by Thom Hamer
In the gradually unfolding discourse around the metamodern, a terminological distinction is vital: that between metamodernism and metamodernity. Although both terms refer to a “structure of feeling”[1] that is becoming more and more pervasive since the 2000s, they are fundamentally different in meaning. The distinction is parallel to that between postmodernism and postmodernity, despite the fact that there, too, the conceptual border is crossed on a regular basis. Such terminological transgression is committed even in one of the most influential critiques of postmodernity, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
ISMS AND ITIES
So what’s the difference? Postmodernity and metamodernity, on the one hand, refer to the historical condition, with characteristics like television in postmodernity and the internet in metamodernity. Usage of these terms suggest a diagnosis of the times, along with the myriad effects that they have upon their contemporaries. It is in this sense that the (postmodern or metamodern) structure of feeling consists in “a particular quality of social experience […] historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period.”[2]
Postmodernism and metamodernism, on the other hand, refer more to a belief-system, set of values, or even a methodological framework, with postmodernism being iconoclastic and ironic, while metamodernism is more characterized by alternative traditionalisms and post-irony. Thus, metamodernism is a deliberate commitment, though one need not employ this terminology in order to be committed to the concept.
UNDERSTANDABLE CONFUSION
While illuminating, the distinction at the same time renders intelligible the source of confusion, because something can be both symptomatic of a zeitgeist and a deliberate commitment to a set of values. Differentiation, then, is a matter of methodology. What is the objective of our cultural investigation? Is it to flesh out the meaning of an artefact (e.g. artwork, political agenda or religious worldview) as emerging from (1) an individual or (2) a larger dynamic?
Sociologists, for one, would typically emphasize the latter, thereby tending toward analyses of postmodernity rather than postmodernism, metamodernity rather than metamodernism; but this is of course not the only methodology available. Especially after the waning of postmodernism, we can once again study the subjective, authorial, intentional point of view, from which the isms cannot be reduced to ities. We are not mere symptoms of the times; we shape them in being shaped by them.
This text was written by Thom Hamer, an existential philosopher and artist working in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved.
REFERENCES
[1] Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen, Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 6–7.
[2] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (OUP Oxford, 1977), 131.
Thom Hamer 
In ordinary usage, “modernity” tends to be associated with a social condition, and “modernism” with an art movement or an aesthetic. Modernity is much older than modernism. But perhaps modernism, given its fascination with the abstract, the isolated, the disjointed, is the aesthetic culmination of modernity, with its emphasis on the ideal, the abstract, the analytical.
“Postmodern” and ‘”metamodern” are both defined with reference to “modern.” We may find, then, that their respective “isms” and “ities” are in a similar relationship. In postmodernity, we see the consequences of atomism in open fragmentation, as opposed to the unification which was paradoxically expected from modernity’s atomism (in the form of “objectivity”). In metamodernity (which term I have just learned), we see a trend beyond fragmentation; but this time, we can make our the true paradigm shift beyond “objectivity” toward a more subjective, relational version of reality.
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Thanks for the addition, AJOwens! Although the isms extend beyond the artistic or aesthetic (for example to methodology and axiology), I think your emphasis upon the “ity” as a social condition is correct. And admittedly, my critique of Jameson’s title was somewhat polemical given that it does, in fact, deal with postmodernism as an artistic or aesthetic sensibility, though only as a phenomenon and not as seen from the authorial point of view.
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You can call me Jim. . .
I could plead that “the aesthetic” extends beyond artistic expression to cover other types of expression such as methodology or axiology — in the sense that “the aesthetic” is a mode of experience or thought: an approach to reality, for example in contrast to “the ethical” or “the religious” as in Kierkegaard. It is essentially a contemplative or appreciative mode. But that’s just for the sake of argument. 🙂
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That’s actually very helpful terminology, Jim! I could argue that the ethical and especially the religious sphere in Kierkegaard are isms, rather than ities. Perhaps everything Kierkegaard talks about in terms of spheres is an ism, inasmuch as he discusses how our lives are guided by a commitment, to aesthetic pleasure, obeyance to ethical law, or surrender to the divine. That subjective commitment, in my reading of him, has more emphasis in his works than the social condition.
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SK’s “Christendom” strikes me as a social condition, perhaps one where Christian values are overtaken by the hollowness of modernity. He may have been the first to notice. Christianity is technically an “ity,” but for SK at least, describing it as a social condition would be problematic. Can a social condition have inwardness? So, “Christendom.”
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