Two Metamodernisms: Aesthetic Category vs. Developmental Theory
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Metamodernism functions as two very different things — a modest aesthetic label and an ambitious developmental theory — and the tension between them reveals that even the modest version was quietly smuggling in evolutionary assumptions it refused to own.
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The Observer
Metamodernism, meaning crisis, sacred reconstruction — epistemology, cultural evolution, and post-postmodern spirituality
The Translation
AI-assisted summaryFamiliar terms
A critical fault line runs through metamodernism discourse: the term operates simultaneously as a cultural studies periodization and as a developmental theory of cultural evolution, and these two projects carry vastly different intellectual commitments. The cultural studies version, originating in Vermeulen and van den Akker's 2010 paper in the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, proposed something relatively contained — an emergent structure of feeling characterized by oscillation between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony. This was aesthetic taxonomy, akin to identifying Mannerism or Romanticism as a distinct sensibility.
The developmental version, advanced most forcefully by Hanzi Freyja and adjacent integral theorists, appropriated the term and imported the full apparatus of stage theory: transcend-and-include logic, hierarchical complexity, directional cultural evolution. Here metamodernism becomes not merely a sensibility but a position on a developmental sequence, with postmodernism as a necessary but surpassable predecessor.
The insight that makes this more than a terminological dispute is that the cultural studies version was already implicitly relying on developmental logic it refused to acknowledge. The prefix "meta-" and the explicit framing as what comes "after and through" postmodernism presupposes directionality — a sequence with normative implications. Vermeulen and van den Akker wanted the rhetorical force of naming the next cultural epoch without the philosophical burden of defending a theory of cultural progress. This amounts to having it both ways: claiming the mimetic energy of periodization while disavowing the developmental commitments that periodization entails. Intellectual honesty demanded either a full commitment to theorizing cultural change or a retreat to purely descriptive aesthetic analysis.