Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics

What is metamodernism? Whether you're new to the topic and looking for a beginner's primer, or a scholar already well-versed in the current discourse, this book will prove essential reading…

While the cultural logic of postmodernism continues to permeate and shape society, it is no longer the vanguard of innovation. Today, new art and ideas are moving beyond its established tropes and intellectual impasses. By radicalizing postmodernism's own self-reflective skepticism, irony, and critique, they are pointing the way to novel forms of earnestness, aspiration, and meaning. This "metamodern" paradigm shift is fundamentally changing the narrative, transmuting irony into sincerity, deconstruction into reconstruction, and relativity into directionality.

This book offers an overview of this exciting new discourse, surveying the major strands of metamodern thought while synthesizing them into a compelling theory of cultural evolution. By recursively reflecting on themselves, says Dempsey, societies produce increasingly decentered and complex perspectives. By "going meta" on postmodernism, then, critical self-reflexivity itself becomes an object of reflection, revealing the meta-pattern that allows one to toggle between cultural logics without getting lost. Metamodernism thus signals a new sense of coherence, progress, and purpose on the other side of postmodern relativism and value nihilism.