Brief Discussion of a Marxist Critique of Metamodernism

"You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists" // Abbie Hoffman

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Full text of NH Critique of Metamodernism: https://write.as/tw5u34u672vyx3wv.md

Marxist Critique of Luke Turner's Metamodern Manifesto (2011):
by Comrade NH

I read the manifesto by Luke Turner (http://www.metamodernism.org) and to be honest it is full of the same pompuous yet incomprehensible language as all the postmodernist texts. To me it’s not clear if he actually rejects any of the core concepts of postmodernism. He says that “we must liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety” and that “we acknowledge the limitations inherent to all movement and experience”, and “all information is grounds for knowledge [...] no matter its truth-value”. All of this sounds very postmodern. He says that we should act as if we can transcend the limitations of movement and experience. Clearly hinting that the limitations are real, but that we should act like they don’t exist. Hence he is not really contradicting the fundamental postmodernist proposition that objective knowledge is impossible at all! He is proposing a kind of morality or way of thinking based on a lie. According to him (and according to postmodernism) we can’t know if objective truth and progress really exist, but if we pretend that it does this would make our existence “richer” and help to “unfold” the world. This again is a very idealist and postmodernist approach to reality: essentially what he is saying is that we can change or even create reality by changing the way we think about it. “Thus, metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons.” To me this is just meaningless chatter, very much like postmodernism.

The capitalist crisis results in people looking for a way out of this system. They will start to look for ideas that can give them solutions. This also leads to criticism of postmodernism - this is true. But postmodernism has not been replaced by something different and is not “out”. The war against postmodernism has only just begun.

The reasons why Marxists are focusing their critique on postmodernism and not post-postmodernism or metamodernism is this:

1. Postmodernism is still the dominating philosophical trend in both academia and much of politics.

2. Post-postmodernism is not really a thing. The real basis for the cultural and political trends that we see today is the deepening crisis of capitalism.

3. Metamodernism is neither very important nor a clear break from postmodernism.

N.H.

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Author of Criticism: Comrade NH.