From Systematizing to Dancing with Hidden Continuities

Adam Robbert has given The Side View publication (2018-2023) a little refresh. I was grateful for the chance to contribute an essay to the project entitled: "Meta, Modern: Understanding the Phenomenology of Consciousness."

Adam's feedback on the piece helped make it shine, and I'd like to think it still holds up in some prescient ways.

The way we “go meta” is important, so in this essay, I argue about the need for ‘metamodern’ projects to practice staying grounded in the meaning of metaxy, or betweenness.

It is by keeping one foot on the ground with this emerging structure of feeling—again this experience of liminality—that these communities can avoid becoming too top-heavy, too full of theory-of-everything ‘galaxy brains,’ and stay in touch with the genuine sense of worldview shift that is happening.

As Bruno Latour says, Gaia is not a “god of totality.”

Without the need to retrieve the modernist project of grand narratives construction or propose new abstract universalisms, more and more people have nonetheless begun to sense a “hidden continuity” between things, even intuit a kind of “planetary imaginary” (Bruce Clarke).

Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker, before attempting to give readers a definition of the word hyperobject (coined by philosopher Timothy Morton to describe complex, distributed realities across space and time such as the climate crisis), aptly describes its feeling as “a hidden sense of continuity . . . concrete details stand in contrast to the presence of an abstract whole—a whole that shapes life, but isn’t wholly visible from within it.” (Meta, Modern)

This ‘sense’ of wholeness is, at the same time, recognized as something which cannot be exhaustively known or theorized. The reticence to exhaustively map this sense of wholeness is precisely what enables us to stay in touch with its reality.1 (Isabelle Stengers).

The words of systems thinker Donella Meadows serendipitously appeared in my ‘feed’ as I was writing this morning:

‘Going meta’ has something to do with dancing with the systems that have danced us into being. And if we are to go on dancing, go on with the business of making worlds and worldviews, we must stay in relation with this dance. We must learn how human beings already participate, and how we can go on participating in the creation of new possibilities.

Jeremy Lent, an author and friend, makes a fine point of this in his new book (Ecocivilization):

“The major evolutionary transitions that brought life to its current abundance were all results in dramatic increases in cooperation through symbiosis.”

So how are we to go meta? How are we to compose this dance, and with him?

For starters, it begins with attention. Theory plays its part, but one must be present. One must have their roots in things. Then we can begin the kind of work the Mexican Zapatista so memorably described: the work of composing a world in which many worlds fit.

Thank you, dear Mutants. Your support makes this writing possible.

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