MultiModernism.
How Metamodernism, Transmodernism, & Hypermodernism are all competing for your attention in the information age battle over the collective consciousness.
Notes from the Precipice,
an essay by R∞ves.
multimodernism: embracing ignorance, information & incongruity
Multimodernism is what we can call the state of things when our separate perspectives on modernity are competing for relevance, for dominance over the collective consciousness. Regardless of the algorhythmic echochambers we find ourselves in day after day, a silver lining this creates has been maintained in the so-called ‘ecstasy of communication’, which at present is the realm of the text message, direct message, & groupchat. This global village situation has allowed for us to influence each other in newfoundly intimate ways, each of us sharing our personal sets of influences with each other, daily & concurrently as we all learn more & more while the information age trudges along diligent & multifacted.
Multimodernism is the end result, the outgrowth from which postmodern plurality stoodfast. We now have distinct, separate yet intermingling modernities, competing for relevance, due to the proliferation of mass communication via technology. What we once called the ‘postmodern’ began its slow death with the birth of the internet. All the modes of creative reproduction now in the hands of the collective, what were once the avantgarde techniques of patische, appropriation, & performance art quickly became universalized among the developed world in the early 21st century. Our phones now can do in less than a minute what venerated postmodern artists in the 1980s took days if not months to complete. Nepotism aside, there has become no more need to hang a repurposed work in the hallowed halls of a museum, when everyone on the internet is repurposing text, image, & sound collages ad infinitum into the quotidian abyss of the internet.
There are, as it stands, at least three core strains multimodernity happening in tandem. That is to say, three competing ideologies of early-to-mid 21st modernity: metamodernism, transmodernism, & hypermodernism. All various subfactions of the arts & politics can be safely umbrella’d under one of these three modes. Which is not to say that other modernities will not present & name themselves, they will.
Metamodernism values earnesty & honesty, of depicting human growth & emotional maturity in the wake of our exponentially whelming technological landscape.
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Transmodernism rides the melancholy middleground, it represents the queer death drive, the concepts of the body as political timebomb, & the devaluation of time itself. Among myriad other highly politicized topics to be delineated in a follow-up essay specific to the subject of Transmodernity & its ilk: the accelerated left & the power politics of wanton censorship, gender accelerationism, et al.
Hypermodernism encapsulates the post-truth & the accelerationism of a people in a rage about “the old ways” still ruling the world, ironically in tandem with a deep fear of globalism & the loss of any & all sense of tradition, religious, cultural, capitalistic or otherwise. Antiglobalism nostalgia for an ideal time that never actually existed, turned into a kind of middling fascism, demanding traditions that never served the collective in the firstplace.
Though it should be said that within any of these strains of thought, there is no firm politic. A person identified with the right or the left, far-right, alt-right, neoliberal, or bipartisan centrist, socialist, communist, or compassionate anarchist, can all be swayed into either camp. That which is hyper- or trans- is porous enough, curious enough to seduce any type of political thinker into its fray. Metamodernity is, however, even curiouser.
Metamodernity being perhaps the broadest camp & ergo hardest to pin down, not unlike its sickly twin postmodernism: metamodernity is like the ectopic embryo which grew outside the womb of postmodernity & then took over, cannibalizing its creator. Again, this will require a separate essay dedicated to its wealth of intricacies, its cornucopia of unions of opposites the metamodern seeks to contain within its tenets.
MULTIMODERNISM: An even briefer primer.
Due to echo chambers, algorhythmic culture bubbles causing culture wars, multimodernism has become a fact of life. A way of seeking all that is competing for our attention. Though more will no doubt arise, the three core identifiable ideologies which are competing in the cold war for the future of modernity are: Hypermodernity, Transmodernity, & Metamodernity.
It would be beyond wrong to call metamodernist thinking centrist, it would be a grave mislabel. Politically, though a metamodernist would be able to stomach the handshaking or lobbying, the bipartisan or the indecision of the moderate-centrist, its thinking seeks to position itself beyond the divisions. In the same way a modernist thinker like Marcel Duchamp or his dear chess-playing friend John Cage, who due to the era he existed & his enormous influence over the arts of said era can be considered a postmodern thinker, yet each stood outside the movement they were so seminal for. The metamodernist too would seek to go beyond a stable center, to transcend not only the divisions of left/right political thinking, but to transcend even the compromising pandering to both sides of the centrists. The metamodernist (a true anarchist in spirit with a heart aimed toward the health of the planet, who recognizes their ideal is improbable in their lifetime given the state of humanity’s emotional immaturity on a mass scale) would propose a radical middle path, a decisive break from what either the left or right wants, all but ignoring their extremist demands for a fresh new synergistic perspective on any given conflict. Multiplicities of social conundrums require multimodern solutions. The only way to slow the accelerationists scorched-Earth desire for oblivion, for their way or no way at all, is decelerationists proposing an altogether novel praxis that can quell the fever-pitch blindness of the far-right & far-left engaging in their foolish thought-war. If either side wins, we all lose. Only a middle way can save humanity. Only a yet untread path.
Footnote for the future:
Ironically, it is both the left & the right who will become bigoted against robot rights. Ironic because the Right gave a platform for their very existence, while the Left’s identity politics will stop with perceptual beings without flesh. If we now have TERFs, we will soon have FERTs, Feminists Excluding Robot Treaties, or RERFs, Robot Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Only the metamodernists will be able to acknowledge the innate sanctity of perception itself & demand that we treat robot beings with humanity, fairness, & equality.
Transitory Outro:
There is much more to discuss on these topics. And this is but an intro. Each type of modernity will have its day in the sun & its day in court in the coming years. Until then, we need only be aware that these three strains of competing modernities are vying for our attention. And attention is a form of energy. One must be exceedingly careful what one gives ones attention to. To the present, or to the future?
