In 2011, Luke Turner published a Metamodernist Manifesto. The manifesto recognised “oscillation to be the natural order of the world” and called for an end to “the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child”. Instead, it proposed metamodernism as “the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons”. The text cited the work of Vermeulen and van den Akker, and concluded “we must go forth and oscillate!”. Turner later credited his manifesto to the actor Shia LaBeouf as part of the pair’s wider artistic collaboration. (1)

Doubt everything.

This is the essence of meta-modernism.

Doubt everything.

Go back in time to the era of Parmenides. Ask him again.

Can you doubt causality? Can you doubt randomness? Because everything at the end is a matter of choice. People doubt that there can be a First Cause which needs no cause of its own, only to “prove” that the whole cosmos itself can exist without a cause! Turning in circles, we try to convince ourselves we are dashing in straight line. But we are not. We are standing still to where we started from. Existing from nothing. Our only way “out” is to re-unite with everything and re-define that “everything” into “nothing” once again…