From Postmodernism to Metamodernism

Christina Aziz asks whether metanarratives still matter, and if so, how.

In reaction to the religion, tradition and romanticism of earlier eras, ‘modernism’ was the name given to the broad movement of ideas, art and architecture that sprang from the twentieth century’s celebration of the supremacy of science. ‘Postmodernism’, by contrast, labels an attitude that took root in Western culture from the 1960s onwards, that rejected modernism’s certainty and universalism. Postmodernism has been characterised by experimentation, irrationalism, playfulness and, some might say, runaway individualism, including a rejection of the very idea of an authoritative, objective point of view. Considered a precursor of postmodernism, Friedrich Nietzsche caught something of its spirit when he wrote that “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, 1873). A similar skepticism about given truths was manifested in Sixties France, in Jacques Derrida’s critique of linguistics and Michel Foucault’s wholesale subversion of the social sciences. As Christopher Butler puts it, postmodernism is certain only of its uncertainty.

Yet having superseded modernism, postmodernism is now itself in decline. The most influential ideas of postmodernism from the 1970s and 1980s have lost popularity. Just as postmodernism was a rebellion against modernism, metamodernism started surfacing in the 2000s, striking a balance between the poles of modernism and postmodernism.

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