Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. I first encountered his second book “The Myth of Disechantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences.” The question of this book was, “How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?”
His most recent book, and what inspired the invitation, is “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory,” which I understand as a desire to create a more affirmative and constructive way forwards after the devastating deconstruction of the post-modernists. It’s heady, but fun - and I think has implications for how we think about the self, and the future.
I start all these interviews with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian, so she helps people tell their story, and I stole this question from her because it's such a big, beautiful question. But because it's such a big, beautiful question, I'll explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in absolute control and you can answer or not answer this question any way that you want to. The question is: Where do you come from?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that question could be located in discourse around identity, or it could be one of geography, or something existential. I'll dip into that with geography and see where we can get from there. Maybe there's some demography. I'll be there. My mother's an immigrant, but I was born in Ohio.
I grew up in Ohio and New Mexico. At 16, I won a fellowship to go to England for the first time to study a little bit at Cambridge University. I had enough credits to finish high school early, basically, and took what would have been my senior year of high school to figure out whether I wanted to be a private investigator or a Buddhist monk. I didn't end up on either path.
I ended up on an academic trajectory, although I didn't know that. I thought I was gonna be a rock star, but I went to college anyway, and I was very well prepared for the academics because both of my parents are professors and three out of my four grandparents taught college or university. I went to school on the East Coast initially for undergrad and master's program, then I started a PhD program in California and then had a year in the UK and then lived in Japan and went to lectures of various posh people in Paris while I was writing up. So I spent two years in France and a year in Japan and then somehow ended up at a job in a small town in Massachusetts at the tail end of my 20s. In certain respects, I've been here with the odd sabbatical accepted ever since. That's one way to talk about where I'm from.
That's maybe a particularly abstract series of movements, basically. But yeah, I was intrigued by a moment in there when you talked about being either a private investigator or a philosopher. Can you tell me a story about that time? What was happening in that moment?
Yeah, so when I was finishing up high school or after my junior year of high school, I was very restless. I've always been restless. So I was already taking college classes even in high school, but I wasn't sure if that was even that exciting. I was quite enamored of the genre of private investigation fiction, and I was also into Sherlock Holmes. My father had read Sherlock Holmes to me. One of the figures my father worked on was Charles Sanders Peirce, and there's a way in which Peirce and Holmes have very analogous thinking processes, basically something we could call inference to the best explanation.
I thought, with a kind of egotism, that I could perhaps be a Sherlock Holmes-ish figure and contribute. So I went and interned with a private investigator. I picked a private investigation firm because it didn't do domestic stuff; it wasn't a private investigation firm that was mostly about divorces. What it was about was things that were either breaking the law or some other fundamental, more serious issue was at stake.
But what I quickly realized was the job of being a private investigator actually was producing paper trails for lawyers. It was much more tedious. It was interesting to interview people from different walks of life, but it didn't turn out to be what I was looking for. So then that led me into some more profound sense of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be.
To fast-forward a little bit, by the time I started college, I thought what I wanted to do was combine playwriting with philosophy. I wanted to write like the great philosophical works of classical antiquity; for instance, Plato's works are written in the form of dialogues. I thought this was a way to do new philosophical work and bring it to a broader audience.
Then fairly quickly, people told me that didactic preaching philosophy was crappy theater, and what theater departments were interested in was confessional monologues as a model for doing theater. So I moved from theater to film. In philosophy, I grew up with an inherited engagement with Asian philosophy and I wanted to do that, but it turned out that after taking a bunch of courses in a philosophy department, Asian philosophy was basically not taken seriously for Eurocentric reasons. That flipped me into a religion department initially, where Asian philosophy and then continental philosophy (French and German stuff) were taken more seriously. Then all along, I was playing in bands and trying to do other stuff.
But yeah, do you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up? So maybe you've answered this a little bit, but young, in New Mexico, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I think for a long time, I wanted to be a rock star. I really thought that was what I wanted to do. But I also have always loved writing, so the other thing that I think I also knew from quite early was that I wanted to write. One of my models for the pivot to academia was my grandmother. When I was in New Mexico, I was living with her and she was actually a fairly famous anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman, who in a way people said went "native" insofar as she came to believe in the reality of spirit beings, which I did not. But I found her just amazing.
Spending time with her where she would tell stories drawn from her fieldwork among Mayan Indians, or stories of Greek myths, or folk tales from ancient China, was really provocative. She was just an amazing woman, very inspirational, and really convinced me that there was something cool and even fun about academia, or at least a kind of intellectual life. Even though both my parents are academics, I was grappling with them in a different way, let's say. My grandmother was really a hero for me and an inspiration.
Yeah, what was heroic about her? I'd love to hear more about her and her work.
She came out of an experience of various kinds of trauma connected with the Second World War and immigration and a whole bunch of other things. She had a kind of brave ethnographic ability. She would go into different parts of the world for most of her ethnographic work. She spoke ten languages and had spent a lot of time working in the Yucatan in Mexico. Her technique was to go into different communities and go to the kitchen and hang out with the women. While learning to cook different kinds of things, she'd learn what they were saying in a sort of real way about their communities and their ideas about the future, etc.
She also had a kind of rigorous scientific side, had a strong background in linguistics, and was very interested in the phenomenon of glossolalia or speaking in tongues. That's what her early publications were about. Then later, after she retired, she was very brave about what she actually believed, which didn't fit into a lot of people's paradigms because she lived in a world where she thought spirits were real and such things.
So all of that was very appealing in a certain way, very heroic.
Yeah, what was appealing? I'm just curious, what was the attraction to the stories that she told for you? What did you make of all of this growing up in an environment with... yeah, it was just your grandmother, right?
Yeah, this is my grandmother. I think part of what I enjoyed was that there was a kind of poetry to it. There was a mythic quality to it, but also she was very interested in the ways that different cultural logics lead toward different orientations toward the world and the environment. What we might say today are different ontologies, so different ways of being in the world. She would say, and I think this is probably an anthropological truism, that being in one culture is like putting an eyepatch over one eye and you can only see things in a kind of flat way. But being able to experience two cultures gives you a kind of binocular vision where you can see the contingency of different kinds of cultural forms. It even changes your orientation toward your own world, whatever world you choose to inhabit. All of that, I think, I found really wonderful.
You know, she was interesting. She was a complicated figure. She would mix blood with cornmeal and throw it out, the blood of chickens, and throw it out to the spirits. She was not sentimental and fuzzy. She was a very charismatic figure. She had a difficult shared relationship with my mother, but she was great to me and my brother.
So tell me a little bit about where you are now and the work you're doing, just for people to know what you're up to.
Yeah, so I'm a historian philosopher and I tend to do things that alternate between those two modes or in some cases show how you need both. I've done historical work that focused in the first case on either the history of Japan, translucent look at it in transactional history, or on the history of Western Europe. I've also done philosophical work that takes very seriously thinkers in the philosophical canon, trying to work on problems, particularly problems in the question of knowledge, as you might guess, questions of ethics. I'm very fundamentally interested in questions of the social world. What is it that we mean when we're talking about the social world? What is the social world made up of?
In this case, this is the language of social ontology. What is it that exists when we're saying that something is money? What are we actually talking about? What does it mean to be money? What gets something in the category money? What are the cases in which you could be wrong about something being money? Or to put it another way that appeals to my students: What is social construction? What does it mean to say that something is socially constructed? I would argue that it isn't to say that something doesn't exist. Often people presume that when someone says something is socially constructed, what they mean is that thing isn't real. So if you say money is socially constructed, you might be saying money isn't real. But that'd be a very strange argument because how else could money have come into existence but through a set of social processes? So then the question is more how is the social constructed. Anyway, I produce a typology in a recent book. Those are some of the things that I've worked on.
Yeah. What do you love about your work? Where's the joy in it for you?
Part of what I'm interested in is taking things that people have historically presumed to be the case and showing how they're actually obstacles preventing us from doing different kinds of new thinking. I sometimes feel like I'm "Emperor's new clothing" it, to make up a bad expression. But I often want to ask why we presume that certain things are the case. Take a given thing, the presumption for instance that over time humanity is becoming more rational or something. Some people have said that. You might think, why do we assume that's true? Why does anyone assume that's true? What's the evidence for it? What's the evidence against it? Who's argued it when?
I also have a love of languages. One of the things I inherited from my grandmother is a lot of languages. I do a lot of my work working back between different kinds of texts and noting that often you get sedimented interpretations of various thinkers or periods because of the way that they've been translated at particular moments. If you go back to the original texts and cultural contexts, you can often find new orientations to certain kinds of problems or presuppositions. That's another way to think about what I'm motivated by.
Yeah.
I'm also a very restless thinker. I change topics a lot.
Yeah, but it strikes me too that there's something a little punk rock or rock and roll about what you're doing when you talk about taking these presumptions and undermining or disrupting them, essentially, right?
Yeah, definitely. When I was playing in bands, I was in punk and then goth bands, and that's definitely important to me. I'll only add that as I've gotten a little bit older and since becoming a parent, I've also gotten more reflexive. There was a generation where I was just trying to tear it all down, and now what I think is really important is doing that extra work of building on the other side of that tearing down. Which doesn't mean you stop tearing shit down, but you also have an ethical obligation to try and figure out what's on the other side. So it's not enough just to say no; we have to say, okay, but what's the alternative? Or how can we reconstruct this thing that we have deconstructed? Or how can we make a kind of hopeful and positive progress on the other side of that?
I've been doing more of that positive work, but only recently - more in the last six years or so since becoming a parent. My daughter's almost six. I've been taking on a more positive set of programs. But yeah, I think that's right. It's punk rock; I try to bring punk rock energy to the kind of stuff that I do for sure.
Yeah, it feels like a nice transition. I first encountered you, I think, just in my omnivorous reading. I can't remember how or where I might have bumped into your book, but it was your second book, the first book that I encountered by you: "The Myth of Disenchantment," right? In that one, and I'll likely butcher the premise of this book, but I had encountered... I guess my interest in it is that I had been really absorbed in the assumption. Is it Max Weber who's saying that science eliminated, rid the world of magic and belief, and we were now living in a world of pure rationality and everything was all kosher and magic was a thing of the past? And so the title of your book alone was a challenge to me and really attractive. Can you tell me a little bit about that book and, for people who don't know this stuff, set the stage for what you were trying to do and what drew you to that topic?
Yeah, what was so attractive about being disenchanted that made it something we wanted to be or that some of us wanted to believe in?
I think that there were two sides to it. There was one group of folks, maybe even three groups, for whom the already accomplished rationality of the West was the thing they were most chauvinistic and celebratory about. This was often in the context of colonialism and the domination of the rest of the world. It involved a trajectory that we see echoes of in contemporary writers like Steven Pinker. I've met him, so I can say to his face what I can also say on this podcast: I think there's broadly, in many respects, a kind of artificial chauvinism around the Enlightenment that creates a myth about it. It treats Europe as the font of all true knowledge, and then there are all these things that get weighted into some grand story about the historical specificity of that.
On the one hand, you have those folks. On the other hand, you have folks who think disenchantment is a bad thing. Often, the language of disenchantment, even in some theorists, has a kind of melancholy in it. Max Weber, as I discovered, comes to that phrase "die Entzauberung der Welt" (the disenchanting or literally the demagicking of the world) while vacationing at a neo-pagan commune in Ascona, Switzerland. There's a melancholy in Weber's assessment.
There's a third group of folks for whom the narrative of disenchantment, the idea that the world is disenchanted, has often historically motivated them to try and resupply the missing magic. One of the biggest groups of people who describe disenchantment are often practicing magicians. I trace that back as a folkloric narrative. Many a book of spells begins with some version of the idea that magic was historically lost and only preserved in this here spell book. We have that in medieval spell books, for instance.
It's a trope of European magic itself (I say European meaning that this particular narrative often occurs in spell books associated with largely European traditions, although there are some examples of it in the Arabic-speaking world as well). The idea then, what makes the book seem extra special, is that it preserves a lost Solomonic magic tradition. It has to presume that magic, the world, is generally disenchanted because in this case it is resupplying that missing magic.
I think those are some of the many reasons, but there's also one other piece: in some cases, people have argued that their specific environment wasn't sufficiently disenchanted, and they have then actively worked to disenchant it. Modernity being located elsewhere, folks in Kinshasa looking to Paris, or people in Paris looking to London as the site of modernity. There's been this sort of looking to the other, often as part of a campaign toward an attempt to produce disenchantment. Again, this has often proved self-refuting. People who try and do it as a historical description have often failed to successfully fully disabuse others of those beliefs.
And how does this relate to the latter part of the subtitle? How do we reconcile all of this in the human sciences? What are the implications?
I think they're quite big. As I trace in the book, a lot of the human sciences, by which I mean the humanities and social sciences, were born in a moment where they presumed a notion of rupture that they associated with modernity. I argue that this myth of modernity, which is the idea that modernity represents a pure rupture, was something they were trying to explain. For instance, early anthropologists were often trying to figure out what distinguished "primitive" societies from modern societies, presuming there was a fundamental distinction between the two.
We see this, for instance, in works about "how savages think." This heavily loaded notion of "savage mind" was a debate around what was distinctive about contemporary thinking. In retrospect, we might see this as fundamentally problematic and methodologically flawed, not to say there are no differences. But the idea of a rupture between the modern thinker and the primitive thinker is artificial.
We might note that sociology was formulated around a problem of industrialized society that presumed some kind of new fragmentation had taken place, producing new forms of social differentiation supposedly unavailable to premodern thinkers. Historians have increasingly pushed back on many of those forms of differentiation. Although there are some new mutations (I'm not saying nothing ever changed - the printing press caused huge shifts), certain things taken as given ruptural moments turn out to be much more complicated and had much longer trajectories than historically thought.
Early psychoanalysis formulated around notions of a modern mind or way of thinking that was also supposed to be, in Freud's words, like "savage thinking." But to do so, he still presumes a binary even as he works to eclipse that binary.
One of my targets in "The Myth of Disenchantment" book was a ruptural notion of modernity. Again, I'm not denying a range of different changes, but I'm denying the idea of a single rupture, whether located at the Protestant Reformation, the printing press, or the Enlightenment. So even "modernity as rupture" is a myth.
Then there's a second myth I'm pushing against: the idea that after modernity, we entered some period called post-modernity where we jettisoned all the great or bad stuff of modernity. That myth is just as much of a mess. There's fundamental confusion; some figures considered high points of modernism were then also thought of as high points of post-modernism. The idea that we entered a fundamentally post-truth world ignores the long history of propaganda. The idea that people suddenly became irrational after a period of being rational is artificial. People are roughly equally rational and irrational; we have different kinds of blind spots and work to educate people in different ways.
All that presumes two kinds of ruptures. One of the things I was trying to do was work through and past both of those.
Yeah, I want to explore some language a little bit, two of them: myth, then modern. I think I've listened to a different interview you'd done where you talked about the word "modern" and where it comes from, the origins, and the implications it has for how we use it. Can you tell me a little bit about what it means to be modern and where that concept comes from?
Yeah, so the word "modern" was first coined... there are debates around it, but one key source is the Roman statesman Cassiodorus. In 580 of the Common Era, he wrote a work called "De orthographia" in which he talked about "modernus" or "modern," which he had coined from the word "hodiernus," meaning "of today." He was writing about it during what was about to be the Middle Ages, 580, so what he's calling modern - "of the now" - literally is what it meant. He was contrasting what he thought of as his modern culture from classical culture.
First of all, it precedes the Middle Ages, which is incredibly weird if you're looking historically. Second, the presumption that there was a kind of rupture and change at that historical moment... He didn't actually recognize the things that were in fact changing. He was at the cusp of a transition that he wasn't capable of recognizing and thought he had already traversed. It takes basically about a thousand years for the term to really sink in as a descriptor. But even then, it often has a kind of ruptural sense to it and an artificial one, often located within a particular cultural horizon that left a lot of other people out.
The idea of it as a temporality always had an uneven distribution, so there were always some people that were more modern than others. We see this in the legacy of European colonialism, which often seemed to justify itself by saying, "Oh, these so-called unmodern people are the people we need to colonize and help modernize." That's there already in some respects at the beginning of the term. I could go into more detail, but that's a good part of it.
Yeah, and then the other one is myth. This one's of particular interest to me because I feel like I'm an amateur. I'm always punching above my weight. But I love Joseph Campbell and I take that word "myth"... kind of have an earnest interpretation of myth. It's a functional term, right? I don't know how you feel about it, but we use it very often... I think Campbell says myth is what we call other people's religion. It's more of a pejorative. We use it that way these days. When you talk about myth, what do you mean? And what are the uses of it or abuses of it?
Yeah, so there are different ways that you could define the term myth. It comes from the Greek "mythos," which means actually something quite close to the idea of narrative. In the early Greek materials, what it means to be a myth is to be something that has a kind of narrative structure built into it. In the book, in particular, I'm following thinkers like Hans Blumenberg who described myths as prefabricated tropes that transpose things across different domains. For instance, the repeated phrase "God is dead" does a lot of narrative work in a lot of different contexts and often gets taken for granted by people who mean very different things by it.
I'm in dialogue with Blumenberg, but also with one of my favorite French thinkers, Jean-Luc Nancy, who argues that the only true myth is the absence of myth. He's interested in the idea that we have entered a post-narrative age. This relates to Lyotard, who claimed that the defining feature of post-modernity was the end of metanarrative, but it turns out we have plenty of narratives.
I think humans tend to think narratively; we tend to think in terms of stories. That seems to be one of our main methods of communicating with each other: to locate them in narrative forms. There's good psychological evidence that we're more likely to remember things when we can chain them together into a narrative framework. In this respect, part of what I wanted to argue in the book is that we, despite Lyotard and company, have never left behind narrative.
I also want to suggest that even those people who think of themselves as post-myth have lots of prefabricated tropes, including the trope of disenchantment. Weber's phrase "the disenchantment of the world," as translated and promoted by Talcott Parsons and others, took on a life of its own. People started to ask why the world was disenchanted or presumed that the world was disenchanted based on what I would argue are mythic grounds, by importing this prefabricated trope.
That's how I'm using the term specifically, but you could define it in a range of different ways. One of the issues in myth studies, insofar as that represents a small discipline, is that many competing definitions of myth are on offer. What tends to happen is a new thinker just comes up with a new definition, and so instead of resolving any debates, it just continues to denigrate.
I wonder how you feel about this. Isn't it less about answering the question, "Is the world actually less enchanted?" And more a question of "How is it that the narrative of disenchantment is so compelling to so many?"
It depends, but I think it could be about both. Yeah, so I'm both in the book trying to explain why did we get the... how did anybody get the idea that the world was disenchanted, where did it come from and how did it become a self-descriptor for certain groups of folk? And why does that story get reproduced? Why does that become reproduced?
And then in a third case, what is it? We can ask what is it that we actually believe and why if you flip the problem... most of the historical sociological work that I was looking at presumed disenchantment. I was trying to explain why did the world get disenchanted... the story is something to do with science blah blah blah. But instead if we didn't become disenchanted, then that's a totally different problem that we have to solve and I argue that it is a product of a kind of fragmentation of belief. So I'm not denying that globalization hasn't transformed belief and true there compared to, I don't know, let's say the 15th century, Europeans may be less monolithic in their beliefs, but precisely because of that, because of this kind of fragmentation you have more people that believe in more different kinds of things including more things that they're characterizing as other people's enchanted beliefs and you get a kind of belief fragmentation environment and you get the globalization of notions of spirits or globalizations of new counts of magic or what-have-you and what I'm interested in describing is a contemporary moment that is not so much as some theorists had imagined where we are in a dry period of materialism where nobody believes in anything but rather the present moment is perhaps best characterized by fragmentation and one in which and this is perhaps something subtle. But I talked about in the first chapter of the book the way in which because people, let's say 75% of Americans as I noted, have paranormal beliefs, but they don't have the same ones and your belief in one category is more likely to make you skeptical of another so concretely if you... people who think that we believe in demons some to often believe that people reporting UFOs are really having encounters with the demonic or people who believe in spirits might believe that UFOs are really spirits and that people with delusions are the ones that are wrong about their beliefs. I'm not describing a moment of stasis, but I'm trying to describe the kinds of fragmentation of contemporary belief.
I want to shift into your most recent book “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.” Yeah, and I was just trying to... I'm so attracted to this stuff. I feel like some of it is really over my head. And I thought I would just express my interest in it and where I think it collides with my own work and then have you introduce the concepts. So as a confession my first encounter with the word modernism was in a Sturgill Simpson album. I fell in love with Sturgill Simpson. I don't know if you're... yeah his music.
Yeah for sure. Yeah, and yeah no, yeah a metamodern sounds or whatever.
Yeah. His second album has a song about becoming a father which is beautiful, one of my most beautiful favorite songs. Welcome to the world Pollywog. You mentioned becoming a father. Yeah, and I hadn't really and in my work, I think about brand as a myth and as a narrative and companies and products that do the work of developing and sustaining a narrative that inspires people and resonates with people do better than those products or companies that don't invest in helping people make sense of what they do using narrative and myth is a very... and so when we shift all these big ideas modern or postmodern or metamodernism we shift the idea of the self, right? And so I'm interested in... and so in encountering your book, it feels like you're announcing a different... there's been a shift and how we think about the self in a way. Is that accurate?
Yes, so I would say two things. In the first case I love your... I didn't know you had that background in advertising in it and one of the things that's... I would say that relates to the myth book and in regard to that is yeah, people are driven by narratives and they're driven by these kind of prepackaged myths and their ways in which one of the things that that folks interested advertising have discovered is how to formulate those in ways that tie products for instance into particular narrative formulations. And you could note that there was an older version of theorists who thought that capitalist modernity the logics of capitalism would make people hyper-rational that the market would be a kind of Smithian exchange of information or Hayekian exchange of information and that's and actually advertising is way more important than that. It's not that's the narratives because we don't escape narratives part of our thinking is actually built into the myths of the narrative. So I totally agree.
Yeah, I was just resonating with the logical positivism point. I almost interrupted you because I feel like when Google arrived and we had the search engine, there was this dream of every consumer would have access to perfect information and so they actually wouldn't need... there'd be no need for advertising our brand because we could be just purely explicitly rational creatures making the best possible product decision in every instance.
Yeah, and instead what we are is in a world with proliferating phantasmagoric advertising and so where the dreams of the most pessimistic disenchanter... we see more quote-unquote magical imagery on display on a daily basis than you know most folks would have in the past and that commodification of that imagery is something that's interesting. I've also written about a little bit elsewhere, but anyway, yeah. But we and I have a piece on fortune-telling for instance, which are the economics of it, which is in progress but not out yet, but it's about huge industry... are arguably comparable to online dating. And so we're definitely in a world where... but that's a separate question. But so advertising and myths are definitely important. The other... the second piece about what I'm trying to do... announce a new self. So I would say with the language of metamodern.
I'm not necessarily argue... so there are a couple of us who are using the term and one of the differences between me and maybe some of the others is that I'm actually to produce a change rather than describe it. In particular when I'm using the expression metamodernism and to be honest I came to a little bit late. The book went out for its first round of peer-review titled... what it was titled "Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory" and then are the future absolute of theory after post-modernism but then people were like... but what are you talking about a positive project? You need a name for your positive project.
And then I remembered the work of a Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji who I've gone on to meet and he's a mentor figure but he described the metamodern artist as an artist who is capable of using and transcending both the modern and the postmodern and he had any particular takes on it and I thought that's what I'm trying to do. So I'll use this word metamodernism. There's a hit of a tucking tongue-in-cheek because isms always tend to be almost always pejorative in our contemporary moment. Most things don't call themselves isms. They mostly get used as polemicals for other folk but in part I think it's appropriate because one of the things I'm interested in is a kind of reflexivity and so it's something that turns the techniques we could associate with quote-unquote post-modernism on themselves. But then uses it to work its way out the other side and I can say in more detail about what I'm doing. But the other piece of it is at bottom.
It's just even without all the language of jargon and branding it's an attempt to make an argument for a new systematic philosophy that I think would be a benefit to any of us interested in the humanities and social sciences and and it makes the case mostly on its own terms but I then refer to a lot of other figures because that's how you got to do it in order to and because no no person is an island and I'm influenced by a whole range of my kind of similarly omnivorous reading strategies. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, and what I've listened to a couple interviews with you before. What is the shift that you're attempting to produce and what's the problem in the humanities that you're trying to solve?
Yeah, so in part what happened in starting let's say in the Anglosphere in the 1970s late 1970s and early 1980s was the dominance of a new set of a new canon of philosophical works that were mostly being imported from the French, but sometimes German and sometimes they had Anglo American analogues. And these works are being mashed up and blended together into a new hybrid form and they relied which was often called by its critics post-modernism and sometimes was also called such by its proponents. The... these are figures like Foucault and Derrida and perhaps Heidegger and Richard Rorty and what-have-you and what happened was in the blending up of these different figures they... folks drew on their most skeptical arguments and they tended to draw on them in ways that were we might say decontextualizing them from their particular historical milieu. Derrida and his reputation France was very different than Derrida in the United States and Derrida himself would say "Deconstruction is American."
That was one of his formulations. But but or is America. It was that one more literal translation but and so what happened was these sort of skepticisms were repackaged together and then they were used either as polemical others against which disciplines sharpened their criticisms or more often than not they became models through which scholars did a kind of second-order reflection on their work. And this is because we as scholars are always encountering issues outside our own discipline that have to do with questions of meaning, they have to do the questions of knowledge of epistemology, they have to do the questions of ethics, they have to do the questions of what we could call social ontology or the thing that we're referring to in the humanities and social sciences and people often went to this canon to answer those questions and that was liberating in its own moment. It was very cool.
I imagine some period of around when I was being born, but this stuff has had diminishing returns and what it's ended up doing is producing a situation where the lack of... To disappoint the formulation, a lot of ivory tower scholarship is basically useless because it's grounded in meaning but fundamentally misguided philosophical assumptions. Because of that, it has contributed to the self-martyrdom of an already weakened intellectual class in such a way that folks are mostly... have historically for a long period of time... were mostly agreeing on basically things that were about how dissolving or deconstructing the edifice of the Academy and there was some good reason to deconstruct that to make room for a whole crowd of folks who hadn't normally or previously gotten access to that Academy, folks from minority backgrounds or women, etc.
So that early work was important and I mad props to my predecessors of that generation. But it's not what we need to be doing anymore and it's ceased to be productive. There in fact, the very notion of progress is antithetical to the way that this movement instantiates itself. You get the idea for instance that there are only stories and the only thing that we do as academics is tell stories. It turns out we're not very good storytellers. We shouldn't be leaving that often. Novelists and for the advertisers or whatever or you get the idea that knowledge is power, which is not something that Foucault says but people attribute to Foucault and if so you ask them, "Well, do you have knowledge of that claim? Does it make you more empowered? Is power a bad thing?" Like all these other things that we're presuming that are, you know?
A mess and I came out of this world. I was a fanboy. Another way to locate myself to your earliest question is I came out of this world. I went to France to be to see the lectures of big shots. I ultimately saw lectures by people like Agamben. I saw people like Derrida and Zizek, etc.
And I was really immersed in this stuff and I loved it as a kind of cynical wisdom and a way to talk truth to power but what I think we started doing was we stopped... we questioned other people but we never questioned ourselves and we started calling out power without realizing the power effects that we were having and we started to dissolve institutions for instance at a time when we actually needed institutions and all these other things.
There were all these negative effects and basically I want to argue that a lot of the philosophy was misgrounded in one way or another and but that the way to get past it is not a retreat to an older set of philosophical norms as though that skepticism never happened. So some of the people that I hang with or I've chatted with in analytic philosophy departments are like, "Oh you suck because you take these guys seriously."
No, they're real theories. There... Foucault was not a bullshit artist. He is a very smart and intelligent dude. And if you read him seriously and carefully, there are a lot of... he makes a lot of interesting arguments that we need to address but we don't end with Foucault and we also don't return to some now discredited notion of a kind of... I don't know... whatever decontextualized knowledge valueless pursuit that is anachronistic and misses the effects that our truth claims have for instance. The metamodernism book is an attempt to work through and pass that material to grant the grounds that animated the postmodern and skeptical critique. And but by turning them on themselves to take us into a new moment. So we abandon... we become skeptical of skepticism. The way you defeat for instance a climate change skeptic is not to thump on some notion of fact, right? You don't say "I have the facts and you don't" or... that's not going to persuade anybody. Not only do we need new narratives, but we also need new epistemic tools and part of the... one of the things you can teach people to do is how to be more skeptical and more skeptical of skepticism itself. What is motivating your skepticism? You might ask rather than saying don't be skeptical of climate change, say what is motivating your skepticism, trying to figure out what's motivating their skepticism.
Why they're skeptical and then that can help teach them perhaps and hopefully to be skeptical of their own skepticism and by addressing their arguments on their own terrain can lead you out toward a kind of humble knowledge. And so part of the other pieces relates to the way that we communicate our knowledge claims. So there's been a long tradition of in actual scientific praxis holding two things provisionally, but in science communication treating science as a monolithic creator of eternal truths and so science says the virus is spread by droplets and that's the only thing we need to worry about and then science says something different and then people say oh I'm skeptical of science and that's a mistake in communication and it's a mistake in a presupposition about what knowledge is. Knowledge itself needs to be understood in terms of something that has a temporality, a temporal horizon built into it and I don't mean this in any kind of jargonistic or ridiculous way.
I mean if I'm gonna make a truth claim, like the population of Williamstown is 4,250 people... so I just made that up and let's just say that would be a truth claim at a particular time and it would be a truth claim of a particular definitionally bounded geographic scope and as the geography changes and as time changes that truth claim would lose or weaken its validity. Similarly the language and vocabulary of our knowledge changes. So the definition of what it is to be a meter has shifted very slightly in the last ensuing years since the French Revolution and for instance and or... and we're constantly revising the things that we know or understand about the world. So instead of thumping on facts as if that's the way to refute skepticism.
I want to argue that a kind of skepticism can lead us toward a kind of humble provisional knowledge. And so I can stage this in a couple different ways, but that's one way to do it.
Yeah, I love the examples you give because they make it very accessible. You mentioned the climate skeptic and you mentioned the public health, the science communication. That's interesting to me too. But you're describing the before and after a little bit, right? Tell me if I'm wrong, where you're saying in one case, there's the mod and maybe I'm being too literal here but that there's an old way of doing it where the climate skeptic you would just throw facts at them. That's a very postmodernist way of doing it. And then but a metamodernist way of approaching climate skeptic would be to understand them.
It's a little bit what I felt like you said. I would say that there... I would go... I would type... I don't love these triads, but I think... But I can play it. If I were gonna play that game, here's how I would say it. Maybe this will sharpen the argument. We might call the modernist response to some facts, right? We might say that we might call the modernistic claim that there's a universal truth and you say to the climate change people, "Here's the truth. It's that no, you're just wrong" or whatever. We might say that the postmodernist is the idea that all truth claims are bad because truth is just a language game. And so therefore you just say, "Your might be"... if we want to look at it concretely you might be fair about it and say, although even he wasn't, but look you might just say, "The climate scientists just have their truth and we have our truth" and then we go along. A metamodernist view might be to in this respect grant the reasons for skepticism but also grant where those skepticisms run aground and work our way through and past them.
So by noting to... by historicizing about both the modern and the postmodern moment that lets us out the other side and showing us where what it means to make a true statement about the climate has some qualifications built into it, for instance. And that involved does necessitate a kind of empathy. But it also, which we might be getting from the postmodernists, and it does emphasize... it does, but it also emphasizes the importance of a kind of... of kinds of positively valued knowledge that we might be getting from the modernists even as we no longer hold to universalizing notions. Yeah, and I look at this also in post-colonial theory.
One of my biggest influences is Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who describes a cosmopolitan ecology of knowledges where you look at different ways of world-making, different ways of knowing that we might associate with, in his case for instance, indigenous epistemologies, etc. There was an old-fashioned, let's call it modernist tendency to say that stuff was all junk. There was a postmodernist tendency to say all that stuff was equally good and everything is all equally good, even though many postmodernists didn't actually take their children to see New Age doctors; they just went to the same medical establishment as the rest of us. Now today we might say that there is a long legacy of dismissing these knowledge claims. So we have to be very careful when we're talking about indigenous epistemologies to figure out the many things that were good and built into that have been artificially, for reasons of racism, excluded. But on the other hand, we can also begin to compare and work through different kinds of particular epistemological claims, and that's clear because also one of the unities I'm trying to break down is this idea of a single Western worldview that has a certain kind of claims built into it, or even a single scientific worldview, because it turns out that the positivists were wrong. Science is a disunity, not a unity. That doesn't mean that there are not better justified truth claims. Things that we have better evidence for are associated with the sciences, but that doesn't mean that all of the claims associated with the sciences are well justified, and it also doesn't mean that plenty of truth claims not associated with the sciences are not also well justified.
So to give you another example, history departments in the English-speaking world, we don't use the word science to cover history, but you do for instance in the German Wissenschaft or the French. But for instance in this case, the historical claim that Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France is a well-justified knowledge claim, but it is not a scientific one in a way that science, if you were going to define science as a unity. But you might instead note that yeah, that's a well-justified truth claim. But in any case, what I want to terminate in is if we hold lightly to our truth claims, even when we have them and hold on to them with a kind of humility. So even though I'm gonna tell you that I think it's quite unlikely that I will revise the truth claim "Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France," there are conditions under which we could learn that that was not actually the case. For instance, we could learn that the coronation ceremony, famously witnessed by several hundred people, maybe a thousand people, was in fact a fabrication of a particular journalist later in Britain. I can come up with some story that would explain it. It's very unlikely though that we would do that, but that orientation toward our knowledge which keeps a kind of humility and in which we keep around other previously discredited epistemic models is also valuable, too.
So part of the other point about a cosmopolitan ecology of knowledge is, and this is one of the things that motivated Paul Feyerabend in his critique of the unity of science, is that sometimes we end up figuring out that the old theory we thought we'd got rid of was actually pretty good. Like tectonics, which people were like, "No, that's total junk. How could the plates move around? That's a really naive theory that pretends that the continents are jigsaw puzzles." And lo and behold, actually, we've developed later evidence for it. So I would say string theory is in that respect today. I don't think that there's any good evidence for string theory, but I think we should keep it around in case we develop evidence for string theory later on, for instance. Yes, all that is to say it's a different orientation to knowledge.
Yeah Yeah, what what would you guess are the implications of metamodernism for Myth-makers? What does it mean to create a narrative with a sensitivity to these ideas?
Yeah. I would say that there are a couple different things that one could take away from this. In the first case, to those who think that scholarship is all stories, I think that's a mistake. But to those who think that narrative itself is something that we should dispense with as a problem, in point of fact, for instance, Hayden White in the history department in the philosophy of history ended up arguing that history tended to be told according to certain narrative tropes. But there's a next step which is to say yes, but there are better or worse reasons for telling particular history according to those tropes, and some of those tropes better or worse fit the evidence. So you can actually make judgments of the narratives on evidential grounds, not just that they're neurodiversity.
The idea that what objective knowledge looks like is some kind of people have had like this weird cybernetic model of the mind in which people are Bayesian reasoners based on waiting statistical... Humans don't think that way. That's a product of a Cold War. We can historicize it in a particular moment in the history of cybernetics.
So in the first case, to my fellow educators, I would say we both don't have to be anti-narrative and we can recognize that there are better or worse reasons. Some of those reasons are epistemological. Some of those might be ethical. That's okay. We can own our ethics as long as we talk through them.
That's part of the argument to those who are in the world of narrativizing. I think we need to be careful. Sometimes people, even on the left-wing politics that I agree with and look at myself in, sometimes get drawn away with telling stories and they don't even necessarily want to connect those stories to any evidential claims. I think that's probably more common on the right than it is on the left. But I do see it on the left when the stakes are high. People don't care whether there's evidence. They say, "This is a story" or something like that. I think that we can hold ourselves as reasoners to better standards than that.
We can not say that there is a single truth but rather that there are certain things that we can deploy the kind of evidence that we do or don't have and that represent a kind of humility, which I think is very important. So I think we need to be aware of our own limitations, who we are, where we're located situationally and elsewhere, even as we reach out and engage with other people from different perspectives and vantage points. This is neither the self-complete atomization of a kind of, let's say, postmodern academic model where you are merely your standpoint, but rather one in which we recognize that it isn't precisely our limitations that allow us to reach out and connect with other people. We're all equally all screwed up in some way or another. We're all limited beings. We're all finite.
I don't know much more. I think the other kind is the kind of stories that we want to tell. I'm interested in not just stories that tell us how cruddy everything is, but stories that focus on our capacity to imagine better futures. I'm not interested in those positive stories that dismiss the suffering of people in our current moment. I think that would be, again to use the typology that people seem to want me to use a lot, that would be an old modernist kind of model where we're just like, "Everything's gonna be great. It's utopian. Let's ignore the suffering. It's gonna go away. Everything's just making progress." That's a bad idea, but it's also a bad idea to, in a certain respect if you're artists, do whatever, follow your inspiration. But I think I've personally had enough of purely dystopian stories.
What I'm interested in are stories or narratives that are capable of seeing the importance of struggling toward a better future, and I think this is also true in terms of a politics. Concretely put, a politics of cynicism, which unfortunately became a dominant politics in many sectors of, again, I'll talk about my own group, the left, for a long time is not a motivating politics. I think we need to recognize the suffering that people are having, and again, I don't want to dismiss that suffering. But I want to say we also need to focus on ways that we're not just attacking the other guy. We're actually trying to build a better world, and I think the degree to which we can do that, we can bring more people on board at the kind of changes that we want to see.
Then the other piece finally on the political terrain is I think we can agree to disagree more than we often do. I'm part of the... I'm again...I'm talking to the left. I'm part of the tolerant left in a certain way. I think that we need to be able to disagree. I think that there's a line between agonism and antagonism, and I've had some arguments with colleagues about this, which is lovely because it in a way fits my view. I think arguing is good. Actually, disagreement is completely fine and completely productive, and I actually am happy to refute the right-wing assholes or whatever. Sorry. I'm happy to refute people I disagree with on whatever grounds, and I think that we need to allow forums for those kinds of engagement. But I draw a line at forms of violence and calls for violence. So there's a question there, too. There's a line, but it involves actual violence, not disagreement. And I think we've gotten quite sloppy about where we draw that line.
I love everything you've just said. I want to make sure you've got a little... are you okay on time for a little bit more? Yeah, I've got 15 more minutes. Okay, because I want to follow up on this last bit because in listening to one of your earlier... another interview or conversation you had, you really made it explicit, and you're saying it here, too, that we were coming out of a phase and maybe there was something about postmodernism or the academia that found it impossible to be affirmative, like that. It was almost exclusively a deconstructive exercise that had no ability to produce anything good and it wasn't productive. And you've said this even in becoming a dad, you're trying to deconstruct and reconstruct. We have a responsibility. So it sounds like metamodernism is... it's optimistic. It's an attempt... it's future-oriented in a way that things have not been in the past. Does that feel...?
Yeah, I don't absolutely love the word optimistic, but I'll say it is future... it's hopeful and it's future-oriented, and it believes that there will be a struggle and that the struggle will take a while. But that we... that struggle is worth it and it's worth directing our energies and efforts toward that struggle, and that struggle can't merely be the negative work of calling out what is bad, although that's an important first step. As I emphasize always to my students and also to my colleagues, that first step is important. You have to recognize what's wrong before you start trying to work together with folks to figure out how to fix it, but you need that second step. And we in the Academy, for a combination of reasons, one of which was the ascent of a kind of postmodern theory...
The other was a scent of a certain misinterpreted version of what value neutrality was supposed to look like. We had the idea that positive projects were value laden and that critique was itself didn't have values, and so we just started criticizing each other. Then we got really good at it, or we would make it so far away from values that we were knee-deep in the archives and we were saying, "I don't care if this is relevant to anything. I'm just writing another book on footnotes in Shakespeare," or whatever, you know what I mean?
So I think that there is room for an Academy that engages. Partially also, there's a confusion of political elites, economic elites, and cultural elites, and we've let the critique of elitism and the critique of the vast economic inequalities that have defined our society to be a self-humbling critique. That also got us all tangled up in a mess that wasn't able to be what we rather need, which is a fine-grained critique and a kind of openness and humility to folks outside the everyday.
I'm not also saying I think that one of the big moves that some of this was postmodernism, which is a good one, which is things like listening to our interlocutors more, taking more seriously excluded voices. All that stuff I totally believe in and think is valuable, but with the next step, which is that we are all working together on a positive project. I want to emphasize those, and we can afford to disagree about many things, even much more than we realize, as long as there's some pieces of that collective struggle that we can agree on together.
We don't have to be monolithic about anything, and I think the attempt to be monolithic in our politics or in our economic systems or in our discourses is itself a legacy of an older era modernism, but it's snuck its way back in and it's bad. What we actually need to do is struggle, but that doesn't mean you don't try and persuade people. There's another mistake that people have made, which is they've presumed that persuading people of things based on arguments is a kind of power rather than a kind of empowerment or allowing people to empower themselves.
I think it's our duty to argue with folks and argue with each other and persuade people, even about values. I think once we hold our values up, this makes them more rather than less amenable to scrutiny. Ironically, the best way to get value neutrality out of a community is to have individuals in the community be clearly aware what the values of the individuals in that community are. So if I tell you what my politics are, you have a better sense of factoring out what you need to when we're working together.
All those things I think give us an opportunity to work together to do something that I think could be really fundamental, which would be to use what we're doing in the human sciences to build or help us struggle together to build a better world. The other piece that I would emphasize is that we have to be careful also to recognize that things take time. If you look at survey data, for instance, people massively underestimate how long it takes to produce productive change.
There's been a strong tendency on the left (I don't know what your audience is, but I'm speaking within the left) when we don't see instant change, we give up. Whereas unfortunately the right has often played the long game, and I say this with full apologies and all self-locating here. That has been, to my perspective, incredibly detrimental because the right has gotten a lot of victories in certain sectors in recent years. I think we on the left need to, or we on whatever political spectrum, we as humans living together on a planet, and this is probably even more urgent to me, living together on a planet...
That is suffering from anthropogenic climate change. We need to play a long game and need to recognize the importance of working hard for that change and not giving up if it doesn't happen fast. And also recognizing that change is going to be struggle. It is going to mean giving up certain things. But on the other side of that struggle is a better, brighter, more sustainable future.
Yeah, I have two things I want to say, and the first is I feel like the way that you're layering this on top of the Left's communication struggles. I'm in full alignment with you on... and is it true? Does it layer on that way where you're, in some respects, the move you're making is a diagnostic of these like... this history of short-term thinking, poor communication, all the everything and a negative... a lack of a firm affirmative future orientation?
Yes, for sure, and I... Yeah, and I'm reacting to the mere... I can't help but react to global political trends because I'm experiencing them. And I think I would be disingenuous to deny that. And if you google me, you would probably learn that I have an uncle, for instance, who was a Democratic congressional candidate in the kind of Bernie Sanders wing of the party. He didn't get it. It was in Ohio. He lost. I have critiques of party politics within the Democratic Party too. And but I see myself as emerging from this discourse and in particular... If you time my books to that... for certain political events and imagine that the books are coming out a year after those political events... Yeah, you may begin to notice certain patterns but... but I think also... Yeah, I'll put that... but but I don't also... but to be clear, I think there are some issues that are more important than left and right, and one of those is the issue of the climate.
And if you... and I have some hopeful data on this point, which is that even young conservatives in the United States, but even more so globally, recognize climate change as an urgent threat. And I think that's one of the places, for instance, where there's a lot of room, despite all of our other disagreements, for growth, especially if we're willing to put our formulations in arguments that are more congenial to debate and to that level of discourse. So for instance, conservatives, if you talk about the value of hunting in the natural world and conservation... You may have noticed but early American conservation movements were often right-wing movements, not left-wing movements, and you can... we can afford to recover that language and we need to be able to do that because the planet is at stake, right? And so we can and in this way that's one of the places, for instance, where we do really fundamentally need to reach across the aisle and amplify those voices on the other side. We're grappling with the climate catastrophe that we are facing right now.
One last question. This is a question I stole from a therapist guy. I think his name is Steve... something like that. It's called the miracle question. And so it goes like this: You and I, we're gonna finish our conversation in about 5-10 minutes. You're gonna go home, you'll finish your day. You'll have dinner, you go to bed. You wake up in the morning, right? Everything that we've talked about this thing... So you've described metamodernism as an act of production. You're not describing something that's out there. You wanna actually try to produce, right? Create this thing. You wake up tomorrow and that miracle has happened, right? So imagine that metamodernism has infiltrated the world. It's being implemented in ways that you would hope. Now, what do you notice? How do you notice that metamodernism has taken a hold?
Yeah, great. Let's see. Let me stage it in a series of concentric circles. So in the first case, on the local level, I think... Let's say at an institutional level. I think it leads toward a regenerated sense of the Academy and its broader mission, which I think we've lost sight of and have replaced with anemic versions of critical thinking or preparing people for job markets that don't exist. Instead, a metamodern Academy is an Academy focused on human flourishing and a pluralistic notion of human flourishing and a flourishing of humans as part of a multi-species environment in which we're not the only creatures on the planet and in which we are working together. To take our learning to the streets because part of the things that I'm also arguing for in the book is that one of the things is self-isolation and self-irrelevance of the Academy is one of the things that has crippled us for quite some time.
So then concentric circles outward from that, I imagine a national politics that is more hopeful. Maybe we're getting... I've been feeling a little bit of hope this last week, but I don't want to spoil it. But a more hopeful national politics that is able to figure out the ways that we can strategically work together to address urgent concerns, some of which are by people who are disadvantaged for reasons of how they've been racialized or for gender, but also for reasons of class, which I think has unfortunately dropped out of some of the left's conversation. But there are many different kinds of ways of being disadvantaged.
Metamodern politics looks at the problems clear in the face and then works on thinking about pragmatic solutions that are not merely gestural, but that then ties those pragmatic solutions to narratives, to stories that help us learn and come together as communities working on hopeful projects. And then taking out from the perspective of U.S. politics, imagine a global politics in which the nation-state is decreasingly important and in which communities are important and in which the globe itself is important and in which we take very seriously both the right of certain communities to autonomously determine themselves and the importance of some global issues that transcend local politics, especially the climate.
And then beyond that, I imagine a future where we take to the stars that are not being driven by corporate greed. This is not... I don't know... the billionaire mission to Mars, but a collective effort on the part of humanity to transcend our earthly planet, not leaving it in shambles, but not as a way to flee addressing the climate crisis, but as a way to hopefully look forward to the universe that's out there. Where, if I had to bet on it, I would say I don't know if there's any advanced civilizations. I think probably not anywhere near us, but I do imagine that we will find other forms of life in the next... probably microbial, but in the next decade or two. And I think it's important for us to dream big, to dream to take us into the future.
And I think the metamodern future is one in which the utopia is one in which there are... I can come up with concrete political things, but I'll leave those out for today, but I'll say one in which we recognize the importance of collective struggle and also don't imagine the utopia is the end of history.
We will never be done struggling. We'll never figure it all out, and eventually as we go far enough, even the metamodern, if I'm successful beyond my wildest dreams, will reach its own horizon of limit finitude. But also I think it's a collective project, and one of the things that I've been delighted by is the way that it mutates. The Spanish translation of the metamodernism book is about to come out this year, and I read a preface written by a Spanish philosopher about the book. I was asked to write my own preface to the translation, and he's picking up on things that, seeing myself through another's eyes, I wouldn't have emphasized, but I can see how important that is to the global conversation in the Spanish-speaking world. I think that's great and fabulous, and I think it'll mutate and things will grow.
I'm firmly committed to a kind of humility, and the other piece of it, to bring up the utopia, is sometimes utopian visions have such a fixated idea of where they're going that they can ignore the realities of the present day and think that the ends justify the means in ways that are incredibly detrimental. That is not the utopia I'm aiming for. Maybe for a kind of utopianism that allows pluralization, divergence, and also change, and allows the project continually to be revisited. So we need to continually check in. Jefferson described America as constantly needing revolutions, and I don't know that literal political - depending on how you understand that - that may go too far. But maybe not. There are ways in which at least we need a revolution in our thinking on a regular basis.
Which isn't to say... I actually, weirdly enough, among certain sectors of the left, I believe in institutions and the capacity of institutions once they are available to people from a broad spectrum. I think they historically haven't been, but I think as they are increasingly... once we... I believe in the power of institutions as long as those institutions can be encouraged to grow and change, and we have to figure out how to cause them to grow in the right ways. So rather than being anti-institutional, I'm pro-institution, but I think we need to be able to change and transform those institutions that we inhabit. So anyway, that's a little bit. I got a little fuzzy there at the end, but that's where we go Yeah, it's beautiful.
I want to thank you so much for your time, and accepting the invitation. And I really love where we ended up and it's been really helpful for me to just to talk to you about it. So thank you so much.
Yeah pleasure.
