fuck this gay-ass bombed-out intellectual desert which boomers hath bestowed upon us

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3229108&forum_id=2#30519803)

Both the metamodern epistemology (as if) and its ontology (between) should thus be conceived of as a ‘‘both-neither’’ dynamic. They are each at once modern and postmodern and neither of them. This dynamic can perhaps most appropriately be described by the metaphor of metaxis. Literally, the term metataxis translates as ‘‘between’’. It has however, via Plato and later the German philosopher Eric Voegelin, come to be associated with the experience of existence and consciousness. Voegelin describes metaxis as follows:

Existence has the structure of the In-Between,

of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything

is constant in the history of mankind it

is the language of tension between life and

death, immortality and mortality, perfection

and imperfection, time and timelessness,

between order and disorder, truth and

untruth, sense and senselessness of existence;

between amor Dei and amor sui, l’aˆme ouverte

and l’ame close;

http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/5677/6304

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3229108&forum_id=2#30519956)

Demolishes it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3229108&forum_id=2#30519815)

i found a pdf of the book and i read the last chapter.

suffice to say, it should have been patently obviously that you, of all poasters, would unabashedly agree that art's exclusive purpose is carnal.

that pinker BOTH misquotes and misreads that woolf quote is extremely telling.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3229108&forum_id=2#30520182)

Notes on metamodernism (2010)

Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker

The ecosystem is severely disrupted, the financial system is increasingly uncontrollable, and the geopolitical structure has recently begun to appear as unstable as it has always been uneven.1 CEOs and politicians express their ‘‘desire for change’’ at every interview and voice a heartfelt ‘‘yes we can’’ at each photo-op. Planners and architects increasingly replace their blueprints for environments with environmental ‘‘greenprints’’. And new generations of artists increasingly abandon the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction, parataxis, and pastiche in favor of aesth-ethical notions of reconstruction, myth, and metaxis. These trends and tendencies can no longer be explained in terms of the postmodern. They express a (often guarded) hopefulness and (at times feigned) sincerity that hint at another structure of feeling, intimating another discourse. History, it seems, is moving rapidly beyond its all too hastily proclaimed end.

In this essay, we will outline the contours of this emerging structure of feeling. We will first discuss the debate about the alleged demise of ‘‘the’’ postmodern and the apparent rise of another modernism. We will argue that this modernism is characterized by the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment. We will call this structure of feeling metamodernism.2 According to the Greek English Lexicon the prefix ‘‘meta’’ refers to such notions as ‘‘with’’, ‘‘between’’, and ‘‘beyond’’. We will use these connotations of ‘‘meta’’ in a similar, yet not indiscriminate fashion. For we contend that metamodernism should be situated epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism. And finally, we will take a closer look at some tendencies that exemplify the current dominant sensibility, in particular the Romantic turn in contemporary aesthetics.

Some remarks, finally, on our approach. As the essay’s title ‘‘Notes on metamodernism’’ suggests, we intend what follows as a series of linked observations rather than a single line of thought. We seek to relate to one another a broad variety of trends and tendencies across current affairs and contemporary aesthetics that are otherwise incomprehensible (at least by the postmodern vernacular), by understanding them in terms of an emergent sensibility we come to call metamodern. We do not seek to impose a predetermined system of thought on a rather particular range of cultural practices. Our description and interpretation of the metamodern sensibility is therefore essayistic rather than scientific, rhizomatic rather than linear, and open-ended instead of closed. It should be read as an invitation for debate rather than an extending of a dogma.

HISTORY BEYOND ‘‘THE END OF HISTORY’’, ART BEYOND ‘‘THE END OF ART’’...

The postmodern years of plenty, pastiche, and parataxis are over. In fact, if we are to believe the many academics, critics, and pundits whose books and essays describe the decline and demise of the postmodern, they have been over for quite a while now. Some argue the postmodern has been put to an abrupt end by material events like climate change, financial crises, terror attacks, and digital revolutions. Others find that it has come to a more gradual halt by merit of less tangible developments, such as the appropriation of critique by the market and the integration of diffe´rance into mass culture. And yet others point to diverging models of identity politics, ranging from global postcolonialism to queer theory.3 As Linda Hutcheon puts it, in the epilogue to the second edition of The Politics of Postmodernity: ‘‘Let’s just say it: it’s over’’.

But if these commentators agree the postmodern condition has been abandoned, they appear less in accord as to what to make of the state it has been abandoned for. Hutcheon therefore concludes her epilogue with a pressing question—a question to which she herself does not yet know the answer:

>> The postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on—as do those of modernism—in our contemporary twenty first-century world. Literary historical categories like modernism and postmodernism are, after all, only heuristic labels that we create in our attempts to chart cultural changes and continuities. Post-postmodernism needs a new label of its own, and I conclude, therefore, with this challenge to readers to find it—and name it for the twenty-first century. <<

Some theorists and critics have attempted to answer Hutcheon’s question. Gilles Lipovetsky, of course, has claimed the postmodern has given way to the hypermodern. According to Lipovetsky, today’s cultural practices and social relations have become so intrinsically meaningless (i.e. pertaining to past or future, there or elsewhere, or whatever frame of reference) that they evoke hedonistic ecstasy as much as existential anguish. The philosopher Alan Kirby has proposed that the current paradigm is that of digimodernism and/or pseudomodernism. The cultural theorist Robert Samuels has further suggested that our epoch is the epoch of automodernism. And a number of critics have simply adopted the syntactically correct but semantically meaningless term post-postmodernism. Most of these conceptions of the contemporary discourse are structured around technological advances. Kirby’s digimodernism, for instance, ‘‘owes its emergence and pre-eminence to the computerization of text, which yields a new form of textuality characterized in its purest instances by onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple-authorship’’. And Samuels’s automodernism presupposes a correlation between ‘‘technological automation and human autonomy’’. But many of these conceptions—and Lipovetsky, Kirby, and Samuels’s, however useful they are for understanding recent developments, are exemplary here—appear to radicalize the postmodern rather than restructure it. They pick out and unpick what are effectively excesses of late capitalism, liberal democracy, and information and communication technologies rather than deviations from the postmodern condition: cultural and (inter) textual hybridity, ‘‘coincidentality’’, consumer (enabled) identities, hedonism, and generally speaking a focus on spatiality rather than temporality.

Nicholas Bourriaud’s suggestion, altermodernism, is probably the most well-known conception of the latest discourse. However, it also appears to be the least understood. In response to the exhibition of the same name Bourriaud curated at Tate Britain in 2009, Andrew Searle reported in The Guardian that ‘‘Postmodernism is dead ... but something altogether weirder has taken its place’’.10 Similarly, the art critic for The Times, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, testified that ‘‘Postmodernism is so last year but [that] its replacement ... is all over the shop’’. Bourriaud’s accompanying essay invites a similar reaction: the precise meaning of altermodernism is as slippery and evasive as the structure of the argument is unclear. As we understand it, Bourriaud ultimately defines altermodernism as a ‘‘synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism’’. According to Bourriaud, this synthesis is expressed, respectively, in heterochronicity and ‘‘archipelagraphy’’, in ‘‘globalized perception’’ as well as in nomadism, and in an incorporation and/or affirmation of otherness as much as in the exploration of elsewheres.

Many of Bourriaud’s observations appear to be spot-on. The developed world has extended—and is still in the process of expanding—far beyond the traditional borders of the so-called West. Bourriaud argues that this development has led to a heterochrony of globalized societies with various degrees of modernity and a worldwide archipelago without a center; to globally intersecting temporalities and historically interrelated geographies. Consequently, he justly asserts, our current modernity can no longer be characterized by either the modern discourse of the universal gaze of the white, western male or its postmodern deconstruction along the heterogeneous lines of Notes on race, gender, class, and locality. He suggests that, instead, it is exemplified by globalized perception, cultural nomadism, and creolization. The altermodernist (artist) is a homo viator, liberated from (an obsession with) his/her origins, free to travel and explore, perceiving anew the global landscape and the ‘‘terra incognita’’ of history.

Bourriaud’s conception of altermodernism is at once evocative and evasive; it is as precise in its observations as it is vague in its argumentation. However provocative his writing may be therefore, it is also problematic. For instance, his notion of a ‘‘globalized perspective’’ is somewhat difficult, for it implies a multiplicity and scope of (simulacral) vision neither phenomenologically nor physically possible (it appears to us to be more appropriate to speak of a ‘‘glocalized perception’’, in which both the a priori of situation and situatedness are acknowledged). Similarly, his intriguing account of a progressive creolism is opposed to the retrospective multiculturalism of the artworks he illustrates it with. And his description of the restless traveler and the Internet junky as embodiments of altermodern art also seem rather anachronistic. For that matter, Saatchi’s (long the personification of the postmodern, late capitalist art made flesh) recent shift away from the Young British Artists toward contemporary artists from the Middle- and Far East is far more telling—precisely because it implies an interest in a variety of ‘‘glocalized perceptions.’’

The main problem with Bourriaud’s thesis however, is that it confuses epistemology and ontology. Bourriaud perceives that the form and function of the arts have changed, but he cannot understand how and why they have changed. In order to close this critical gap, he simply assumes (one could call this the ‘‘tautological solution’’) that experience and explanation are one and the same. For Bourriaud, heterochronicity, archipelagraphy, and nomadism are not merely expressions of a structure of feeling; they become the structures of feeling themselves. And, indeed, it is because he mistakes a multiplicity of forms for a plurality of structures, that his conception of altermodernism—as expressed in the irregularity of the exhibition and the inconsistency of his writing—‘‘is all over the shop’’, never becomes wholly comprehensible let alone convincing.

Bourriaud perceives, say, seven types of fireworks, in seven kinds of disguises: one is red, one yellow, one blue, one is circular, one angular, and so on. But he cannot see that they are all produced by the same tension: an oscillation between metals, sulfurs, and potassium nitrates. We will call this tension, oscillating between—and beyond—the electropositive nitrates of the modern and the electronegative metals of the postmodern, metamodern.

FROM THE POSTMODERN TO THE METAMODERN

What do we mean when we say that ‘‘the’’ postmodern has been abandoned for the metamodern? It has become somewhat of a commonplace to begin a discussion of the postmodern by stressing that there is no one such thing as ‘‘the’’ postmodern. After all, ‘‘the’’ postmodern is merely the ‘‘catchphrase’’ for a multiplicity of contradictory tendencies, the ‘‘buzzword’’ for a plurality of incoherent sensibilities. Indeed, the initial heralds of postmodernity, broadly considered to be Charles Jencks, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, and Ihab Hassan, each analyzed a different cultural phenomenon—respectively, a transformation in our material landscape; a distrust and the consequent desertion of metanarratives; the emergence of late capitalism, the fading of historicism, and the waning of affect; and a new regime in the arts. However, what these distinct phenomena share is an opposition to ‘‘the’’ modern—to utopism, to (linear) progress, to grand narratives, to Reason, to functionalism and formal purism, and so on. These positions can most appropriately be summarized, perhaps, by Jos de Mul’s distinction between postmodern irony (encompassing nihilism, sarcasm, and the distrust and deconstruction of grand narratives, the singular and the truth) and modern enthusiasm (encompassing everything from utopism to the unconditional belief in Reason).

We do not wish to suggest that all postmodern tendencies are over and done with. But we do believe many of them are taking another shape, and, more importantly, a new sens, a new meaning and direction. For one, financial crises, geopolitical instabilities, and climatological uncertainties have necessitated a reform of the economic system (‘‘un nouveau monde, un nouveau capitalisme’’, but also the transition from a white collar to a green collar economy). For another, the disintegration Timotheus of the political center on both a geopolitical level (as a result of the rise to prominence of the Eastern economies) and a national level (due to the failure of the ‘‘third way’’, the polarization of localities, ethnicities, classes, and the influence of the Internet blogosphere) has required a restructuration of the political discourse. Similarly, the need for a decentralized production of alternative energy; a solution to the waste of time, space, and energy caused by (sub)urban sprawls; and a sustainable urban future have demanded a transformation of our material landscape. Most significantly perhaps, the cultural industry has responded in kind, increasingly abandoning tactics such as pastiche and parataxis for strategies like myth and metaxis, melancholy for hope, and exhibitionism for engagement. We will return to these strategies in more detail shortly.

CEOs and politicians, architects, and artists alike are formulating anew a narrative of longing structured by and conditioned on a belief (‘‘yes we can’’, ‘‘change we can believe in’’) that was long repressed, for a possibility (a ‘‘better’’ future) that was long forgotten. Indeed, if, simplistically put, the modern outlook vis-a`-vis idealism and ideals could be characterized as fanatic and/or naive, and the postmodern mindset as apathetic and/or skeptic, the current generation’s attitude—for it is, and very much so, an attitude tied to a generation—can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism.

We would like to make it absolutely clear that this new shape, meaning, and direction do not directly stem from some kind of post-9/11 sentiment. Terrorism neither infused doubt about the supposed superiority of neoliberalism, nor did it inspire reflection about the basic assumptions of Western economics, politics, and culture—quite the contrary. The conservative reflex of the ‘‘war on terror’’ might even be taken to symbolize a reaffirmation of postmodern values.16 The threefold ‘‘threat’’ of the credit crunch, a collapsed center, and climate change has the opposite effect, as it infuses doubt, inspires reflection, and incites a move forward out of the postmodern and into the metamodern.

So, history is moving beyond its much proclaimed end. To be sure, history never ended. When postmodernist thinkers declared it to have come to a conclusion, they were referring to a very particular conception of history—Hegel’s ‘‘positive’’ idealism. Some argued that this notion of history dialectically progressing toward some predetermined Telos had ended because humankind had realized that this Telos had been achieved (with the ‘‘universalization of Western liberal democracy’’). Others suggested that it had come to a conclusion because people realized its purpose could never be fulfilled—indeed, because it does not exist. The current, metamodern discourse also acknowledges that history’s purpose will never be fulfilled because it does not exist. Critically, however, it nevertheless takes toward it as if it does exist. Inspired by a modern naiveté´ yet informed by postmodern skepticism, the metamodern discourse consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility.

If, epistemologically, the modern and the postmodern are linked to Hegel’s ‘‘positive’’ idealism, the metamodern aligns itself with Kant’s ‘‘negative’’ idealism. Kant’s philosophy of history after all, can also be most appropriately summarized as ‘‘as-if’’ thinking. As Curtis Peters explains, according to Kant, ‘‘we may view human history as if mankind had a life narrative which describes its self-movement toward its full rational/social potential ... to view history as if it were the story of mankind’s development’’. Indeed, Kant himself adopts the as-if terminology when he writes ‘‘[e]ach ... people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal’’. That is to say, humankind, a people, are not really going toward a natural but unknown goal, but they pretend they do so that they progress morally as well as politically. Metamodernism moves for the sake of moving, attempts in spite of its inevitable failure; it seeks forever for a truth that it never expects to find. If you will forgive us for the banality of the metaphor for a moment, the metamodern thus willfully adopts a kind of donkey-and-carrot double-bind. Like a donkey it chases a carrot that it never manages to eat because the carrot is always just beyond its reach. But precisely because it never manages to eat the carrot, it never ends its chase, setting foot in moral realms the modern donkey (having eaten its carrot elsewhere) will never encounter, entering political domains the postmodern donkey (having abandoned the chase) will never come across.

Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naiveté´ and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern. One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather, it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles. Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm.

Both the metamodern epistemology (as if) and its ontology (between) should thus be conceived of as a ‘‘both-neither’’ dynamic. They are each at once modern and postmodern and neither of them. This dynamic can perhaps most appropriately be described by the metaphor of metaxis. Literally, the term metataxis (motajy´) translates as ‘‘between’’. It has however, via Plato and later the German philosopher Eric Voegelin, come to be associated with the experience of existence and consciousness. Voegelin describes metaxis as follows:

>>> Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness, between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence; between amor Dei and amor sui, l’aˆme ouverte and l’ame close; ... <<<

For Voegelin thus, metaxis intends the extent to which we are at once both here and there and nowhere. As one critic puts it: metaxis is ‘‘constituted by the tension, nay, by the irreconcilability of man’s participatory existence between finite processes on the one hand, and an unlimited, intracosmic or transmundane reality on the other’’. Now, the debate about the meaning of metaxis is one of the longest running and most intriguing in the history of philosophy and deserves (and requires) much more attention than we can possibly offer here. The account we provide is therefore inevitably reductive, the arguments we lend from it inexorably precipitate. For our purposes, we intend the concept not as a metaphor for an existential experience that is general to the condition humaine, but as a metaphor for a cultural sensibility that is particular to the metamodern discourse. The metamodern is constituted by the tension, no, the double-bind, of a modern desire for sens and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all.

http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/5677/6304

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3229108&forum_id=2#30520356)

https://www.scribd.com/doc/313296539/155-540-1-PB-1

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3229108&forum_id=2#30520402)

it seems to me like there is this re-emerged desire for sincerity over irony, but a full-fledged return to sincerity isn't the answer for the exactly the same reason postmodernism overtook modernism.

i think the "metamodernism" oscillation between the two poles is generally shit.

but, idk, it seems to me that rather than "oscillate" between sincerity and irony, the answer should be more like sublation or hegel's aufheben.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3229108&forum_id=2#30531785)

let's collaborate on formulating an aufheben-based theory of what following postmodernism.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3229108&forum_id=2#30531985)

What is the irony to which they’re reacting so vehemently, and what is the earnest anti-rebellion they desire?

The issue is there is no easily-identified artistic movement in 2014, certainly not one that can be characterized as either detached irony or earnest sincerity. Cormac McCarthy published The Road mere months before Tao Lin published Eeeee Eee Eeee. Both novels are products of the same time, even if they seem to live at opposite poles. The ongoing irony debate, then, is a reaction not to a dominant cultural sensibility but to the particular structural nature of an era that makes such opposites possible. Seth Abramson, in a piece called “On Literary Metamodernism,” describes this situation better than I can:

>>> The challenge today’s younger artists face is to find wholeness of being and clarity of emotion in the midst of a cacophony of Internet-Age stimuli. These stimuli are forever wrenching them back into our noisy American culture, one that impels them to a multifaceted, Internet-savvy selfhood that never feels entirely true or essential. <<<

So the problem isn’t that there is a dominant cultural sensibility, enforcing its relativistic, ironic detachment onto us at the expense of earnest meaning. Rather the problem is Abramson’s “cacophony.” He goes on to describe the state of literary America as “hundreds of literary micro-communities,” which is a reference to the MFA system but which, at a higher order of magnitude, also works as a description of contemporary cultural discourse, which plays out in public and in real time.

Most of us now live multiple versions of ourselves in various public spheres; your Twitter self is not your Facebook self is not your Instagram self. Even if you don’t dabble in the social networks, you are, in all likelihood, plugged in to Internet media, reading or watching or listening to whatever content flows your way through your chosen connections to the stream. Your Internet selves are in constant dialogue with the selves of a lot of other people, in other words. While writing this essay, I was sent a Gchat that linked me to a Helen Lewis piece about teenagers and social networking.

Lewis:

>>> What unites many of those who are heavily invested in social networks, Marwick argues, is “a sense of life as an ongoing performance”. … Social networks’ constant demands for updates encourage us to become spectators of our own lives. Think of all those people holding up smartphones to get their own blurry photo of the Mona Lisa, say, when there’s a perfectly focused postcard available in the gift shop. <<<

The stream delivers! Here’s Abramson again:

>>> To be sincere, one must, presumably, deny the contemporary poet’s multiple “artificial” selves, and therefore be insincere to the real state of affairs; yet to indulge the contemporary poet’s multiple artificial selves is to sincerely detail the insincerity our culture sometimes forces upon us, and therefore be, however inadvertently, insincere in content if not design. <<<

This whole irony kerfuffle is a response to the reality of the Internet Age. This is a reality that cannot be described as ironic or sincere because it is both, often at the same time.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3229108&forum_id=2#30532092)