Metamodernism

All you really need to know about metamodernism

In the early 1980s, noted schizophrenic Daniel Johnston recorded himself with a standard tape recorder wailing about his raging virginity while pounding on a chord organ. This aided in birthing a genre that would become collectively known as "new sincerity" by buzzword creators everywhere after Wes Anderson began producing films portraying autistic creatures as unconventionally witty individuals who manage to comfortably glide through life just by being so dryly "quirky" (note that this is not the case with autists in the real world; rather, they have no sense of empathy and enjoy creating Sonic the Hedgehog recolors during all hours of the day). All of this influence led to the upbringing of a generation who believed that it was way fucking cool to try to emulate a character from Napoleon Dynamite or Infinite Jest (also note that no hipster has actually read this in its entirety).

In the year of 2010, while the rest of the world was too busy watching hilarious Jessi Slaughter breakdowns and minxy tits on YouTube, a trio of academic failures banded together over some cheap weed a half-read copy of 1Q84, deciding that this new era of hipsterism was the natural successor of postmodernism. These individuals would eventually agree on the terminology/buzzword "metamodernism".

Wait, what?

“	Metamodernism is neither a residual nor an emergent structure of feeling, but the dominant cultural logic of contemporary modernity. It can be grasped as a generational attempt to surpass postmodernism and a general response to our present, crisis-ridden moment.	„

According to the creators (read: hijackers, see "history" section) of this movement in the arts, "metamodernism" is an "oscillation" between modernist and postmodernist ideologies, which means that it's hip to try to act naively "sincere" while still being an enormous douche bag.

For further reading, please attempt to translate the buzzword soup explanation titled "What is metamodernism?" found on metamodernism.com (because the next big philosophical movement will obviously be based on a wordpress blog) into comprehensible English, because we sure as hell can't.

History

The term "metamodern" actually dates back to 1975 when some towelhead known for his publishing of "queer theory" books used the term vaguely satirically to describe the fusion of technology and culture (this idea has been labeled the much more apt term "hyperreality" in recent years). Over the course of the next 35 years, this emerging buzzword would get dropped in various pseudo-intellectual college mags nobody ever cared about until it was discovered by Robin van den Akker, Luke Turner, and Timotheus Vermeulen, a group of serial family-disappointers who regularly attempt to compensate their below-average penis size by liberally using a thesaurus every time they author another "avant-garde" blog post.

The hipsters responsible for this shit

Robin van den Akker

I am a huge faggot, please rape my face.

Robin van den Akker has been trying to worm his way into cultural relevancy for some uncounted years now. His favorite methodology of doing so is to invent a new *ism or post-* and name-drop random artists and authors in incoherent blog posts with the hope of someone finding his ramblings to be of some kind of intellectual value. "Metamodernism" has been his most successful venture thus far.

Luke Turner

File:Another reason why you should enter a starbucks and shoot every man woman and child you see in the building.jpg

I am a huge faggot, please rape my face.

Luke Turner was head of his class in the WordPress School of Learning Useless Corporate Jargon and Applying it to Contemporary Art. He considers flash websites to be avant-garde.

Here is some old pseudo-MySpace profile of his in which he calls himself an "angry goth" and "nihilist bear".

Timotheus Vermeulen

I am a huge faggot, please rape my face.

Timotheus Vermeulen was recruited as no more than an errand boy by den Akker and Turner. Nevertheless, he nearly wet himself in excitement upon discovering that he would be allowed to philosophize with the popular kids.

Metamodernist celebrities

Shia LaBeouf

After evading the typical post-child acting career downfall thanks to appearing in the latest franchise of Transformer movies, LaBeouf decided he was destined to become a memorable figure in early 21st century art. LaBeouf soon discovered "metamodernism" (presumably after searching Twitter for #avantgarde), which result in this:

Judging by some of LaBeouf's later outbursts, it is quite likely he is in the onset of a serious mental illness.

James Franco

James Franco is an American actor who believes his stance as being marginally more intelligent than his Hollywood peers (a feat that requires virtually no effort to accomplish in the era of Seth Rogen and Jaden Smith) as well as having played Riff Riff in a Harmony Korine film makes him some kind of cultural deity. Franco is to be overlooked at all costs.

"Metamodernist Manifesto"

Warning: Pretentiousness imminent

1.
We recognise oscillation to be the natural order of the world.
2.
We must liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child.
3.
Movement shall henceforth be enabled by way of an oscillation between positions, with diametrically opposed ideas operating like the pulsating polarities of a colossal electric machine, propelling the world into action.
4.
We acknowledge the limitations inherent to all movement and experience, and the futility of any attempt to transcend the boundaries set forth therein. The essential incompleteness of a system should necessitate an adherence, not in order to achieve a given end or be slaves to its course, but rather perchance to glimpse by proxy some hidden exteriority. Existence is enriched if we set about our task as if those limits might be exceeded, for such action unfolds the world.
5.
All things are caught within the irrevocable slide towards a state of maximum entropic dissemblance. Artistic creation is contingent upon the origination or revelation of difference therein. Affect at its zenith is the unmediated experience of difference in itself. It must be art’s role to explore the promise of its own paradoxical ambition by coaxing excess towards presence.
6.
The present is a symptom of the twin birth of immediacy and obsolescence. Today, we are nostalgists as much as we are futurists. The new technology enables the simultaneous experience and enactment of events from a multiplicity of positions. Far from signalling its demise, these emergent networks facilitate the democratisation of history, illuminating the forking paths along which its grand narratives may navigate the here and now.
7.
Just as science strives for poetic elegance, artists might assume a quest for truth. All information is grounds for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, no matter its truth-value. We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of a magical realism. Error breeds sense.
8.
We propose a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage. Thus, metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons. We must go forth and oscillate!

See also

• Deep thinker
• Art school
• Tao Lin

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