Postmodernism’s critique of everything from truth to art has left us in the intellectual wilderness. Greg Dember argues that Metamodernism, a nascent movement which protects subjective experience from the ironic distance of postmodernism whilst rejecting the scientific reductionism of modernism, is the solution to our need for a new –ism.

Metamodernism, as a conceptual category, is new enough in its adoption curve that – when writing about it for a general audience—one still has to introduce the basics before saying anything novel or specific. Also, since metamodernism is always understood in some sort of relation to modernism and postmodernism, one really ought to make clear how one is using those terms as well. So, let’s start by getting all of that out of the way.

Metamodernism is generally understood to be both the name for a cultural period and a term for the sensibility that has arisen during that period. The period in question began roughly a few years before the turn of the (recent) millennium and continues into the present. It comes after postmodernism; is in some sense a reaction to postmodernism; and in some sense depends on postmodernism to even make sense. Postmodernism has a similar relationship to modernism in terms of its periodization. Each reacts to, builds upon and/or refutes the previous epistemic period. So I will begin with describing modernism and work my way through postmodernism and back to metamodernism and then share some thoughts about how metamodernism is showing up in 2023 and speculate about future developments.