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May 2018

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From:
"Diop, Corinne Joan Martin - diopcj" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 20 May 2018 12:47:08 +0000
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Hi everyone,

We are grappling with this in art too!

It is a few years old now (2010), but we still discuss the attached "Notes on Metamodernism" by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in Contemporary Art Theory class... It is a lot about art but even more so is about the metamodern world view.

This is one of my favorite quotes from it-- it is good for when artists feel like giving up:

I’m noticing a new approach to artmaking in recent museum and gallery shows. . . . It’s an attitude that says, I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious. At once knowingly self- conscious about art, unafraid, and unashamed, these young artists not only see the distinction between earnestness and detachment as artificial; they grasp that they can be ironic and sincere at the same time, and they are making art from this compound-complex state of mind. (Jerry Saltz, ‘‘Sincerity and Irony Hug it Out’’, New Yorker Magazine, 27 May 2010)

And...

As Curtis Peters explains, according to Kant, ‘‘we may view human history as if mankind had a life narrative which describes its self-movement toward its full rational/social potential . . . to view history as if it were the story of mankind’s development’’.18 Indeed, Kant himself adopts the as-if terminology when he writes ‘‘[e]ach . . . people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal’’.19 That is to say, humankind, a people, are not really going toward a natural but unknown goal, but they pretend they do so that they progress morally as well as politically. Metamodernism moves for the sake of moving, attempts in spite of its inevitable failure; it seeks forever for a truth that it never expects to find. If you will forgive us for the banality of the metaphor for a moment, the metamodern thus willfully adopts a kind of donkey-and-carrot double-bind. Like a donkey it chases a carrot that it never manages to eat because the carrot is always just beyond its reach. But precisely because it never manages to eat the carrot, it never ends its chase, setting foot in moral realms the modern donkey (having eaten its carrot elsewhere) will never encounter, entering political domains the postmodern donkey (having abandoned the chase) will never come across.

And...

Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between na ̈ıvete ́ and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern. One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather, it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles. Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm.

Even older but still relevant (to art anyway) article is "Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism" by Raoul Eshelman in UCLA's Anthropoetics: Journal of Generative Anthropology http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/perform/

Again here are a few favorite tidbits:

This closed, simple whole acquires a potency that can almost only be defined in theological terms. For with it is created a refuge in which all those things are brought together that postmodernism and poststructuralism thought definitively dissolved: the telos, the author, belief, love, dogma and much, much more.

And in part 6: Performatism also has a political dimension. In his carefully honed essay For Common Things, Jedediah Purdy (2000, orig. 1999) argues against the postmodern attitude of ironic indifference and for the acceptance of individual political responsibility in a postideological age. But how is the individual to work towards a political goal in the absence of any clear ideological guidelines? Purdy exemplifies this dilemma using two seemingly disparate examples: that of the ruinous strip mining in his home state of West Virginia and that of the turn to democracy in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Destructive strip mining in West Virginia cannot, to paraphrase Purdy in my terms, be averted solely by imposing a strict governmental frame (a “carbon tax”) or by performing acts of individual resistance. Rather, both need to coincide in a typically circular fashion whose alpha and omega is a non-ironic, “attentive” subject...


I will be interested to see if any of this resonates outside of art!!

Corinne





Corinne Diop
Professor of Art
https://www.facebook.com/corinne.diop.studio/

Photography Area Head
http://www.jmu.edu/artandarthistory/programs/Photography.shtml

School of Art, Design, and Art History
MSC 7101/ 820 S. Main St
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA  22807
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(540) 568-6485

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________________________________________
From: tree of knowledge system discussion [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2018 8:15 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: metamodernism

Hi All,
  Just checked out metamodernism on Wiki and the posted “Metamodern Manifesto<http://www.metamodernism.org/>”. I consists of the incredibly new idea that we should think about ideas in terms of dialectics (poles) and fluctuating tensions between them. As if there were some sort of synthesis that could be achieved via a thesis in tension with an anti-thesis. If that is the depth of that movement, I am not surprised I have not heard of it.

  I will say it here as I have implied in my writings. Postmodernism is the recognition that human knowledge systems, even scientific ones, are built in socio-historical contexts and ultimately function to serve interests relative to power and influence. Natural science modernism did not have a fully effective way of factoring out intersubjective/social construction forces for one simple reason. No one had the Justification Hypothesis formulation of language, self-consciousness, and Culture.

  If you really want to move toward a post post-modern Grand Meta-Narrative, there is currently only one serious solution as far as I can see.

Best,
G
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