Metamodernism Manifesto

Metamodernism Manifesto is a short illustrated essay that defines metamodernism through a single organising question: how much trust does an artist place in reality? Its opening claim is deliberately plain — reality has not become more complicated; we have simply begun to notice more of it. That accumulation of impressions, the manifesto argues, produces a hybrid consciousness capable of holding inseparable and antagonistic phenomena together without resolving them, and from it follows a new artistic method and a new metaphorical apparatus for understanding reality. The text proceeds as a sequence of short propositions. A typology of artistic trust distinguishes romantics and realists, who trust only what they can see (Childe Harold, Mr. Pickwick), from modernists, who trust only what they cannot — Malevich's Black Square, and by extension the mythologies of Hitler and Stalin; from postmodernists, who trust nothing (Beckett's Watt, written while its author hid from the Gestapo); and from metamodernists, who trust everything, as in the films of Wes Anderson. A second section argues that metamodernism is necessarily counterintuitive: universal search and the documentation of reality by millions of people have ended the romantic faith in intuitive insight, and accuracy is now a function of the number of checks. A third takes up the critical demand for authorial purity — a caste system among critics — and sets out romantic-realistic, modernist, postmodern and metamodern ideals, locating the metamodern difference in constant oscillation, where no distinction remains between the hand and the glove. Further sections treat the "snippet" as a characteristic metamodern device, drawing on the six invented novels Suzy Bishop carries in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, and close with a "Triad of Uncertainty": there is nothing that cannot be funny, nothing that can be called certain, nothing that can be said to be in place. The manifesto is offered as an open document. It may be expanded with full agreement, elaborated in greater detail, or completely rejected.