Inspired by Say Hello to Metamodernism! by Greg Dember
David Foster Wallace, the Boredom of The Pale King, and More
Say Hello to Metamodernism! is a book ‘about the air that [we] breathe, the ground [we] walk on, the water [we] swim through (if [we’re] a fish). But, it’s not about pollution or climate change — it’s about cultural change […] the aesthetic environment.’¹⁰³ We discussed extensively the teachings of Sociology on how we are shaped by our aesthetics and environments more than our thoughts (say in Pierre Bourdieu), and this being the case, we should take “cultural criticism” very seriously: it can be an insight into the “horizon” that is shaping us while we shape it, which shapes the “horizon” — on and on, so ‘the episteme — the dominate cultural outlook — ’ forms.¹⁰⁴ Dember focuses on Metamodernism, by which we can think:
‘Metamodernism refers to works of art, literature, film, music, philosophy, and other aspects of culture that engage the conflicts between modernist conviction and postmodern relativism by embodying an aesthetic that braids together those different perspectives — with an emphasis on felt experience or interiority.’¹⁰⁵
Dember discusses David Foster Wallace as a possible ‘pinnacle of postmodern writing [while] express[ing] dissatisfaction with postmodernism’s grip on the culture.’¹⁰⁶ I agree that ‘Wallace was more like a literary Moses figure, leading the way through the desert to the post-postmodern, but unable, himself, to truly cross over into such a mentality.’¹⁰⁷ There is for Dember ‘still [something] missing for readers who seek an emotional core’ in Wallace, even if Wallace himself suggested the need for this in his famous stress on “New Sincerity.”¹⁰⁸
For me, Wallace could have been closest in Infinite Jest through the refusal of Don Gately to take painkillers because he’s afraid of a relapse, but this reading might only follow if Gately made this choice to feel something (which I think there’s reason to think, though I could be wrong), which Wallace suggests throughout the novel is hard to do when we are constantly overwhelmed and drowning in entertainment (“infinite jest”). There might not be enough oscillation in the text between Postmodernism and Modernism to justify this reading of Gately’s refusal, even if that is implied, which suggests a particular “game of chess” that Metamodernism must play to succeed at defending and expressing interiority (a “mean” must be found, as Jockin stresses with Aristotle). We are told in the novel that ‘Gately figured he might die. It wasn’t calm and peaceful like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you.’¹⁰⁹ Isn’t this interiority? Not all expressions of interiority are Metamodern; this could just be Existentialism, like seen in Camus. How does Existentialism “pass over” into Metamodernism? A difficult “game of chess,” I think, which is the “oscillation” and nuanced “braiding” (key terms) of Postmodernism and Metamodernism in such a way that the emotional core comes through. In Existentialism, anxiety comes through, but that is not the same as an emotional core, a moment of sincerity, connection, and even beauty. If this is to emerge, it all comes down to the skill and details of the creator: it must be designed; the experience cannot be linearly willed or simply discussed. We cannot simply talk about the oscillation of Postmodernity and Modernity and create the effect; it must be experienced thanks to a particular “gathering” of elements that causes a mysterious and emotional “apprehension” (alluding to Sam Green’s “The Mermaid”). To put this another way, the creator has to “weigh,” very carefully and precisely, the ways that Modern and Postmodern elements interact (into “a void” and/or Hegelian “negation” ) so that there can suddenly be an apprehension that generates an experience of emotional and rich interiority. For me, Dember’s Metamodernism is very architectural, designed, experiential; it is deeply crafted.
The Pale King by Wallace for me suggests that the “Literary Moses” was approaching the Promise Land and intuited its existence and qualities, but again he did not enter. There’s glimmers of autofiction in Wallace, which ‘is not unique to Metamodernism,’ for ‘[t]he blending of the real and the made-up […] is certainly a postmodern move,’ but Wallace for me does it in a way that isn’t merely Postmodern.¹¹⁰ Dember writes that ‘metamodern autofiction’ is possibly distinct in that ‘by putting the author in the narrative, the format gives the author — and thereby the reader through identification — a greater sense of agency in our mediatized/narrativized world.’¹¹¹ Does Wallace succeed in this by inserting himself into the text (‘Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona’)?¹¹² Well, for me, it creates an odd effect in the way Wallace does it that suggests “a real person here” precisely like “a real felt interiority,” but it is unclear because this could be a Postmodern gimmick. It’s just not clear; it oscillates.
Boredom fascinated Wallace, and perhaps boredom (as Patricia Meyer Spacks considers), when fully faced, can become a “void” in which “personal development” becomes possible, a space in which Modernism and Postmodernism saturated themselves into a(n) (apophatic) “void.” Boredom is when “nothing is going on” externally, so if something happens, it must be internal. Wallace’s novel focuses on the IRS, the perfect setting for seeing if boredom can prove a “void” in which “felt experience and interiority” can emerge. I think Wallace considers this in the question of “heroism,” and Wallace seems to ask, “Must the hero be bored to really be a hero?”
‘He paused again and smiled in a way that was not one bit self-mocking. ‘True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk. You and the return, you and the cash-flow data, you and the inventory protocol, you and the depreciation schedules, you and the numbers […] True heroism is a prior incompatible with audience or applause or even the bare notice of the common run of man.’¹¹³
Is this an attempt at Metamodernism? Possibly, especially if we consider that we must “freeze up and blur categories against one another” like Modernism and Postmodernism to let the truth at which they are trying to get come through “between them” (metaxis). If this is valid, boredom and “nothingness” are states “without categorization” that is structurally like what Metamodern “braiding” and “oscillation” leave us with, which provide an “apophatic space’ in which something can come through. However, it can be argued that Wallace didn’t become Metamodern because he couldn’t make Postmodernism and Metamodernism oscillate, only think of a situation like the effect of the oscillation (“a void/opening”) in absolute boredom at an IRS job. Metamodernism might be art that arrives at a state like boredom without being boredom, because that might be a state in which “an interiority” doesn’t emerge, precisely because it has been numbed away — a perhaps insurmountable problem that suggests why Wallace as a Literary Moses didn’t enter the Promised Land.
Boredom doesn’t oscillate; it’s stagnate. It’s hard to imagine a “sincere and earnest boredom,” which is the paradoxical kind of state (A/B) that seems required for “an emotional and/or interior emergence.” Wallace was right to search for a “kind of nothingness” for the way to Post-Postmodernism, but “the nothingness of absence” versus “the void of excessive lack” are very different. To elaborate on this key distinction throughout O.G. Rose with Thomas Jockin, boredom might be too much on the side of nothingness versus lack, while what I almost want to call a “Metamodern Saturation” (inspired by Alex Ebert) of Postmodernism and Modernism emerges to “a lack that is not nothing.” Boredom is an absence, while Metamodern Saturation is an excess that hence seems like an absence, similar to how an overabundance of light blinds us (to use Jockin’s example). Wallace is evidence that boredom/nothing/absence isn’t the way to Post-Postmodernism (not that Postmodernism is necessarily bad) — it must be lack/saturation/excess — but we’re in Wallace’s debt for suggesting even this truth. Wallace writes as if “lack is nothing” in the depths of a Postmodern boredom, whereas Metamodernism suggests “lack is not nothing” in a “total saturation” of Modernism and Postmodernism.
I’m ahead of myself: let us spend more time defining Metamodernism. Dember considers “Performalism” of Raoul Eshelman as a step on the path, where creatives and artists were ‘performing belief even when they understood that things they wanted to believe in were likely just that — belief.’¹¹⁴ But Metamodernism is still distinct: whether than just “acting like beliefs are true,” a clearing is left open (Heideggerian) for emotion to come through. Emotion isn’t really performed, it is “given space” (in lack/excess) to come out (through oscillating, braiding, and/or saturation). Nevertheless, Eshelman is a step on the path to what Dember describes, but why is what Dember describes called “Metamodernism”? Dember notes the prefix can mean self-reference that ‘consciously references or comments upon its own subject or features,’ or ‘[a] prefix added to the name of a subject […] that analyzes the original one but at a more abstract, higher level.’¹¹⁵ Vermeulen and van den Akker use “meta” more aligned with ‘metaxis,’ which is a Greek word that means ‘ ‘middle ground,’ but can also refer to a kind of oscillation between poles.’ ’¹¹⁶ This makes me think of William Desmond, who Andrew Luber introduced me to, author of Being and the Between, who orbits his work around “metaxis.” Desmond suggests that philosophy and theology are “fitted” as examinations of “between spaces,” which from my bias I want to associate with “Conditionalism” and topics discussed in A Philosophy of Glimpses. Is Dember making a similar point about art? Does the “collective consciousness” suggest the time is right for thinkers like Dember and Desmond? Perhaps so; when Desmond discusses “being,” he is not discussing:
‘an object over against us, the knowledge of which we gain by crossing a dualism between us and it. The situation is more subtle. It might be put this way: there is an ontological intimacy to our mindfulness of being, which is immediate, and which is not constructed from two fixed poles (say, subject and object) that are jointed together […] / We might be inclined to say we are ‘englobed’ by being [(though not ‘engulfed’)].’¹¹⁷
Dember writes that ‘Metamodernism is a sensibility motivated primarily by a need to safeguard the individual’s interior, subject felt experience against the potential degradation of postmodern ironic relativism and modernist reductionism; and, also from the ontological inertia of pre-modern tradition.’¹¹⁸ Funny enough, we might say William Desmond is trying to “safeguard being” (and theology) from the potential degradations of postmodern deconstruction and modern objectivism, systemization, and/or empiricism. Dember might highlight ways how art has found, through methods and techniques, to “safeguard interiority,” while Desmond might show ways how philosophy and theology can “safeguard metaphysics” (‘[m]etaphysical thinking is precipitated in the between,’ which leads to a ‘doubleness’ that can align with what Desmond calls ‘the eros and the agape of metaphysics’).¹¹⁹ ¹²⁰ Please note though that what Dember means by “being” is not simple or traditional, for he tells us things like ‘[b]eings demand our attention, not being’; likewise, what Dember means by “emotional interiority” is not simply emotionalism.¹²¹ It’s much harder earned. It must follow a “gathering” and design.
William Desmond might point toward a “Metamodern Philosophy” that can be thought alongside Dember (Hegel is also such a thinker if my ideas on “intersuppositional philosophy” are not crazy, though they might be). How Desmond approaches metaphysics does in my view align to how Dember describes the Vermeulen and van den Akker understanding of the oscillation, ‘which allows for the interaction of two opposing factors in such a way that they neither negate each other, end up with one prevailing, nor settle into a milquetoasty midpoint compromise,’ for in Desmond there seems to be a notion that being comes forth as distinctly itself when beings so interrelate that the beginning of one cannot be clearly defined from the beginning of the other (the way to being is not its negation into an absence but “saturating beings” into a phrase transition (Ebert with Hegel)).¹²² With this, Dember wants to add that this allows “the coming through of a deeply felt experience” (which is perhaps “the speculative reason” of the dialectic in a Heideggerian “clearing” or Green’s “void”), an emphasis with which I resonate.
As I have thought about it, the “oscillation” can be thought of where the artist approaches Postmodernism, but just before actually reaching it the artist goes the other way back to Modernism, but then just before reaching it the artist turns back to Postmodernism — on and on in such a way that it can never be said for sure if the work is Modern or Postmodern (the work achieves a wild and difficult “saturation” of possibility versus absence of possibility). But I want to stress that this is by design even if not intentional calculation, especially once artists begin to own the label of Metamodernism, so it won’t suffice to say people are “moving away from Postmodernism.” That’s true, but it’s also incomplete: it’s not that artists are heading toward Postmodernism and then fleeing from it back to Modernism, and then fleeing Modernism once they get to close, on and on like a pendulum (to “flee” either versus “work with” leads to a regression, and further would suggest Modernism and Postmodernism are bad, which is a blunt moralization). I think it’s very architectural, and a possible problem with the word “oscillate” is that it is metaphorically easy to align with a pendulum that doesn’t go anywhere (not that Timotheus Vermeulen or Robin van den Akker do this or something). The Metamodernist doesn’t leave Postmodernism; he or she works it in, as the Metamodernist does with Modernism, for the movements must be used or else we can regress to a “bad traditionalism” (versus say a Humean or Hegelian “(re)turn to tradition” with and thanks to Metamodernism). For this reason, I very much like the language of “braiding” that Dember employs; he writes:
‘In this book, I will sometimes use the term braiding, which is very similar to oscillation. The major difference is in how the metaphor works. In oscillation, you have a thing that is shifting back and forth between states. With braiding, the image is of two opposing qualities co-existing throughout an artwork over time, in relation to one another, but always maintaining their own distinctiveness, like two strands wrapped together in a braid. Each metaphor — oscillation and braiding [(perhaps like “dialectic” and “speculation” in Hegel)] — applies more accurately to some metamodern exemplars than to others.’¹²³
Metamodernism is not moving away from Postmodernism as arguably Postmodernism did from Modernism, but instead trying to “braid” the movements together so that they almost “negate via perfect symmetry” (versus erasure, “a negation of negation”), leaving only us to “shine” (to use a term from Hegel). I imagine with “braiding” almost a game of chess where the author moves a Modernist piece on the board, then a Postmodernist piece to stop the advance, then another Modernist piece, on and on (“impasse” by “impasse”), until the game ends in a stalemate where no pieces can advance, and yet it turns out that this was the goal, because this “pushes up” to the players with the question of how they will react (there is a “structural oscillation” that leads to a “hermeneutic oscillation,” to use excellent language from Dember). Metamodernism invites similar questions.
Now, we must be careful with my “stalemate-chess metaphor,” because it might sound too much like “rational calculation,” which is too Modern. Likewise, we must be careful to associate the word “braiding” with “calculating,” for I don’t think you can really calculate the point when you are “too Modern” or “too Postmodern”: it’s more like an intuition; it is more like Sam Green describes the feminine. The artist gathers the Modern and Postmodern elements, begins connecting, weaving, and braiding them into a work, and then the artist keeps re-weaving and re-editing and re-braiding until “suddenly and all at once” there is an apprehension of an emotional core and subjective interiority coming through. This I think is like a stalemate in chess, but only if we think of the pieces being moved more by a “felt sense” than just rational decision. Better yet, in Metamodern creation, the artist works by feeling/rationality (“(non)rational”), a “braided phenomenology” for a “braiding” work.
A successful Metamodern braiding of the Modern and Postmodern creates a “void” like Sam Green describes, in which there is a radical “saturation” of the elements together to the point where they cannot be clearly categorized. Where this categorization is denied, we don’t know how to define the work, which also means we’re also not sure what to believe — if the irony is cynical or human, or if the aspirations of the characters are in jest or genuine, etc. — and in that ambiguity, the work brings us to the place where we focus on what we can know: the characters are having interior experiences and felt senses. And since they are genuinely having these experiences, we are given permission to have them as well.
I’m not sure if it’s right, but we might say that Metamodernism starts as an oscillation which the artist learns to follow and move with, and then the artist comes to braid in and with this oscillation until the artists saturates the elements so much together that they cannot be separated in their distinctions like colors of a quilt. This creates a(n) (excessive) clearing (“void”) through which interiority can come forth (like Heidegger’s “clearing” and “being”). To explain this a little more, in a conversation with Linda and Greg (“Talking Metamodernism with Tim Vermeulen”), Vermeulen noted that we can think of Metamodern characters as sometimes recognizing there is an “outside” where God, demons, mystical subjects, etc. might actually exist, but the characters cannot fully access that “outside” to know for sure. The characters oscillate between believing and disbelieving, confronted by a possibility that, even if not realized, could be real. Now, as we’ve said, this uncertainty in itself isn’t new, for we see similar uncertainty in Existentialism and Postmodernism all the time, but whereas in Existentialism the uncertainty leads to anxiety and in Postmodernism it might lead to ironic detachment, in Metamodernism the uncertainty leads to a focus and even praise of interiority (“the conditions of possibility” for this experience, suggesting phenmenology). Also, while in Existentialism and Postmodernity “ultimate truth claims” are generally dismissed or problematized, though that happens in Metamodernity, such problematization is for the sake of bringing focus and attention to personal development and interiority. As Linda put it, there is an understanding in Metamodernity that we must be careful about “universal truth claims,” but nevertheless there is still seeking (a description I would also apply to the SCM as a critical mode for the possibility of Global Pluralism not self-imploding).
Hence, we can say that in Metamodernity we are confronted with possibility that causes a(n) (rational) oscillation between what is and isn’t (Modernistic), which we cannot settle because of skepticism, irony, and say concerns with justice (Postmodern), and in Metamodernism, rather than using say rationality or irony to deal with this swaying, we instead try to relate and braid the elements of our situation until there is a saturation where we can’t draw the line between “what is” and “what isn’t” and yet nevertheless this becomes a new “way of things” (perhaps the oscillation becomes more stable in now everything being included in the oscillation, like the earth seems stable as it moves, for we’ve so internalized the oscillation). Once this occurs, there’s the possibility of an Ebertian “phase transition,” for we’ve made a clearing (“void”) through which interiority can come out and “shine.” To list out the possible steps (which, I stress, might not be right):
It is dangerous to “move beyond” what has come before; as we learn in Hegel, we must “work with history” as/and “what is” or else we risk self-effacement. Likewise, we must “work with” Postmodernity and Modernity, or else we could end up in trouble. But how exactly we can do this is hard, because it is not a matter of “at hand” calculation but a careful intuition and feeling of when we are about to go “too Modern” or too “Postmodern,” etc.
As a closing aside, a hope of The Map Is Indestructible by O.G. Rose is to argue that “maps” are internally consistent and thus indestructible according to their own logics, which is basically to say trying to argue someone out of their worldview, ideology, etc. is likely to fail. The hope is to put the question of “which map is right” to the side so that instead we can focus on “the space between maps” for what might develop there (in that metaxis, alluding to Desmond again), but this can be done not by relativizing maps, but by “saturating them” to their internal consistency where we are forced to realize “autonomous rationality” cannot move us beyond them, and yet nevertheless the maps might not “correspond” with actuality. What now? Well, as angle, we can focus on our felt sense and interiority and see what might emerge then. The hope is that we can maintain a “faithful presence” in and to the metaxis, for it is in that “void” that personal development is possible. But how can we find and “encounter” people there to “surprise” us and help us develop beyond our present ideas and notions? Perhaps with “the social coordination mechanism”? An aesthetic and incubator of habits of metaxis…?
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Notes
¹⁰³Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 1.
¹⁰⁴Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 1.
¹⁰⁵Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 2.
¹⁰⁶Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 39.
¹⁰⁷Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 40.
¹⁰⁸Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 41.
¹⁰⁹Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New York, NY: Little Brown and Company Hachette Book Group, 2006: 973.
¹¹⁰Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 217.
¹¹¹Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 218.
¹¹²Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2011: 66.
¹¹³Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2011: 230.
¹¹⁴Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 43.
¹¹⁵Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 46.
¹¹⁶Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 47.
¹¹⁷Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995: 4.
¹¹⁸ Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 51.
¹¹⁹Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995: 5.
¹²⁰Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995: 7.
¹²¹Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995: 14.
¹²²Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 57.
¹²³Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 58.
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For more by Greg Dember, please see his book, Say Hello to Metamodernism!, the excellent YouTube channel he hosts with Linda, and their website, “What Is Metamodernism?”
