Critiquing Metamodernism (w/ James Cussen)

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  • เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ม.ค. 2025

ความคิดเห็น • 26

  • @cacambo62
    @cacambo62 3 วันที่ผ่านมา +1

    Very interesting discussion! At 9:30 James asserts that "we're not in the habit of talking about the politics of the baroque." In The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, José Antonio Maravall does just that.

  • @mills8102
    @mills8102 5 วันที่ผ่านมา +4

    I really appreciate this. It's really a breath of fresh air to see respectful critique when so few can do it well and without it turning into polemics and apologetics. Thank you 🙏

  • @RichardCosci
    @RichardCosci 3 วันที่ผ่านมา

    Great conversation! Nothing like having an “opponent” to stimulate some “processing”. Especially a well intentioned, intelligent and respectful opponent. Learned much, as usual!
    Thanks to both!

  • @autismfromtheInside
    @autismfromtheInside 2 วันที่ผ่านมา

    It's hard to write a brief comment on a 2:14min video.
    "Transcend, include, forget" helped me understand 'access' or lack thereof to less complex levels.
    One 'problem' that seemed to be common in this discussion is, "who is we?", are 'we in postmodern times?'. Time, and location, and individuals are all different. There are 'pockets' and as you mentioned, we can't neatly (and accurately) reduce culture to discrete categories - that should not be surprising.
    "I can't wait to have some solid ground under my feet" - it feels like you're looking for something that cannot be expected to be there.
    Maybe this 'solution' is too simplistic, but if we understand and expect a diversity and variety of thought and cultural expressions, from person to person, place to place, time to time, then it becomes relatively easy to 'name' any particular group by their traits, accurate to the appropriate level of granularity (e.g this section is mostly yellow with orange spots)

  • @BassamAbusamra
    @BassamAbusamra 3 วันที่ผ่านมา

    what an episode this is, I'm half way through listening in the background and I want to come back and listen in full attention..

  • @AnnaRiedl
    @AnnaRiedl วันที่ผ่านมา

    1:53:50 "do you have a problem with that?" best moment

  • @GlobeHackers
    @GlobeHackers 4 วันที่ผ่านมา

    I'm so happy James delved into this domain, I've had hives over it for years, and it is indeed hard to articulate a satisfying critique. None of these models or conversations will inspire the actions required to address the many ongoing catastrophes we've been addressing for decades. The plebs and proles lack the imagination and willingness to sacrifice to build organized resistance across cultures worldwide to take power away from the Players of "The Great Game 21st Century." We will have "the conversation" until circumstances dictate that we panic, and from there, all manner of violent chaos will emerge. Developing a new culture takes generations, and it's already past midnight. Let's enjoy our ponderances while we can. Much obliged.

  • @riffking2651
    @riffking2651 5 วันที่ผ่านมา +2

    Great conversation guys. Was cool hearing James' perspective on metamodernism, and putting forth his critiques. I'm definitely more in the camp of grand narratives and wanting to build new cultural projects and institutions, but I think it is really important that people are refining the underlying structure and bringing as much rigor as we can bring to bare. I do think that at this stage, even with some fairly broad strokes, we can tell a story that is far closer to the reality of things compared to most of the other stories that might hold a similar spot in culture.

  • @MeunisyKi
    @MeunisyKi 4 วันที่ผ่านมา

    Great discussion

  • @ReflectiveJourney
    @ReflectiveJourney 5 วันที่ผ่านมา +3

    Recursivity seems to be impcitly tied to more complexity.
    I also have an issue with linear model of complexity.
    Also, a model being more complex doesn't necessarily mean that it will fit the world better. A pragmatist critique here would be that the move towards simplicity/complexity is determined by the feedback from the world and cannot be apriori determined by the theory.

  • @musiqtee
    @musiqtee 4 วันที่ผ่านมา

    A good dialogue, guys! My take (major caveats):
    Modernity emerged contrarian to what it emerged from, a progressive idea of pure rationality. Post-modernity is the fractured outcome, a transition without an imagined cohesive future, a stasis and decay.
    Meta-modernism is… well, can we even frame it beyond ideas emerging from the decay of what is? Isn’t our point in time a bit like for e.g. Hegel - change is ongoing, but seemingly hard to integrate and project into expectation?
    We seem stuck in a cultural stage theory, where no steps can “lead down” - only “up”. Difficult, when there’s no cohesive framework of what “up” or “down” even means, outside of our perceived economic models - demanding “growth” beyond ecological limits we DO know.
    OK, that’s my ontology messed up. I’m old enough to experience how a given reality wasn’t sustainable at all. My peers become conservative in the real meaning of it - violently holding on to what was.
    My path is lonely in that context. Realising change, accepting change, embracing change - and finally imagining _some_ future. That’s where meta-modernism emerges.
    And yes, nothing in this is linear. It’s complex, not complicated. Ideal and material. Hopefully holistic. Big unknown is the global scale, constraints and time window.
    Change against the implosion of what “is”, because it never was static, as “common sense” always imprints on us.

  • @slater-san
    @slater-san 5 วันที่ผ่านมา

    What was the book James referenced at the end of the episode? He mentioned it was a French conservative look at "the philosophers of '68", but never mentioned the title. I'm interested in looking that one up.

  • @metamodernbarbell
    @metamodernbarbell 5 วันที่ผ่านมา

    Edit: added explanation after the quote.
    TH-cam comment: "So hold on :) If postmodernist says "there is no such thing as truth" - is that statement true? Because if it is, it is self contradictory. So it has to be false :)"
    Brendan Graham Dempsey: "That’s correct. That’s called the “performative contradiction” of postmodern relativism. A key insight that forces its own transcendence."
    🙃
    I think the conversation is interesting in points, but it's interesting to me that Dempsey implies sympathy for the critique of the 'postmodern boogeyman', but this is a boogeyman that he has been more than happy to employ when it has suited him.
    On a meta level, one might argue that it is more 'generative' to have an agreeable, civil conversation, & that entails Dempsey's own emphases from being deemphasised. I can see that view, but I do think that this can have the effect, inadvertently perhaps, of talking around a subject without really getting into the meat of it and I think that's what we see here.
    Iirc Emil, or Hanzi maybe lol, said something like 'modernists seek to minimise conflict, metamodernists seek to minimise resentment'. Now I think maybe there's room for a bit of both, but Dempsey seems very much aligned with the 'peace, brother' camp... probably James too but I think that's a choice with costs as well as benefits.
    I've seen at least one other example of Dempsey employing the boogeyman (one of the recent politics posts does it in a 'both sides' play) and I suspect I could find it elsewhere as well.
    Dempsey's strategy to avoid this accusation of boogeymanning seems to involve hiding behind the steelman of Storm....but there seems to be, putting aside that he has expressed views at least somewhat distinct from Storm (& significantly less circumspect), something quite uneven-handed about that strategy. I think its effectiveness also partly relies on ppl then having to do a close-read on Storm's text in order to debunk it. Anyway, I guess I will write more on this soon on my own blog. Probably next week....working title 'Dempsey & Makepeace'....iykyk.

  • @jacob_massengale
    @jacob_massengale 5 วันที่ผ่านมา +2

    Reality is always more complex than we can grasp, and scientists have job security. But the point is, complexifying at the level of science is not accessible to most people. You need a somewhat simplified meta narrative to unite a society in a way most people can believe, which is what a paradigm does. Otherwise, they will be alienated and uncomfortable with high numbers of strangers in metropolitan settings, which is conducive to paranoia and conspiritorial thinking.

  • @eqapo
    @eqapo 2 วันที่ผ่านมา

    That emic vs etic clash of "postmodernism" and the ideological turing test was important but teeth pulling and indicative of a kind of jordan peterson derangement syndrome. A constructive insight I have is that Brendan speaks from a third person, historian, descriptive point of view, and James seems to be a very "interventionist" intention to enact metamodernism as a self-aware, conscious historicizing agent. The activist moral impetus is the same as revisionism, but the modus operandi is different. I suppose that is quite a valuable metamodern role and a developmental continuation of marxist praxis but leveraging complexity that is properly midwifing the zeitgeist rather than a historicist determinist usurpation or revisionist separatism. Nice talk

  • @aeonian4560
    @aeonian4560 5 วันที่ผ่านมา

    26:35 So have you guys (Brendan and James) ever heard of Ken Wilbers concept of „Ladder, Climber, View (Rung)“? There is a youtube video on the integrallife channel. It basically takes in account and answers this criticism you make here. You lose the view from lower stages in the course of development. The view from a higher rung isn't the same as from a lower rung, but you retain the structure or capability you gathered by climbing the ladder. Strange if you never heard of that concept. KW talks about it in the Course „Integral Spirituality - A deeper Cut“, also in the „Core Integral“ Courses One and Two. The Core Integral material is only available these days by semi-legal means on the Internet. Jeff Salzman has made a podcast on „Ladder, Climber,View“ and there is material on it on several sites like Integalpostmetaphysics. You really should at least look into all the advanced Integral Theory material and concepts before you write about it professionally.

    • @BrendanGrahamDempsey
      @BrendanGrahamDempsey  5 วันที่ผ่านมา

      Hi. Yes, I’m familiar with that. I encountered it in Religion of Tomorrow. It is relevant, but also doesn’t resolve the tension of conflating UL and LL perspectives. It could be applied to both those quadrants though, since decentration is happening in each, albeit differently.

    • @aeonian4560
      @aeonian4560 5 วันที่ผ่านมา

      @@BrendanGrahamDempsey Thank you very much for responding. You should go through "Core Integral - Course 2 - Advanced Integral" some day if you haven't. - Here is another concept I learned from Ken Wilber - you can read about it on Integrallife. The distinction between deepstructures and surfacestructures. Deepstructures are like hands and feet, everyone gets them by being a human being. They include psychological structure that your born with like archetypes for example. Surfacestructures are individual experiences and leanings that are actually embedded in deepstructures but you can't say anything about them in detail by studying psychology for example, because everyone in a sense is different. - So you can read and think about the deepsttuctures of societies in a spiral dynamics way but with that you never know their surfacestructres. - Agrarian societies in China had the same deepstructures as elsewhere and you can even draw similarities between their ways of thinking like between Confucian ethics and the feudal system in medieval Europe, but the surfacestructures are as different as the language of Chinese and French. You retain those spiral dynamic levels only in the way of deepstructures, you dont know their individual expression in other places or times, but can draw conclusions by reading the deepstructures - and even then societies are always all over the spectrum.

  • @Secretname951
    @Secretname951 3 วันที่ผ่านมา

    Pretty good

  • @eqapo
    @eqapo 2 วันที่ผ่านมา

    1:56:08 cognitive complexity analysis seems to be the right conceptual tool to affirm the old Plato's Republic elitism and the masses, the noble myth, esotericism, forgive them for they know not what theydoism politics.
    As in, IQ research has been the tragic "ur dumb" individualist story whereas we are needful of emancipatory affordances in a analytic systems framework that says "all these people are getting cognitively crushed"

  • @jj4cpw
    @jj4cpw 5 วันที่ผ่านมา

    This conversation was a bit too abstract, conceptual, and, well, Meta for me. I wish there had been more specifics as, for example, the discussion beginning at around 1:52.00

  • @jerrypeters1157
    @jerrypeters1157 5 วันที่ผ่านมา +1

    Yes, it was a "delight" to listen to as well.

  • @aeonian4560
    @aeonian4560 5 วันที่ผ่านมา

    On there being no cultural evolution since the axial age (later you say that the philosophers of 68 were in a transitional movement). It is often said that all of western philosophy are footnotes to Plato. But each and every individual 2500 years ago and now had still to work itself up to the quality of philosophizing that a Plato represents. What makes cultural evolution is numbers, density, availability of education, distribution, technology, demographics and many other factors.

    • @BrendanGrahamDempsey
      @BrendanGrahamDempsey  5 วันที่ผ่านมา

      It’s not that there hasn’t been cultural evolution since the axial age. Rather, the cognitive complexity exhibited by axial age thinkers it would seem is the same as in modern thinkers. The cultural evolution part comes in with regard to how that sort of cognition scales and gets applied to new social contexts and technologies etc

  • @GreenManorite
    @GreenManorite 4 วันที่ผ่านมา

    I think you have up to much ground on the integration of past cultures and modes of thinking. Two arguments: technologies are rarely replaced rather the old continues along with the new or is integrated. The existence of a new development leaves many adherents to old modes of thinking. Second, we have individuals and subcultures that are clearly operating in a traditional Christian or modernist frame. We interact with these people, therefore we must be in part integrating their frame if not in the individual, in the culture.
    I don't think there is complete integration, but we are likely understating integration. Just as English is a mosaic of centuries of cultural influence there is major cultural strains where contemporary thinkers have access. These are not pure reproduction of historical thought, rather versions of those modes that have lived alongside the intermittent history creating some subsequent bias but also refinement.