Thoughts on Metamodernism (Part II)

Inspired by Say Hello to Metamodernism! by Greg Dember

Photo by Mehdi Sepehri

There are different opinions on what constitutes “Metamodernism,” but Dember writes that ‘I would wager that most of us would agree that it has something to do with what David Foster Wallace seems to have prophesized: a new kind of response to the world that escapes postmodern irony and relativism without going backwards to the kind of simple faith in rationality that characterized modernism.’¹²⁴ As examples, Dember considers works like Jojo Rabbit (which suggests Metamodernism can help make Postmodern critiques of Modernity better than Postmodernity, in say suggesting a ‘more disturbing’ story), Pig (‘[a] perfectly rendered meal can be a spiritual experience’), and many more.¹²⁵ ¹²⁶ In music, he considers Ben Folds Five (who Reed Bernick introduced me to, to my delight), Sufjan Stevens (thanks, Michelle) (note ‘the tiny/epic oscillation’), and Billie Ellish (I appreciated Dember connecting her and her brother to The Carpenters).¹²⁷ Truly, it’s an excellent book by Dember, and after reading it I felt like I had a much better grasp on the concept of “Metamodernism.”

As we discussed, I see in Dember’s description an effort of Metamodernism to create a “clearing,” “void,” and/or “total saturation” (Ebert) for the sake of something (interior) of the subject coming through. Even when Dember describes Shameless and asks, ‘How do people unencumbered by conventional ethics show love for each other?’ — I can’t help but associate this with “a void” in which all that is left is the persons, and so any development that occurs must be a “personal development” and hence point to an interior space.¹²⁸ On the novel Either/Or by Elif Batuman, Dember even discusses ‘a defense of interiority in the face of [political] causes — even the worthy ones — that tend to overwhelm individuality’: no matter what, a “clearing” must be left open.¹²⁹ Furthermore, in Metamodernism deftly moving to assure that it swings the other way just before it’s too Modern or too Postmodern, it makes itself hard to categorize, and in that “void,” what we can know for sure is the subjective “shine” and interiority that comes through. ‘Metamodern culture leans each extreme against the other, thereby defending an aesthetic ‘safe space’ where interiority can thrive.’¹³⁰ Metamodernism avoids categorization as Postmodern or Modern, but it does so not by denying the movements between them but by “braiding” them both together so skillfully that there is “an excessive saturation” that voids categorization, and in that inability to make the work intelligibility, personhood is clarified and elevated.

A key paragraph:

‘[…] when individual experience ceases to claim to be anything beyond individual experience, what still remains is individual experience. Thoughts can be deceptive, but feelings cannot deceive, nor can they be explained away, if feelings simply are what they are. Felt experience claims to be nothing more than it is, and therefore, cannot be made to be less than it is.’¹³¹

Modernism taught us that basically every idea can be doubted, and Postmodernism taught us every notion can be ironized, but that just leaves a “clearing” for emotion to stand strong as itself. Emotions are real. They might be wrong, but they happened (sentio, ergo est). Might feeling be the basis of a new phenomenology and metaphysics? Beautifully? Lacking? Hence why psychoanalysis at the basis of philosophy versus an abstract principle…?

Greg Dember and Linda Ceriello discussed “Metamodernism and Autofiction” with Tope Folarin, author of A Particular Kind of Black Man, and I found particularly powerful the idea that when Tope was stuck in life thinking that the choice was “either/or” — either a powerful experience he had was based on something that really happened, or else the powerful experience didn’t exist or matter — he found himself on a really dark path. Once though he realized the Metamodern position of “both/and” — that it was possible for him to not know if something was true or false and yet his emotional experience still be valid — Tope found a new hope and direction.

The idea that Metamodernism makes possible a “both/and” where we acknowledge something might not be real and yet nevertheless have actual impacts on us makes me think strongly about “the fetish” Žižek discusses and the subjects of Sociology like money or national-identity more broadly. In a way, I would say Metamodernism is a culture in which we are “more sociological,” in the sense that we as subjects are more in our lives aligned with how society itself operates. It won’t suffice to say, “money is fake” or “society doesn’t exist” (as it won’t to make a hard divide between “online” and “offline”), which is a Modernist mistake: the whole idea of Sociology is that things that don’t exist like rocks nevertheless are real and have causal impacts on our lives. Is this not like a character in a Metamodern story (or like someone with, say, a mystical experience, as Linda discusses)? The point of Metamodernism is to say that even if we don’t know what’s real (“either/or”), we nevertheless undergo real emotional and interior experiences. Which, I should note, also hints at why Greg sees a Metamodern Philosophy in a return to defenses of consciousness, like in Chalmers or Philip Goff, both of whom are ‘part of a renewed interest in interiority throughout Western culture at large, part of the metamodern shift.’¹³²

On that point, Dember also sees Metamodernism in Object-Orientated Ontology, which though against seeing subjectivity as special, nevertheless entails and oscillation and “braiding” in the emphasis on “undermining” and “overmining” for defining what constitutes an object:

‘[I]f you separate the head and the handle of a hammer, then neither of the resulting things (the head or the handle) is still a hammer. The hammer-ness was inherent in the whole thing. So, in OOO, a hammer would be treated as an object, but a pile of leaves would not.’¹³³

This again reminds me of Sociology, where society becomes a society seemingly at the point where nothing can be added or taken away without the society ceasing to be a society. Where is that point? It seems impossible to tell (but not to recognize) as a “hyperobject” (Dember also discusses Tim Morton): though we can see when a hammer ceases to be an object, it’s not easy to say when a society ceases to be a thing. While we can see a hammer lose hammer-ness and respond accordingly, if a society loses society-ness, we might carry on with our business for decades without noticing anything, like a frog boiling in water. This is arguably exactly what has happened through Modernism and Postmodernism (“the loss of the Social”), as easily necessary for us to be where we are now, and which Metamodernism can alert us to and help grasp (however incompletely). Now, we are dealing with “hyperobjects” or ‘objects that are of such vast dimensions, both in time and space, that they cannot be perceived in normal ways by humans, or engaged with in normal way by other non-human objects.’¹³⁴ What can we do about those? Well, I don’t think we can “solve” them, but they could be “addressed” by an infrastructure that kept a vast diversity of people always “orbiting” themselves, objects, and the world, ever-getting at different parts that can then be shared, while at the same time changing habits so that we better relate with “hyper-objects” — such as with an SCM…

What I am getting at is that, in an odd way, Metamodernism is when “culture aligns with sociology,” because culture is society, right? Yes, but the point is Hegelian: Metamodernism is when culture is “realizing itself” as what it actually is, on the personal and individual level, which aligns with the descriptions of Sociology to which I gravitate. Metamodernism is a possible recovery of the Social, a realization that, back in the 1800s, we chose Capital instead of the Social, because we were overwhelmed by the anxiety that the Social brought (as we’ve discussed in O.G. Rose). We were not ready for “interiority,” we could say: we had to go through Modernism and Postmodernism first for us to be aptly prepared and before “plausible deniability was gone” that the interiority (with “the subject”) needed to be focused on and faced. Interiority is terrifying, risking “The Real” in a confrontation with “Love(craft),” but the hard road is the only road left. Here, we might see why Dember stresses that Metamodernism ‘isn’t the kind of thing one can join, like a club or a team’ — it’s happening, as “shinned” by and expressed mainly ‘an aesthetic to experience.’¹³⁵ ‘It’s sort of (emphasizing sort of) a way of thinking,’ but it might be seen more precisely as a “situation” to which we need to habituate our thinking (it would perhaps be more accurate to say “Metamodernism suggests Hegelian thinking” versus “Metamodern thinking”).¹³⁶

Before Modernism and Postmodernism, it was still plausible that say rationality or irony could deal with our problems, for most of our problems were due to totalitarianism, “theories of everything,” oppression, and the like. Had it been possible to go straight to Metamodernism, totalization and injustice would easily never be corrected or even be seen as wrong, which is to say “interiority” would have just served Power. We have discussed Matthew Stanley and the challenge of “inward-ranging,” and the interiority which Metamodernism praises is easily a problem if it is used by Power to control and manipulate. Recall how Rodrigues in Silence is “captured” and controlled by Power in falling back onto a Christianity that focuses on silent, inward faith versus outward expression in the world: if we did not go through Modernity and Postmodernity, this is perhaps the state Metamodernism would lead us all to (and please note that Linda and Greg are careful to stress that Metamodernism is not necessarily good, noting how much movement into extremism and conspiracy is Metamodern). And Metamodernism may still lead us into ending up like Rodriques; that risk is very real. That question is what we might do and what infrastructure and/or “medium condition” we might make to help assure Metamodernism doesn’t lead us to “inward-ranging” that benefits Power, a step that no initiatives could have perhaps made before Modernism and Postmodernism. Regardless how it feels, we have not taken the wrong path, for we have taken the roads needed so that experience could support the majority in the next steps (via a remove of “plausible deniability,” as necessary because “ideas are not experiences”): Hegel stresses that we “ought” to defend our “State of Now” (as discussed in “Hegel’s Justification of Hegel” by O.G. Rose).

In the conclusion of his book, Dember discusses Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how Buffy is ‘forced to choose between’ her mother and her friends, but it’s done in such a way that it’s not clear if the choice is based on an illusion or real. Dember’s point is that ‘what matters is the metamodern way Buffy makes her choice’ — it is based on ‘her felt experience.’¹³⁷ In a society where we don’t know what is real and what is false — what is “fake news” or “a deep fake” or a social construction… — we are all more like a fictional character like Buffy than we might realize but are coming to realize thanks to Metamodernism, more and more each day. For culture to align with Sociology is to realize human, social reality is a blurring of the real/fake, a state of “the (un)real,” which could lead us toward Existentialism and anxiety (as it mostly has so far, following Part I), or it could direct us toward a Metamodern sensibility (“anxiety could be a superpower,” alluding to Bustamante). Anxiety with Postmodernity ‘tend to threaten a stable sense of interiority,’ but there’s another way: we accept that the line between fake/real cannot be drawn and instead focus on our interiority.¹³⁸ Isn’t this a retreat to popular Kantianism? No, a negation/sublation: it’s a (re)turn to Hegel, but that will require the work of Cadell Last and The Absolute Choice to explain.

Sociology is a main concern of Belonging Again, along with socioeconomics and “political economy,” because I don’t think these fields can be divided (except perhaps in terms of “quantification,” which leads to trouble). This very “braiding” of sociology, politics, and economics suggests something Metamodern, and we might also say, alluding to the famous distinction of C. Wright Mills, that we are in a world where “troubles” and “issues” have been blended together in such a way that we can’t tell what falls into the realm of our control and personal responsibility, and what is structural and requires a whole social shift. Faced with this ambiguity, which can result in us feeling like ‘[our] privates lives are a series of traps’ (“either/or”), the potential for an honoring of interiority is greater (“both/and”), but this might just end up in conspiracies if we’re not careful (as Dember and I discussed, #210).¹³⁹

Mills suggests that we can increase freedom thanks to understanding the distinction between “troubles” and “issues,” for this framework can be an example of helping generate ‘a quality of mind that will help [people] use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves’ (wonderful) — but this freedom could be like the Postmodern increase of freedom and justice through deconstruction: we might be left “oscillating” and unsure what to think.¹⁴⁰ We might realize ourselves as ‘minute point[s] of the intersection[] of biography and history within society,’ but where does biography begin and where does history end?¹⁴¹ And so we can oscillate between “troubles” (biography) — which ‘occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations’ — and “issues” (history) — which ‘transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life.’¹⁴² Suffering this, people can search for ways to “braid” the historic and biographic together until they find an “emotional resonance” that feels right — which could make them susceptible to movements like QAnon, where we can feel like our story is intersecting with an effort to change society and make history. “Messiah Cults” (we might say) “braid” the historic and biographical, providing an emotional feeling of addressing great problems that average people can struggle to find in Institutional Sociology a theory which helps them understand (Institutional Sociology being defined by problematic “abstracted empiricism,” pragmaticism, or scales that leave individuals behind, as Mills elaborates on).

Metamodernism might be seen as cultural evidence that the failure of Sociology to function like Mills describes (in failing to move from “Conspiratorial Sociology” to “Tragic Sociology”) is a mistake we can’t afford to keep making. The qualities and influences of Metamodernism on people are happening, and if “a defense of interiority” is one of those features, then if we don’t consciously seek to defend interiority in say politics, academics, church, etc., then the movements which do like QAnon will prevail. Unfortunately, Mills tells us that people today ‘do not find contemporary literature an adequate means for knowing’ their ‘social and historical reality,’ and also they are not finding ‘orienting values’ for which they long.¹⁴³ Institutional Sociology has not provided nutriment (split between “Teaching” and “Research,” as Mills describes, worsened by ‘[t]he confusion in the social sciences […] [which] is wrapped up with the long-continuing controversy about the nature of Science’), so there is a need for a unique “medium condition” (as we discuss in O.G. Rose) which can also habituate the right orientation, not just give the right information, for that is not enough if we are to effectively and sustainably ‘gauge what is going on in the general struggle for power in the modern society.’¹⁴⁴ ¹⁴⁵ “Data,” which ‘represent[s] a very abstracted view of everyday social worlds,’ is not enough.¹⁴⁶ Nor is it enough to say that everything now is a product of the past (‘[t]he historical nature of a given society in a given period may be such that ‘the historical past’ is only indirectly relevant to its understanding’): the past is needed to think the present, as Hegel stresses, but saying the past “practically” is the present is not to tarry with “The State of Now.”¹⁴⁷ ‘Historical transformations carry meanings not only for individual ways of life, but for the very character — the limits and possibilities of the human being,’ yes, but those transformations will not be realized if we forget the present for the past, or the past for the present.¹⁴⁸

‘The life of an individual cannot be adequately understood without references to the institutions within which his biography is enacted,’ and in this we see a need for new institutions which enact biographies anew.¹⁴⁹ If we don’t so innovate, the qualities and motivations of Metamodernism will be present and possibly “captured” by moments that prove deeply problematic. Could we stop this by recognizing this possibility and seeing it as “false”? No, that is not enough. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann famously discuss “the sociology of knowledge” in The Social Construction of Reality, claiming ‘the sociology of knowledge must concern itself with whatever passes for ‘knowledge’ in a society, regardless of the ultimate validity or invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such ‘knowledge.’ ’¹⁵⁰ ‘It is precisely this ‘knowledge’ that constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist,’ and as we’ve said and learn in Sociology, it is not enough simply to recognize money as a “social construct” (for example), for money regardless continues to structure our lives.¹⁵¹ If we think that knowing something is false will “stop it” (as institutions and Power might want us to think, alluding to Matthew Stanley’s work), then we might think we can “free ourselves” from false institutions, false constructions, etc. just by learning they are false, but this is a false revolution (again, as Stanley teaches us). The ‘[c]ommonsense knowledge’ that makes possible ‘routines of everyday life’ will not go away simply because we find out it’s false; after all, we still must live together (or “fight together”).¹⁵²

Berger and Luckmann write:

‘The validity of my knowledge of everyday life is taken for granted by myself and by others until further notice, that is, until a problem arises that cannot be solved in terms of it. As long as my knowledge works satisfactorily, I am generally ready to suspend doubts about it.’¹⁵³

Unless someone can come along and present me with basically undeniable evidence that my “knowledge of everyday life” is false (especially since [m]y knowledge of everyday life is structured in terms of relevances,’ meaning I easily care about it), I’ll likely keep it.¹⁵⁴ And since certainty is basically impossible, this isn’t likely to happen anyway (“the map is indestructible”), which means there are two mistakes we can make: believing we can determine what is false with certainty, and (a backup defense) believing that knowing something is false or a “social construction” (like money) keeps it from shaping us. Making these mistakes, it’s easy for us to spend a lot of time and energy on, an effort that seems to make a difference but that ultimately can play into the hand of Power.

‘[A]n entire legitimating machinery is at work so that laymen will remain laymen, and doctors doctors, and (if at all possible) that both will do so happily.’¹⁵⁵ In Part I, we learned this is not necessarily bad, but what if our “everyday life” is structured against our flourishing? ‘As man externalizes himself, he constructs the world into which he externalizes himself,’ and if man externalizes and so also internalizes an oppressive “everydayness,” it is simply too difficult to reverse course?¹⁵⁶ It can’t be done easily or quickly, no, but via an infrastructure it can be accomplished. For many people, ‘a single symbolic tradition maintains the universe in question,’ and if that symbolic tradition is to be altered or shifted, we must handle stars and order rocks — stunning and burning, in danger and life.¹⁵⁷

Could we through a new “medium condition” provide a new ‘knowledge of everyday life that is taken for granted by myself and by others until further notice’?¹⁵⁸ Of Childhood? Lack? Beauty? No sustainable change favoring the Social is possible without this step, which suggests a challenge for us, because our “new address” requires a Social that entails profound Otherness, and troubles begin ‘whenever […] ‘strangeness’ [breaks] through and the deviant universe appears as a possible habitant for one’s own people.’¹⁵⁹ There’s hope for “intrinsic motivation” in that ‘[s]ocialization is never total and never finished,’ but that also sounds exhausting and means it’s never “closed” and safe.¹⁶⁰ Unless we “self-forget” ourselves, experience drive, and experience beauty, perhaps? And there is a ‘reality-generating potency of conversation’…¹⁶¹ ‘In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself.’¹⁶²

There is no possibility of “a new knowledge of everydayness” without institutions: even if we have free speech, as Jonathan Rauch champions, Rauch warns that free speech alone is not enough: we also need “the constitution of knowledge” with institutions and cultures that support it (as he expands on with Jim Rutt, #287); otherwise, moments or glimmers of McCloskey’s Rhetoric and Voicecraft will not last. As Dave at Theory Underground teaches on, Pierre Bourdieu discusses the intersection between material and symbolic power, and what we learn from him, as Loïc Wacquant puts it, is that today there is ‘not one but two species of capital [which] give access to positions of power, define the structure of social space, and govern the life chances and trajectory of groups and individuals: economic capital and cultural capital.’¹⁶³ Can the a new “medium condition” provide both these (while also being an infrastructure the trains us into new value-affirming habits), thus changing the course of society and helping recover the Social? Again, this is a question many online are taking on.

We will discuss The State Nobility by Pierre Bourdieu more when we consider “the college monopoly on credentials” in II.3 — here, I only wanted to note the distinction between “economic capital” and “social capital,” which is important for understanding the world today, and that we also need to keep in mind when considering new possibility of “everyday knowledge” that enable “social intelligibility” without regression. This point suggests why institutions shouldn’t be ignored, and why it is important to design a “medium condition” as an institution. ‘Man as a person […] can most readily be understood in terms of the roles which he enacts and incorporates. These roles are limited by the kind of social institutions in which he happens to be born and in which he matures into an adult.’¹⁶⁴ What is an institution? As Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills put it, ‘[a]n institution is […] (1) an organization of roles, (2) one or more of which is understand to serve the maintenance of the total set of roles.’¹⁶⁵ This is general, but it means any new “social coordination mechancisim” will be made up of roles and also roles to maintain the SCM, and without this distribution the SCM will fail. If those who maintain the SCM lack economic and social capital, they likely won’t be able to last (or maintain “faithful presence”), so the topics of economics and status are paramount, suggesting a need for legal, cultural, economic and educational reform in terms of law and structure. Though it will have to be expanded on, in Metamodernism as a culture realization of “(Tragic) Sociology,” we might be moving into a culture realization of the need for these reforms favoring an SCM if our interiorities and subjective experiences are to “shine” and extend humanity in light of temptations to replace it.

¹²⁴Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 65.

¹²⁵Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 113.

¹²⁶Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 116.

¹²⁷Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 151.

¹²⁸Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 211.

¹²⁹Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 236.

¹³⁰Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 6.

¹³¹Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 49.

¹³²Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 255.

¹³³Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 261.

¹³⁴Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 266.

¹³⁵Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 296.

¹³⁶Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 296.

¹³⁷Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 291.

¹³⁸Dember, Greg. Say Hello to Metamodernism! Boise, ID: Exact Rush Publishing, 2024: 292.

¹³⁹Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 3.

¹⁴⁰Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 5.

¹⁴¹Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 7.

¹⁴²Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 8.

¹⁴³Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 17.

¹⁴⁴Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 99.

¹⁴⁵Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 119.

¹⁴⁶Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 124.

¹⁴⁷Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 155.

¹⁴⁸Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 158.

¹⁴⁹Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford, University Press, 2000: 161.

¹⁵⁰Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 3.

¹⁵¹Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 15.

¹⁵²Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 23.

¹⁵³Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 44.

¹⁵⁴Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 45.

¹⁵⁵Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 88.

¹⁵⁶Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 104.

¹⁵⁷Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 121.

¹⁵⁸Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 44.

¹⁵⁹Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 122.

¹⁶⁰Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 137.

¹⁶¹Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 153.

¹⁶²Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: First Anchor Books Edition, 1967: 183.

¹⁶³Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility. Translated by Lauretta C. Clough. “Forward” by Loïc Wacquant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996: x.

¹⁶⁴Gerth, Hans and C. Wright Mills. Character and Social Structure. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964: 11.

¹⁶⁵Gerth, Hans and C. Wright Mills. Character and Social Structure. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964: 13.

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For more by Greg Dember, please see his book, Say Hello to Metamodernism!, the excellent YouTube channel he hosts with Linda, and their website, “What Is Metamodernism?”