Karma is not real, and there is only a secular, indifferent natural order. You can rape and kill children in torturous ways and still have soft ice cream in the sun the next carefree, beautiful morning. Or you can be a good, empathetic person and still get cancer and have your mother creamed by a bus. There is no Karmic law. There is no fairness. Sorry. Human beings, our society and morality are just fluctuations upon the surface of a deeper physical reality of nature, and this reality is fundamentally amoral. It doesn’t care. Thus, all there is to it is that humans have ideals, social contracts, norms and opinions, but these are contingent, relative and not really real.

Where the first order simply justifies itself arbitrarily, and the second order justifies itself by reference to an absolute order of the universe, the third order must wrestle with the question of morality in a much more fundamental way. The third order still has morality, but has difficulties when it comes to justifying that morality. I shouldn’t make other people suffer unnecessarily. Really? Why not? You’ll hear all kinds of outrageous excuses from secular people, justifying their moral sentiments in an amoral universe: Because that is how our species is programmed. Because I feel like it. It’s not that I don’t think I shouldn’t murder children; it’s just not my style. We must help the poor because human dignity demands it.

The third stage can ridicule the second stage all they want. But their neck is exposed: You still have morality, and you cannot justify it as universal. I mean, “because human dignity demands it”? How irrational and magical isn’t that? You deserve a big rational slap in your face for excuses like that, as far as Karma goes. In the stage three position your own morality cannot be superior to anyone else’s – including the guy who wants to steal your car.

Secular Karma

The fourth stage, secular Karma, addresses this issue. It agrees with the secularists that there is no universal moral computer out there, keeping scrupulous track of each individual soul over the years and eons; indeed it agrees that there is probably no such thing as an individual soul in the first place.

But it adds a few things that make Karma meaningful in a rational and secular setting, showing a deeper, contemplative meaning to the term and to the Buddhist and Christian wisdom traditions. The fourth stage basically says that Karma is, just as the root of the word suggests, simply the net effects of each action or agency. This net effect should be viewed with collapsed time and space dimensions, meaning that even suffering caused to creatures at great distance in time and space – or across long causal chains of events – has the same value. Same goes for bliss caused.

This means that good actions are good because they have favorable or desirable consequences for sentient beings, and bad actions are bad because they have unfavorable or undesirable consequences for sentient beings. That’s it. That is the meaning of Karma. It is so by perfect logical necessity, by definition. It is universal and all-pervading. It has always been true and it will always be true. To know and act according to this truth is good, always has been and always will be. To ignore or neglect this truth is bad, always has been, and always will be.

It is hard, scientific, logical, secular Karmic law. There is no escape from it. There never has been and there never will be.

But a few things need to be clarified.

Spiritual Reason

It is important to understand that we just made a few great leaps that part with some of our individualistic, atomic intuitions of the modern era. These need to be explicated.

The first part is that we must consider “consciousness” in general. Secular Karma only makes sense if we consider the world as non-indifferent, as entailing consciousness, experience, perception and feeling. If nothing were alive to sense bliss, beauty or pain, then of course nothing would matter. The universe would really be amoral.

But the universe is not indifferent. It seems to be full with life and/or at least the potential for life, which also gives it a moral nature even at the level of birthing stars and space dust. Life in turn seems to be ordered into increasingly sensing and feeling entities such as animals of different kinds. These self-organizing entities both have subjectivity and the potential for giving birth to new life forms and new forms of lived experience. It is easy to imagine cultural development and biological evolution – now advancing more rapidly through the use of science – bringing forth genuinely new forms of life with novel non-indifferent experiences of the universe.

But what is the specific place of consciousness in the world, the locus conscientae, to use a fancy term? If you turn your mental gaze inside and try to find the source of your own consciousness, you never seem to really hit home. Are my thoughts my consciousness? Who then is hearing the thoughts? Who is speaking them? To whom is that voice speaking? And who has a stomach ache? Who reacts to it? Just answering “Hanzi” seems unsatisfactory. The Eastern traditions have pointed out this simple fact at least since the Axial age some 2500 years ago.

So if I cannot seem to find a delineated individual consciousness within my own experience – can I really be said to have an individual consciousness at all? I can’t find a stable category that I call “myself” anywhere in the world… My body is made out of matter I digested just the other day, my words were taught to me by you guys, the thoughts just seem to be flowing out of me from some void, beyond “my” control, my DNA seems to be changing epigenetically, my looks, my needs, my values and opinions, habits… They all have origins beyond my individual “self”.

Nevertheless I am conscious. If I am conscious, but not separate from the rest of the universe, the conclusion should be clear: My real self, in a deeper sense, is consciousness itself, which is the consciousness of the universe itself. This means that my own consciousness is basically and fundamentally the same as yours and everyone else’s. We may not be able to see with each other’s eyes or hear each other’s thoughts, but we seem to be conscious by virtue of the same functions of the universe. We seem, in a very real sense, to be part of the same conscious self-organizing process.

It appears that you guys also have brains and bodies and that you are conscious. Most probably you cannot be clearly delineated as individuals either. You must be conscious in the same non-individual way that I am.

If this is understood, the principle of secular Karma should not be surprising. If my real self is consciousness itself, anything that I do that harms anyone or anything, in any time, at any distance, is fundamentally harming myself. This is so by necessity.

Again. Precisely because we do not have individual souls, Karma makes sense. This is the exact opposite of believing that we have individual souls which persist over time and that Big Brother is watching (oh, with love of course). Precisely because there is no individual soul, but only a commonly created consciousness, Karma makes sense.

Karma showed up as a contemplative insight by people who disidentified with their individual sense of self. They said that, since the individual self has no substance and consciousness seems to be a fundamental quality of the universe, my real self must be consciousness itself – in all beings, in all ages, in all places, from all perspectives. Thereby, it doesn’t matter more if Hanzi is happy than if John or Mary are happy. That Hanzi’s experience should matter more is merely an optical illusion of the senses. If John in 10000 years suffers, it is as relevant as if Hanzi suffers today, or as if Mary suffered a thousand years ago.

This contemplative insight was simplified into the mythical teaching of traditional religions, be it as Karma or heaven and hell. The simplification was that, if Hanzi is a bad boy (and yes, I admit to being just that) then Hanzi himself will be punished at a later time. Not so. Karma doesn’t care if Hanzi is a good boy. It just cares about all sentient beings, in all times. And Hanzi is part of that. If Hanzi causes harm, he may still be happy. But at a more fundamental level, I will still have harmed myself.

The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment were right to dismember that mythic, simplified construct. But they largely failed to understand that at the core, the religions were right, that spiritual insight is real, and that Karma is the law of the universe. Moral cause and effect.

The Impure, Guiltless Universe

What Jesus, the contemplative Jesus, taught (if he was a historical person or the result of the writings of other historical persons) was a vital paradox of existence: that we are free from sin, that there is no such thing as individual guilt and no reason for blame – and that we are always sinners, in that our agency unavoidably is imperfect and always causes both harm and does good.

His solution to this paradox was a certain mental quality or attitude: that of universal love, which is the same as radical acceptance of all things as they are. Which is the same as surrendering to God. Which is the same as identifying with God-in-the-world (the Holy Ghost or Godhead).

The contemplative insight of secular Karma is that we are always without guilt, and that there is no reason for blame towards ourselves or one another, or the world itself. This is a transpersonal perspective. It appears that people who reach spiritual insight all come down with this same transpersonal perspective: don’t cast the first stone, because you are really throwing it at yourself. Just identify with everything, accept it, love it, and give it your best smack-down, all the while accepting that you will both fail and succeed.

So we can never be perfect, never “free from sin” (where “sin” simply means making mistakes and causing harm). And yet, we are always perfect or pure in the sense that no guilt or metaphysical notion of evil can ever be attached to our individual souls (because they are not there). We can always, in full love and acceptance of all things as they are, be forgiven and redeemed. There is no nasty Karma machine keeping count. That is the real essence of Eastern acceptance and Christian forgiveness. These insights are good news, which is the meaning of the word “evangel“.

Secular Karma, then, is the reasoned belief that this universe is a moral one. It is the insight that I am not the “good guy” or the “chosen one”, but that all I do matters immensely for all sentient beings. This is carried not as a burden, not as a duty, but as play – a play with tragedy, beauty and mystery; and yes, a play with the messy business we call politics.

Welcome to the impure, guiltless universe.

I’ll leave the final word with that old rascal you know:

‘To see the universal and all-pervading spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. This is why my devotion of Truth has drawn me to into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.’

– Mahatma Gandhi, Autobiography, 1948, p 615 (quoted in ‘Truth is God’, p 5, compiled by R. K. Prabhu)

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on his facebook profile here.