This was an enjoyable article to read, thank you for posting it!
I loved the term "epistemic agility," and the call to acquire more of it somehow. The reference to Zach Stein's warning about getting lost within the infinite regress of meta-meta reflecting, and also that pointing out the meta is not necessarily a solution itself to the problems revealed through meta-awareness.
Continually my attention returns to the mechanism of Justification as a critical foundation point in remaining anchored and moored whilst encountering these overlapping waves of problems and overlapping articulations of those problems (and, naturally, the problem-waves that the articulations themselves produce, and so on and so on).
-Chance
############################Hi List,
Below is a note from Jonathan Rowson sharing an essay on the meta-crises we are in, followed by my reply.
Best,Gregg
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Jonathan Rowson
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2020 6:33 AM
To: New Metamodernism List <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: How to think about the meta-crisis without getting too excited.
Hello friends.
You are friends, right?
I've been working on a longer paper making some conceptual distinctions between 'the emergency', 'the crisis', 'the meta-crisis' and 'the pickle'.
I realised I will need a few more weeks or even months to finish it, and won't have time for a while, so I wrote a brief reader-friendly overview on Medium to elicit some feedback in the meantime (and because it's an emergency!).
The brief overview is this:
The emergency is about the urgency to act. The crisis is about the unreasonable necessity of transformation. The meta-crisis is about the tenacity of our inertia. The pickle is not another name for the meta-crisis but a way of recognising its plurality without getting lost in it, and keeping it connected to the beating heart of the emergency and the materiality of the crisis.
Experiencing the pickle is playing with abstraction enough to know our predicament as fully as possible, but then gladly returning back into everyday existence, crucially in a way that is no longer naïve about the provenance of our situation.
I also believe there are three main patterns of meta-crisis (each of which has at least three illustrations in the longer paper):
The hyphen in ‘meta-crisis’ speaks of a crisis of self-reference and sometimes a paradoxical failure of achievement; too much liberty may kill liberalism, too much voting can weaken democracies, and we don’t always understand how we understand, we tend to deny our denial, and we are struggling to imagine a new imaginary.
The composite word ‘metacrisis’ is inspired by our German friends, and useful for resolving to speak to the cross-pollinating crises of our time as one thing; the aim is to better ‘join the dots’ between apparently disparate phenomena while recognising that no single grand vision or narrative, however textured and inclusive, can fully make sense of itself.
The adjective in ‘meta crisis’ says that’s the kind of crisis it is — a crisis defined by a debilitating lack of epistemic agility –too much abstraction in some ways and too little in others; a cultural inability or unwillingness to ‘go meta’, for instance to think about the political spectrum rather than merely thinking with it, or for economic commentators to question the very idea of ‘the economy’ or what exactly we mean by ‘money’.
In the longer paper, metamodernism also features more prominently, but for now you'll have to put up with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a Batman (1989) clip and the return of the meta pumpkin pie.
Hope you like it!
Jonathan.
Jonathan,
Very nice. I will forward your note over on my Tree/Theory of Knowledge List serve with your permission.
My own version of describing the meta-crisis is “the Digital Identity Problem” and my commitment is to try each day to be part of the solution. For me that involves “awareness, acceptance and active change” in one of the four domains that are listed. I was reminded the other day of an important slogan that I think captures some of the pickle we are in. I was having a conversation with a doctoral student about my Unified Framework being metamodern vision and that I had been having a number of clashes at work with folks who are fully embracing the postmodern vision, especially on issues of diversity and inclusion and identity politics. She stated that although she wanted to get to a metamodern view, she also noted that folks needed to go through the postmodern view. She warned me that people often face a choice between going fast and far alone or going slow and steady together. I agreed that made sense. And yet part of the struggle I have is that, given the situation we are in, we now need to go fast and far together! That seems to be another way to think about the pickle we are in.
Best,
Gregg
___________________________________________
Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857 (phone)
(540) 568-4747 (fax)
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