constant escape
winter withered, warm
While the point of this thread is to generate useful and quotidian applications for this otherwise abstruse ideology, I'm afraid I must start off with a more academic application: hermeneutics. @catalog the gadamer/ricoeur stuff could help us out here - I'm unfamiliar with the two.
By hermeneutics, here, I mean the interpretation of texts (texts proper, film, music, etc), or of messages more broadly. Seeing how vast this territory is, we can see how it isn't just an academic concern... although it certainly will sound like it.
I just learned a nice word: agapeic, "showing unconditional love". An agapeic interpretation of a text/message is a trusting interpretation, rather than a skeptical one.
Another good word is ephexis, which, from what I gather, means a sort of prevailing skepticism. Perhaps even an ideology around skepticism used in a constructive way. Nietzsche mentions it near the end of Antichrist, I believe, when he talks about the rigor of philology, and how ephexis is a sort of defense against succumbing to conviction. In the same book, he asserts that conviction is a prison.
For anyone unacquainted with metamodernism, the core dynamics, from what I understand, involve "oscillating" between the ambition/belief dominating the modern, and the criticism/disillusionment dominating the postmodern. The central positive of the postmodern is, arguably, that it sees clearly what the modern was blind to. It is now privy to reality, at the cost of losing belief in a better reality. The optimal synthesis would be ambition minus illusion, a critical belief.
In hermeneutics, we can associate an agapeic reading with the modern side, and an ephexic/skeptical reading with the postmodern side.
Read the text as if it were sincere and sufficiently informed, as if it were divinely correct. Bracket the skepticism, which can be difficult. Consider where such a reading might lead you.
Then read the text as if it were misguided, the fruit of naivety and illusion. Don't let yourself get carried away by any of its currents. Consider where such a reading might lead you.
Then compare the two. Consider the sheer distance between the two roadmaps. How is the world presented in an agapeic light, and how is it presented in an ephexic light. Then, between these two extremities, where is the optimum?
So there's a mostly academic application of metamodernism, but what about a broader use for it? As I've mentioned, the sensibility of metamodernism -- the balancing act between belief and criticism, where one extreme is fanaticism or mere conviction and the other extreme is Nihilism -- has helped me contend with demotivation and meaninglessness, two formidable forces in many walks of life (especially in idealism).
So how can this be mobilized, elaborated, or translated to help us process and approach the ominous and convoluted problems we face today?
Part of why I'm such a jargon-mongerer is that I believe this kind of theory can make it easier to render such theory more accessible. Using it to process itself - which is how the discourse can become exponential denser and, yes, less accessible. But that is not the only application of metamodernism (nor is the trend confined to architecture, which is the conclusion you may arrive at after reading some the papers about it).
It's possible to process discourse down to the ground. But that seems to be opposed to building a discourse up from the ground. How opposed are they, really?
I mentioned Gramsci earlier today, but I fear the timing was poor. Can we identify a common sense, and express it in metamodern terms?
Ephexic reading: institutionally codified racial injustice undergoes waves of largely superficial recognition, which only slightly eat away at it, and the world as we know it won't be around long enough for it to be effective; so long as profit is incentivized, all means toward profit are incentivized, and seeing as capitalism is semantically and actually built around profit, as a form of growth, we can expect to see all other values yield to profit; tactics of control are thoroughly engineered and are even more thoroughly implemented (hegemony, etc).
Agapeic reading: Evolution is progressive; biological systems have come to equip themselves with increasingly metaphysical abilities in order to solve increasingly abstract and complex problems; dialectics of progress and conserve amount to pseudo-progress, which is still progress; the means of social deterritoralization is mingling, while the means of social territorialization is nationalism - the former is arguably inevitable, while the latter's Hail Mary defense, genocide, is arguably increasingly untenable; humans, as the lead actors in the Tragedy of Entropy, have hearts.
A mess of an example, no doubt. But how can this approach be implemented in a practical way? How can metamodernism, perhaps masquerading as a less lofty movement, revitalize hope whilst preserving reason?
By hermeneutics, here, I mean the interpretation of texts (texts proper, film, music, etc), or of messages more broadly. Seeing how vast this territory is, we can see how it isn't just an academic concern... although it certainly will sound like it.
I just learned a nice word: agapeic, "showing unconditional love". An agapeic interpretation of a text/message is a trusting interpretation, rather than a skeptical one.
Another good word is ephexis, which, from what I gather, means a sort of prevailing skepticism. Perhaps even an ideology around skepticism used in a constructive way. Nietzsche mentions it near the end of Antichrist, I believe, when he talks about the rigor of philology, and how ephexis is a sort of defense against succumbing to conviction. In the same book, he asserts that conviction is a prison.
For anyone unacquainted with metamodernism, the core dynamics, from what I understand, involve "oscillating" between the ambition/belief dominating the modern, and the criticism/disillusionment dominating the postmodern. The central positive of the postmodern is, arguably, that it sees clearly what the modern was blind to. It is now privy to reality, at the cost of losing belief in a better reality. The optimal synthesis would be ambition minus illusion, a critical belief.
In hermeneutics, we can associate an agapeic reading with the modern side, and an ephexic/skeptical reading with the postmodern side.
Read the text as if it were sincere and sufficiently informed, as if it were divinely correct. Bracket the skepticism, which can be difficult. Consider where such a reading might lead you.
Then read the text as if it were misguided, the fruit of naivety and illusion. Don't let yourself get carried away by any of its currents. Consider where such a reading might lead you.
Then compare the two. Consider the sheer distance between the two roadmaps. How is the world presented in an agapeic light, and how is it presented in an ephexic light. Then, between these two extremities, where is the optimum?
So there's a mostly academic application of metamodernism, but what about a broader use for it? As I've mentioned, the sensibility of metamodernism -- the balancing act between belief and criticism, where one extreme is fanaticism or mere conviction and the other extreme is Nihilism -- has helped me contend with demotivation and meaninglessness, two formidable forces in many walks of life (especially in idealism).
So how can this be mobilized, elaborated, or translated to help us process and approach the ominous and convoluted problems we face today?
Part of why I'm such a jargon-mongerer is that I believe this kind of theory can make it easier to render such theory more accessible. Using it to process itself - which is how the discourse can become exponential denser and, yes, less accessible. But that is not the only application of metamodernism (nor is the trend confined to architecture, which is the conclusion you may arrive at after reading some the papers about it).
It's possible to process discourse down to the ground. But that seems to be opposed to building a discourse up from the ground. How opposed are they, really?
I mentioned Gramsci earlier today, but I fear the timing was poor. Can we identify a common sense, and express it in metamodern terms?
Ephexic reading: institutionally codified racial injustice undergoes waves of largely superficial recognition, which only slightly eat away at it, and the world as we know it won't be around long enough for it to be effective; so long as profit is incentivized, all means toward profit are incentivized, and seeing as capitalism is semantically and actually built around profit, as a form of growth, we can expect to see all other values yield to profit; tactics of control are thoroughly engineered and are even more thoroughly implemented (hegemony, etc).
Agapeic reading: Evolution is progressive; biological systems have come to equip themselves with increasingly metaphysical abilities in order to solve increasingly abstract and complex problems; dialectics of progress and conserve amount to pseudo-progress, which is still progress; the means of social deterritoralization is mingling, while the means of social territorialization is nationalism - the former is arguably inevitable, while the latter's Hail Mary defense, genocide, is arguably increasingly untenable; humans, as the lead actors in the Tragedy of Entropy, have hearts.
A mess of an example, no doubt. But how can this approach be implemented in a practical way? How can metamodernism, perhaps masquerading as a less lofty movement, revitalize hope whilst preserving reason?