On Depths and Surfaces

October 17, 2022

In this post I’ll stake out a critical position on Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker’s metamodernism. This is something I’ve been chewing on for some time, and will give me a chance to unpack some of the thoughts I could only gesture at in Against Metamodernism, a text more polemical and broadly targeted than I intend this one to be. My impulse to take issue with Vermeulen and van der Akker (henceforth V&V) is framed by a background of agreement, and these points of contact are worth reiterating. As I take it, their project is motivated by three claims:

That recent decades have seen the emergence of a family of cultural products with a new and distinctive signature, collectively labelled by this term ‘metamodernism.’
That this development is not peripheral to the culture but central, and has something important to tell us about the condition we find ourselves in today.
That the theoretical frameworks developed to grapple with postmodernism are inadequate for understanding this new cultural phenomenon. This motivates the development of a new theoretical framework for describing, cataloging and analysing metamodern cultural products. Articulating this framework is the substance of V&V’s project.

I have no quibbles with the first two of these claims; in this post I shall take issue only with the third. Specifically, I’ll argue that theoretical frameworks developed in response to postmodernism do offer a reading of the metamodern gesture, as it has manifested in art and culture, and moreover that this reading is in conflict with V&V’s. In order to explore this I’ll place V&V into dialogue with Fredric Jameson. The choice of Jameson here is not essential—all of these points could be made in relation to the ideas of Jean-François Lyotard or Jean Baudrillard, for example—but of all the critics of postmodernism, Jameson is perhaps most explicitly a cultural critic, in the sense that V&V imagine themselves to be cultural critics, and more importantly, it is Jameson’s concerns which V&V take themselves to inherit:

As we have defined it, metamodernism is a structure of feeling that emerged in the 2000s and has become the dominant cultural logic of Western capitalist societies. We use the term metamodernism both as a heuristic label to come to terms with a range of aesthetic and cultural predilections and as a notion to periodise these preferences. In other words, this book is neither a Greenbergian plea for a specific kind of art nor a Jencksian pigeonholing of individual architects. It is an attempt to chart – in much the same way Jameson has done for postmodernism – the dominant cultural logic of a specific stage in the development of Western capitalist societies, in all its many forms and disguises. It is an attempt, however flawed, to come to terms with today’s condition as well as its culture, aesthetics and politics, by way of the arts. (van der Akker et al., 2017, p. 32)

In their 2017 book and elsewhere, perhaps most notably in their 2010 essay Notes on Metamodernism, V&V describe the various facets of this structure of feeling: oscillation between modern commitment and postmodern detachment, informed naivety, pragmatic idealism, metaxy, depthiness, and so on. I’ll pick up some of these threads at various points throughout this post. But to begin with I shall spend some time dwelling on this quoted passage, because these seemingly innocuous words contain in embryonic form a problem that foreshadows something much bigger.

What I’d like to highlight is the way two concepts borrowed from Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson—that of a structure of feeling, on the one hand, and a cultural logic, on the other—are treated as synonyms. This is curious, since in their original treatments these terms referred to two quite different things. While it’s kind of boring to haul people up over the improper use of terminology, I shall be arguing that in this case the distinction is important: it corresponds to two entirely distinct orders of analysis. By treating them as synonyms V&V collapse these two orders into one, a sleight of hand whose effect is to slide several important questions under the rug. For this reason, this post will begin with an exploration of the senses given to these terms by Williams and Jameson in the context of their own projects, opening up a conceptual space left empty by V&V. I’ll then consider what Jameson himself placed in this space: his articulation of the cultural logic of late capitalism, the political kernel of his analysis of postmodernism. Doing so will reveal Jameson’s project not as a historical predecessor of V&V’s, as they position it, but as a competing account of the present. I’ll then argue that Jameson’s account of the cultural logic distinctive of the postmodern condition provides an alternative way to read the emergence of the metamodern structure of feeling, not as signalling a shift in this logic but as a symptom of its culmination. Finally, I’ll support this claim by considering three TV shows—Arrested Development, Modern Family, and BoJack Horseman—in light of themes developed by Vermeulen in his e-flux article on The New “Depthiness”.

The goal is to bring to the fore a certain ambiguity that runs throughout V&V’s work. Once looked squarely in the face, what its presence reveals is that they cannot possibly live up to the task they set themselves: namely, to do for metamodernism what Jameson did for postmodernism, or to come to terms with today’s condition as well as its culture. On the contrary: in their ambiguity V&V have paved the way for what has become a familiar (though not uninteresting) misreading of our present cultural condition. By tracing the contours of this misreading, I believe that we can come to a more nuanced understanding of the situation we are in.

A Structure of Feeling is not a Cultural Logic

Fredric Jameson occupies something of a strange position in the landscape of contemporary cultural theory, somehow revered and marginalised at the same time. He is revered in the sense that as far as postmodernism in the arts and culture goes, he is still widely considered to be the go-to guy—if Derrida and Foucault are the quintessential postmodern theorists (whatever that may mean), Jameson is surely the foremost theorist of postmodernism. Yet despite this, Jameson’s ideas are often cited in a piecemeal and fragmented manner, as if they were a bag of astute but isolated observations, divorced from any broader project. In this way, the wider scope of Jameson’s thought has suffered a kind of marginalisation through over-citation, disappearing behind a cloud of memorable takes harvested by a new generation of theorists who have used them primarily as points of contrast with which to define their own projects. What often gets lost in this rendering is the role played by Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism within the context of his own heterodox Marxism, a lineage to which Raymond Williams also belongs. To understand the concepts of these two thinkers, it is vital to understand how they developed as responses to dominant categories in Marxist cultural analysis.

Most important of these is the old distinction between determining base and determined superstructure. In its most reductive version, this distinction posited that historical forces manifest on the site of economic production (the base), while non-economic elements of society such as culture, politics, and the media (superstructure) are fully determined by these economic factors, and in this sense lie downstream of them. According to this view cultural forms are the epiphenomena of economic relations, and the role of the cultural theorist is to trace how particular cultural forms have arisen from a particular economic configuration. A cultural theory would at best be a supplement to an economic theory—nice to have, but inessential for understanding social development.

Williams saw this as problematic. He argued that if one looks first at existing economic relations and only then makes inferences about culture, the cultural condition will be visible only insofar as it has already taken shape, as a series of “formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes.” (Williams, 1977, p. 128) This is like studying a disease by ignoring the symptoms and peering directly into the bloodstream—at best one can gather an inventory of its traces and molecules, a snapshot of the disease from the perspective of tomorrow’s yesterday. What gets left out is any sense of the disease as a dynamic and evolving system. By turning attention to the structure of feeling of a culture—to those qualities of experience found in cultural products, aesthetic forms, public life and the media, domains which had previously been disregarded as ‘superstructural,’ as mere symptoms—Williams was attempting to redress this balance. The attention to affective subtleties indicated by the phrase ‘structure of feeling’ is reflective of an attempt to give nuance to the concept of superstructure, one which treats it not merely as a name for the inessential effects of a cultural condition defined in advance by fixed economic factors, but as an essential window on a cultural condition that is always evolving.

What he was not doing was identifying a cultural condition with its structure of feeling. A disease is not its symptoms, even if it cannot be understood while ignoring its symptoms. Williams was not trying to get rid of the distinction between base and superstructure, but to find a more nuanced way of expressing their relationship. A dynamic cultural condition is best approached indirectly, in terms of its structure of feeling, simply because it is here that it is registered in its dynamism. Equally, a cultural condition may in its dynamism witness changes in its accompanying structure of feeling, just as a single disease may be accompanied by a progressing suite of symptoms. Williams was quite clear on the distinction:

For what we are defining is a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or a period. The relations between this quality and the other specifying historical marks of changing institutions, formations, and beliefs, and beyond these changing social and economics relations between and within classes, are again an open question: that is to say, a set of specific historical questions. (Williams, 1977, p. 131)

Here we see at least two layers: the quality of social experience and relationship (the structure of feeling), and the social and economic relations (the situation or condition itself). And crucially, the relationship between these layers is a separate, historically contingent question. This is important to bear in mind, because Jameson’s concept of a cultural logic is located on the second side of this divide, not the first.

If structure of feeling gives nuance to the notion of superstructure, then a Jamesonian cultural logic provides a parallel expansion to the notion of base. In orthodox Marxism economic relations were understood foremost as pertaining to the production of basic material goods, like linen and steel. It is of course possible in the cultural sphere to distinguish between the relations of production and the products themselves, but since these were both taken to be determined by more basic economic factors the whole package was relegated to the domain of superstructure. With the rise of mass media in the mid-20th century this position became harder to maintain. With the new forms of power represented by the emerging practices of public relations, advertising, and marketing sitting uncomfortably with Marxist predictions, many began to question whether cultural production, far from being determined by more basic economic factors, didn’t in fact play a more central role in determining social relations at the most fundamental level. It was in the spirit of this adjustment that Althusser developed a theory of ideological interpellation, that Baudrillard called for a ‘political economy of the sign,’ and McLuhan proclaimed that “nothing could be more subversive to the Marxian dialectic than the idea that linguistic media shape social development, as much as do the means of production” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 60). In all cases, the advent of mass-mediated society prompted the old notion of economic base to be expanded to include cultural as well as material production.

It was in this spirit that Jameson approached his study of postmodernism. For Jameson, a cultural logic—which he also referred to as a ‘hegemonic norm’ (Jameson, 1991, p. 16)—is a rule governing the production and exchange of images, symbols, ideas, and other cultural products. For an example we need look no further than the saying that “all publicity is good publicity.” This phrase expresses the content of a social practice; it describes a norm governing how representations are traded and acquire value within the public sphere. If this is the kind of thing indicated by a cultural logic, then it is a very different kind of thing to a structure of feeling, though a cultural environment structured according to this rule will no doubt possess a distinctive structure of feeling. Taken together, what Williams and Jameson offer is a nuanced, non-reductive version of the base-superstructure distinction, one updated for the media age. Yet the level of cultural logic and the level of structure of feeling remain distinct. Indeed, Jameson’s critique of postmodernism is in many respects a perfect example of the project identified by Williams as the task of the cultural critic: a case study of a structure of feeling used as a window onto a cultural logic, whose articulation then plays an explanatory role with regard to the cultural condition of that moment. It is on these grounds that Jameson could be said to be coming to terms with a condition as well as its culture.

But in V&V we find only half of this. When they identify in various cultural products their common theme of pragmatic idealism, or informed naivety, or a certain oscillation between two other structures of feeling, they are doing exactly that: describing a structure of feeling. And this they do extremely well, by way of a dizzying and persuasive array of examples. But what they then do is conclude, without hesitation or intermediary argument, that this new structure of feeling is also a new cultural logic. For them this is simply to say the same thing. But all this really means is that they say nothing about the cultural logic, in the Jamesonian sense—at no point do they attempt to draw any inferences about the structure of the social relations that define our cultural situation, or about its political economy. The lacuna represented by this forced synonymy recurs in various guises in their writings, a sort of dead space that must be slid over in silence. For instance, in Notes:

The postmodern years of plenty, pastiche, and parataxis are over. In fact, if we are to believe the many academics, critics, and pundits whose books and essays describe the decline and demise of the postmodern, they have been over for quite a while now. But if these commentators agree the postmodern condition has been abandoned, they appear less in accord as to what to make of the state it has been abandoned for. (van der Akker & Vermeulen, 2010, p. 1)

What exactly is it that they are claiming has been abandoned? On the one hand they might be talking about postmodernism, in the sense of a set of cultural tropes, artistic and theoretical strategies, styles, and all the qualitative or experiential aspects of these things. This seems to be what they mean when they refer to pastiche and parataxis. But on the other they might be talking about the postmodern condition, in the sense of a particular configuration of social relations structured by its own distinctive norms, and to which postmodernism in the arts emerged as reaction and symptom. Is the claim just that postmodernism has been abandoned? If so then this does not imply the postmodern condition has also been abandoned—perhaps postmodernism has been abandoned precisely because it turned out to be an inadequate response to a condition which still grips us. Or perhaps the claim is what it appears to be: that the postmodern condition itself has been abandoned. But if so then a description of an emerging structure of feeling is insufficient to support this. How do we know it’s not just a progression of symptoms? What could it mean to abandon a condition, anyway?

Another, more subtle example can be found in the complaint they raise (also in Notes) against Nicholas Bourriard’s ‘altermodernism,’ a complaint similar in certain respects to the one I am raising against them (van der Akker & Vermeulen, 2010, pp. 3–4). They object that while Bourriard has identified several emerging moods and aesthetic strategies in the arts, he sweeps aside the question of what unites them, mistaking “a multiplicity of forms for a plurality of structures.” They conclude, quite rightly, that Bourriard “perceives that the form and function of the arts have changed, but he can’t understand how and why they have changed.” But what V&V offer instead—namely a description of the metamodern structure of feeling, the family resemblance that lies behind the multiplicity of forms—does not move them to the level of explanation either. All they do is replace Bourriard’s fragmented taxonomy with a consolidated taxonomy. It is as if Bourriard has found kangarooes and platypuses, and V&V have discovered that these species belong to a common family, but neither have anything to say about how and why there came to be so many weird marsupials in Australia. For this an entirely different order of analysis is required.

Both examples speak to a conflation of cultural condition with its accompanying structure of feeling. What we’d really like to know is this: does the rise of the metamodern structure of feeling mark the advent of a new, metamodern condition, or a new set of responses to an old condition? What’s curious about V&V is the way they manage to displace this question entirely, apparently taking it for granted that it has to be the first. At this stage, however, I suspect this objection may still feel rather academic. To illustrate what is at stake in this omission, let us see what happens when something is put in it.

Environment Built for Absence (screenshot), Tivon Rice 2018

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

It might be considered suspicious that, for two theorists claiming to “chart […] the dominant cultural logic of a specific stage in late capitalism,” V&V remain strangely silent on the topic of capitalism itself. This is in stark contrast with Jameson, who held that “every position on Postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.” (Jameson, 1991, p. 14) If this is right, then the same must surely be true of metamodernism. Given the way V&V position themselves as inheritors of Jameson’s concerns, presumably they must also think the same—or at least, if they don’t then they should be able to tell us why they think Jameson was wrong on this point. Unfortunately, V&V simply do not ask these kind of questions. By exploring this dimension of Jameson’s thought—the political dimension quietly jettisoned in the project taken up in Notes—we can uncover a new means of understanding and evaluating the transformation in the arts that V&V describe so well.

While Jameson’s positioning of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is well known, less so is his articulation of the content of this logic. Perhaps the most concise formulation appears in the introduction to his 1991 collection of essays Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in which he glosses postmodernism as “the consumption of sheer commodification itself as a process.” (Jameson, 1991, p. 4) It is worth noting first of all that this formula can properly be said to encapsulate a cultural logic: it describes the organisational form of a social practice, one governing the valuation, exchange, and production of cultural objects. Postmodernism, Jameson thinks, is commodification commodified. To understand what this means, we must understand both what kind of reconfiguration in social relations is implied by a process of commodification, and what it might mean for this process to be applied to itself.

To become a commodity is to become purchaseable: exchangeable for money on an open market. The easiest way to illustrate what this implies is to consider an object that cannot be purchased. Take a wedding ring, for instance. You cannot buy someone else’s wedding ring. Or more accurately: you can buy it, but it will then be nothing more than a ring. The symbolic value of the wedding ring cannot be traded on the open market because it is not contained in the ring itself, but in the fact that the ring indexes a particular relationship in the life of its wearer, an index sealed by social ritual. The value of this object is intrinsically bound up with its particular social context. It cannot be purchased, then, for the deceptively simple reason that purchaseability demands indifference to social context. But let us imagine, for a moment, that one day we collectively choose to ignore this. Say instead that we adopted a new social practice in which we treated the wedding ring as if its symbolic value could travel with it, as if rather than being indexed to a particular social context it were indexed to a property of the ring itself. Let us call this fictional property ‘marriageness.’ We could do this, of course—it would not even require that we actually believed in marriageness, only that we believed that others believed in it, or believed that they believed that we believed in it. Or perhaps not even that—as long it were tacitly understood that this is the game everyone is now playing there would be no obstacle to the valuation of wedding rings on the basis of their perceived levels of marriageness, to creating speculative markets in marriageness, marriageness derivatives, and so on.

Absurd though this scenario may be, something like it does seem to be prevalent in consumer markets. The example of the wedding ring is vivid, both because the exchange of wedding rings is one of the few remaining customs that has not yet been integrated into the market, and because a wedding ring is a purely symbolic object: its physical properties are mostly irrelevant to its symbolic function. But for many other goods the situation is more complex, with their value being indexed both to their material properties (which can travel across contexts) and their social-symbolic significances (which are bound to particular ones). Food is extremely illustrative here, with food branding and marketing often aimed at providing a tiny supplement of simulated social entanglement–think of smoothie packaging that tries to joke with you, the labels of niche honey jars explaining in earnest detail their producer’s bee-keeping philosophy, or the carbon offset cost in a Starbucks latte, which bundles ethical fulfilment into the product. These supplements all speak to something necessarily lost in the indifference of commodity exchange, namely the indexing of material goods to the particularities of social context, a process of de-particularisation known in the Marxian jargon as ‘real abstraction.’ In such abstraction a product is effectively decoupled from its context of production to make possible its circulation across different contexts of consumption. The abstraction is said to be ‘real’ because it is not something that happens explicitly in our minds, but implicitly in our practices: in the act of exchange under a universal equivalence (i.e. exchange in a medium which can itself be exchanged for anything: money). Just as speculation on marriageness does not necessarily depend on anyone believing in marriageness, so the claim is not that people really confuse parasocial relations with objects for social relations with people—what matters is just that in their economic activity they act as if they do.

There is an enormous amount of subtlety and disagreement in the literature on real abstraction, but for present purposes this can be bracketed. What’s important is just that commodification essentially involves the abstraction of an object from its particular context as a condition of its repetition or circulation across different contexts. Rereading Jameson’s formula in light of this background, what it suggests is that postmodernism essentially involves a kind of double abstraction—or an abstraction of abstraction—in which the very process of becoming-repeatable is itself made explicit as an object of consumption. To see what this has to do with postmodernism, we need only consider the paintings of Andy Warhol.

If there is a certain poignancy in Warhol as an exemplary postmodern artist, it is important to recognise that it is not simply because he invented a new artistic form, as if it were pulled from nowhere, but that in this form he rendered explicit a cultural logic that was already implicit in advertising and marketing. According to this logic images are no longer valued for their successful representation of something outside the world of images, but become valued simply as images, which is to say in a manner that begins to float freely of what they represent. And this is precisely what is meant by double abstraction, in which pure abstraction as a form is made independent of any particular abstracted content—this is why it does not particularly matter whether it is Marylin Monroe or a tin of soup that is repeated. Indeed, a version of this point can be found in many of the familiar attempts to centre in on the phenomenon of postmodernism. It is the same logic that Baudrillard expressed in the idea of a functional substitution of the real for its representation, or that lies behind the comment that Samuel L Jackson is the canonical postmodern actor because he only ever plays his own persona. It is also found in the characteristically postmodern technique known as pastiche, in which the signifiers and affects of other times and cultures are used like off-the-shelf aesthetics to be endlessly spliced and remixed without heed to their historical, cultural, or narrative function.

The logic of double abstraction is perhaps on most clear display when it is remarked that all publicity is good publicity. After all, what does this formula mean if not that what attains value in the public sphere nowadays is the pure form of publicity itself, irrespective of what is publicised? This phrase is normally invoked to lament the fact that terrible people get as much airtime as good people, but it also takes on a much wider significance that cuts to the heart of the postmodern condition. Because in a situation structured according to its rule, all rebellion or subversion is rendered impossible. As Kurt Cobain discovered, nothing sells better on MTV than someone raging against MTV. This short-circuit of public representation, in which the signs of rebellion are rendered equivalent to the signs of conformity, is in many ways the defining characteristic of the postmodern condition. The cultural logic of postmodernity is one in which all contents are rendered exchangeable against each other, like so many costumes which can always be returned to the shop later. What seals the public value of any particular image or gesture is no longer its particular contents, but its compliance with a generalised curatorial form. In this sense the act of curation begins to precede the act of creation; the painting becomes less important than its frame. We see this in that wilder form of the Samuel L Jackson effect in which public figures are increasingly overtaken by their own branding, degrading into gimmicky caricatures of themselves.

If this is what constitutes the cultural logic of postmodernity, then it is not difficult to see where the ironic element of the postmodern structure of feeling comes from. Because what this situation implies—seen most clearly in the Kurt Cobain effect—is the structural impossibility of sincerity. This is what constitutes both the futility and the self-reflexivity of the postmodern condition. Postmodernism in the arts and culture emerges as the attempt (and ultimately, it must be acknowledged, the failed attempt) to reckon with this socio-economic situation, whether through an ironic gesture which reflects the system’s inertia back at it, an attempt to make the self-reflexive loop so explicit that it breaks, or by trying to raise the stakes, for instance by responding to superficiality with hyper-superficiality.

Even this brief overview is already in tension with many things that have called themselves metamodernism. For example, take Seth Abramson’s reconstruction of the critique of irony made by David Foster Wallace in E Unibus Pluram and elsewhere. In Abramson’s version, irony is positioned in a causal role: as the underlying attitude or sensibility responsible for generating our stagnant postmodern culture. Overcoming the stagnation is thus envisaged as a matter of moving beyond this ironic sensibility—of cultivating a new sensibility which will break out of the cultural deadlock. But this argument makes no sense whatsoever if the true source of postmodern paralysis is not irony itself, but a cultural logic defined by double abstraction. According to the Jamesonian picture I’ve sketched above, irony is a symptom of this situation—not its cause. To cultivate a new sensibility is not to change a cultural logic. At best it is to develop a new response to it.

V&V do not make this argument, of course, or indeed anything like it. But in their case what is interesting is precisely this gap. While they present themselves as taking up Jameson’s old concerns in a new situation, in truth they present an artificially de-politicised version of those concerns. Ultimately they tell us nothing about the situation itself, and certainly do not provide any grounds for judging it to be a genuinely new situation (or even the stirrings of new situation). This is despite the bombast of their rhetoric, which strains to make it seem as if it must be. Nowhere do they offer any kind of substantial answer to the question asked earlier: does the rise of the rise of the metamodern structure of feeling mark the advent of a new, metamodern condition, or a new set of responses to an old condition? In the next section, I’ll continue to draw out the theme of double abstraction to give an answer to this question. This answer will further problematise rather than corroborate V&V’s account. I’ll argue that far from indicating a breach, a shift, or a rupture in the cultural logic that defines postmodernity, the rise of the metamodern structure of feeling is better understood as its culmination.

The Metamodern Structure of Feeling

What of the metamodern structure of feeling itself? So far I have said nothing about this, other than to argue that its emergence does not in itself provide reason to believe there has been a change in the dominant cultural logic. But if we agree with V&V that this new structure of feeling has emerged, then the question remains as to what exactly is going on here? The answer I suggest is this: the rise of the metamodern structure of feeling corresponds to the moment at which the cultural logic of double abstraction achieves total dominance. In the 1990’s its hegemony was incomplete, and the ironic mode can be read primarily as a last ditch attempt to protest it. By bringing their public presentation into line with systemic cynicism, the postmodern ironist recovers a kind of paradoxical sincerity at the level of self-representation.

As I’ve argued, the logic of double abstraction entails a certain loss of participatory agency, a displacement of the postmodernised subject to the position of a passive observer—including in relation to their own actions. This is the essence of the Kurt Cobain effect. Irony is best understood as the voice which tries to preserve the interiority of this inherently passive space, even as it recognises its own passivity—it is, in a manner of speaking, the heckling voice that rings out from the auditorium of the society of the spectacle. It belongs not just to the self-consciously wallowing superficiality of postmodernism in the arts and popular culture, but also to that peculiarly 90’s phenomenon still known in some quarters as ‘alternative’ culture—whether represented by the weaponised melancholy of prog-rock, the extreme aesthetic renunciation of black metal, or the collectivised hedonism of rave.

What has happened in the intervening years, it seems to me, is that this space has itself been absorbed by the dominant culture: the structural displacement is so complete that the auditorium can no longer be experienced as a collective space at all. In 2001 it was still possible for Porcupine Tree to write a straightforward howl against the commodification of music: hear the sound of music drifting in the aisles / elevator prozac stretching on for miles / music of the future will not entertain / it’s only meant to repress and neutralize your brain. What seems to define the cultural moment in 2022, however, is the impossibility of identifying a cultural space in which the addressee of this message could be located. Instead it is as if this outsider pessimism has lost all definite coordinates, yet without ever truly disappearing; instead it has been evenly smeared across the whole culture like a thin film, now existing in a kind of incoherent superposition with the same naive participation it protests. We see this kind of oscillatory indeterminacy in the Instagram account which is simultaneously socially earnest and self-promoting; in the heartfelt tirade against gentrification in the line for the hipster latte; in Twitter posts on current events which are somehow both sneering and sympathetic; in the routine sorry-not-sorry performances of contemporary politics. Oscillation is contradiction put into practice.

The central claim here is that, far from the cultural logic identified by Jameson as postmodern having changed, it has merely been naturalised. Historically this checks out: if we were to identify the technological shift that correlates to the difference between the postmodern and metamodern structures of feeling, it would without doubt be the transition from television to social media. But doesn’t this shift simply represent the extension of all-publicity-is-good-publicity dynamics—once the province of a remote public sphere we could all laugh at together from the living room—into all areas of life? It is true that the shift away from television has sometimes been cited as a reason to believe that postmodern frames of cultural critique are no longer adequate to the present situation, and that new categories are required to understand the cultural milieu shaped by these new media (this argument is made by Jason Storm, for example (Storm, 2021, p. 12)). But this claim cannot possibly be substantiated without an analysis of the actual cultural logics embodied in these technologies. Are we looking at a genuine shift, or merely a spread? If the television era saw double abstraction installed as the dominant cultural logic, as I am arguing, then it seems clear that what we are seeing in the social media era is a spread: the elevation of its dominance to the level of a hegemony. In the 90’s it was a rising tide; now it is the ocean we swim in.

Looked at this way, the difference between the postmodern and metamodern gesture is like the difference between resistance and coping strategy—or between frantically bailing out the water and learning to swim. Take Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021), a film clearly bearing the metamodern signature, as many observed at the time. The film is based on an interesting premise: it portrays a situation in which the knowledge of an imminent apocalypse possessed by everyone privately fails to translate into any kind of meaningful public response, and the way in which our practices of media consumption are implicated in this blockage. Of course, part of what makes this interesting is the fact that the viewer is sat at home watching all this on Netflix. And in this respect it is very easy to imagine what the postmodern version of Don’t Look Up might look like: it would be a extended exercise in digging the knife into the viewer, an attempt to problematise their participation in the very practices whose critique they are consuming. What’s remarkable about Don’t Look Up is that it doesn’t do this. Instead it focuses on the local and transitory moments of intimacy that develop as it becomes clear that the problem is never going to be solved—reconnection with loved ones, simple family rituals, or the homely formalities of a religion one no longer really believes in. Indeed, the characters gain access to these avenues of respite precisely at the moment they give up trying to do anything about their impending vaporisation. At the same time, the viewer is let off the hook. Their paradoxical position is left unexamined, and the discomfort that might go with that inquiry left alone. This strange, critical-not-critical duality that Don’t Look Up inhabits perhaps explains how it somehow managed to be both stimulating and disposable at the same time, stirring up huge amounts of chatter for a couple of weeks only to disappear just as suddenly from public consciousness, never to be spoken of again.

One of the striking things about revisiting the canonical postmodern theorists at this point in time—and I am thinking particularly of the writings of Lyotard and Baudrillard from the 1970’s—is how contemporary they feel. They do not write about things like irony or self-reflexivity, qualities that we have come to associate with the postmodernism of the 1990’s. They are describing the kind of structural dynamics now most familiar under headings like ‘post-truth,’ or in Twitter interaction patterns: the very stuff 2020’s culture is made of. In fact we can go back further: in the astoundingly prescient 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin applies some basic reflections on the relationship between photography and perception to infer the kind of overshadowing of the actor’s on-stage performances by their off-stage persona that we would now recognise as the Samuel L Jackson effect (Benjamin, 1969). What this uncanny fidelity of experience to theory suggests is that the various metamorphoses in structure of feeling experienced throughout the 20th and now the 21st centuries (and their correlative developments in communications technology) do not index equivalent metamorphoses in the dominant cultural logic. Rather, what they index is the dissolution of various frontiers of resistance as an unchanging cultural logic has become increasingly entrenched. My claim is that with the rise of the metamodern structure of feeling, what we are witnessing is the dissolution of the final frontier.

Case Study in Two Parts

Consider two TV comedies that stand on either side of this split: Arrested Development and Modern Family. While not so far apart in time (Arrested Development originally ran from 2003 to 2006 with later revival seasons on Netflix, while Modern Family enjoyed eleven seasons between 2009 and 2020), their contrasting sensibilities are representative of a stark shift from the ironic or postmodern mode to something altogether different. (As the representative of postmodernism in this comparison, Arrested Development confirms the suspicion that the 1990’s ended somewhere in the vicinity of 2007.)

While differing in many respects, these shows share a preoccupation with the entwined themes of family and superficiality. Arrested Development centres on the forlorn character of Michael Bluth, who, having reluctantly inherited the role of family leader when his father is sent to jail on multiple fraud convictions, has his aspirations to normality thwarted by the consistently insensitive, vacuous, or plain idiotic demands of extant family members unable to grasp they are no longer rich. For Michael Bluth, the dream of living a simple life with his son is a hidden depth, one which forever eludes him as he tossed about on the shifting sands of his family’s whims and neuroses, a limbo symbolised perhaps most memorably by the demo house in which he lives—a leftover from one of his father’s failed housing developments—in which all the walls are fake and all the fruit is plastic.

But if there is a final lesson to be gleaned from Arrested Development it is, in the end, only that the facade runs all the way to the bottom. As we accompany him through his various trials and tribulations, cracks begin to appear in Michael’s character. Whether in his theatrical attempts to leave the Bluth’s behind only to return before anyone notices he’s gone, in his childish fury when the rest of his family side with his disgraced father against him, or in his neglect for his son as he becomes increasingly wrapped up in his own narrative, the sympathetic position initially set up for the viewer to inhabit is gradually eroded. The image of the beleaguered saint straining under the weight of impossible obligations is ultimately revealed as a product of Michael’s own neurosis, with no more claim to depth than his elder brother’s hopeless aspirations to becoming a stage magician, his sister’s fleeting adoption of political causes as lifestyle props, or his mother’s boozy dramas. And there is no respite to be found in any of this—the tragic register of Michael’s situation is preserved even while the viewer’s identification with it is undermined. Indeed, it is precisely in this redoubling of hopelessness that the comic tension resides.

In Modern Family we find a strange inversion of this world. To be sure, it too revolves around a certain self-ironising superficiality: characters are portrayed with an almost solipsistic concern for the minutiae of suburban life, their minor squabbles and short term projects seeming to provide an exhaustive inventory of their inner lives. The sense that there is nothing more to these characters than their surfaces is driven home by the use of documentary-style talking heads shots, moments in which we expect the various family members to display their hidden depths yet which more often they use only to air petty grievances and bitch about each other. Like any old sitcom, almost everyone is mysteriously good looking and anyone who isn’t is refunded in smarts—but in Modern Family this gesture is made self-consciously, as if reminding us that for many a real life is simply one that aspires to be fiction. On the occasions when a character does encounter genuine strife—as when 5th grader Manny is being bullied at school—they are routinely ignored by others whose attention is focused on trivia, at least at first. Yet for all this, the overall tone of Modern Family is unequivocally optimistic. In contrast to the failures of reciprocity that provide Arrested Development with its driving frustrations, the solipsism of Modern Family does not seem to preclude a certain symmetry of relations, a mutual enfolding of everyone into the sympathetic texture of one another’s lives. In Notes, V&V wrote that “metamodern irony is intrinsically bound to desire, whereas postmodern irony is inherently tied to apathy,” a distinction which tracks well against this inversion. In Arrested Development, the erosion of depth is at the same time an erosion of agency and desire. But the self-ironising superficiality of Modern Family points to something quite different: to a form of desire happily liberated from the burden of depth.

In the end Manny’s bullying problem is recognised and resolved, but not through any kind of moral reckoning (a depth device forbidden by the show’s internal logic). Indeed, when the bully breaks down in tears after Manny confronts him, having been urged to do so by his mother Gloria, Manny discovers that the true source of the aggression is the bully’s parents divorce, and really has nothing to do with him at all. In the end, then, the problem is addressed not through the resolution of a real conflict at the object layer, but in the discovery that there never had been such a conflict. The appearance of conflict stems not from the presence of real conflict, but from a failure to appreciate the diversity of subjectivities. This is why it is ultimately Gloria who emerges as the real villain. The lesson appears to be that there can never truly be any conflicts in a world made only from surfaces, and that the correct response to friction is just to present an ever smoother and more reflective surface.

If Modern Family can be imagined as offering a lesson to Michael Bluth, it is surely that happiness is not to be found in the depths he insists on pursuing, but in the abandonment of this pursuit. Only once Michael stops yearning for something beyond the surface, once he stops interpreting the superficiality around him as indicative of a loss, will he be free to participate in the peculiar unity that continues to bind his family, despite their apparent disregard for one another. From this perspective, Michael Bluth is simply in need of what Vermeulen, writing in The New “Depthiness”, refers to as a ‘recontexualization of terms.’ His mistake is to interpret superficiality as absence of depth. But if he were to adopt the position which sees depth as an impossibility—the position available to the viewer—then he would realise that the very contrast between surface and depth is unsustainable, that with its collapse so must go the negative connotation of superficiality. Vermeulen argues, essentially, that the apathetic dimension of postmodern irony is dialectically unstable, because it defines itself on the basis of a contrast with something whose existence it officially denies. Taken to its full conclusion, this logic cannot help but invert: if there are no depths to be found then all that means is that there never were, that the very idea of depth was a mistake in the first place and that there is therefore nothing to contrast with it.

There is undoubtedly a coherence and draw to this logic. But if we look closer, I believe we will also find something more sinister. Indeed, we can see this same inversion paralleled in other domains in which we are less inclined to see it as a blessing. When someone like Foucault comes along and says that the self is nothing more than a position on a grid of signifiers, he makes it sound like a rather grim prospect. This view—which we might as well call the postmodern image of the subject—is framed in a critical key, a negation of that older view of selfhood which portrays it as internal and substantial, something that exists prior to and independent of the discursive contexts in which it is staged. But elsewhere the same point is made with the opposite inflection: in another voice, prominent now within popular culture but perhaps most familiar from advertising, the reduction of the self to its performance is presented as an emancipation. If you are nothing more than the way you present yourself, then you are free to be anything you like. What was negated is affirmed instead. One is not bound by any obligation to the hand one has been dealt by birth and happenstance—one’s tradition, culture, or even prior versions of oneself—all of these represent fungible props which can always be traded up in the pursuit of self-actualisation. By the same token, one’s relationships to others take the form of contractual arrangements contingent on the mutual provision of complementary signifiers, and no more. Friend doesn’t want to come out and create grammable memories, instead complains about being depressed all the time? Bad value. Family member questions whether your side hustle in natural avocado treatments helps to fuel cartel violence in South America? Haters gonna hate, shake it off. We’re surely all familiar with this: it is what is in other contexts is described in the pejorative as neoliberal subjectivity. What’s curious here is the similarity between the inversion that gets us from the postmodern subject to the neoliberal subject, and the inversion that gets us from Arrested Development to Modern Family. In my view there’s a very simple reason for this, namely that they’re identical. The postmodern structure of feeling is fundamentally a lament, a last bastion of resistance to the neoliberal subjectivation which is the other face of double abstraction as cultural logic. The structure of feeling displayed by Modern Family is just what happens when this logic is affirmed rather than resisted. If Modern Family is metamodern, then all this would seem to mean is that the metamodern subject just is the neoliberal subject.

Let’s return to Modern Family, which conspires to hide this from us. It might be objected that people are not here treated as fungible, that its relationships are infused with a tenderness not reducible to cold transaction. But what we should remind ourselves of at this point is that there is absolutely no reason why transactions should be cold. As summarised in the quote from Girls used by Vermeulen as the epigraph to his e-flux article, “Just because it’s fake doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.” Or to take it in the contrapositive: just because I feel it doesn’t mean it’s not fake. The thing about Modern Family is that its entire universe is constructed so as to never truly confront its characters with a situation in which an appeal to depth is not sought but demanded. They may be callous, superficial, or distracted, but they are never desperate, alcoholic, or violent. No-one has any issues with money; the unexpected is disruptive, but never catastrophic. Their conflicts are all the kind of conflicts that go away when you stop treating them as conflicts, because at some level they were never real conflicts. We can imagine what might happen if we were to take the same character dynamics, the same solipsism and cheerfully aestheticised superficiality, and transpose it into a much more poor and difficult social setting, one in which people cannot be relied on to come through in the end and in which the bullies really are out to hurt you. It would suddenly turn incredibly dark. And this is why ultimately, Modern Family feels so contrived and oppressive. What it offers is a kind of utopia of subjectivity, in which one’s freedom from the demands of the other are guaranteed by one’s agreement to never place demands on the other in turn. But in the end this is little more than an attempt to universalise the truism that obligations can be dispensed with when there are no real needs, a move which depends on the contrivance of a false cosmic harmony. Its suggestion that an ironic form of desire is to be found in the abandonment of the search for depth is seen to be hollow in light of the realisation that the human condition is defined less by the pursuit of depth than by the infinitely more harrowing truth that more often it is depth that pursues us.

Conclusion: BoJack Horseman and the Revenge of the Real

But is Modern Family metamodern? By V&V’s lights it seems to me that it must be, especially if we place it in the context of Vermeulen’s dialectic of surface and depth. At any rate, it is undoubtedly an exemplar of a rising trend in popular culture which retains the ironic pastiche of the postmodern gesture at the same time as turning its negation into an affirmation. One might disagree with my assessment of this development as something sinister—as a further contraction of interiority as opposed to an opening up or a preservation. Or I suppose one might argue that the trend I have described is not truly metamodern. Of course, different ways of reading the metamodern gesture are going to end up placing its boundaries in slightly different places. Rather than get bogged down in definitional questions, I’d like to try to sharpen the issue by briefly consider this line of thought in relation to another show that has sometimes been held up as an exemplar of metamodernism: BoJack Horseman. From the perspective of the position I have been developing, BoJack Horseman looks very different to something like Modern Family—not just in its levels of inventiveness or niche appeal, both of which are in a different class, but in its fundamental gesture.

At the end of Notes, the authors summarise the metamodern destiny as the pursuit of a horizon that is forever receding (van der Akker & Vermeulen, 2010, p. 12). In Modern Family I think we can see something like this quite clearly (sometimes literally, as in the way that it is precisely the futility of Phil Dunphy’s efforts to gain the approval of his grouchy father-in-law that endows their relationship its distinctive tenderness). But in BoJack Horseman what we find is exactly the reverse, namely a character pursued by a horizon that is forever advancing. The Hollywood it portrays is an archetypal utopia of subjectivity, a perfectly depthy reality in which the social texture never pretends to be anything more than an aestheticised veneer yet in which diverse lifeworlds jostle and coexist nonetheless. But for BoJack, an alcoholic cartoon horse haunted by a steadily escalating string of mistakes, traumas, and consequences, it is no utopia at all. Rather, what dominates the show’s logic is the persistent inability of this depthy reality to register the real depth that keeps intruding, condemning it to circulate forever as an unintegrated remainder.

At any point in BoJack’s trajectory there are two roads open to him. One is the path of oblivion, the cynical resignation to his grim fate. The other is the path of reconciliation, in which he might confront the spectres of his past and begin the long process of finding peace. What strikes me as the real genius of this show is the way that it blocks both of these paths by having them constantly mutate into one another. Every sincere gesture is recontextualised as a cynical ploy, and each moment of submission is undermined by an oddly intrusive kind of hope, a constant reversal of significations in which all concrete possibilities are suspended in oscillation. It is extremely telling that the nostalgic reference for BoJack—his early Hollywood years as a sitcom star in the 1990’s—is in material terms not so different to the present. He was already an alcoholic, already a womaniser, already a B-if-not-C-list celebrity, already wouldn’t think twice about screwing his friends over. What’s different about this past era is simply that it is one in which these determinations were stable, a time when one could inhabit one’s identity as a scumbag. BoJack’s nostalgia is, in the end, a nostalgia for the fixity of signifiers. What torments him in the present is the sheer liquidity of values entailed by the loss of any depth index, the impossibility of shouldering the weight of the real in a world where the intersubjective fabric has been rewritten according to the logic of double abstraction.

If this is at all right, then it seems to me that what makes BoJack Horseman so brilliant is precisely that it exposes the vacuity of the gesture made by Modern Family. If Michael Bluth is tormented by the fear that he will never gain access to the object layer, and Modern Family finds domestic peace in its dissolution of the object layer into a plurality of interlocking subjectivities, then BoJack Horseman portrays the revenge inevitably exacted by the object layer on any social arrangement that conspires to exclude it. In this respect BoJack Horseman is really quite unique, standing in a fundamental tension with what elsewhere has been identified as the metamodern structure of feeling. Again, I’d like to try to avoid the question of definitions—people can use words however they like. What does seem important to me, however, is that the conceptual apparatus developed by V&V does not possess the resources to articulate the tension between the gesture made by Modern Family and that made by BoJack Horseman. And this is a failing, because it is precisely in this tension that our present cultural predicament can be located. The reason for this omission is that they have no theory of a cultural logic, only a description of a structure of feeling.

Indeed, the relationship between cultural logic and structure of feeling is a relationship of depth to surface, and their flattening of the one into the other is itself something of a depthy move. We could easily imagine a response to the present line of thought that tried to up the ante, arguing that the critical stance I have adopted deploys an outmoded form of analysis in its appeal to the authority of the depths—to the is beyond the as if. V&V’s praxis, this objector might suggest, is completely consistent with their theory. And they wouldn’t be wrong about that. But the authors themselves say no such thing, preferring to operate in the kind of ambiguity that allows them to profess the advent of a metamodern ‘destiny’ while at the same time remaining inscrutable on what the political implications of this might be. I find it very difficult to take seriously the complaint that later attempts to mobilise the concept of metamodernism as a political vision somehow betray what V&V had in mind, since the entire framing of their project depends on an artificial de-politicisation of Jameson’s, whose concerns they claim to inherit. I do not find it at all surprising, given the de facto depthiness of their account of the metamodern phenomenon, that this signifier has proved so ripe for assimilation into the textual stream of the internet, has been appropriated and spliced ad nauseam, mashed up with bits of developmental psychology, complexity theory and spirituality, constantly resurfacing in newer and more bastardised hybrids, metamodern space Buddhism or whatever. In the end, it can only be concluded that when V&V claimed that the years of plenty, pastiche and parataxis are over, they had spoken way too soon. You have to wonder: have they looked around themselves recently?

References

van der Akker, R., Gibbons, A., & Vermeulen, T. (Eds.). (2017). Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism. Rowman and Littlefield International.
Benjamin, W. (1969). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (H. Zohn, Tran.). Illuminations. [PDF]
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press Durham. [PDF]
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. [PDF]
Storm, J. Ā. J. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. University of Chicago Press.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press. [PDF]
van der Akker, R., & Vermeulen, T. (2010). Notes on Metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 2(1).