As I work on research, thinking and writing about the historical age taking shape around us, I’ve developed the term ‘Metamodern” to identify our new Now as something historically unique. I didn’t invent this name; its use can be traced to the 1970s but has been popularized since publication of a seminal 2010 article, “Notes on Metamodernism,” by Dutch cultural theorists Timothy Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. All that to say, ‘metamodern/metamodernism’ has become a thing, a term of art, a new name for our unfolding present time period, coined to help us interrogate and grasp what’s happening around us.

I find this naming-of-the-new useful; nevertheless, in the back of my mind I hear theorists and critics calling ‘naming the new’ a waste of time at best, at worst a misleading fad. Remember when ‘postmodernism’ was the rage? Maybe not; that’s the point: it’s gone and many of us are happy to forget it. Is it even credible to define an age in a word? A ship in a bottle.

The following sketch is nothing more than my attempt to think out the utility of naming periods of historical time. I believe it’s an important exercise in any time period. As you’ll see in my posts on Metamodernism, even more important today. See what you think.

Playing the Name Game

Most of us play the ‘name-the-Now game’ and play it often; parents especially, in order to understand their spawn. We find ‘Generation Gap’ or ‘Boomers’ or ‘Gens X thru Z’ useful terms if only as starting points to sort out tensions with our loved ones. ‘Builder,’ ‘millennial,’ ‘post-millennial’: each adds timely color to the obvious fact that generation by generation our life worlds change. Our rising I-Gen ‘tweens’ are barometers of the new ‘now.’

Cultural producers—writers, artists, musicians, architects, designers—play the name game with relish. Witness the staying power of names like ‘modern’ (retro ‘mid-century modern’ is all the rage), ‘postmodern’ (dying but not dead), ‘romantic,’ ‘classical.’ It’s the producer’s job to notice the ‘now’; to listen to it, sense how it feels; to give it a style; to name movements that interconnect and coordinate colors, fonts, images, sounds, words, forms, surfaces, shapes, and production techniques that define the ‘now’—to invite us into an aesthetic that brings us alive. If they blow it—produce an off-key ‘naming’—they starve or get forgotten.  

Advertisers’ and their ‘culture vultures’ obsess over the name game to define the latest market niches: ‘black urban professionals,’ ‘hipsters,’ ‘high net-worth luxury consumers,’ ‘gender segmentation, ‘male, white working class’—the generational label ‘millennials’ was coined by advertisers. Segmenting and naming emerging ‘nows’ sharpens their perception of the ‘now’ in order to grab our attention, manipulate our feelings, close deals for the peddlers of ‘stuff,’ and deploy armies of ‘influencers’ to cultivate our tastes and desires.

Let me widen the picture. History is a rolling river; a long train of slow, passing boxcars; just one damn thing after the next. Are we conscious of it when it changes? Maybe not in the ‘now,’ but in retrospect we see the great bends in the river clearly enough to give them names.

Another—expansive—name game is in play. Historians have built an industry upon the back of history’s vast body—chopping out great chunks of time and naming them like so many cuts of meat in order to compare one particular ‘now’ from other past ‘nows’ from other places and times: Manchus, Mongols and Meiji; The Renaissance, The Age of Enlightenment, Age of Revolution, Age of Invention; the American Century, the Chinese Century, and so on. They recognized that periods of time—ages, epochs, eras, dynasties, world-systems, the longue durée—arise and subside, but that each in its own time carried on its own distinctive cultural logic, integrated aesthetic, its own theme of life—until it was replaced by another one.

Indeed, history provides a public service, and sometimes a contentious one. Historical research uncovers our evolving cultural logics and the historical, genealogical sequences of our cultural logics; it then ‘periodizes’ (cuts up) their sequences under thematic names—patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalisms (colonial, industrial, authoritarian, etc.), revolutions, globalizations—to give us tools to use in public debate. Bryan Stevenson’s cogent historical periodization of black oppression, for example—from enslavement to segregation to mass incarceration—encodes his brilliant Legacy Museum in Montgomery with useful historical names.

History also defines our self-understanding. Our personal subjectivities—our inner sense of feeling about ourselves—form, of course, within the wider consciousness of our present-day, new, collective ‘now.’ However, the new subjectivity of the new Now does not appear ex nihilo. It evolves, in fact, out of the logics and themes of ‘nows’ past. Thirty years ago, Charles Taylor provided us documentary evidence of the historical genealogy of contemporary Western subjectivity, a sequence of ‘nows,’ in his definitive Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. To name and to know these past ‘nows’ is to know and to be able to talk about a substantial part of ourselves.

Now, a crucial question arises: How easily do these past historical ‘nows’ comingle, intersect and re-form within our subjectivities in our present ‘now,’ and in the presence of new circumstances? Is this a stable situation? Are we, on one hand, ‘now’ living in a coherent, predictable, understandable age, itself the product of a stable sequence of ‘nows’ added up together, enabling us to live predictable lives? Or, on the other, do we live in a disorganized, unpredictable gap, a disjuncture, a seam between stable ‘nows,’ awaiting the next ‘now’ to take shape, not knowing what to do? If so—if we find ourselves at a turning point, a ‘hinge’ in history—we must name it to grasp it.

It’s important to interpret this situation accurately—thus, to name it. But it is hard to grasp the situation with confidence. We can feel it inwardly, intuitively, more easily than we can see it objectively in the world “out there.” Our inner unease with the unnamed present is, perhaps, why we play the name game with such intensity. Nonetheless, whatever this invisible new reality is, be confident that it already has penetrated our consciousness, arrived unawares, already taken up residence in our minds, and even now shapes our psychic makeup. We can sense it. We are already becoming the new humanity of the new ‘now,’ whether we can see and name it—or not; whether we like it—or not.

If historians look backward to name past ‘nows,’ philosophers and social theorists attempt to name the new ‘now,’ make sense of it, and project it into the future. Perhaps they still feel the sharp kick in the pants that Karl Marx—that greatest of observers of his own time—gave them when he complained: “Until now, philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

In this arena we’re no longer talking only about evolving aesthetics, cultural sensibilities, subjectivities, and ideas, but rather, about world-historical processes of change—about our evolving politics, economics, science, ecology, laws, justice, and the meaning we take from these about how to treat each other. When in any age these interconnected meta-structures lose their coherence, their common logics, their interconnections, and come apart and fade, the transition from the present ‘now’ to the next ‘now’ creates unbearable turbulence. What guidance have we got now to know what to do next? We grope in the dark. Wars are fought over less. We might pause from our busy ‘now’ to think about—and name—what is appearing before us.  

So then, what’s in a name? What force is contained in the act of naming the ‘now’? An insightful new name—one powerful enough to interpret an age in a word—redirects our minds from past habits of thought and concentrates them, centers them on what’s going on now instead of yesterday. A good name provides the pin that locates us on the map of history in relation to other ‘nows’; a fresh lens to see a new set of circumstances enclosing us; the seed of a new way of thinking about ourselves in the emerging moment; the magnet that attracts our common energies to move forward; the flag to rally our collective minds for the sake of the future—a new frame of mind to grasp what’s happening to us Now.