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.