I did indeed come across the importance of this distinction via Brent’s work, and gave credit and praise accordingly, as you can see in this extract from my essay on metamodernism below, and in footnote 13 especially. 

I am of the view that Brent is right that the best way to grasp the philosophical acuity and political bite of metamodernism is to view it as an antidote to hypermodernism. Many people are already doing this in theory and practice with different terminology.

Despite what Brent says, I don’t think I ever opposed this distinction explicitly, but simply hadn’t had time to make sense of it until I wrote the essay last year. It takes a while to make adequate sense of either metamodernism or hypermodernism as ideas, and even longer to intuit or theorise their relationship.

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*Origin stories and forgotten prophets*

Metamodernism began ripening in the early 21st century onwards, but it has a meaningful pre-history that should not be overlooked. The term was first mentioned by American literary scholar Zavarzadeh Mas’ud in 1975,[12] to describe patterns of aesthetics and attitudes that he had been observing since the 1950s, including the co-presence of fact and fiction, art and reality, manifest most tangibly in the hybrid genre of ‘the nonfiction novel’. Those who know his work inform me that since he was writing before the term postmodern was in wide circulation, Zavarzadeh may have been using meta in the most straightforward sense of ‘after’, synonymous with ‘post’. This would help explain why metamodernism took a while to get into its stride, and beyond the occasional reference in literary journals, there were perhaps only two important but somewhat neglected sources in the nineties inspired by liberation theology – Albert Borgmann and Justo L. Gonzalez – recently uncovered by Brent Cooper. These sources point to a broader (and perhaps deeper) origin story about the provenance of metamodernism that challenges the academically orthodox view that it is primarily a literary or artistic affair.[13]

In the field of technology studies, Albert Borgmann (1992) juxtaposed hypermodernity with metamodernity in a way that clarifies the two incipient worlds that we live with today. One is a dystopian future we often feel we are drifting towards, while the other is the future we are called on to fight for. For Borgmann, postmodernity bifurcates into a runaway hyperreality where we become increasingly lost and exploited through technological servitude. He refers to ‘the fatal liabilities of the hypermodern condition, of a life that is enfeebled by hyperreality, fevered by hyperactivity, and disfranchised by hyperintelligence.’ And yet, if we can muster the courage, guile and coordination, we can instead create a world of metamodernity where humans reclaim control of the capacities required to shape our lives, through what Borgmann calls ‘focal attention’: ‘Focal things cannot be secured or procured, they can only be discovered, revered, and sustained in a focal practice. Such focal things and practices are well and alive in our artistic, athletic, and religious celebrations.’ Borgmann’s framing of the metamodern impulse is echoed in the challenges of addiction and attentional capture highlighted by the recent documentary The Social Dilemma, and also in Matthew Crawford’s applied philosophical work on the need for ‘focal activity’ and an ‘attentional commons’.[14]

Another figure largely ignored by the field of metamodern studies is Cuban-American liberation theologian Justo L. Gonzalez, who connected metamodernism to the postcolonial struggle in Metamodern Aliens in Postmodern Jerusalem (1996). Gonzalez sees a legitimate use for ‘meta’ in the sense of going beyond the modern, such that the enduring postcolonial struggle of many millions around the world is not subsumed within postmodern critique but grounded in a generative vision of reality in turn grounded in liberation from enduring colonialism in all its forms. Cooper suggests that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez embodies Gonzalean metamodernism: ‘A young female minority leader of a new progressive coalition … Pragmatic idealism is back with a playful vengeance.’ [15]

Borgmann and Gonzales did not build their intellectual identities around metamodernism; they used the term almost incidentally in fairly obscure sources, and did not initiate discourse around metamodernism. Nonetheless, in their own ways Borgmann and Gonzalez exemplify an impulse that could be distinctly and meaningfully metamodern, namely the desire to disclose perceptions of context (meta as within and between) that are saturated with history, meaning and perspective (because modernism and postmodernism have done their work) but nonetheless remain ours to shape; and that perception of context is therefore potentially liberating (metamodern). While these sources uncovered by Cooper are not an explicit part of the conceptual scaffolding on which contemporary ‘metamodernism’ has been built, I am impressed by the fact that they both exemplify a perception of context that traverses political and spiritual features of human experience and proactively seek to combine them for normative ends. These sources speak to me because in my own way I have been trying to do similar work for the last decade, starting with the realisation, while working at The Royal Society of Arts in London, that my policy research work on climate change and my public enquiry into spirituality were grounded in the same perception of context.[16]

In what might playfully be called the mid-history of metamodernism, there is also an intriguing and underexplored relationship between metamodernism and Yoruba culture that is intimated by Moyo Okediji in the late nineties, the spirit of which can be discerned today in Bayo Akomolafe’s poetic and prophetic thought today, and which Minna Salami is currently researching for Perspectiva. Some have described Reggae music as inherently metamodern in its awareness of an interiority characterised by the co-presence of suffering and joy, which we can sense for instance in Bob Marley’s line about some people feeling the rain while others just get wet. More broadly, a case has been made for Black metamodernism.[17]

**

[12] Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud, ‘The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives’, Journal of American Studies, 9(1) (1975) 69–83. ISSN 0021-8758. JSTOR 27553153.

[13] Brent Cooper has provided significant service to the idea of metamodernism, and much of what follows is gleaned from his series on alternative histories of metamodernism and his bibliographic tracking of the use of the term. See for instance: Cooper, Brent, ‘Metamodernism: A Literature List: Tracking the Scattered Use of the Term’, Medium (July 2019) and ‘Missing Metamodernism: A Revisionist Account of the New Paradigm’, Medium (June 2019).

[14] For a full discussion of Borgmann and related sources, see: Cooper, Brent, ‘Borgmannian Metamodernism: Philosophy of Technology and the Bifurcation of Postmodernity’, Medium(June 2019). For Matthew Crawford on the Attentional Commons, see: Crawford, Matthew, ‘Matthew Crawford: In Defense of the Attentional Commons’, Texas Architecture (October 2016).

[15] Cooper, Brent, ‘Gonzálezean Metamodernism: Post-colonialism, Alter-globalization, and Liberation Theology’, Medium (June 2019).

[16] See for instance, Rowson, Jonathan, ‘A New Agenda on Climate Change’, The RSA (December 2013) ; Rowson, Jonathan, ‘Spiritualise: cultivating spiritual sensibility to address 21st century challenges’, The RSA (October 2021).

[17] Cooper, Brent, ‘Black Metamodernism: The Metapolitics of Economic Justice and Racial Equality’, Medium (June 2019).