The Map is not the Territory: A guide to my writing on Metamodernism

This post is intended as a signpost to the rest of my writing. I’m going to group it into 3 Main sections. This section is a guide to my…

This post is intended as a signpost to the rest of my writing.

I’m going to group it into 3 Main sections. This section is a guide to my writing on here on medium so far. There are over 30 articles now, thats over 6 hours of reading.

• Metamodernism — Knowledge, the foundation of all things

• Black Metamodernism — Wisdom, the application of knowledge

• The Eman Nation — Understanding, a model based on wisdom

This signpost is to the first of those. In 2019 after several years of reading and talking I began writing about the foundations of metamodernism in a series called The Theory of Emanism:

“The Theory of Emanism”

• 0-Meta Something? was the first article explaining what metamodernism is and what it could be from my perspective.

• 1-Meta Nothing? was an exploration into the foundations of a new way of looking at the world. In it I lay the foundations for Emanism. In hindsight the methodology used was akin to those laid out by Jason Storm in Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.

• 2-Every (Meta) Thing in between applied the ideas in the previous two papers and laid out a possibility for a new metamodern cosmology, and a way to highlight the liminal space between science, art, philosophy and religion.

• 3-Meta Ignorance: The Goest and the Invironment offered a metamodern model of epistemology that held space for gnosticism and agnostism as complementary. Ie. A model that offered a way of knowing that accounted for the ability to know The Truth and also accounted for an inability to know The Truth, at the same time

• 4-Meta Ignorance: Remembering and Forgetting then showed that ignorance as remembering and forgetting was a fundamental and all encompassing universal process. From atoms to the mortality of humanity.

• 5-Meta Ignorance: Bias, Prejudice and Discrimination wrapped up the concept of ‘meta ignorance’ with a final display on the dangers of ignorance in another form as incomplete knowledge, and how this could lead to isms and schisms.

• 6-Hued Mano was a brief poetic interlude exploring connotations and situations.

• 7-Meta Mortality: Ideas of Immortality offered a new way to discover a perspective of eternity through apparent mortality. A rational afterlife aswell as a before-life of ideas, including the idea of the indiviual human being.

• 8-Meta Mortality: Rituals of Rememberance returned to the idea of remembering as a process and linked this process to the idea of ritual as existences way of enduring. Doing so it gave a rational case for feeling magical.

• 9-Meta Mortality: Denial of Death brought together as a method to hold space for the need to not ignore lifes invariant as death. It also highlighted links between memories and morals.

• 10-Meta Mechanics: The Model of Hierachical Complexity introduced 12 phases of the Model of Hierarchical Complexity and showed how it could be a model for understanding the build of existence

• 11-Meta Mechanics: Metathiesm introduced us to the idea of metatheism (a system where both theism and atheism are seen as complementary) from both meta-theist and meta-atheist perspectives.

• 12-Meta Mechanics: How to understand a thing you’re stuck inside of then showed that there was scientific evidence supporting that the cosmological theory outlined was possible.

Despite all of this, and probably because I don’t write perfectly, none of this was seen as enough, whether that was understandle enough, or relateable enough, or metamodern enough. So I decided I’d called it something else. After all if I called it something else how could people say I wasn’t doing the thing I had coined. So began the project named Black Metamodernism

“Black Metamodernism”

• Black Meta Mode — is the quintessential guide to Black Metamodernism. It includes an expanded Manifesto (the link is the short version), notes on Light Supremacy, why Black Metamodernism is the antidote, an aesthitic, the 3 aspects of Blackness, why metamodernism is Black and much more.

• As the attacks on my character and my project increased I wrote three articles:
  - The first Meta Negation: How Icarus lost his wings and found solid ground on the dangers of unfocused negation and focused oscillation, as well as a display of the dangers of misreading stories. 
  - The second What makes a person metamodern: degrees of dichotomy showed we may all be metamodern, and yet there are many different degrees.
  - In the third Metamodern Ethics: Diunital Morality I dove into an application of all of the above to the ideas of Good and Bad, starting with a reinterpretation of the Original Sin story.

• When the above didn’t work I resorted to writing academic papers with the help of AI. The first was Metamodern Individuals Anonymous: Narrative Archeological Therapy for the Hypermodern Neo-Narcissist. In it I showed that most metamodernists had missed out key moments in metamodern academic history leading us towards technologically focussed hypermodernity, and not metamodernity.

• The second paper was the completely unreferenced Metamodern Existentialism: Moving beyond Nihilism with Hauntological Discovery. Here I applied the theory of Emanism, the concept of Meta-Nothing and Metatheism to Existential Nihilism.

• The final paper The Third Cradle: Decolonising AI and Rehumanising Black Thought showed metamodernism had been complict in the domination of northern hemisphere ideology, through a conceptual incarceration (idea prison) that lead to mentacide (death of thought) for Black people the world over.

• The detail and insights in these papers lead to a generous review being written, and bit of exposure with an Integral interview. Unfortunately that also brought on two months of constant bad faith critique online, as well as disappointing (lack of) supportive community responses in key situations.

• The E.C.H.O in the room earnestly contexualised Oscillation, Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics, after several disintegral conversations, and a commodification of metamodernism with osciallitory foundations, forming hypermodernism. Despite all the warnings.

• Metamodern Aesthetics as Apologetics: then simplified the defintion of metamodernism, and pointed to myths as the way to build a metamodern model that can view hypermodernism as complementary, despite its shortcomings.

After this I consider the Black Metamodernism completed for me personally. My aim to understand metamodernism from an angle outside of the typical western frame identified the need into include Souther Hemisphere foundations and apply rational myths to the to myself in the face of the irrational myths that we’re being told about me.

This is the purpose of The Eman Nation, as the emanation as a result of emanism. The Eman Nation is a practical application of the past three years of research into metamodernism.