Beyond (?

) postmodernism: the
‘ethical turn’, metamodernism
Erika Mihálycsa, PhD
Jochen & Esther Gerz, Mahnmal gegen Faschismus /
“Gegendenkmal”, Harburg, 1986
Anselm Kiefer, Barren Landscape (1987-89)
William Kentridge, Trionfi e Lamenti, Rome, 2016
Postmodernism is not a response to failures of western thought,
but – perhaps horrified – to its successes. Postmodernism,
implicitly or explicitly, is about ethics before it is anything else.
Before it is a style in art and architecture; before it is a
description of an era (“late-capitalist” or “postindustrial” or
“globalized” or “postcolonial”); before it is a philosophical
movement, however vaguely defined (as “poststructuralism” or
as “nomadic”); before it names a situation of knowledge
(“incredulity about metanarratives,” say) it is concerned with
ethics. It is an ethical response to exactly the idea of a “single
pattern” that characterizes western thought and the activity that
stems from that “single pattern… This is because postmodernism
is, first, the disruption of the metaphysics of comprehension, which
is the gesture that characterizes western thought. This disruption
stems from an encounter with otherness.”
(R. Eaglestone, “Postmodernism & ethics against the metaphysics of comprehension,”
The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. S. Connor, 2004)
Emmanuel Lévinas (Ethics as First Philosophy, Totality and
Infinity [1961]): subject constituted by its meeting the Other
(autrui), which places on her/him an immediate demand for
recognition & response; in this meeting (face-to-face) the Other
is not to be systematized into structures of knowledge &
protocols of action, not to be subjected to epistemological
violence (cf. grasping, Verfassen), not to be objectified,
assimilated, but preserved in its unapproachability,
unknowability, unassimilability

 “‘I think’ comes down to ‘I can’ – to an appropriation of what

is, to an exploitation of reality.” (Totality & Infinity, 46)
 “In subordinating every relation with existents to the
relation with Being, Heideggerian ontology affirms the
primacy of freedom over ethics.” (Totality & Infinity, 45)

 body theories, theories of empathy/affect, trauma studies,

animal studies, ecocriticism, spatial theory, posthumanism …
Lévinas: ontology grounded in responsibility to(ward) the Other

Why does the other concern me? Am I my brother’s keeper? … These

questions have meaning only if one has already supposed the ego is
concerned only with itself, is only a concern for itself. In this
hypothesis, it indeed remains incomprehensible that the absolute
outside-of-me, the other, would concern me. But in the ‘pre-history’
of the ego posited for itself speaks a responsibility, the self is
through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to
principles. (Otherwise than Being or, Beyond Essence, 117)

Ethics = occurrence of “strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to

the I, to my thoughts and possessions”; this inability to comprehend
and to grasp the other leads to the way in which ethics, although not
a sort of knowledge, “accomplishes the critical essence of
knowledge” (Totality & Infinity, 43): ethics critiques knowledge.
Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond”, Essays, qtd in Derrida,
The Animal that Therefore I Am, 385-386
Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am (1997/1999, Signature Derrida, 415)
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore
I Am, 423-424
“’l’animot”
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 432
God believes I am a body & a mind, miraculously conjoined.
With my body I eat the nut. Something happens, & the nut,
either the idea of the nut or the fact of the nut in the stomach,
triggers a thought: Nut good. More nut. Understand one-two-
three, get more nut. It amuses God to think that this is what
happens, to think that the miracle (that is to say the trick) of
conjunction allows him to use a nut to get the mind to work.
God reflects in passing that conjoining a body with a mind was
one of his more inspired ideas, his most inspired & funniest.
But God is the only one who finds it funny. The creature, It, I,
the laboratory animal, does not find it funny, except in a grim
Beckettian way, because the creature, It, I, does not know it is
a body & a mind conjoined. I think, therefore I am: that is not
what It thinks. On the contrary, it thinks, I am! I am! I am!
(J.M. Coetzee, “Eight Ways of Looking at Beckett” [2006],
Late Essays 2017)
At every turn Sultan [chimpanzee in Kö hler’s experiment, 1917] is
driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of
speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled
towards lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to
get that?) & thus towards acceptance of himself as primarily an
organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied. Although his entire
history, from the time his mother was shot & he was captured, through
his voyage in a cage to imprisonment on this island prison camp & the
sadistic games that are played around food here, leads him to ask
questions about the justice of the universe & the place of this penal
colony in it, a carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away
from ethics & metaphysics towards the humbler reaches of practical
reason. And somehow, as he inches through this labyrinth of constraint,
manipulation & duplicity, he must realize that on no account dare he give
up, for on his shoulders rests the responsibility of representing apedom.
The fate of his brothers & sisters may be determined by how well he
performs. (J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 1999, “The Philosophers &
the Animals”)
That at least she does not have to invent: this dumb, faithful body that has
accompanied her every step of the way, this gentle, lumbering monster
that has been given to her to look after, this shadow turned into flesh that
stands on two feet like a bear & laves itself continually from the inside with
blood. Not only is she in this body, this thing which not in a thousand years
could she have dreamed up, so far beyond her powers would it be, she
somehow is this body; and all around her on the square, on this beautiful
morning, these people, somehow, are their bodies too. […]
She believes, most unquestioningly, in the ram, the ram dragged by its
master down to this terrible place. The ram is not just an idea, the ram is
alive though right now it is dying. If she believes in the ram, then does she
believe in its blood too, this sacred liquid, sticky, dark, almost black,
pumped out in gouts on to soil where nothing will grow? … She could do
the same, here and now: turn herself into a bag, cut her veins & let herself
pour on to the pavement, into the gutter. For that, finally, is all it means to
be alive: to be able to die.
(Elizabeth Costello, “At the Gate”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKzcbbEb
7l4
El Anatsui, 2007)
 Metamodernism
(Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism”, 2010)

• “structure of feeling”, emergent sensibility (meta = ‘with’,

‘between’, ‘beyond’)
• oscillation between the typically modern commitment & typically
pm detachment
• situated epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically
between (post) modernism, historically beyond (post) modernism
• its description/interpretation: essayistic rather than scientific,
rhizomatic rather than linear, open-ended instead of closed
• outlook vis-à-vis idealism: Modernist = fanatic and/or naïve; pm =
apathetic and/or skeptic; Mm = “informed naivety, pragmatic
idealism”
• new Romanticism, romantic conceptualism
 Metamodernism: epistemology of as if +
ontology of between in both-neither dynamic
• Mm & history: “The current, metamodern discourse also acknowledges that
history’s purpose will never be fulfilled because it does not exist. Critically,
however, it nevertheless takes toward it as if it does exist. Inspired by a
modern naivete yet informed by pm skepticism, the mm discourse
consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility.”

• Mm & ontology: “It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm & pm irony,

between hope & melancholy, naivety & knowingness, empathy & apathy,
unity & plurality, totality & fragmentation, purity & ambiguity. By oscillating
back & forth, the Mm oscillates between the modern & pm. One should be
careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however.

• Mm: constituted by the tension, the double bind, of modern desire for sens,
& pm doubt about the sense of it all.
 Metamodern “new romanticism”
• “Romantic coceptualism” (rational, abstract conceptualism
gives way to affective/ sentimental abstraction: cf. Jö rg
Heiser)

•attempt to negotiate between nature & culture, finite &

infinite, commonplace & ethereal, formal structure &
formalist unstructuring, permanent & perishing – crucially:
attempts unsuccessful bec. no balance, only oscillation
achieved

•“if these artists look back at the Romantic it is neither

because they want to laugh at it (parody) nor because they
want to cry for it (nostalgia). They look back instead in order
to perceive anew a future that was lost from sight. Mm
neoromanticism: not reappropriation, but re-signification “of
the commonplace with significance, the ordinary with
mystery, the familiar with the seemliness of the unfamiliar,
the finite with the semblance of the infinite.”
Herzog & De Meuron,
Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, 2017