What is Metamodernism? Is probably the first question one is going to ask themself upon looking at this little blog of mine. After all, you can’t have a Modest Metamodernist without a Metamodernism to which such a person belongs.
[Commentary: The Modest Metamodernist is sort of a joke name in of itself. A genuinely modest person probably wouldn’t genuinely call themself a Metamodernist, if they fully understood the meaning of the term, which I do.]
Let’s try to situate this question a bit. What is Modernism? That one’s relatively easy. Modernism is a system of systems. A system, as I speak of it in this sense, is a grouping of abstractions into a coordinated set; abstractions in of themselves being rules that describe groups of concrete reality.
In this sense, Modernism is a set of philosophies and practices that started around the turn of the Renaissance in the 1500s. Humanism, Individualism, Capitalism, modern science, modern democracy, and more obscure philosophies, such as Objectivism; all of these systems of thought were born within Modernism. One can call a system of systems a paradigm, and Hanzi Freinacht and other researchers in the Metamodern community call this specific type of paradigm a Metameme.
All sorts of ideas, or memes, were born and are contained within the Modern Metameme. But a Metameme isn’t limited to just politics or philosophy. It is also an overall structure of feeling for an age, and as such can be reflected in the arts-Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism could all be considered examples of Modern art.
[Commentary: An early attempt on my part to synthesize the cultural and political schools of Metamodernism at the time. I feel that the word ‘paradigm’ could use a simpler explanation-but I can’t seem to find one that does the Model of Hierarchical Complexity proper justice. Oh well. ]
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