Ten years of WiM!
The What Is Metamodern? website has been a thing for 10 years now! Huzzah!
How did we get here? We started off poking at this thing with a long stick from our own little corner in Seattle. We puzzled over what we were seeing, hearing, reading… and we wrote. A couple years later, we felt the need to give our expanding inquiry a vessel, and hence What Is Metamodern? was birthed. Over time, we’ve found ourselves in the good company of the many other thinkers, writers and noticers of culture, agreeing that, yup, there’s something here!
If you follow us on Twitter you can see that we’ve been reposting our older pieces in order. It’s gratifying (and only occasionally embarrassing) to scroll back through those early posts and notice that in our first stabs at identifying and describing metamodern artifacts of culture, we were actually hitting on something. Our analyses have – we hope – become more nuanced. And as the field of metamodernism studies has continued to expand, guest authors as well as those who’ve shared the screen with us on WiM Conversations (our video interview series) have helped provide more perspectives. We hope to keep at it for the foreseeable future!
Ironically, we don’t actually have any new WiM articles to announce at this time (those alerts being the overall raison d’etre of this newsletter). However, the reason why is a well-boding one: we’ve been busy with an array of metamodernism-related events all spring. Here’s our report, and afterward, a few film/TV/book recommendations:
International meetings and events:
WiM editors Linda and Greg attended the Glocal Metamodernisms Conference at University of Jyväskylä, Finland in April, and in February before that, via Zoom, the Melbourne Metamodernism Conference. We enjoyed both immensely, for the quality of the papers and for the interstitial conversations and camaraderie.
Greg has made transcripts of his papers from these two conferences available on the publishing platform Medium:
“What is Wrong With Everybody? (The Alienated Creative Hero in Metamodern Intersectional Television)” (Jyväskylä)
“Oscillation Revisited” (Melbourne).
Look for Linda’s keynote talk from the Melbourne Conference, “A Bodhisattva Move: Popular Mysticism’s Influence on the Metamodern Turn” to (eventually) be posted on Medium as well. Linda was also invited to speak at the University of Bergen, Norway where she lectured on the topic of metamodernism in the field of religious studies and popular culture (sponsored by the Religious Studies department). Students and faculty members asked challenging questions and made this a great experience.
In Helsinki, we also had the pleasure of meeting with video essayist and expat American comrade, Jared Bauer, co-founder of the YouTube channel Wisecrack. His clear and cogent reflections on film, television and philosophy are sometimes informed by notions of metamodernism. As it happens, Jared came onto our radar a few years ago with his piece on the TV special, Bo Burnham: Inside. Jared’s analysis had struck us as a good example of what we sometimes refer to as “metamodernism hidden in plain sight.” It was extra cool to learn that he is steeping in his own “what is metamodernism?” inquiry over in Finland!
Publications:
Greg was recently interviewed for a video essay on the topic of metamodernism in contemporary film by yet another YouTuber, Thomas Flight. The video, “Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now?” is a really great introduction to metamodernism, with top-notch production values. As of the writing of this newsletter, it has received over one million views, which is kind of hard to comprehend and certainly speaks to the interest in this topic.
Greg’s review of Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s recent book, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, came out in the journal, Correspondences, Vol. 10 #2. Storm’s ideas sit somewhere adjacent to the metamodernism that we make it our purpose to discuss. That is, as Greg argues, while Storm employs his own definition of metamodernism, his project is still one that in some sense would fit under the umbrella of “metamodern cultural study” (because it, itself, is an instance of a kind of metamodern cultural expression); but it’s primarily focused on suggesting a metamodern approach to conducting scholarly inquiry. (Whereas, what we’re primarily doing is pursuing inquiry about stuff — artifacts of culture that may arguably be considered “metamodern” and why.) So, Storm is doing a type of “meta-metamodernism.”
Speaking of “metamodern stuff”...
Here are a few of our recommendations:
Fiction:
Either/Or — Elif Batuman sequelizes her sensational first novel, The Idiot, which we lavished praise on in a previous edition of this newsletter. Both books adopt a very confidential tone as if your wittiest but also deepest friend was writing you daily emails about her romantic obsessions and/via her philosophical ponderings. The college-age protagonist, growing up before readers’ eyes, tries on more identities while maintaining her scattered, unassuming, yet often whip-smart incorporation of observations of human nature via the books important to her. More, more, more to love, love, love.
Fiction but also TV:
The 1997 novel by Chris Kraus, I Love Dick and the limited TV series, 2017 (Amazon) “based on” her novel — More different than same? I (Linda, here) think so! I Love Dick (does one ever get over the self-consciousness?) the novel gives us a very limited number of characters to drive a minimalist plot: Woman writes letters about the artist’s life and about love to man she’s become obsessed with, while shifting residences between LA, New York and Guatemala City). Whereas, the ten-episode series has a self-consciously diverse set of minor characters that move the plot by illuminating life in a dusty, dilapidated, central-Texas town whose bright light is its struggling-to-be-relevant arts center. The novel, hailed as discursively innovative, is auto-fictive. The TV show is full of pathos: metamodern-style appreciation for the quirky and the damaged, and all the inevitably well-meaning but also really fucked-up ideas people have of how to grapple with contemporary existence.
One might not be wholly off to suggest that the novel reads as largely postmodern, with that metamodern autofictive element that opens us to felt experience; while the TV show builds from a pomo sense that truths are peculiar to individual actors, with no capital T truth anchoring anything for long, while its characters grow, slowly, awkwardly, via the metamodern discovery that the pomo deconstructive “Truth” also fails to present as the “solution.”
TV series:
Beef (Netflix) centers Asian-American characters, but not in a simplistic, laudatory-only way. In fact pretty much all of the characters are, on the surface, rather horrible people. Underneath that surface the show reveals their humanity, in a manner similar to the TV show Shameless. Beef is just one tightly-wrapped season so far, with more in the works.
Film:
We’ve not yet seen either Beau is Afraid (in theaters now) or Barbie (coming in July) but each seems to give off promising, metamodern vibes!
Beau comes from horror director Ari Aster (Hereditary and Midsommar) but is billed as a tragic-comedy. It stars Joaquin Phoenix and is distributed by A24, a production company responsible for such diversely metamodern films as Lady Bird, Eighth Grade, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. The trailer seems to oscillate between horror vibes and heroically-relatable-sadsack-just-trying-to-get-home vibes. And everyone who has seen it seems to have either loathed it or found it mindblowing. Intriguing!
Barbie is directed by Greta Gerwig — star of the quintessentially metamodern film, Frances Ha (2012) and writer/director of the celebrated Lady Bird (2017). Based on the trailers, it appears to adopt an attitude that is both sentimental and sardonic towards the Barbie doll product franchise, and to grapple with the constructed world/real world dichotomy in a similar manner to arguably metamodern films such as Free Guy and The Lego Movie. Promising!
We leave you with a bit of tantalizing foreshadowing… Our next newsletter is pretty darn certain to have some big news impacting the realm of the academic study of metamodernism. Stay tuned!