When Peter first mentioned metamodernism to me, my hair stood on end: I didn’t know what it was, but some traumatic 20th-century bullshit or other was intimately linked to every root and syllable in this new fake-Greek word.

I found postmodernism repugnant from the jump—so much that I tried to ignore Foucault, who, like most writers who get more attention than their work can bear, is distorted the most badly by his most loyal fans (too much loyalty is not loyalty, it’s an attempt to get narcissistically abused for free because you miss your mother).

Maybe my knee-jerk hatred of postmodernism was mere youth: Postmodernism was the flagship intellectual pretension of the 1960s radicals who preceded my generation, and, tsk, young apes always gotta dethrone the silverback, eh?

But I think it’s more likely that I, in my unfocused, eat-the-whole-world-with-your-mind adolescent passions, was turned off by a single moment in time, and an obnoxious professor. An English professor.

Yeah, it’s hard to admit, once upon a time I was an English major at a state school. I was about the only kid in my high school class of 23 who was functionally literate, so I wound up as valedictorian, and in the state of Wisconsin, that means you get a free ride to a state school, and I didn’t even know Classics was an option, and I liked books, so why not?

Well, you don’t want to do it because of that genre of professor.

Now, now; I’m not the cartoon anti-intellectual who thinks all of academe is in a state of dry rot. The Classics program I enjoyed at Southern Illinois-Carbondale when I finally went to school for real at the age of 30 (Belushi attended SIU, which was the model for Animal House; what an alma mater for a comedy writer, and note the Greek theme!) was cheap and fantastic, and made me a much better person. 

But in English departments, where you were cheered for being a terrible person, postmodernism ran the wildest outside of art school—even if no one could actually read the Foucault in the original, because for some reason American “writers” think they need to avoid learning other languages the way they avoid reading other writers—displaying an almost enviable obliviousness to the particular character of the English language itself; even at the time, I was so embarrassed I added in a French major—you got kind a lot of arrogant and not as smart professors. 

Oh, c’mon, I know brilliant people with English doctorates. Which probably took ten years off their life, dealing with these puffed-up mediocrities. I’d kind of like to return the favor. So, not all of the English faculty. God, I'm tired of having to add caveats.

In fact, it wasn’t always like this. Much like in the early 2000s, when I got to work with some of the last classic newspapermen, I got to glimpse the tail end of the modernist world of English lit. I had two great English professors in my short tenure as their creature—one a Chaucer scholar; is that even legal now?— both at the end of their careers, and clearly from a world with more rigorous standards. If you were going to major in your own native language, you had better have an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature as well as a deep understanding, right?

But we were teenagers, I was only seventeen and still hadn’t really pubescified. What understanding of literature did we have AT ALL? We had neither book smarts nor life smarts, as much as we needed to think we were swimming in both. 

So I’m not saying I minded being taken down a peg or two by a lowly English professor (wait for it). In fact, the better professors made me feel foolish on the regular, because their classes were genuinely HARD (you’d never guess how many different secret ways those stuffy 19th-century writers had for secretly referring to VAGINERS).

Both of these profs could be straight-up smug assholes, asking us questions they knew would trip us up, breaking down our smart-kid, I-got-accepted-to-Madison ego shtick. Hey, you can laugh, but for many of us, that’s as high as our parents would consider allowing us to shoot. Maybe getting into the UW was a pathetic goal, which means most of us had overshot it so hard, we still needed convincing we weren’t the smartest people ever born.

God, smart people are so genuinely stupid, it knocks me out. Which was, I guess, the central problem with postmodernism.

Anyway, they might have humiliated us, and they might have enjoyed it, but like sociopathic surgeons, they were doing it expertly, and for a reason. I started becoming a writer when I was humiliated by having no idea they were talking about fucking. It brought up an old social trauma from junior high. I was TRIGGERED.

It also healed it. And showed me how dry humor works.

But then I got to the Boomer professors. I know, kicking the Boomer has become the national sport. But up till that point I had never met the actual Boomer stereotype before in my life. The people I knew in that age group weren’t Thirtysomething ad execs who went to overpriced wild man/woman retreats on long weekends, drank chardonnay, and masturbated about how great the ideas they had read about made them. They were recovering from Vietnam, waiting tables, inventing spreadsheets someone else would take credit for, paying obscene medical bills: generally doing normal, time-tested human stuff but in a changing late-20th century world.

My Boomer relatives had insulted me, screamed at me, blamed me for all their life’s problems. They even lied. But they had never tried to insult me for thinking there is a Truth.

Yeah; while I have fond memories of  being humiliated by the Chaucer professor, the youngish, probably ex-hot guy with the scraggly beard and smug countenance who was teaching my women’s studies breadth requirement or whatever—holy shit. That was NOT good B&D.

I thought I was being so clever, getting the “breadth requirement” in through a class that was also in my major. Some of the “core curriculum,” as the PC-studies courses they had begun to mandate were branded, really did give breadth and depth to your education. Like  my History of Science class; I do wish everyone had to take that one. But in the humanities, these “breadth” requirements were continually used as a back door to narrow the discussion of everything down to the relativistic, meaning-destroying terms of postmodernism. And, oh my god, were they ever smug.

I could have almost grasped Foucault, if it weren’t for the smugness.

At first, it felt like it did when the clever professor tripped us up with secret sex poetry; a little grin, then a stupid-sounding question. But then it turned out, the question actually was stupid. Instead of leading us to trip over the secret language of literature, this guy tripped us up by steering the conversation towards Truth, and I walked into it: 

“Am I looking for Truth?” I said; “Well, yeah, that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?”

And with a greasy grin, like Grok drawing a Cheshire Cat, he triumphantly leaped to the point of the lesson: “But there is no truth, Ann.”

Uh… OK.

Did he explain to the class WHY there is no Truth, with a capital T or without it? No, he did not; he simply observed that everyone has a different vantage point, and therefore there cannot be a truth. Then he started droning about the implications of nothing being true: Now it’s all gravy!

I sat there like I was marinating in hydrogenated soybean goo, not feeling healthily roughed up, as with Chaucer, but genuinely disturbed.

What did he mean, there is no Truth? At the time, I didn’t think of an answer; I merely felt the wave of smug, over-intellectualized rationalization for dishonesty wash over me like an unwanted caress.

In the true esprit de l’escalier, I know now, decades later, what I should have said:

“So… you believe quantum mechanics when it says observation changes things? Good, you’ve heard of Schrodinger’s cat, you’ve got the uncertainty stuff down. But haven’t you heard of time’s arrow? I’ll bet you read every word Martin Amis ever breathed, haven’t you? Observing things might collapse their wave function into reality, but that’s the thing: Does the mystery of the cat in the box make the wave, when it collapses, any less what-it-is? Obviously, no. The fact that observation changes a fact does not make the end result not a fact. When you open the box, Schrodinger’s cat is now either in there, or he’s not (boo).”

Unfortunately, at the time, I didn’t know enough physics to tell off that asshole. All I had was my sense that, even if we’re all blind men trying to feel up different parts of the elephant, even if I am an ignorant fool, it remains an elephant.

Well, he probably knew less about physics than I did, come to think of it, and would have given me a blank stare anyway.

Unless it’s 1922, never major in the humanities. (Classics doesn’t count, it’s more of a linguistics degree with a lot of history.) (Sure, Ann.)

Truth is, I was too close to psychologically breaking to get through both school and work, so I chose the one that I had to do so I could eat for the moment, and spent as much time as I could dropping acid, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. It’s a long story, and probably a distraction. Would that be metamodern to do, dropping a distraction in here on purpose? Would that stick to the brand? While sticking it to the man? Or is gratuitous treading on the fourth wall more postmodern?

I am very sick of brands, so I’m going to spend my time noticing that the fourth wall was never really there to begin with. Everybody knows they’re watching a play, and every once in a while, usually as a gag, the author decides to remind you of that. Shakespeare wrote the spiel about all the world being a stage, not Ionesco (who was more of a modernist anyways).

One of the most offensive cultural threads that has remained unbroken from the 20th century to the 21st is this jejune assumption that everything we do is brand new—or as Morrissey put it “When we make love, the sun shines out of our behinds / This is not like any other love, this love is different, because it’s us!” Born in 1975 (you’re going to find that out sooner or later, fuck it), I feel wedged between the generation that thought they invented sex, and the generation that thought they invented gay sex. When we were the only ones who seem to bother making love.

I’m not really sure what metamodernism is, so I’m going to pretend it’s a kind of Renaissance: The revival of a sense of history, of our humble place in it, in the cycles of life, emotional life, and intellectual life.

There’s nothing new under the sun, but good lessons are hard, unpalatable, and we need most of the important stuff re-explained about three times a decade.

Since the un-truthers came passive-aggressively shimmying in, it’s been uncool to talk about anything but righteously wrecking everything that came before us, because there are problems in this world, and we forgot that there have always been problems, and always will be. 

That might be our biggest problem: Human beings are problem-solving machines. And I mean MACHINES: If we don’t have problems, clearly we will create them. For all their weird, sly, underhanded braggadocio, the postmoderns did leave me with the useful thought that was their undoing: It’s as important  to prune ideas as it is to advocate for them.

I think I just figured out what metamodernism is: It’s cleaning up after postmodernism.

The project of sweeping up all the layers of meta, cataloguing them, and turning back to human-ing again, sadder but hopefully wiser.

Because once in a while I re-read PG Wodehouse and imagine we were all happy savages before the genius of post-modernism came along to tell us we suck. Cheerfully inventing cannons and bombs and plastic and factory farms, because with God up there dead we no longer had any idea what the hell life was, or what mass death meant. I guess I’m glad some asshole made us question whether Truth is real, because it led me to a more important question: 

Whether Reality is real. Cue Old 97's Singing The Disconnect at Mr. Small's.

I don’t know if I’ll ever figure THAT out. But with any luck, this will be the last time I’ll complain about postmodernism. I can make peace with it. Might even read more Foucault than they forced on me. 

This individually narcissistic, collectively masochistic self-takedown was a bump in the road we couldn’t avoid. Once we came up with the nuke and data-based managerial systems, it began to look like we’re the kind of creatures that need a kick in the codpiece on the regular. To show us that, whether they’re real or not, Truth and Reality can always get at those pain receptors.

To go back to an old piece of wisdom that a nice, stoned Boomer who once read the Bible made a song about: To everything, there is a season. We had to be annoying and lame for a few decades.

But from here on out, let the cat be the one to kick me. I still believe in meritocracy.

Ann Sterzinger is the author of NVSQVAM, Girl Detectives, and numerous other books. Follow her writing on Substack at Nuisance Online Distributor and follow her on X @VraieSterzinger.