METAMODERNISM AND THE RETURN OF TRANSCENDENCE by A. Severan (a pen name for Brendan Graham Dempsey) is only 70 pages long but it is dense with information and insight. For the first time ever, I am going to begin a book report with comments on the Appendix, which is an article written by Dempsey in 2014. Clearly, at an early date he identified an important aspect of metamodernism which I am only now begining to explore. The article may be sufficent for those who do not want to take the time to read the book. The article and the book are about the dance between immanence and transcendence.

[Re]construction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth By Brendan Dempsey / October 21, 2014

I. WHEN ARE WE?

We find ourselves in strange times... Since the early 2000s, the groundwork for a new cultural paradigm was being laid.

Dempsey charts the history of western culture into two eras, Premodern and Modern, consisting of eight periods, each shorter than the one before: 

Dempsey informs his readers that these periods are real in the same sense that the seasons Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter are real, useful constructs.

II. WHAT WAS POSTMODERNISM?  

Along with Dempsey, I reject those who assert that there is no such period as postmodernism. Interestingly, Dempsey dates the beginning of the period at around 1950, the year before I was born. Postmodernism is denied by some and misunderstood by many. 

III. SOMETHING NEW IN THE AIR

The metamodern reckoning with postmodernism is well underway. And at the core of it, I shall argue, lies the fraught desire to re-engage transcendence, or something like it, after the failure 

of postmodern culture to offer a sustainable means of identity construction.

IV. PRELIMINARIES:  TOWARDS A HERMENEUTICS OF TRUST

Dempsey documents the early thinkers who paved the way for metamodernism, names I am not familiar with - Fredric Jameson and Ihab Hassan.

V. THE MANY RETURNS  OF DIMENSIONALITY

The backlash against postmodernism is easy to understand.

People are not so keen, it turns out, on living in a world without meaning and depth, place and purpose.

The rejection of postmoderism scatters people in various directions and this subject matter now becomes very personal. One of my friends, a Christian conservative, reacts by emphasizing his values ever more strongly. Another friend focuses on doing Modernism ever better. Neither friend is interested in my path, metamodernism. The gap between me and my friends has widened but, fortunately, I have found a metamodernist community where I am building new meaningful relationships. Another reaction to postmodernism is evidenced by those who want to "finish" the work of The Enlightenment period. 

Here a new horizon opens up, a kind of sub-dimensionality, where the relationship is not the old “below/above,” “natural/supernatural,” “this world/other world,” etc., but rather more based in intra-immanent language, such as “outer/inner,” “constituent/emergent,” “self/universe,” even “unhelpful constructs/helpful constructs.”

VI. ART AFTER POSTMODERNISM

To be sure, across the landscape of visual art, there has been an increasing interest in, if not clamor for, dimensionality—for a sense of something deeper or beyond the everyday world, but not apart from it.

Late in life, I am learning to appreciate the soul of an artist who is able to capture the zeitgeist before others put it into words.

VII. CULTURAL THEORY  AFTER POSTMODERNISM

Finally, we come to metamodernism, an interpretive paradigm for post-postmodernism first proposed by cultural theorist Timotheus Vermeulen, philosopher Robin van den Akker and literary scholar Allison Gibbons Vermeulen and van den Akker’s 2010 essay in the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, titled “Notes on Metamodernism,” laid the groundwork for this interpretive model, arguably the most comprehensive yet proposed.

This model of metamodernism focuses on oscillation between two opposites. Thirty-three pairs of words are given. I will highlight those that are most meaningful to me.

VIII. REFLECTIONS ON THE METAMODERN PERIOD

Writing today, ...the result is a resurgent push in the direction of those old untrendy human concerns—for depth, identity, meaning; for transcendence, long repressed... 

Having been keenly deprived of it in postmodern consumer culture, a metamodern generation seems particularly attracted to the intensity and energy of things that have history, depth, a story, a character.

The contemporary art scene is now incredibly diverse, with space for these revivals and re-deployments, methods that aim not simply to subvert and deconstruct but edify and re-construct after postmodernism.

...the theory of metamodernism has itself since been explicitly taken up and leveraged as a prescriptive vision for healing our collective wounds... 

Such “political metamodernism” began in earnest with the work of Hanzi Freinacht and his Metamodern Guide to Politics series, which uses the metamodernism of Vermeulen and van den Akker as the “philosophical engine” for its presentation of cultural history and the political program that stems from it. In the process, it appreciably transforms the paradigm, synthesizing cultural analysis with a developmental metanarrative that’s both descriptive and normative.

Platforms like Metamoderna, Perspectiva, the Stoa, the Consilience Project, GameB, Rebel Wisdom, Parallax, and the Integral Stage are a few such nodes of note for this “liminal web,”[27] which activates the metamodern sensibility to bring about the broad cultural transformation said to be necessitated by metamodernity’s multi-pronged and interrelated “meta-crisis” of the global climate emergency, wealth inequality, environmental degradation, institutional decay, culture war, and the sense-making and meaning-making crises that undergird them all. These crises, initiated by modernism and either ineffectively attended to or outright exacerbated by postmodernism, constitute the unavoidable impetus behind all such metamodernists’ admittedly-fraught yet necessarily idealistic efforts (i.e., pragmatic idealism).

And, just as this meta-crisis is the universally-acknowledged problem to be addressed, so is there a near universally-acknowledged component of the solution. Spirituality, for lack of a better word, is broadly recognized as a vital element of the metamodern worldview that must cultivated if we’re to succeed.

Just what form(s) this post-metaphysical transcendence shall assume going forward is now the burning question fueling various articulation efforts by metamodern thinkers. John Vervaeke, for instance, has outlined the vision of a “religion that is not a religion,” in which the efficacious methods developed by the original Axial Age traditions for countering life’s perennial problems might be recontextualized along with newer forms into an “ecology of practices” that work in our 21st century world. Meanwhile, in his formulation of “Meaning 3.0,” Jamie Wheal has also proposed a practice-oriented framework for a post-metaphysical religion, offering an entire “alchemist’s cookbook” of recipes for hacking transcendent experience in the body.

Gregg Henriques’s “Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK)” attempts such a grand synthesis, as does Ken Wilber’s explicitly post-metaphysical articulation of “integral spirituality”—now finding reformations and nuancing in the “integral diaspora” that includes metamodernist figures like Zak Stein, Layman Pascal, Bruce Alderman, as well as Hanzi Freinacht himself to an extent.

...these efforts stand at the cutting edge in their attempts to flesh out a robust articulation of edifying and efficacious metamodern spirituality grounded in a “post-metaphysical” sense of the transcendent... Without a more solid edifice, cults proliferate; conspiracy theories abound, speaking to a hunger for sense and meaning in the rubble of postmodernism. The burning questions, Who Am I? and Why Am I Here? find energizing but incomplete answers in racist and anti-racist camps alike. The old cultural logic is no longer able to meet the challenges of the moment—challenges that, arguably, it created. The metamodern re-imagination of transcendence is thus increasingly becoming a political project, as much as a philosophical or theological one. Its attempt to fashion a re-integrative framework of soft universals aims beyond, yet by means of, the human soul—towards a collective healing, a cultural revitalization.

This is still a risky move, to be sure; some may not find it at all skeptical enough. But this new sensibility boasts a courageous vulnerability. It is optimistic, in a guarded way. It is hopeful, but not blind. It has a sense that its own vulnerability and earnestness are subversive—indeed, the only thing that can be so any longer in the face of corporate appropriations of irony and cynicism (Wallace). Like the old avant-garde, this new sensibility has momentum, and the confidence that comes from being unscripted, unbought, uncertain. It is a youthful movement, linked to a generation maybe, but not demarcated by it. It is a sensibility inspired by a renewed dedication to transcendence—indeed, of a kind not quite seen before: a distinctly metamodern transcendence.

NO, NO, NO. Metamodernism is not just a youthful movement as the membership of Emergent Commons makes clear. Nor is it exclusively a spiritual movement because it has ample room for the pragmatic approach of fellow Baby Boomer Jim Rutt. And, when properly understood, it must have room for everyone.

METAMODERNISM AND THE RETURN OF TRANSCENDENCE is Volume I of the METAMODERN SPIRITUALITY SERIES.

By coincidence (?) Hanzi Freinacht recently posted When Irony Saves the Faithful, which makes a great companion piece to this book report. I posted the article on Emergent Commons with the following comment:

Some of the Possibility Space is…

…either Hanzi Freinacht or Brendan Graham Dempsey

…neither Hanzi Freinacht nor Brendan Graham Dempsey

…both Hanzi Freinacht and Brendan Graham Dempsey

My hope for Emergent Commons is to be a container that can hold the whole Possibility Space.

My Aspirational Self would be able to have meaningful connections with all EC members.

My Present Self is strongly in the Both/And space.