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Religious Studies Review, Vol. 0, No. 0, Month 2022
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Special Issue: Metamodernism
The Metamodern Bend: Theorizations for Religious Studies
and a Review of Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth
After Postmodernism
METAMODERNISM: HISTORICITY, AFFECT AND DEPTH
AFTER POSTMODERNISM
Edited by Robin van den Akker, Timotheus Vermeulen,
and Alison Gibbons. London: Rowman and Littlefield
International, 2017 Pp. vii + 244. Hardcover, $110.20; paper,
$50; Kindle, $28.45.
Very few full- length texts have been written on the burgeoning
concept- theory of metamodernism. Metamodernism: Historicity,
Affect and Depth after Postmodernism by van den Akker, Gibbons
and Vermeulen is, to date, the only scholarly, multi- authored, ed-
ited volume on the topic. Their volume develops the conception
of metamodernism introduced in a 2010 exploratory essay (by
Vermeulen and van den Akker) titled “Notes on Metamodernism.”
In the mid- 2000s, at a time of general, cross- disciplinary agree-
ment that “postmodern vernacular has increasingly proven
inapt and inept in coming to terms with our changed social sit-
uation” (van den Akker et al. 2017, 2), these scholars joined a
spirited discussion adjacent to others floating new terms such
as digimodernism (Alan Kirby 2006), altermodernism (Nicholas
Bourriaud 2009), cosmodernism (Christian Moraru 2011) and
performatism (Raoul Eshelman 2000) as to what ought to be the
term and form/concept to follow postmodernism. In a sense, all
of these alternatives echo Fredric Jameson’s call from 1988 ad-
dressing the need for a new discourse to reflect the postmod-
ern historical moment, this time by refreshing it for today’s
post- postmodern moment: if history did not, in fact, “end” with
Fukuyama’s famous pronouncement, then what did it do? If it
has instead “bent”— a term Vermeulen and van den Akker bor-
row from John Arquilla— what is the tone of this bend, and in
what ways has it, as they write, “come to define contemporary
cultural production and political discourse”? (2).
Of these bids to theorize a post- postmodern, it is van den
Akker and Vermeulen, later joined by Gibbons, whose writings
most decisively introduce a paradigm for the humanities writ
large, one that has been taken as a scaffold by scholars in nu-
merous fields who have contributed to developing metamodern
theory since. What follows is an evaluation of its usefulness as
such, including a brief review of their volume to highlight its
applicability for the humanities and especially for the study of
religion.
Genealogical Notes
It bears mentioning that a handful of scholars had deployed the
term metamodernism prior to the aforementioned 2010 essay
by Vermeulen and van den Akker. Some of these applications
intersect with the study of religion. There are too many publi-
cations and scholars of metamodernism to list here, so what
follows is necessarily an abbreviated accounting.
Perhaps the earliest interdisciplinary theorization of a con-
cept of metamodernism with significant overlap with religious
studies comes in a 1991 Master’s Thesis in Communications by
Thomas A. Haig (Concordia University), who applies his “meta-
modernism” to “describe the paradoxical attempt … to repro-
duce the trajectory of modernity by appropriating traditions
marginalized by modern ‘progress’” (iii). Haig uses New Age
consumer culture as his exemplar of a widespread spiritual cul-
ture that “relocates its trajectory and its crises” as something
other than modernism and postmodernism (82).
Haig’s meta- modernism prefigures Vermeulen and van den
Akker’s popular use of binaries to help understand the contem-
porary condition described as feeling as if neither here nor there
though simultaneously in both, which they nickname “both/
neither.” In what is by far the most quoted statement defining
metamodernism in scholarly as well as popular contexts to
date, Vermeulen and van den Akker write: “Ontologically, meta-
modernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern.
It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern
irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and
knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality
and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity” (Vermeulen and van
den Akker 2010a, 3).
Haig writes, “Meta- modernity eradicates modern dialectics
(general vs. particular; individual vs. community; fragmenta-
tion vs. synthesis; self vs. other) but not by means of any de-
constructive or critical strategy. Instead, modern dualisms are
both maintained and resolved by an attempted relocation of the
modern trajectory …” (83).1 This position is also reflected in
what became one of the major literary stances on metamod-
ernism as a “re- modernism,” as outlined in the works of, for
REVIEWER: Linda C. Ceriello
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA 30144,
USA
Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 0 • NUMBER 0 • MONTH 2022
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example, Mary K. Holland (2013 ), and the co- authored works by
David James and Urmila Seshagiri, especially their 2014 essay,
“Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution.”
David Foster Wallace’s influential 1993 essay, “E Unibus
Pluram,” is a touchstone for later efforts to conceive of the spe-
cific tenor of metamodernism as a post- postmodern epistemic
turn and to describe the tenor of the aesthetic sensibility that
accompanies it. Wallace has been acknowledged as “a main
reference point in debates throughout the Humanities on what
comes ‘after postmodernism’” and an influence on subsequent
“discussions about the need for new directions in Humanities
scholarship— such as ‘post- theory,’ ‘post- critique,’ and ‘surface
reading’” (DFW Society 2021).
An essay in the volume under discussion, “Radical
Defenselessness: A New Sense of Self in the Work of David
Foster Wallace” by Nicoline Timmer, is quite helpful in outlin-
ing the significance of Wallace for metamodernism, in part by
explaining his influence on subsequent writers who would de-
velop the signature metamodern sensibilities. Wallace’s thesis
denoted a condition that would also later be harnessed to name
literary moves such as “new sincerity” and “postirony” (the lat-
ter addressed by Lee Konstantinou in the volume) that arguably
stretch the boundaries of literary applications and result in a
theorization even more applicable to religious studies.
Artist and professor of art history Moyo Okediji takes
metamodernism in a more ontological direction in essays in
1999 and 2000 that describe metamodern visual culture’s
re- cognition, the aesthetics of which Okediji calls “semioptics.”2
Linking the Black Atlantic practice of spiritual possession with
performative practices, the contemporary artist can be thought
of as “diasporating” across multiple selves, thereby rendering
irrelevant modernist structures of racial identity. Metamodern
art for Okediji provides a means to re- cognize “frameworks of
justice, equity and love” (Okediji quoted in Ceriello 2021, 1).
Following her 2007 essay featuring a metamodern reading
of William Blake, Alexandra Dumitrescu’s 2014 dissertation,
“Towards a Metamodern Literature,” employs her own meta-
modernism in literary but also at times quasi- religious terms
as “a paradigm that reflects the self’s evolution towards its self-
realisation, and the sublime and the beautiful” (167). In 2015,
biblical scholar Tom de Bruin writes an essay titled “That’s So
Meta: The Post- Postmodern Church” in which he deploys the
metamodernism of Vermeulen, van den Akker, and Gibbons to-
ward a more nuanced understanding of the new landscape of
the Seventh- day Adventist Church. In 2017 Buddhism scholar
Michel Clasquin- Johnson publishes “Towards a Metamodern
Academic Study of Religion and a More Religiously Informed
Metamodernism,” the first peer- reviewed essay that consid-
ers what kinds of theoretical work “metamodernism” can do
for the field of religious studies. In her 2019 essay, “Made
Up Prophecies: Metamodern Play with Religion, Spirituality
and Monomyth in the LEGO Universe,” Sissel Undheim uses
metamodernism to understand the contemporary secular
spirituality evident in LEGO popular culture. The present au-
thor’s dissertation, along with essays published from 2018 to
2019, locate as metamodern the dominant narratives evinced
in contemporary spiritual movements (such as the “spiritual
but not religious”) and compare liminal ontologies from mys-
ticism and metamodernism toward theorizing a “metamod-
ern soteriology.”3 Jason Josephson Storm’s 2021 monograph,
Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, employs the term “meta-
modernism” to name his collection of philosophical- conceptual
tools that he hopes will improve scholarly practices in the
human sciences. Some of these tools can be seen as belong-
ing under the umbrella of the prevalent discourse as described
in van den Akker, Gibbons and Vermeulen’s corpus, which,
as mentioned, has formed the theoretical scaffold for the bulk
of contemporary metamodernism scholarship to date; though
they bear a loose resemblance to this discourse overall.
With this brief genealogy in mind, let us turn back to the
2017 volume that is our concern.
Structure and Terminology
While most of the volume’s essays spring from the disciplines
of cultural studies, art history, and literary and media studies,
the volume is certainly useful to religious studies in the overall
sense of continuing to define a paradigm of research and theori-
zation that, as mentioned, has been applied cross- disciplinarily.
Its range of topics also supports the notion that such theoriza-
tion is important in accounting descriptively for any notion of a
“Western cultural milieu,” which naturally would underpin con-
temporary religious, spiritual, and secular- spiritual analyses.
The commitment to a volume of essays versus a mono-
graph came, as van den Akker noted, because the early years
of teasing out what metamodernism is and how it should be
described were a collaborative effort (van den Akker and
Vermeulen 2022). He and Vermeulen, along with Gibbons and
others— thirty- plus scholars and cultural critics in total— shared
essays on the website, Notes on Metamodernism from 2009 to
2016, now archived.
Introduction essays set the ground for each of the vol-
ume’s three sections: “Historicity” by van den Akker, “Affect”
by Gibbons, and “Depth” by Vermeulen. The essay that in-
troduces the volume as a whole, “Periodising the 2000s, or,
the Emergence of Metamodernism,” by Vermeulen and van
den Akker, explains the use of several key terms referred to
throughout their oeuvre and this text, such as oscillation and
structure of feeling. It also explains what is and is not meant
in their conception by the prefix meta- in front of modernism—
important, as the meta seems to only increase in terms of its
array of significations with time— and clarifies how and why
metamodernism is conceived of as both periodizing and char-
acterizing an aesthetic sensibility.
Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 0 • NUMBER 0 • MONTH 2022
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The 2017 volume self- consciously mirrors the sections of
Jameson’s axes of postmodern cultural logic, extending the
central conceptual motif of a structure of feeling initiated by
Raymond Williams in 1954. For Williams, it is “that element of
culture that circumscribes it but nonetheless cannot be traced
back to any one of its individual ingredients. It can be ascribed,
instead, to the particular experience of time or place” (van den
Akker et al. 2017, 8).
Vermeulen and van den Akker explain their own applica-
tion and address the confusion around the vagaries in various
usages over the decades: “Some treat it as a cultural superstruc-
ture in the classical Marxian sense or as cultural hegemonic
following a more Gramscian notion: at times, it features as a
sensibility, then as a literary strategy.” (7). Its tenor, they sub-
mit, is best “traced in art, which has the capability to express a
common experience of a time and place” (7) and can be defined
as “‘a particular quality of social experience … historically dis-
tinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of
a generation or of a period’” (8). Metamodernism, therefore, is
“both a heuristic label to come to terms with recent changes in
aesthetics and culture and a notion to periodise these changes”
(4).
Particularly helpful in ensuring that metamodernism
earns its place as a broad episteme in kind with postmodern-
ism and modernism (and is thereby not reduced to a partisan
movement or a discreet project) is the editors’ notion that meta-
modernism is a means of charting a cultural dominant:
Our methodological assumption is that the dominant cul-
tural practices and the dominant aesthetic sensibilities
of a certain period form, as it were, a ‘discourse’ that
expresses cultural moods and common ways of doing,
making and thinking. To speak of a structure of feeling
(or a cultural dominant) therefore has the advantage, as
Jameson once explained, that one does not ‘obliterate dif-
ference and project an idea of the historical period as mas-
sive homogeneity. [It is] a conception which allows for the
presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet
subordinate features. (2010b)
Their notion of oscillation, which is for some scholars (though
not all) one of metamodernism’s central defining concepts, as
I have written elsewhere, is useful in the humanities in that it
carves out a needed conceptual space between deconstruction
and reconstruction, pessimism and optimism, toward a future
that maintains a staunch interest in being present with all pos-
sibilities (Ceriello 2018a, 92).4 The authors’ aforementioned use
of the nomenclature of both/neither (they also use and/nor) can
work to show that even if both sides of the spectrum are felt to
be coexisting, no move toward any single meaning or outcome
is thought of as mandated or preordained as a “correct” one.
These reflections speak directly to why they write, “in
moving back and forth or oscillating between positions (mod-
ern and postmodern, say), metamodernism does not simply
combine the ‘best of both worlds’ so to speak” (11). That is,
the metamodern episteme is not taken as “better” or “worse,”
nor is any particular notion of “progress” after postmodernism
assumed. The notion of oscillating between modern and post-
modern impulses, aesthetics, sensibilities, etc., entails that
metamodernism does not involve reducing the complexity of
the contemporary moment to one or the other, nor to a multi-
perspectivalism or a totalizing idea of integration. This is crucial
in terms of avoiding positing a conception of metamodernism
that amounts to a return to modern narratives and values. That
is, if signifying the latest, grand utopian plan were the main
purpose of deploying a new “- ism,” it would fail to constitute a
worthy innovation and would furthermore fail to do what many
scholars are precisely attempting from their respective fields
to do, which is to understand the specific tenor of reality in the
times we are already living in.
The authors also take pains to comment that metamod-
ernism does not avoid addressing social struggle. On the con-
trary, it is a means of accounting for the unique forms such
struggles have taken, from the Occupy Movement to right-
wing populisms and other types of protest (addressed often via
technology- enabled connectivity) that have attempted to face
down social problems generated by neoliberalism (13).
Applications of Metamodern Theorizations in
Religious Studies
Until recently, the scholarly work of developing metamodern
theory occurred mainly in literary and cultural studies fields.
Increasingly, however, metamodernism can be regarded as
within the purview of and even extending the reach of re-
ligious studies. Moreover, those who engage in studies of
contemporary religious and spiritual trends and phenomena
need to be able to ground those studies in a hermeneutic
framework that reflects the epistemic content of the current
moment. Too often, scholars find themselves anchoring ideas
to the recent postmodern past. Impasses in understanding
become both inevitable and more significant as postmodern-
ism is understood as no longer the cultural dominant in the
West.
Metamodern sensibilities influencing the tenor of
scholarship in religion can be seen in recent panels at the
American Academy of Religion’s Annual Meeting focused on
sincerity and earnestness as reading lenses along with other
innovative approaches that expressly attempt to think beyond
“either/or” limits. One example of metamodernism having al-
ready found its home in the field of religious studies is affect
studies, an area of research that has gained purchase and
developed in interdisciplinary conversation with the fields of
religion, literary theory, and cultural studies. The emergence
of affect theory itself has been explored as a possible artifact
or epiphenomenon of the epistemic turn to metamodernism
(see Ceriello 2018a). Affect studies garnered an official place
Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 0 • NUMBER 0 • MONTH 2022
4
in the AAR as of 2013 with the admittance of the Religion,
Affect, and Emotion unit. This is an area whose intersection
with metamodern theory could lead to further developments
for both.
On a personal note, theorization of metamodernism helped
me in 2012 to begin addressing certain research questions,
for example, why the identity “spiritual but not religious” has
been on the rise while New Age spiritualities have lost favor,
and why instantiations of the mystical, the spiritual, and “the
weird” have all become (paradoxically) more normative. One
cannot miss the fact that a distinct sense of the weird came into
vogue after the turn of the millennium. Apropos here, in the
last two decades, narratives of the spiritual, supernatural, and
paranormal— both fictional and confessional- autobiographical—
are of more public interest overall, perhaps specifically because
as of the early 2000s, the obligatory response to the religious
and spiritual is less often a knee- jerk ironic or deconstruction-
ist dismissal.
A metamodern theoretical approach has the potential
to affect religious scholarship in quite profound ways. It al-
lows researchers to feel less like they must pigeonhole their
subjects (as well as their own human, authentic responses)
to, for example, either prove or disprove the veracity of a
truth claim. Jeffrey Kripal, whose own scholarship I have
elsewhere called “metamodern” for championing this “third
thing” in mysticism studies (Ceriello 2018a), hosted a confer-
ence in March 2022 at a major research university gathering
researchers and true believers of the weirdest of phenomena
under study (see Archives of the Impossible). Rather than
studying consciousness- shifting events as either/or religious
claims, and rather than reductively framing them as patho-
logical or as examples of mass- lock- step ideological follow-
ership, group mind, or the like, scholars are increasingly
viewing such phenomena as belonging to a milieu in which
in a broad sense, individual penchants, felt experiences, and
various affective reclamations are already transforming the
humanities. In short, the fallback to binaries of universal-
ism versus contextualism seems to be in the process of being
wrested open, and affective readings are arguably more toler-
ated since the mid- 2000s. My own research indicates that we
can begin to account for such changes in the disciplines by
tracking the reach of the metamodern turn.
Many of the volume’s essays show with comparativist pre-
cision how popular culture, fiction, and other art forms have
supported and extended metamodern affective and aesthetic
sensibilities. Quirky, oddball characters, seen as heroic more
for their humanness than for their superpowers, are drawn by
blending realism with supernatural or impossible events that
take place in a diegesis in which the weird is not pathologized
or “explained away” (which would be part of a modern narra-
tive) but rather exists alongside the ordinary, as in the volume’s
essay, “The Joke That Wasn’t Funny Anymore: Reflections on
the Metamodern Sitcom” by Gry C. Rustad and Kai Hanno
Schwind.
Raul Eshelman’s “Notes on Performatist Photography:
Experiencing Beauty and Transcendence after Postmodernism”
is the volume’s essay perhaps most overtly related to the terrain
of religious studies. In it, he explains his notion of performa-
tist double framing as a technique that obliges an audience to
commit to emotional realities embedded in alternative realities
that are distinct from ordinary life. Describing a photograph
by Mike Perry called “Mor Plastic, Flip Flop13,” which depicts
a flip flop beach sandal eroded into a nature motif, Eshelman
writes:
[W]e are now confronted by plastic that itself has been cor-
roded by the ocean and been rendered hauntingly beautiful
because of it …. [T]here is a subtle message suggesting the
workings of a kind of opaquely operating natural religion:
if the ocean can thusly beautify the plastic junk we throw
into it, then there is some hope somewhere. This attitude
is not uncritical, but it reverses completely the postmodern
attitude that recognizes only one- sided perpetrator- victim
relations and that sees its ethical purpose in preventing evil
rather than in participating in positive truth processes …
The numinous beauty captured in Mor Plastic, Flip Flop13
has an ethical impetus to it that is derived from its ambiva-
lent, oceanic origin. (192- 3)
Furthermore, Eshelman holds, linking aesthetic and narrative
to ethical relationalities, “the performative interaction of nature
and culture” is key to arriving at constructive solutions to envi-
ronmental problems (192- 3).
Metamodern textual readings provided in the other es-
says in the volume depict somewhat similar strategies to
address and reckon with the still extant postmodern self/
worldview and its highlighting of fractured relationships— not
in a make- wrong or desperate sense but in an embrace of
the human as flawed, multiple, and continually oscillating
between modes of fixing or solving, and simply owning the
liminality of our condition at any given moment. Without,
that is, needing to somehow protect grand narratives’ static
meanings by pronouncing a foreclosure toward or disconnect
from any future.
To distinguish metamodern from postmodern aesthetic
tendencies in this regard, the editors of the volume call this,
delightfully, “up- cycling of past styles, conventions and tech-
niques. Whereas the postmoderns ‘recycled’ popular culture,
canonized works and dead Masters by means of parody or
pastiche, metamodern artists … increasingly pick out from
the scrapheap of history those elements that allow them to
presignify the present and reimagine a future” (10). Both
are a kind of reuse, but their distinction is clear: rather than
the reuse being undergirded by a notion of degrading (which
necessarily stems from some fixed notion of purity that
Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 0 • NUMBER 0 • MONTH 2022
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postmodernism necessarily rejects even as it creates its own
brand of ideological purity out of notions such as “nothing
outside of the text”), the metamodern sensibility seems to
confer a sense of “redirecting toward new positions and hori-
zons” (10). As many of the essays in the volume show, this
reuse often occurs through playful usages that acknowledge,
reflexively, a sense of understanding that we exist in a kind
of playground of image, sentiment, and identity. This radical
and self- conscious guilelessness, sometimes referred to as
sincere irony or “ironesty,” has become intriguing for many
simply because it reflects an already felt relationship— a post-
postmodern felt experience of the world.
Other highlights of the volume include James MacDowell’s
essay, “The Metamodern, the Quirky and Film Criticism.”
MacDowell’s evocative turns of phrase describe central and often
rather slippery metamodern aesthetic sensibilities: “simultane-
ously grand and inadequate” (32); “an attitude of emotional and
intellectual commitment (or affirmation, hopefulness, sentiment)
in the face of a nonetheless- present potential for skepticism (or
irony, consciousness of absurdity, affected distance)” (34); per-
mitting “both a detachment from a naive investment in the fiction
and a sense of wide- eyed wonder [at the] distilled orderliness”
(characteristic, in this case, of Wes Anderson films) (35).
Also eminently quotable and replete with descrip-
tive examples of metamodern moves in literature is Lee
Konstantinou’s essay, “Four Faces of Postirony.” One of his the-
orized faces, “credulous metafiction,” helped me understand
a literary tone I had been tracking for a decade, exemplified
in characters written by such artists and authors as Miranda
July and Dave Eggers, who, Konstantinou writes (quoting
Roiland, who is, in turn, quoting Wallace), use “metafiction
not to cultivate incredulity or irony but rather to foster faith,
conviction, immersion and emotional connection … a means
of returning to ‘old fashioned content’” (93). He continues,
“Credulous metafictionists read postmodern forms as tools for
reconstructing readers’ lost capabilities. … Form is tactical or
instrumental. It’s designed to do something to us” (94).
No matter what one may conclude of Konstantinou’s
structure of “four faces”— I’m intrigued but wonder about de-
limiting to just four— there is little use in arguing against his
proclamation that, howsoever we shall conclude the current
post- postmodern milieu is best named and described, “no the-
ory of the new cultural dominant can proceed without first ad-
dressing the difficult problem of irony.” For religious studies
scholars who utilize the hermeneutics of suspicion and of post-
structuralism, connections will be clear. Konstantinou’s and
MacDowell’s essays each also challenge and clarify the use of
the term oscillation in useful ways.
In truth, there are no clunker essays here; one will be re-
warded by spending time with each, as they can only have a
cumulative effect of broadening one’s sense of metamodern
sensibilities. The only thing that seems out of place in this
volume is the epilogue, “Thoughts on Writing about Art after
Postmodernism,” a gorgeous meditation by James Elkins on the
discipline of writing, which might have served to bridge struc-
turalisms had he made mention or connection to the topic of
metamodern writing as a distinct entity.
Toward Future Metamodernisms and Conversations in the
Humanities and Religious Studies
The always- already fraught project of discussing epistemes or
structures of feeling is perhaps felt to be extra hazardous of
late. From the perspective of contextualism, we confront the
idea that it may be problematic or unwise (or worse) to assume
there is any common human experience (for example, if every-
thing is contingent along a racial divide) while on the other end
of the ontological spectrum are various and steadfast claims
of universalism as a ground of being— the sense that ultimately
all difference inevitably dissolves, and all beings are parts of
a greater whole. This is at once an ancient philosophical idea
harkening to nondual traditions, a New Age and later SBNR
maxim, a systems- theory idea, and also a lived reality for mys-
tics, for whom it occurs experientially, as attested throughout
the literature of mystical experience. The question for inquiry,
then, is whether the usage of a structure- of- feeling motif, upon
which metamodernism is scaffolded, depends on acceptance of
one of these ontological positions as against the other.
We intuitively and instinctively know that human
experiences do not divide neatly down this universal-
versus- contextual, reason/logic- versus- romanticism poles.
Fortuitously, this is the very sort of binary that metamodern-
ism offers the possibility to undo and reconceptualize, as I
have explained. That said, I wonder if the contingency argu-
ment (a postmodern view) necessarily kicks the legs out from
under the universality arguably inherent in the concept of a
structure of feeling? Questions such as these certainly have
their place in this conversation, and more and varied voices
will make the inquiry all the richer.
Another ever- present question is, “Why this metamodern-
ism?” Providing one is convinced that an affective and aesthetic
bend has indeed occurred— of which the essays in the volume
provide ample evidence— we still may wish to ask why it has
come to bend in the particular way it has. That is, every epis-
temic period has its destabilizing set of circumstances or his-
torical happenings that define and influence the shift. Why did
the types of events mentioned in this volume’s essays result in
the specific metamodern aesthetic characteristics? Why does
the reclamation of affect look like freak folk music, queer uto-
pianism, auto- fiction, or the rise of the geek- as- hero in televi-
sion and film? Why the “artisanal turn” per se? Why the “new
depthiness”? The close- reading cases in these essays make very
clear that these aesthetics exist. One can hardly miss seeing
them continually being written all over literary and popular
Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 0 • NUMBER 0 • MONTH 2022
6
culture, fine art, architecture, music, and so on. In addition to
identifying the what, I would have liked the individual essays to
speak more elaborately as to why.
Some speculation about why this particular set of aes-
thetic sensibilities has arisen comes in Vermeulen and van den
Akker’s opening essay, which mentions the anthropocene as
a concept that has taken hold in a near- global sense and has
therefore had significant narrative- shaping power. “The wide-
spread adoption of one single concept across academia, with its
increasingly patrolled disciplinary boundaries and highly spe-
cialized jargonist niches, is a rare intellectual event in itself; it
may very well point towards humankind’s becoming conscious
of its destructive behavior” (14). One hopes that more will be
written that draws these connections.5
A common speculation given as to a causal factor leading
away from the postmodern and toward the post- postmodern
bend is simply: “9/11.” I do not find the fallout- from- 9/11 the-
sis convincing since the metamodern shift had arguably begun
in the late 1990s, or even before that with proto- metamodern
artifacts— harbingers of an aesthetic that was in evidence per-
haps before it found a wide enough cultural readiness for its
reception and development. For example, in music, singer-
songwriter Jonathan Richman’s childlike ironesty, or Talking
Heads’ 1985 Little Creatures. In literature, Wallace’s afore-
mentioned 1990s manifesto- like essay forecasts a more sin-
cere post- postmodern; Josh Toth’s essay in this volume, “Toni
Morrison’s Beloved and the Rise of Historioplastic Metafiction”
will argue that Morrison’s 1987 novel ushers in what he calls
“historioplastic metafiction” and marks another beginning of
the move away from the dominance of postmodern sensibili-
ties. Also, as Konstantinou points out, if irony “died” after 9/11,
it did not stay dead for long (87). Vermeulen and van den Akker
themselves devote time in their 2010 essay to stating why 9/11
is not to be taken as a direct causal element, even finding the
Iraq war that began in 2003 more significant (2010a, 3).
Gibbons’s essay that opens the section on “Affect,” as well
as her chapter in that section on autofiction, “Contemporary
Autofiction and Metamodern Affect,” also make convincing
speculations as to “Why this metamodernism?” while avoiding
overt over- determinations. She writes:
Contemporary autofictions do not only narrativise the self,
but they also thematize the sociological and phenomenologi-
cal dimensions of personal life, such as how identities relate
to social roles, how time and space are lived and how experi-
ence is often mediated by textual and/or digital communica-
tion. It is in this sense that metamodern affect is situational;
it is ironic yet sincere, skeptical yet heartfelt, solipsistic yet
desiring of connection. Most of all, it is experiential. (130)
The current version of the crisis- ridden, decentered self, writes
Gibbons, “ground[s] its subjectivity in lived experience as well
as in the interactions between our bodies and our environ-
ments.” The affective turn in autofiction and in the humanities,
for Gibbons, is a turn away from the “cool detachment” of post-
modern ironic sensibilities, instead suggesting that subjects’
ruminations on global concerns point to the place of self- in-
relation- to- conflicts, which in turn shapes contemporary ethics
and aesthetics as particulars, even if not entirely eschewing all
grand narratives of progress (130).
Van den Akker’s “Metamodern Historicity,” the opening
essay for the “Historicity” section, sets the stage for a history-
of- ideas- style enumeration of some of the large social challenges
that may have had a hand in sculpting present- day aesthetic
sensibilities: globalization, late capitalism, increased commod-
ification and mass mediatization of everyday life— all occurring
during the postmodern period, eventually making room for a
localism movement. Likewise the stifling of a sense of history
pace Fukiyama perhaps eventuates in increased interest in such
literary tropes as magical realism (22). This thesis may point
presciently to more recently observed examples of “dark meta-
modernism” as discussed most pointedly in Jörg Heiser’s “Super-
Hybridity: Non- Simultaneity, Myth- Making and Multipolar
Conflict.” If, for audiences, the aforementioned conditions are
masked by socially mediatized reality, what better medium than
“post- internet” popular culture for artists to unmask them?
Vermeulen’s essay “Metamodern Depth, or Depthiness,”
which opens the final section, immediately metamodernizes
the idea of depth. His quip- phrase “new depthiness” usefully
reminds us that the metamodern project is not to try to paint
over postmodernism with some shiny, new, utopian version
of reality. Metamodern theory, in keeping with postmodern
theory before it, is, again, essentially descriptive and has the
goal of accounting for the world in which we find ourselves
today. The observation about metamodernism’s quality of
reclaiming affect necessarily highlights some arguably not-
very- sweet or pro- social elements of contemporary society.
The emphasis on feelings over facts that has led to a post-
truth environment is as troubling as any of postmodern cul-
ture’s legacies. The reclamation of affect includes all sorts
of reactivity and, the authors in this section aver, such per-
formed depthiness should not pass our scrutiny. This idea is
explored by Sam Browse in his “Between Truth, Sincerity and
Satire: Post- Truth Politics and the Rhetoric of Authenticity.”
His essay points to one direction metamodern studies would
do well to go, and that is toward analyzing instances of its
appropriations in the late capitalist era. The marketing of
sincere irony or ironesty and the curation of discourses of
authenticity are already in full swing in political and adver-
tising arenas, as is to be expected with any new and popular
cultural dominant.
Conclusion
For those who had not previously heard the word “metamod-
ernism,” or had heretofore only seen it in general- audience
Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 0 • NUMBER 0 • MONTH 2022
7
usages (Sturgill Simpson’s 2014 album, Metamodern Sounds
in Country Music, anyone?), there should be little doubt
about the upward trend of interest across the humanities
in its use and development. In the five years since this vol-
ume’s publication, many more scholars have joined in devel-
oping this conception of the term, ushering its theoretical
usages into a variety of fields. According to Google Scholar,
as of September 2022, Vermeulen and van den Akker’s in-
fluential 2010 essay has been cited over a thousand times.
The scope of its usage has also increased to more substan-
tially represent the cultural study of religion, spirituality,
and secularism. This will reveal more of the term’s potential
and breadth.
Additionally, while at some earlier points, the idea of
metamodernism as a cultural dominant may have looked like
it was largely tracking “white culture” (whatever that impre-
cise phrase may mean), the term has clearly been taken up
more widely, with metamodern artifacts of culture found in-
creasingly in more non- European, non- Caucasian- dominated
countries, and by scholars and creators of color in the West.
This constitutes perhaps the most promising direction for its
continued study.
Rather than concluding with a statement as to this text’s
intended or likely audience, I will simply mention those for
whom its value might be inadvertently missed. Methodological
purists in religion may be loath to consider a new “- ism” on
the block; or see no benefit to conceptualizing the bend of
post- postmodernism; or preemptively dismiss the volume as
aimed at those interested in textual readings of art or pop
culture (which, I might add, would be to miss something cen-
tral to the humanities— that individuals discover themselves
in and as part of a current moment via the artifacts of cre-
ativity by prescient artists and creators). Those thus inclined
to silo the metamodernism theorized in the works of van den
Akker, Gibbons and Vermeulen (and with it, that the prepon-
derance of scholarly metamodernism research done to date)
will miss the capacious possibility of the term, as outlined in
this volume.
NOTES
1 For a more extensive summary of Haig’s thesis, see Ceriello (2018a,
41- 43).
2 See Okediji, “White Skin, Black Kins: Multiple Mimesis, Metamod-
ern Masks,” and “Returnee Recollections: Transatlantic Transforma-
tions”.
3 See Ceriello (2018a, 2018b, 2018c).
4 From the perspective of mysticism studies, applying metamod-
ernism to mystical phenomenologics works well, in that it is the
paradoxical movement in and out of realities that are impossible to
reconcile that characterizes mystical experience.
5 My own work seeks to trace this narrative shaping in a parallel way,
to the popularization of concepts associated with contemplative
traditions and with the mass appropriation of specific elements of
Asian philosophical and religious traditions, e.g., “mindfulness,”
“nonduality,” “awe and wonder,” “witness consciousness.” See Ceri-
ello (2018a, 2018c).
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