By Peter Fousek
In the opening of his recently published third book, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, philosopher Jason Josephson Storm writes that, in his latest text, he intends “to philosophize with lightning” (Storm 5). An endnote clarifies the meaning of his metaphor: lightning is both powerfully destructive and brilliantly illuminating. That simultaneously negative and positive character is an apt analogy for the project of Metamodernism, which works to expose the shortcomings of established intellectual practice while creating a new, progressively rooted and analytically oriented theory of the social world as a guide for future scholarship and activism. Writing an academic book review is outside of my normal wheelhouse; nonetheless, having worked as a research assistant for Storm, and as a result having had the opportunity to speak with him about the inspiring implications of Metamodernism, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about the book on a political platform. Because, at its essence, Metamodernism is revolutionary philosophy, culminating in a liberating political imperative.
Transformative social movements require united mass support in pursuit of a collectively held goal. For a progressive, justice-oriented campaign to be effective, it needs a solid theoretical foundation capable of producing a shared understanding of society in the minds of its members, and a corresponding conviction about why and how they should build a better world. The highly influential revolutionary praxis of Marxism is rooted in the theoretical basis of historical materialism; that theory has provided the impetus for wide-scale activism and mobilization, has guided the organization and direction of countless movements around the world. Storm’s theory possesses similar strengths: Metamodernism provides a comprehensive understanding of the social world, motivated by a fervent and fundamental belief in radical compassion, social justice, and egalitarian mutualism. From these values, it establishes a rigorously systematic philosophical mode, with which we may not only analyze and understand our world, but also learn how best to change it in pursuit of those underlying motivations.
Storm’s project is broken up into four different parts: Metarealism, Process Social Ontology, Hylosemiotics, and Knowledge and Value. To demonstrate how the book builds into a call for political action, it may be most effective to work backwards from its final chapters to the theoretical basis for their claims. Metamodernism’s Chapter 7, “The Revaluation of Values,” is its most explicitly political. His focus there is on the role of morals and ethical values in the scholarship of the “human sciences” (Storm 1)–Storm’s umbrella term for disciplines in the humanities and social sciences—as well as the role played by those values in political society more broadly. Breaking from the position that the moral relativism of the postmodern movement has ushered in a post-moral era, he shows that ethical values are a foundational element of the social world, and, consequently, that the study of that world necessitates their consideration and implementation.
When studying processes of social formation and the people who take part in them, it is imperative to analyze the values held by individuals and groups, which motivate their behaviors and influence the beliefs through which they come to understand themselves and their world. Further, Storm argues, if academic and intellectual projects within the human sciences are to offer meaningful commentary and critique, capable of honestly informing us about the nature of our world, they must reflectively acknowledge the ethical values that form the basis of their scholarly position. According to Metamodernism, “we need to bring our values to the surface and submit them to further scrutiny and refinement” in order “to make progress” (Storm 238). This is because moral values are inseparable from the social world, and any attempt to eliminate them only “drove ethics underground,” (Storm 238), thereby concealing a hugely influential element of society and its dynamics. On that basis, anti-moral arguments often serve reactionary political ends, e.g. “attacking social justice as incompatible with scientific objectivity,” (Storm 238) and thereby giving an ostensibly intellectual justification for the silencing of progressive voices.
Storm goes beyond an exposition of the importance of values and the need for their acknowledgement, however. He proceeds to make the claim that, given their centrality, they should serve as both motive and guide for future scholarship in the human sciences, orienting that scholarship towards the creation of a better world rather than towards a deconstructive or otherwise limited understanding of an arbitrarily delineated category of study. In other words, Storm argues that the study of society should be a morally rooted endeavor, with ethically constituted goals. It should not take place in the isolation of ivory towers, but instead should engage and interface with the subject of its study. Scholarship, in the metamodernist view, should be openly and unabashedly political, providing the knowledge and inspiration behind future political action.
The project of Metamodernism is itself an excellent example of such politically invested scholarship. Its first six chapters are dedicated to the establishment of a Grand Theory, a new and comprehensive philosophical mode that attempts to explain the nature of the social world. To that end, Storm opens with a chapter that works to produce an understanding of reality, moving beyond ideological debates disguised as existential arguments in its investigation. The “metarealist” position which Storm arrives at demands a nuanced, multi-modal understanding of reality, which allows for his subsequent study of social construction. Part II of Metamodernism, containing chapters two through four, begins by demonstrating the inadequacies of existing scholarly modes to produce sufficiently meaningful and valid scholarship. These inadequacies stem from a failure to recognize the dynamic, processual nature of the social world and the elements that make it up, which Storm labels “social kinds” (Storm 106). Social kinds are determined by anchoring processes: causal relations which produce a set of characteristics, or power-clusters, that are shared by members of a given social kind. Those power-clusters then endow their corresponding social kinds with causal-relational roles in broader processual networks. Socioeconomic class, for instance, could be thought of as a social kind determined by its relations of production (a causal anchoring process), and characterized by certain economic, social, or political attributes (power-clusters relating to and explained by the anchoring process). Viewing the world through the lens of social kinds enables a thorough, reflective, and progressive method of analysis and understanding, which resists imposed or inherited beliefs and assumptions and works to de-reify social formations and their constituent elements.
Having established an understanding of social kinds, Storm goes on to produce a corresponding theory of meaning in Metamodernism’s Part III. Chapter 5 proposes a “minimal metaontology,” (Storm 164) which pairs ontology with semiotics, language with material reality. The metaontology of Chapter 5 considers language to be a medium in which the mind interfaces with the world, facilitating a dialectically constitutive relationship between the two. The sentient mind, according to Storm, understands the world semiotically. From the interaction and engagement between the mental and physical emerge concepts of meaning, as the mind, through experience, comes to recognize certain signs as the signifiers of power-clusters, and thus of social kinds. Thus, meaning and understanding are predicated on mind-body interdependence, rather than dualism. Further, because people can externalize the contents of their consciousness via the materialization of cognitive signs, thought is a collective process which utilizes “public concepts,” (Storm 201): the already materialized signs that influence and inform our individual understandings of self and social world.
This brings us to Part IV, which crescendos into Chapter 7. Chapter 6, “Zetetic Knowledge,” (Storm 209), establishes a theory of “humble, emancipatory knowledge” (Storm 215) which allows for the possibility of uncertainty while resisting a denial of our ability to know things at all. Storm’s theory of knowledge incorporates doubt, but resists the kind of crippling skepticism which refuses to move past an initial stage of doubting. His incorporation of doubt is a subversion of certainty; this means that we cannot assert that we do not know. Rather, using the metamodernist mode of analysis based on causal anchoring and processual power-clusters, we can evaluate the relative truthfulness of any knowledge claim by analyzing it using evidence-based abductive reasoning, working backwards from hypothesis to cause while ruling out any alternative explanations. This abductive method of knowledge creation enables us to discover the unobservables which underlie the evidence which we attempt to explain.
Metamodernism is worth reading in full; the depth and systematic construction of Storm’s latest monograph make it difficult to summarize. Nonetheless, the outline above at least hints at the underlying revolutionary motivation of the metamodernist project. In the latter sections of Chapter 7, Storm explicitly states the values that have inspired and guided his philosophy. He argues that our sociopolitical activity should be motivated by a central, collective conviction: to promote universal human flourishing through collectivism and equity. “This,” Storm asserts, “has concrete implications for the kind of state or community we need to call into being…I want to call for a politics dedicated toward compassion, so that injustice can truly be overcome” (Storm 269). In a society presently dedicated to callous individualism, a compassionate politics is necessarily revolutionary. It demands that we work to alleviate the suffering of all those who go this journey of life alongside us, that we prioritize the wellbeing of all above any other concern.
This revolutionary political imperative, the pursuit of universal human flourishing, progresses naturally from the theory outlined earlier. It provides a guiding motive value to situate and inspire work in philosophy, the human sciences, and more broadly in our social formations and activity in general. If values are an omnipresent element of the social world, then we must reflect on those that influence us. If certainty of knowledge is impossible, then our values ought to reflect a corresponding humility; if the social world is dynamic, composed of innately processual social kinds, then our morals should be similarly accommodating, striving to cultivate the multiplicity of sentient life and the societies that it produces. Most importantly, metamodernism provides us with a critical-reflective lens through which we may arrive at a deeper understanding of our world and our positions in it.
That understanding is one which compels us to engage in a continuous, dynamic process of personal and societal cultivation and therefore demands empathy, egalitarianism, and the pursuit of collective good. It allows us to recognize the economic and political elements that reinforce injustice and inequality, and offers us the ability to overcome those elements by exposing and deconstructing detrimental social kinds and establishing alternative ones instead, rooted in metamodernist values. In Storm’s own words, “in order to actually produce meaningful change, we need to know how social kinds come into being and how their properties are glued together” (Storm 275). Metamodernism seeks to do just that, integrating an extensive knowledge of past and present, history and thought, with a moral imperative meant to goad and guide sociopolitical activism in pursuit of a more equitable, humane society. To transform the world, we must first understand it, and, in addition, understand what it could be.
