Brendan Graham Dempsey was not one of my early discoveries in the SPACE. However, after he caught my eye he quickly became one of my favorites. I bought his new book as soon as it became available on November 1, 2023. Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics is not light reading but for me, it was well worth the effort. This book report and commentary, like all my others, will be freely available in the public domain for anyone who may be interested, although I highly recommend reading the book itself.

https://www.amazon.com/Metamodernism-Cultural-Logic-Logics-ebook/dp/B0CKNVJLPJ

0. Preface

This book is designed to be read at many levels. It is as much a general introduction to the field of metamodern discourse as it is an attempt to advance a particular theory of the metamodern.

Only once we see how deep the rabbit hole goes will we appreciate how much of a paradigm shift metamodernism really is.

I am watching friends and family going down dangerous rabbit holes as they are captured by culture war and conspiracy theories. They would probably express concern about the rabbit hole that has captured me, metamodernism. A significant difference is that I know I have been captured while they believe they have found freedom.

Chapter 1 Future as Recursion 

Chapter 1 Future as Recursion opens with my own attempt to frame the general template for theories of the metamodern.

To appreciate metamodernism, and this book, it may be helpful to put the idea of recursion into more simple words.“Something that is recursive has to do with a procedure or rule that is repeated. Think of something that "reoccurs" over and over again, like those fun house mirrors that are angled to present an infinite number of images.”

Beyond Postmodernism

For, in the short span between 2017 and 2021, for instance, no less than four different books were published by different authors of different backgrounds attempting to describe a “metamodern” successor to the postmodern throne. These included: 

1) 2017’s Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism, an anthology of essays edited by cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, and Alison Gibbons;

 2) 2017’s The Listening Society, Volume 1 of the Metamodern Guide to Politics Series by sociologist and philosopher Hanzi Freinacht;

3) 2019’s Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World by author, educational philosopher, and futurist Lene Rachel Andersen;

4) and 2021’s Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by philosopher and historian Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm.

I am following the work of those behind the first three books listed but Storm is new territory for me.

With this book, I hope to add yet another theory of metamodernism to the mix—not to further muddy the waters but, in fact, to better clarify what metamodernism is by showing how all of the above are part of the same pattern emerging in cultural consciousness.

I am interested in patterns. However, I am also aware that human beings generally are pattern seekers. We see patterns because we look for them and we find what we look for. But that is not a problem if we are aware of what we are doing, as Dempsey seems to be.

Eternal Recursion and Infinitesimal Progress

Once you know the rule you can play the game…

What rule?

…recursive transcendence through iterative self-reflection.

To make this useful to me, I need some simpler words: I can reflect on matters. And I can reflect on reflecting. And I can reflect on the awareness that I am reflecting on reflecting. Hence a pattern that can repeat without limitation. Applying this pattern enables me to understand that I can transcend beyond my current perspective and reach a higher perspective which in turn can also be transcended. I have established a direction but will never reach my destination. Using my own word, not Dempsey’s, this is an important aspect of the metamodern vibe.

A few years ago, I tried to establish a foundation for my thinking. I eventually realized that any foundation would also need a foundation. I would never find the bottom. Consequently, I began living with an awareness that I did not need a foundation to thrive in life. At the same time, looking for a foundation seems worthwhile, a good direction to go in. Looking for something that cannot be found is a different way of living. This seems to me to be an aspect of the metamodern vibe.

The fact that such higher vantages contain more information makes them more complex… More perspectival parts integrated in more contextual webs of relation mark an increase in perspectival complexity… Metamodernism is a more complex perspective than postmodernism, which was itself a more complex perspective than modernism.

The universe is clearly following a pattern of increasing complexity so why would we think that today we are at a point of maximum complexity? Why would we think that this pattern will ever end? This thinking opens the space of possibility which is also part of the metamodern vibe.

I will suggest eternal recursion as the grounding idea of this immanently-transcendent perspective. This eternal recursion is progressive, since it is continually reaching more comprehensive perspectives. At the same time, this progress is paradoxical, since how can one make any progress in an infinite process?

Epistemic Bootstrapping and Perspective Toggling

Through iterative self-reflection and accretive recursion, profound transformations are possible.

Societal and personal transformation are also part of the metamodern vibe.

…this can produce an affect of intense relief, as though a liberation or breakthrough has occurred that overcomes the impasse towards unreflective joy and simple being.

Many people seem to think that the world is stuck in a very bad place. Many people themselves seem stuck in a bad place. For me, metamodernism is a path forward that gives me moments of joy, a path beyond the tension between modern and postmodern.

It signals the advance to a perspective that can take perspective on the advance of perspectives… abolishes its own status among the transcendent by becoming aware that it will be transcended.

2. Aesthetics

Chapter 2 Aesthetics focuses on metamodernism’s emergence in the field of cultural studies, considering Alexandra Dumitrescu’s prescient 2007 formulation before turning to the seminal 2010 essay of Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. I also take up the latter’s 2017 book and associated contributions by the likes of Raoul Eshelman and Greg Dember.

A tiny bit of pride in my Dutch heritage surfaced when I discovered the contributions of Vermeulen and van den Akker. 

The term “metamodernism” first appeared in the academic field of cultural studies as a way for cultural theorists and art critics to conceptualize and frame novel cultural developments since postmodernism.

We often hear that the map is not the territory but the metamodern map and territory seem different.

Pre-2010 Precursors / Intimations of Integration

The metamodernist thus possesses a plurality of maps, fit for different uses, yet connected to one another to form a coherent, integrated vision of a reality forever under representational construction… Metamodern epistemology is not about gaining Absolute Knowledge… Metamodern epistemology is not about gaining Absolute Knowledge… but rather embracing the never-ending approximation of reality’s diverse terrain through continually adding to and updating one’s various maps of it… the process never ends; the palace is always under construction.

Oscillation, Metaxy, and the Donkey-Carrot Double-Bind

My own engagement with metamodernism dates to this time. Discovering Vermeulen and van den Akker’s 2010 essay not long after it was published, I was immediately taken by their articulation of the emerging zeitgeist.

I appreciated Dempsey providing historical background all the way back to 1975. And I appreciated him sharing his personal journey. My journey with metamodernism began in 2019. 

Metamodernism is thus a novel sort of third thing that arises out of the oscillation between modernism and postmodernism.

All of this supports my idea of metamodernism as a cultural logic of cultural logics. The metamodern navigates and negotiates not just the modern and postmodern, but a plurality of sensibilities and structures…. Whereas the former suggests a “back and forth” polarity, the latter indicates an ability to jump in and out of multiple different frames… Appreciating this is important, I think, for a full understanding of metamodernism’s distinct sensibility…

Many people in society, and many of my friends and relatives, have a very limited ability to jump back and forth. I have come to realize that some people in the SPACE are much better at jumping back and forth than others. For me, this remains mostly aspirational and consequently, I self-identify as a Metamodern Wannabe.

By contrast, metamodernism (argue Vermeulen and van den Akker) re-envisions the basic notion of progress, embracing both the aspirational journey of the modernists and the infinite plurality of the postmodernists. Metamodern progress, they suggest, is a playful dance towards an infinitely receding goal… These gains are not mere illusions but represent real moral and political progress.

New Depths and Performing Transcendence

In this way, deconstructive moves which in postmodernism signaled exhaustions and cynicism are appropriated and redeployed in metamodernism towards reconstructive aims—another key touchstone in all the major formulations of metamodernism to date. Deconstruction, taken further, leads to reconstruction.

Deconstruction leads to reconstruction, another part of the metamodern vibe. Thank you postmodernism. Personally, I am easily irritated by a postmodern vibe but I aspire to include and transcend postmodernism.

Reconstructive Hyper-Self-Reflexivity

What might seem like ‘oscillation’ is, instead, an effort to negate postmodern irony while negating its negation.

Negate negation captures an aspect of the metamodern vibe.

In this deconstruction of deconstruction, Burnham moves past cynicism and nihilism to something else—to a distinctly metamodern sensibility that abandons cynicism for a more earnest, honest, and caring attitude.

In recent years I have sensed a growing cynicism in family and friends. I wish that I could infect them with the spirit of metamodernism and give them hope. Fortunately, I have a number of new friends who have caught the metamodern vibe.

Meaning in a Multi-[Perspectival-]Verse

With the proliferation of perspectival vantages to take into account, the need for effective toggling becomes more urgent.

For most of my life, I embraced a single perspective. For the first half of my adult life my point of view was based on the Absolute Knowledge from God as I lived as a Christian. After losing my faith, I embraced a secular humanist point of view. The ability to toggle between multiple points of view remains mostly aspirational. The irony of now embracing the metamodern point of view makes me smile.

One can get lost in the abyss of contradictions and possibilities, in which case it becomes a void of despair, Or, one can see in this network (and others) the possibility of actual connection, in which case the endless decentration and toggling between viewpoints on different levels can be embraced as its own mode of transcendence.

Yes, I see the possibility of meaningful connections as part of the metamodern vibe.

3. Complexity

Chapter 3 Complexity examines the extended theorization of the metamodern metamodern through the lens of cultural complexification, focusing on Hanzi Freinacht’s 2017 contributions as well as those by Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Björkman (both in 2019).

This is familiar territory for me as I have been following the work of Hanzi Freinacht, Lene Rachel Andersen, and Tomas Björkman for several years.

In 2017… a fresh current of metamodern discourse erupted onto the scene…

Recursion as Hierarcical Complexity

Once aware of the process, one can learn to toggle between the various perspectives contained in one’s new circle of awareness and begin to seek ways to connect the different viewpoints to one another in an integrated pluralism.

And I am hoping that integrated pluralism will lead to widescale cohesive pluralism.

As Freinacht puts it in the opening of his book… I add two more meanings. The first meaning is that metamodernism is a kind of philosophy, a kind of engine for your mind. The second meaning is that metamodernism is a developmental stage.

And Dempsey comments, 

Indeed, this insight allows us to reconstruct cultural history through the lens of recursive complexification, according to which the premodern, modern, postmodern, and metamodern represent stages in a sequence of increasingly complex and relational cultural logics.

This is more or less the tradition in which Freinacht stands—drawing, as he does, on the neo-Piagetian Model of Hierarchical Complexity to assess the evolution of distinct cultural logics… When information gets coordinated according to a higher-level organizational principle, it represents a move to a higher stage of complexity.

Quoting from Freinacht’s book:

13. Metasystematic Stage Can compare and synthesize several systems with differing logics, put together “metasystems” or conclusions that hold true across different systems, reflect upon and name general properties of systems. Understands that things can be “homomorphic”, “isomorphic”, etc. This means that you can see how one system can be changed in corresponding or differing ways to another system.

My comment here is that this probably can only be done well by galaxy brains rather than average and ordinary people like me, but I can grasp the general idea.

Developmentally speaking, people tend to cohere thoughts, ideologies, and identities according to the complexity range most comfortable for them as individual thinkers, and groups of people within a given range tend to share meme clusters within a given range… Each of the stages creates language code that is inherently more advanced than the previous stage.

And this, in my opinion, leads to an interesting challenge. I am experiencing a feeling of less coherence with others who seem stuck in thinking in less complex ways. Fortunately, I have found some individuals who can help me with this but I have lots more work to do.

Metamodernism is the movement to perform this integrative function, as it is able to toggle between the relativizing postmodern perspective and earlier, more naively absolutistic perspectives in a way that can synthesize progress with its seeming opposite. In short, metamodernism reveals the logic of cultural logics, the code for generating new cultural codes. In doing so, it restores the possibility of meaning, offering an integrated pluralism in place of unmoored fragmentation.

My sense is that I now live in a world of increasing fragmentation with gaps between individuals and between tribes now becoming unbridgeable. My hope is that metamodernism is leading the way toward a new, widespread cohesive pluralism. Perhaps my commentary on Dempsey’s book can make a tiny contribution in that direction.

In a radically pluralistic world, we must develop skills to navigate the disparate perspectives we encounter all around us.

I like the emphasis on skill building which has a less elitist ring to it than words like developmental stages.

Social Organization and Multi-Layered Meaning

… Lene Rachel Andersen in her 2019 book Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World…emphasizes more the complexification of cultural codes in terms of societal complexity than conceptual or informational complexity, but these of course overlap. Like Freinacht, she, too, identifies distinct “cultural codes” that have emerged over the course of human history as societal organization shifted from hunter-gatherer bands to agrarian civilizations to modern states to postmodern multicultural polities.

…each new kind of organization demands a novel kind of epistemology and collective imaginary to establish wider, more comprehensive imagined communities.

Collective imaginary! I love those words which seem filled with Purpose. And I am particularly interested in collectively imagining a new, metamodern, worldwide online community of average and ordinary people.

In the process, new ways of making meaning become salient.

YES!

…the metamodern code is indeed the most complex, since it is constituted via all of the other previous codes: a perspective in which the other perspectives are nested, a cultural logic of cultural logics.

I believe such complexity is beyond the capacity of single individuals and can only be actualized by a metamodern collective.

Quoting Anderson, 

Metamodern meaning-making will thus be a personal epistemological meta-web. A meta-web that allows us to choose freely whether we stand with indigenous, premodern, modern and/or postmodern ground under our feet.

Or, to use my words, a world in which every tribe feels included in a greater whole, a world with tribes but without tribal warfare.

For Andersen, as for Freinacht, the metamodern cultural code represents the code in which all the others find their home: plurality nested in unity.

Phase Transitions, Bifurction Points, Paradigm Shifts

One of the major upshots of all of this was the realization that there were patterns of causality operating at multiple levels of reality which human beings were only just becoming aware of.

When complex systems face a phase transition, the old system grows unstable owing to an increase of chaos; however, this new energetic plasticity is what ultimately allows the system to restructure itself, reconfiguring into an even more complex state. The system reaches a so-called bifurcation point where it faces the option of either breaking down or breaking through to a higher level of systemic integration—provisional goal states called attractors.

We seem to be at this point now, truly a liminal time. We hope for breakthrough while being aware of the possibility of breakdown. Our civilization may not be the one that reaches the promised land. But the characters in this book, and many more, give me hope because of the work they are doing. And this metamodern movement needs to scale from perhaps currently a few thousand at present to millions in the near future.

Quoting Björkman, 

…the new perspective could attempt to coordinate the many interpretations and smaller narratives into an overarching narrative, a so-called ‘metanarrative’: the conscious creation of overarching, partially fictive narratives.

I hope to say more about my small narrative being part of a larger metanarrative in a different context in the near future. In articles written by Dempsey, this can be framed as Building the Cathedral. And everyone can help build the cathedral.

Grand narrative thinking returns, but always provisionally. Indeed, the grand narrative is replaced by a true “meta-narrative” stitched together from the various ontological levels of reality. Story and meaning return in an emergent universe playing out a holarchic pattern of eternal recursion at every level—a fractal teleology going everywhere and nowhere.

4. Philosophy

Chapter 4 Philosophy is devoted to Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s 2021 articulation of a metamodern systematic philosophy and an attempt to instigate a paradigm shift in the social sciences by productively working through postmodernism’s own logic towards something new.

Recursion as Dialecical Advance 

Again, not having heard of Storm before, this is new territory for me.

As an academic, Storm is a product of this intellectual program, and his own earlier work (such as The Invention of Religion in Japan) reflects and extends this line of deconstructive analysis. That, however, is precisely what makes his subsequent metamodern critique of it so powerful, since he has come to intellectually work his way through this deconstructive paradigm to a new, reconstructive one on the other side.

…there is much we stand to learn from postmodern deconstruction if we can successfully abstract its core findings and integrate its insights.

Simply put: “Postmodern skepticisms cannot be evaded; they must be worked through.”

Quoting Storm, 

Rather than just a response to postmodernism or an oscillation between modernist and postmodernist modes, metamodernism is an overcoming of both.

And Dempsey comments,

But, as a systematic philosophy, Storm’s metamodernism does not just theorize about this process—it enacts it, showing us just what it looks like to iterate postmodernism’s negative logic on itself to produce something positive.

Real Constructs and a Process Ontology for Social Kinds

…the postmoderns demanded that we see how all knowledge is socially constructed and mind-dependent… surely we are not seeing things as they are, only the conditions of a given perspective… Storm interrogates this presumption and shows how, from a wider vantage, no such skepticism naturally follows from the premises.

Reflecting from a metarealist stance allows us to see how many mind-dependent and socially constructed phenomena are, then, indeed “real.”

...the metamodern vantage is able to integrate the postmodern critique of naïve realism without succumbing to what we might calls naïve skepticism by ascending up the dialectical spiral to a higher vantage that can appreciate the broader contextual kinds of relative degrees and forms of the “real.” …Storm makes a similarly brilliant move in the way he deconstructs the project of deconstruction itself…

Shifting the paradigm in this way, the anti-essentialism of postmodern critiques is correct, but incomplete.

Some people are captured by the role of criticism, not realizing how elementary this approach can be. Everything can be criticized because everything is necessarily incomplete. However, although they tend to irritate me, critics deserve a place at the table.

For now, we can conclude that, even if we cannot have Absolute Knowledge as the modernists hoped, we need not settle for radical skepticism as the postmodernists presumed, but can engage in the task of making infinitesimal progress towards relatively more knowledge of the world’s diverse ontological modes.

The Matter of Meaning

A general insight common to the metamodern paradigm shift is that the human world needs to be placed in deeper continuous relationship with the rest of the world of physical, biological, and ethological processes.

Grounding human meaning-making once more in the world, we see the deep continuities that exist between our own symbolic language use and the forms of communication and interpretation that appear elsewhere in nature… We are not subjects trapped in our minds trapped in language, but products of the world, entangled with it, connected to it… While meaning is subjective, it is not purely subjective—but neither is it purely objective.

The Is-Ought Connection: Value and Knowledge

Indeed, all this suggests that correct belief itself is a value-laden or normative concept, that we should have accurate beliefs about facts or non-normative aspects of the world, and for very functional purposes.

Metamodernism invites us to put our values on the table instead of pretending they don’t exist.

In sum, a metamodern paradigm shift would represent a dialectical advance by means of postmodernism’s negative critiques to a more powerful and positive view of the world and humanity’s place in it.

5. Metanarrative

In Chapter 5 Metanarrative, I take a look at how metatheorists are working within the emerging metamodern paradigm (broadly conceived) to offer novel maps of the natural world and an intimation of a new metanarrative. Works by Gregg Henriques and Bobby Azarian (both in 2023) have been key to placing the metamodern cultural logic within a broader cosmic logic of recursive emergence.

Now I am back in familiar territory and commenting on my favorite chapter in the book.

Meta-Physics and Justification Systems

The metamodern paradigm shift is revolutionizing more than the humanities; it is part of a broader transformation affecting all the disciplines, including the natural sciences… The result is nothing less than a new map of reality, one based on a meta-awareness for how such maps get drawn and the purposes they serve.

For the last half century, the gulf between STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and the humanities has only been growing—the former operating largely still within a modernist paradigm (i.e., positivism, reductionist determinism) and the latter increasingly adopting a postmodern one (i.e., social constructivism, cultural relativism). Attempts at consilience have been elusive to the degree each camp has simply tried to explain the other in terms of itself (e.g., scientists reducing human cultural activity to evolutionary biology or critical theorists casting science as just another language game within culture).

Gregg Henriques…originally came to these issues out of the need to unite that theoretically fragmented field… Like other metamodern thinkers, though, Henriques’s aim is not to leave psychology in deconstructive rubble, but to reconstruct a meta-psychological framework that can relate the diverse theories together and reveal a new conception of “the mind” in the process.

True consilience must be sought at the highest vantage possible… conceptual work done at the highest (meta) level that is still grounded in and justified via the most basic empirical data.

As things complexify, new methodologies and metatheories are needed to understand the new kinds of behavior that emerge.

The implications for linking minds together, however, is highly germane, since it entails a new level of networked information processing that only exists at the inter-subjective level of human symbolic language in Culture.

Henriques’s model provides a significant metaphysical map in which metamodern philosophy can situate its broader insights about ontology, epistemology, and normativity. More than that, however, it also provides us with a compelling way of thinking about what metamodernism itself is: a collective justification system.

Appreciating this, says Henriques, we move from the fragmented and chaotic pluralism of postmodernism to the integrated pluralism of the metamodern, allowing us to reclaim a sense of vision and value for our intellectual endeavors.

Poetic Meta-Naturalism and Recursive Emergence

Bobby Azarian is another metatheorist who sees the significance of the metamodern paradigm shift as an opening for a new naturalistic metanarrative rooted in a universal complexification process… he introduces a number of key frameworks for understanding how and why the universe has produced ever more intricate layers of hierarchical complexity since the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago.

Azarian goes a step further to emphasize an ontic architecture to reality that, in a self-similar manner akin to fractal geometry, exhibits repeating patterns across many scales. For him, the addition of meta “denotes that the causal structure of reality has levels, with new ones always coming into existence through phase transitions known as metasystem transitions.”[184] The universe, then, is open, creative, continually producing novel levels of reality—a fact which explains why knowledge itself is always incomplete, since the reality we map is likewise ever incomplete.

As new levels of complexification emerge, they recursively loop back in on themselves, creating higher-order levels of hierarchical control and information processing capacities. Indeed, pairing this insight with the map offered by the Unified Theory of Knowledge, we get a picture of the universe complexifying from Matter to Life to Mind to Culture using a recursive process of hierarchical self-reflexivity.

Uniting theories like Universal Darwinism, Universal Bayesianism, and evolutionary epistemology, Azarian offers a metatheoretical integrative evolutionary synthesis,

Another way of expressing the matter is to say that we are products of a universal learning process… we are the universe learning itself.

In sum, the metamodern metanarrative frames the acquisition of human knowledge as part of a cosmic saga of complexification-through-learning. Azarian calls it the Unifying Theory of Reality; Henriques, the Unified Theory of Knowledge. Both sing the same song of the universe, the same epic of a cosmos acquiring greater and greater self-knowledge. How? ​Recursive transcendence through iterative self-reflection.

Here I will comment that we are gaining insight into how. But it seems to me that we are not gaining insight into why. And it seems to me that why may remain a Mystery for a long, long time.

Religion Beyond Religion

In closing this chapter on metanarrative, I’d be remiss remiss not to mention at least some of the ways this is affecting the social construction of new “religious” metanarratives.

… as religious studies scholar Linda Ceriello’s research shows... a metamodern lens to the “spiritual but not religious” identity adopted by many millennials and zoomers, and the kind of sense they make of personal religious experience.

John Vervaeke, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, is a metamodern thinker dedicated to this issue… Meaning, he shows, is neither objective nor subjective, but transjective, emerging out of the relational dynamics of organisms in their environment… we need a “religion that’s not a religion,” a path for the cultivation of transcendence and transformation not based in supernaturalism and authority, but reflective rationality and supportive pedagogy.

My own Metamodern Spirituality Series of books has been largely dedicated to the topic, particularly the volume Building the Cathedral: Answering the Meaning Crisis through Personal Myth.

… metamodern thinker Layman Pascal… For Pascal, “religion” in this broader sense actually refers to any context in which a system’s multiple parts operate in synergistic harmony such that they produce “surplus cohesion.” The religious experience, then, literally emerges as a consequence of collective integrations producing holistic properties that are more than the sum of their individual parts.

Because I spent the first half of my adult life in a benign Christian cult, I have a lingering aversion to religion of any kind. Later, as a secular humanist, I took more than a little pride in being neither religious nor spiritual. That began to change in 2015, a story I tell elsewhere.

The cohesion binding the parts is the care, the love, the kindness intuited by the metamodern sensibility as the simple but essential glue keeping the whole thing together.

I employ the image not of a “Headless God” but what I have called the “Kaleidoscopic Eye,” a symbol of awakened sublimity gesturing towards endless Self-realization. For his part, Henriques uses the symbol of the “Elephant Sun God”... 

…that is what a metamodern mystic might sincerely suggest to themselves in the quiet of their heart... —Before ironically adding: “But that could all be bullshit!”

We need a new religion more powerful than every religion generated to date, able to inspire the transformation of everything and everyone, and yet knowing that we ourselves have constructed it. We need powerful metanarratives knowing they are but stories, stories that we need, bullshit that we need. I find all of this rather exciting.

6. Worldview

What sort of “thing” is metamodernism? …We begin by acknowledging that metamodernism is a social construct—but real in the sense that it is tracking durable (though ultimately transient) property clusters in the world… an approach to metamodernism based on definitions is doomed to fail.

Because it cannot be fully defined in words, I prefer to think of metamodernism as a vibe.

Dempsey gives a concise summary:

So, I would argue, can metamodern discourse also analyze different cultural phenomena—e.g., a new regime in the arts and a stage of late capitalism (Vermeulen and van den Akker), stages of psycho-memetic complexification (Freinacht, Björkman), shifting social imaginaries (Andersen), a new philosophical paradigm (Storm), an evolutionarily adaptive metanarrative of collective human information processing (Henriques, Azarian), etc.—and still reflect the same shared anchoring processes and patterns. That is, I think we can see deep structural patterns manifesting themselves in different areas of culture simultaneously—

The word I use, though imperfect—yet for which I have found no better substitute—is worldview…

And I am comfortable thinking of metamodernism as a worldview.

Worldviews, and worldview evolution, are part of the process of cosmic complexification. They are what recursive emergence looks like on the plane of Culture. They are patterns of information—i.e., clusters of powers or common patterns of similarity and difference—that arise out of the integrated insights of countless minds all reflecting on themselves, each other, and the world in which they finds themselves.

This book was a stretch for me but well worth the effort. Many people will not read it. But I am hoping that a few of my friends will at least read my report and commentary.