“Just as [Greg] Dember’s generation inherited modernism and felt a need to rebel, today’s younger generations have inherited postmodernism and no doubt feel the same urge to keep the sense of cultural evolution progressing.”
Sometime in the early 1980s, there was a point when rock bands noticeably stopped taking themselves so seriously. Rather than presenting a clear message, the music started being about attitude and style. Out with Joni Mitchel, in with the Talking Heads and Elvis Costello. As Greg Dember, author of the newly-released book Say Hello to Metamodernism!, writes, “It was music for smart people, but music that urged smart people not to think more, but to dance more. As David Byrne sang, to… ‘Stop Making Sense.’”
This was part of a broader cultural trend toward postmodern sensibilities: less sincerity and belief in grand narratives, more irony and lack of faith in clearly defined truths.
Dember is a Seattle-based writer and musician who studied literature at Yale University. In his new book, he describes the thrill of going to college in the 1980s during the height of—as he terms it—the postmodern episteme. Dember writes, “All of this postmodernism stuff was exciting because it was a liberation from the burden of some kind of presumed truth…It was about seeing the world as it was coming to seem to actually be: a fractured, self-referential jumble of mutually contradicting points of view. There was nothing solid to stand on, so the game was to toss humor and cultural details back and forth as we bounced past each other in some kind of aesthetic bumper-car ride.”
The world today is even more fractured, even more of a jumble of contradicting points of view. Yet this reality has lost all sense of being exciting or liberating. Just as Dember’s generation inherited modernism and felt a need to rebel, today’s younger generations have inherited postmodernism and no doubt feel the same urge to keep the sense of cultural evolution progressing.
How does culture move beyond postmodernism? According to Dember and a growing number of academics, it does so by oscillating back toward modernism. In other words, the culture today is pushed beyond postmodernism by infusing postmodern irony with a healthy dose of modern enthusiasm. Rediscovering unironic enthusiasm is the new excitement. In 2010, an essay by European scholars Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker proposed calling this continuous oscillation “metamodernism.” The name stuck.
In today’s cultural landscape, examples of metamodernism are everywhere. Dember, along with scholar Linda Ceriello, has—for years—catalogued metamodern works of art on the website WhatIsMetamodernism.com. His book, Say Hello to Metamodernism, published in 2024, draws from the best of the website, offering an accessible introduction to the metamodern movement, as well as in-depth analyses of metamodern works of art in pop culture.
Familiar examples of metamodern works include: the films Beasts of the Southern Wild and Everything Everywhere All at Once; the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bojack Horseman; the albums of Sufjan Stevens, Billie Eilish, and Childish Gambino; the novels A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers and How to Be Both by Ali Smith.
Dember dedicates several pages exploring the metamodern qualities of these (and many other) works. Notably, none of the quintessential metamodern works highlighted by Dember are particularly radical, subversive, or even edgy. They are mostly safe—at times almost childlike. This is contrary to what one might expect to see held up as the latest thing in our extraordinarily fractured and polarizing age.
“It turns out,” Dember writes, “we need a sensibility that rejoices in the suchness of human existence, while still recognizing the absurdity of it all.” Consider the music of Elliott Smith, where “evocations of positivity, idealism, and unity are juxtaposed with evocations of negation, brokenness, and waiting.” Smith weaves these elements together, Dember observes, “not in a way that the two poles cancel each other out, nor in a way that one prevails over the other, but rather in a metamodern oscillation that presences both modernist certainty and postmodern doubt, alternating.”
Yes, it is true many people today suffer from a crisis of identity, from a sense of isolation, from a sense of dread about the impending climate crisis and the looming threat of World War III. But even those who stare most intently into the void still enjoy songs with a catchy chorus and films with a three-act structure, still take pleasure in simple walks in the sunshine, still gravitate toward stable relationships with friends and family. While the metamodern perspective does not dissolve the tension inherent to contemporary culture, it does articulate the way in which many people have come to live with the tension.
The term metamodernism has yet to become commonly known. The release of Dember’s book—the first truly accessible book on the topic—is a sign that this may be about to change. I sincerely welcome a wider embrace of the metamodern age, if for no other reason than that it helps explain my own inherent feelings about reality. I have long held the view that postmodern authors are incredibly insightful even though I have never been willing to abandon the wisdom of universal truths and the value of grand narratives. Now I realize I am not being a noncommittal postmodernist; rather, I am a fully-committed metamodernist. Give me Joni Mitchel and Elvis Costello. I will put them on shuffle, and while understanding the joke, I will unironically enjoy every moment.
Peter Clarke, a Merion West contributor, is a writer in San Francisco and the host of the podcast Team Futurism. He can be found on X @HeyPeterClark
