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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
This is Black Barrel producer Lan Le, here to let you know that not all BBP episodes are syndicated on the New Books Network feed. To catch all of our episodes, you can subscribe directly wherever you get your podcasts. That's Black, the Color B E R Y L Now onto the show. Foreign.
- [00:34]
A
Welcome to the Black Barrel, a podcast with intelligent conversations about Buddhism, Asian medicine and embodied spirituality. I'm your host, Dr. Pierce Salguero, a professor of Asian history and health humanities at Penn State's Abington College outside of Philadelphia. In this episode, I sit down with my friend Linda Sariell, scholar of mysticism and popular culture from Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Linda is one of the foremost scholars of metamodernism, with particular focus on contemporary spirituality and mystical experiences. She talks with me about what this concept of metamodernism means and how it can open up new kinds of more capacious thinking. I'm sure you will agree that a lot of what we've been doing on this podcast over the past four years, juxtaposing different perspectives, exposing our full selves, exploring the dark sides of spirituality, leaning into sincerity, has all embodied a metamodern sensibility. Anyway, I think she's the perfect guest to talk with as we launch season four, and I hope you'll enjoy the show. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in multidisciplinary conversations about Asian healing and mystical traditions, then subscribe to Black Barrel wherever you get your podcasts. Also, check out our Members area on Substack as each episode, our guests share downloadable PDFs of articles, book chapters, and other materials for you. One last thing, we're planning an Ask Me Anything episode coming up soon, so reach out via substack or my website, pearsallgirl.com and let me know your questions. Okay. On with the show. Linda, it's good to see you again.
- [02:26]
B
Good to see you again, too.
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A
Yeah, so I don't know. You and I have had both professional and also personal conversations over several years now. At this point, we're both scholars of religion interested in mysticism, some of the same kinds of topics. So we've run into each other at conferences and other sorts of places, and I think your work is really very interesting and very on point for where we are with the podcast right now. So I'm really happy to welcome you to the Black Barrel. And, yeah, looking forward to our conversation.
- [03:00]
B
Well, thank you. That's great. It's. It's great to be invited, and I did have a chance to listen to some of your previous episodes. Just I'm a fan of the podcast. I feel like the topics you're covering are they're certainly working for me. They're, they're of interest to me. And everything from, you know, meditation sickness to, you know, contemporary iterations of contemplative practices cross culturally, all that stuff is just I'm absolutely fascinated by. So it's enriching for me, too. It's going to enrich my research as well.
- [03:35]
A
Well, really happy to add your voice to the, to the mix here. So why don't we start out with just you, very briefly, a couple sentences, introducing yourself, your professional sort of positionality and who you are and, and what you're all about.
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B
Okay, sure. As far as my professional appointment, I'm an instructor in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. I mainly teach comparative religion and religion and popular culture. And I co founded with Greg Denver a web journal called what Is Metamodern? And I also co host with Greg a YouTube video series called what Is Metamodern Conversations. And I'm a co editor with Tim Vermeerlen of an academic book series with Bloomsbury Academic called Metamodern Theory and Criticism across the Disciplines. And I'm currently working on two book projects. I have a book manuscript in progress that brings together my research in theories of contemplative secular spiritualities in mysticism, monsters, monster studies, Awe and wonder studies, and metamodern theory. And then I'm also currently getting book proposal ready with another colleague, Dr. Dave Vliegenhardt of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, for an edited volume on metamodern spiritualities right now. So hopefully both of those will be under contract soon. And yeah, and I'm based on Vashon island in Washington State currently.
- [05:08]
A
I feel like you just gave sort of like a great list of menu items that I would love to sink my teeth into in a moment. But we'll be sure to link to all of that in the show notes and, you know, other ways of getting in touch with you and so on and so forth. We'll put it all in the show notes so people can follow your work and, and learn more about what you're all about.
- [05:27]
B
That's great. Thanks.
- [05:28]
A
So I think we're going to call this episode Metamodern Mysticism. That's the name of your dissertation, right? The name of your project more generally. Maybe it's, maybe it's going to show up in a book title. I'm not sure. But we're going to be talking about metamodernism. I actually mentioned metamodernism in the previous episode. I feel like we should probably start off by just kind of defining what that term means. What, what are we referring to here? And I think that's important because there are, let's say, more than one interpretation or more than one kind of like definition of what that term means.
- [05:58]
B
That's a great question. I kind of like to start with the question of what kind of a thing metamodernism is so that it can sort of orient people to what, what type of thing we're talking about. And the phrase I am liking lately as an overarching, you know, what is it? Is it's an emotional logic of a time period. And that comes from Tim Vermeer and Robin von Denacker's seminal essay from 2010, Notes on Metamodernism, which is not the first theorization of metamodernism, but it's one that kicks off a broad interest, especially in academic circles, in investigating this new ism. So a shorthand is, it's a way of theorizing the post, post modern and saying, where are we now? But I like, I like their words. They talk about dominant cultural practices and the dominant aesthetic sensibilities of a certain period that form, as they say, a kind of discourse that expresses cultural moods and common ways of doing, making and thinking. So it's comparable in that sense to modernism and to postmodernism. So we have kind of like a category here that metamodernism fits under. That's the first thing to say. And then also I also, I want to front load with like, why do we care? Why do we think in terms of these, I call them epistemes for short. These modern, postmodern, post postmodern. For me, it's for their, simply for their contribution and understanding the world so they can provide. Of course they're imperfect categories and they need to be critiqued and keep asking if they're of benefit to us, but they provide something for us that actually, in your last episode, Jeff Kripal had this sentence where he said, we live in the same world, but we don't experience it the same way. When we have some epistemic frames like these, that just gives us a way of understanding how people see the world differently and how we connect sometimes culturally or don't connect. You know, sometimes we miss each other. So with that little, I don't know, preamble, I'll say how I use it. And this is the, the use by I would say the majority of scholars in the academy and also by arts and culture critics and journalists increasingly. I will say that metamodernism is two things. It's a way of observing and describing the post postmodern world, like I said, the one we're living in. And it's also used as a descriptor of the sensibilities and aesthetic choices in various cultural products that demonstrate this post postmodern in the world. So it's taken as a periodization and then a way of describing artifacts of culture as a sensibility, the sensibility behind those things. And just to throw in kind of what it's not in this way of using metamodernism. It's not a movement. It's not a social program of some sort. It's not also all about progressivism or all things that are positive. And I mention those because those are going to be different in other usages of the word metamodernism. So what it is is it's an observational tool, and it might observe some of these things that I just mentioned very well could observe some kinds of social progressivisms that do have metamodern characteristics, but it's not itself any kind of a movement any more than modernism and postmodernism were. So does that help to get us started?
- [09:33]
A
I think that's great. I. You know, the kind of oversimplified mantra I keep in mind when I think about the difference between how scholars use metamodernism and art critics and so on and so forth use metamodernism, it's much more descriptive. Whereas there are people who are forwarding different views of metamodernism that are more prescriptive, descriptive. Right. Like these are sort of systems of thought and kind of like agendas for political action and so on and so forth. And you mentioned the episode with Jeff. That was two episodes ago. In the last episode, I sort of kicked off this season by talking about, you know, metamodern approach to Asian medicine. And I have a little bit more of a prescriptive flavor to that than perhaps you do talking about how, you know, this sensibility, this meta. A metamodern sensibility might. Might mean that we could approach differences in perspectives and differences in opinions and differences in ways of seeing and ways of experiencing, that we might be able to approach those in a. In a more constructive way, kind of leaning into the chaos a little bit, rather than trying to kind of prescribe and formalize and integrate into some kind of larger whole, some kind of harmonious system. Anyway, I. I'm Just sort of throwing out a couple of alternative, I think, ways that metamodernism has been used.
- [10:49]
B
Yeah.
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A
Characterized. I don't know if there's more you want to add on that. We don't need to kind of get into all the disagreements because I know it's. Some of those disagreements are pretty detailed and pretty in the weeds, but I don't know. Do you want to point out, like any. Any of the other forms of metamodism that are out there?
- [11:04]
B
Yeah, I would like to. And just to say also in the way you're utilizing the term to talk about Asian approaches to Asian medicine and the study of Asian medicine and the practices of Asian medicine, it might be called a metamodern approach. I just wouldn't call it metamodernism. I would say it's one of the artifacts of metamodern culture. Might be looking at the disciplines in this way. So it sounds like hair splitting, but I think I would like to mention just a couple of the other major usages because they're the ones that readers or viewers would have come across most likely just by, you know, Googling. There's confusion. So it's nice to have a chance to kind of clear that up in a sense. So the one that I would bring up would be the metamodernism that's used by the Integral community, and that's the Integral that your listeners will probably be familiar with Ken Wilber as the originator of integral thinking, Integral theory. And many people will know that Ken Wilber borrows this concept of the spiral dynamics and develops this hierarchy of human development and consciousness shifts. And the folks who kind of have taken on Integral and have decided it might be nice to use the term metamodernism as a kind of a rebranding. They're. They're doing very different projects. It's. It's even beyond, like, descriptive prescriptive, although that's salient for sure, what you said. So for one example, at one point, the Integral community, and this would include many people might know the. The author pseudonymously known as Hansi Freynacht, and that's a. A character who's gained a lot of sort of popular audience purchase out there in the Internet land. So as an example of how the folks under the umbrella of Integral who have taken the term metamodernism as their kind of rebranding of Integral, how they might use it, that's different. So the example might be in their project of foregrounding what they call multi perspectivalism, and that's Basically about taking opposing views from across the spectrum, whether it's an intellectual or a political spectrum, and trying to integrate them, trying to see if they can all be held at once for the truths that they hold concurrently. Which is actually something that really stems from postmodernism. But what I wanted to point out was more that it sort of sounds like the oscillation that Vermeulen and von Dannecker utilize in, as a centerpost of their thinking about metamodernism. But it's not in the Vermeulen and von Dannecker system, which we can say is sort of like the majority of scholars and academics and culture critics are working with that sense of metamodernism. We're looking at how practitioners, artists, thinkers in all kinds of fields are reacting to this oscillation that we're doing in the current day. And it's very dynamic and I think it's. It reveals a lot about our present day situation and our present day problems. But it's not a project to try to solve them all per se. It doesn't mean that I'm certainly not against solving problems like that or that we wouldn't like to see that happen. Personally speaking, that would be great. But that's not what metamodernism is per se. Does that make sense?
- [14:31]
A
Those tend to be hierarchical, right. And like progress oriented when they do create those kind of integral systems. So I, in my previous, in the previous episode, I was articulating, I think maybe a slightly different position than both. It was a little bit prescriptive because it's like, hey, lean into this, but not leaning into creating a construct, creating an integration, but lean into the dissonance of the oscillation, kind of enjoying and learning to find the energy in the dissonance, in the conflict, in the chaos, without trying to resolve that into some kind of harmonious system.
- [15:07]
B
I think that is a part of metamodernism because there is dissonance and there is, you know, instability and the active reckoning with it is what I find to be the most exciting, most productive, even if it's destabilizing. There's a. There's energy happening there. But so what you're doing sounds to me like, I might say, like a metamodern way of thinking. It's, it's the use of the, the ism term as the umbrella that folks have different thoughts about. So anyway, I deal with this confusion a lot because I have this, you know, my role as book series co editor and reading a lot of proposals and things like that. And so I. It's. It's nice to be able to mention it and to say, you know, there may be things that people are doing that we wouldn't call metamodernism, but we would say that has something to do with metamodernism. And so I guess I would put your recent project in that camp.
- [16:01]
A
I'm relieved. I didn't use. I didn't call it metamodernism. I said a metamodern approach. So. Okay, so. So listeners may be wondering, like, why are we spending, you know, this much time sort of, like, staking this out? And. And so I want to turn to now, like, the. The. The application of what you're talking about to mysticism, because I think that will, by bringing in a really concrete example, will show the real difference in outcomes and difference in what you get when you apply these different forms of. Different ideas about the metamodern, when you apply them to the case of mysticism, mystical experiences, et cetera. So this is your. I mean, this is your playground. So where should we start when. When it comes to metamodern mysticism?
- [16:48]
B
Could I start backing up just a little bit to how I used metamodernism to think about new iterations of spirituality, like the spiritual but not religious? Because it was really helpful in helping me connect a bunch of dots of research questions that I was asking in kind of the early 2000s, and one of which was kind of kicked off the whole thing was I was trying to figure out what happened around the turn of the millennium that made the term New Age kind of go out of fashion. And in its place came this newer identity category called spiritual but not religious. Also, the nuns and the unaffiliated, these are all grew very rapidly starting in the turn of the century as identity categories, boxes that someone could check on the. On the survey.
- [17:39]
A
And New Age became a slur at that point. Right. Like. Like nobody wants to be called New Age anymore.
- [17:45]
B
Right. But it's so weird to me because the beliefs and the practices of these two groups are not very disparate. They're not very different at all. So one answer I came up with was that the New Age centered on and emerged from an essentially modernist epistemic worldview. And I also referred to it as a transcendence model of spirituality. So, so basically, all the. All the things that we're seeking are found elsewhere. Like the higher self has the answer. The true nature is sought in some sort of place away from oneself. This world is kind of a samsara world. And the wisdom that we gain is meant to help us transcend this world. You know, moksha, things like that. This was kind of the worldview that was inherited, but not something that postmodern culture had tolerance for. Postmodern culture kind of puts the kibosh on truth claims, right? Skepticism toward truth claims and bringing irony to bear on any kind of earnest truth seeking in general was kind of the name of the game from the 80s. In a sense, the postmodern project was running its course because it didn't, it didn't leave room for spiritual lives. And that at some point becomes sort of unacceptable. And at the same time, metamodernism was appearing in culture and with its emphasis being on personal felt experience and on bringing back sincerity, but maintaining that self reflexive, ironic reading of culture, those two things came together at the same time. So I found that super interesting to investigate. Maybe they're, we can say they're straddling these modern and postmodern worldviews. And when the supposed, you know, death of the subject and the anti universalisms of postmodernism were just too much at some point and people were saying, in effect, they wanted their agency back, they wanted their experience back, they wanted to come out of the closet with their weird selves. And that's actually the time when it became popular in some ways to be a geek or a nerd or a freak or an outcast. These narratives of characters like that became really common. The unlikely narrator and things like that. So if I can fit this in with talking about Asian religions and since that might be appealing for your audience too, as we know, the influence of Asian religions and philosophies in the west really can't be underestimated. And I wanted to follow these lines of history that were laid by, you know, scholars like Arthur Verse Smith and Thomas Tweed and Lay, Eric Schmidt, Catherine Albanese and. But move it forward into the 20th century so we could account for these new identities and how they're influenced by de. Traditionalized, usually Asian religions. Since these, some of these concepts that we garnered as a culture from Asian religions are they're now like the air we breathe, right? No one bats an eye talking about mindfulness and being in the moment and karma. Karma and even like the spread of, you know, monistic ideas that the spiritual can be found in everywhere and everything that's not anything we even bat an eye at anymore. And there are these secular versions found all over the place, obviously, right? Being in the zone and embracing the study of entheogens and, and really just the wide admission by so many people of having non ordinary experiences. So that's happening. And then you have the influence of popular culture that's narrativizing and portraying and making space for the sharing of personal spiritual experience and supernatural and paranormal experiences. It's all over the place. About a third of this was a poll I looked at in 2016. I think that about a third of the content, the new content on television was supernatural based in some way or another. And so you have this tremendous influence in the last 20 years also of obviously in a way, the Internet, the mediatization of all of our lives. I remember about 10 years ago I gave a lecture and one of the audience members referred to social media and meetup groups as her spiritual vehicle and her sangha. And at the time, this is even just 10 years ago, that seemed kind of wild and now it's barely noteworthy. So this is, I think, a huge shift that deserves our attention and something that lasts.
- [22:16]
A
You were writing all of this pre Covid too. And so I think, I mean I think the lockdowns and the sort of the widespread zoom ification of religion and spirituality right in 2000s has been. Has really accelerated that.
- [22:31]
B
I agree with that.
- [22:33]
A
Yeah.
- [22:33]
B
In a sort of summary sense. I was just going to kind of encapsulate what I just said because it was kind of a lot that I'm basically kind of positing that the growth of the spiritual but not religious as an identity comes in response to the new age, which had this sort of lopsidedly power of positive thinking type of soteriology, did too much ignoring of the shadow side of things. And that made that made it unpalatable to postmoderns. So the sbnr, spiritual but not religious then sort of point their energies back to ground level and they're still interested in personal transformation. But now we have a more kind of secular, informed, more socially engaged type of imminence as opposed to transcendence that manifests culturally and starts to even sacralize individual felt experience. But that's now inclusive of more rougher, more flawed, more shadowy, sometimes weirder, sillier human qualities and experiences. And so in short, it's, it's not about rejection, it's about more embrace of the. The fullness of being human.
- [23:43]
A
You mentioned non ordinary experience just now. So I want to just kind of like fold into what you've been talking about. You know, the whole gamut of mystical, religious, spiritual, meditation, contemplative experiences and so forth. That's kind of like one of the main Focal points of this season going forward for the podcast. So how does the metamodern approach kind of help us to think about these kinds of experiences? I mean, let me say, kind of to re. Encapsulate what I said in the last episode. You know, I think that there are more traditional ways of looking at those kinds of experiences, right? Like, I had some kind of mystical experience, you know, some kind of unity experience or whatever, and this confirms what I read in some scripture or it confirms what my tradition has taught to me. And that's sort of like a, you know, a more traditionalist way of understanding those kinds of experiences. Somebody else might have a more what I would call a modernist way of understanding these experiences, right? Oh, this is like, it's about the brain function. And we can scientifically, you know, put meditators into FMRI machines and look at what parts of the brain light up, and that will be explanatory, and it will tell us, you know, all. All that we need to know about mystical experiences, you know, that they're this. This type of brain chemistry or that type of, you know, physiological explanation. We can have postmodern approaches to mysticism where we can deconstruct the, you know, the gendered nature of the discourse of Teresa Babila's, you know, mystical writings, or we can. We can position within the historical moment, or we can. We can deconstruct the social forces behind these. These descriptions. Right. And that would be a more kind of typically postmodern approach to spiritual experiences. Okay. So observing this metamodern moment, we would see the juxtaposition of those different interpretations kind of all clamoring for attention. Right. We can find the real traditionalists kind of like, pushing that agenda. We can find the scientists, you know, the, The. The modernists pushing that agenda. We can find the scholars doing their. Their critique. And these voices don't sync up. They're in different communities, they're in different journals, they're in different discourses, different media streams. So there's kind of this, like, chaos oscillation, right, between these different kind of viewpoints. So how do you. How do you come in, show us how this concept of metamodernism is going to, like, clarify this situation.
- [26:14]
B
Great. I have. I have two different things I'm thinking about here. And first, just in a way to sharpen, to not disagree, but sharpen kind of what you were just saying, basically, the debate that has held sway in religious studies. As many listeners may know in the past, we've basically had to choose whether we're going to take a universalist, perennialist, granting the truth claim, reality veracity, or. So it's set up as an either or or. We don't accept the truth claim. We contextualize it away in that postmodern sort of manner. And when you entered to grad school, if you're interested in mysticism, the question would be, you find out, you know, is your interest in reductive methods that are, you know, as you mentioned, sort of biological determinisms or sociological explanations for non ordinary experience or psychological ones, so we put those over in the reductive camp. Or is your interest in digging through the phenomenology of, you know, like kind of what's happening there? And that could also be like cognitive science, biological science and cognitive science neurological, or it could be more philosophical, you know, or if you're in comparative studies, you kind of get to sort of say, well, like, how do we parse categories like experience? What does it mean to have an experience? And all those things that really take us really deeply into cognitive and discursive discussions. All very interesting. However, and this is something I got directly from Jeff Kripal in the program at Rice University, one starts to feel that it eli. All of this elides the actual mystical experiences themselves. You lose the forest for the trees.
- [27:59]
A
And I don't mean to interrupt, but. And not only is that just elided, but it's actively excluded. If you're sitting around the seminar table doing a presentation and the expectation in the room is that you will be doing, you know, historicization or whatever, it's inappropriate and laughable if you were to introduce your own story about your own experience. Right. So it's not just, it's not just elided, it's, it's, it's actively excluded and discouraged from the discourse. Right?
- [28:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, I, I heard you say that on, on one of the previous episodes and I related to that. I mean, my experience at a program like Rice's, which is probably, you know, one of the vanguards of the study of the weird and stuff like that. Right.
- [28:46]
A
But for people who didn't hear Jeff Kripal on just two episodes ago, go back and listen. Yeah, yeah, he's like a manifesto to like be weird. Right? Be weird. A mandate to be weird.
- [28:58]
B
The mandate. Yeah, yeah. And that, that sort of maverick kind of, come on, let's push the boundaries here. And I remember I'll just tell one quick anecdote which I look back on and sort of laugh, which was a seminar on mysticism and we had you Know spent the entire semester looking at various ways of approaching the study of mysticism, including the one that was really what brought me to Rice in the first place. The study with Jeff was that he was finding ways to break up this binary of the either or that I mentioned earlier. Not blindly accepting ontological claims and not deconstructing them away and like a knee jerk skepticism, but finding these more honest and more human third positions that account for weird shit happening to ordinary people. Right. So that was, that was the backdrop and certainly it was studied in there. But I don't know why I want to tell this story. It's. I think it's funny. But. So it was the end of the mysticism seminar. And to me, I thought I had kind of read the room, that we were ready to talk about personal experiences. So I came out with this idea that in our end of the end of the semester wrap up, we tell some stories. And I said, how about ghost stories? Stories of, you know, spirits or whatever. And this like stony silence came over the seminar room. And then there was this kind of like, okay, Linda, why don't you start? And I told sort of the most, the tamest, one of the tamest experiences that I could think of from my own personal. Well of the various weird experiences. And it was when my grandmother had died and about three days later, I sort of felt, heard, felt and heard her as if from a vast cavern going, I'm still here, Lynn. I'm still here. It struck me as completely real. And so I just came out to the seminar with this little tale. And again, there was just this very uncomfortable stony silence and nobody knew what to do with it. And I just thought it was the wildest thing. So that when I was in my graduate program, when I wanted to talk with other people about experiences, we sort of made a discussion group that met, you know, off campus and out of class, and we finally put something together that we could kind of all come out of our little closets with our weird experiences that way. So that's part of the context of. Even though you have people who are very effectively theorizing about coming out of the closet and modeling it themselves, I speak of Jeff here. It's still this dicey kind of prospect for the grad student particularly.
- [31:38]
A
Yeah, yeah. And, and, and maybe, maybe it's worth pointing out this was how many years ago that would have been about 2012. Yeah. So maybe the ground has shifted a little bit. We can talk about that. Yeah, maybe also there's a difference between what, you know, tenured professor like Jeff or myself can get away with versus, you know, graduate students sitting around a seminar table. So that's also a reality.
- [31:59]
B
Right.
- [32:00]
A
Just the sort of the comfort and privile different positionality and how that affects your freedom to be able to reveal more about yourself. But yeah, I think, I think you're pointing to the, the shackles that these kind of epistemes can put on us. Right. Like we initially discover so many new and, and really fascinating and valuable ways of thinking. When we, when we sort of encounter, you know, postmodernism or like, you know, sitting around the seminar table learning these methodologies, it's like, wow, these are amazing tools. But somewhere along the line we also realize that they are, they come with an institutional framework and an intellectual framework where they also can become limiting. Maybe spending too long in some of these environments can kind of rub off on us and start to restrict our ability to really engage with this natural capacity of human beings to have weird experiences.
- [32:53]
B
Yeah, I think if that's part of what we want to do, I could see ways that programs could do, you know, we could do what they do differently to allow for more than just the, you know, discursive left brain kind of approaches. But that said, I mean, as I think about that experience, it probably helped me to continue to seek those third ways because it just felt like we have to be able to break through to understand mysticism in a way that respects the content. We're talking about destabilizing the notions of self, you know, and just laying it all bare and, you know, the rug being ripped out from under one entirely. I mean, that's how I would define mystical experience. It's life changingly, life alteringly, ontologically destabilizing. And so we have to do something that's a bit destabilizing, theoretically speaking as well. And I actually find that, I mean, I take Jeff's scholarship to be an example of metamodern scholarship.
- [33:55]
A
Yeah. Although he doesn't use that word. I think, I think that's right. So.
- [33:59]
B
Well, he used a term, I wrote this in my dissertation. He used a term that to me sounds like he's talking about metamodernism back in 2007 and he called it parentheses, post and parenthesis, modernism. By way of saying it is post, but it's not postmodernism. He doesn't mean, but it's something after. And he exactly presences this notion of that we don't have to boil everything down to. It's either wiped off the table by deconstruction and constructivism or its whole, whole cloth accepted. You know, he's saying, like, can't we hold. Hold more of these things and tease them apart? Not, not to like blend them into a nice hole, but to, to help us think. And I think what I want to do next is tell you exactly how I've used metamodernism to do that.
- [34:49]
A
Just a hint of prescriptivism coming into what you were saying there. Right. Like, obviously you have a preference for there to be a new kind of thinking. Right. A new kind of approach, a new kind of more capacious, more flexible, more chaotic, more multivocal, more polyperspectival.
- [35:10]
B
More effective.
- [35:12]
A
More effective. Yeah, great. So, yeah, tell us, tell us how metamodernism, how. How that will get us to this. This place.
- [35:20]
B
Okay. I don't know if it will get us there, but. So, yeah, personally speaking, I certainly would love to see. I do love to see these sort of breaches in the academic sort of strongholds and this. It's a bit difficult to explain this succinctly, but I'm going to give it a try, which is to say that one of the other research questions I was looking at was just looking at understanding the phenomenology of liminal experience. And that could take place in sort of ordinary life and culture, which is, I think what metamodernism is pointing at is to say we live in that space between epistemes. They're bumping into each other. It is a kind of liminal, oscillative way that we already live. So that's describing a condition that we're already in. But I was thinking about that as an analog in some ways to the non ordinary. So when Vermeulen and von Denacker talk about going back and forth between epistemic positions and pop cultural representations of crossing boundaries between the known and the unknown, the non ordinary, especially in paranormal and like monster narratives, the analog. I was thinking that maybe that tells us something about the mechanism, if you will, of what happens in mystical or spiritual realization, that it has something to do with being ontologically between worlds, right? Between the ordinary and the non ordinary. And this continued crossing of boundaries between the self and non self, awareness of the vastness of existence and also having to operate as embodied humans in the quotidian. Right. So mysticism, a mystic has to hold all these realities, kind of becomes that reality in some way, from what I
- [37:10]
A
hear, you know, talking with people who are having difficulties and challenges with spiritual experiences, meditative experiences, et cetera, you know, These, these meditation challenges or spiritual emergencies or however they call them often. It's a, it's around that right there. Reconciling the tension between these two, you know, ontological realities or radically different states of consciousness or however people, however people describe it. It's often a question of integrating those somehow. Reconciling them somehow. Yeah, really providing the, or producing the challenge for people.
- [37:47]
B
Right. It's this. At least I'll speak for myself. In my own strongest opening. There was this stymied feeling of like, okay, I've been given this glimpse of this blowout, the doors, massively real reality. And now I'm supposed to go to class and it was sort of like drive a car. How are you supposed to do this thing after you've been shown that? And so, yeah, I very much resonate with that question.
- [38:19]
A
Not being able to find a footing in both of those worlds, kind of oscillating between the two. So it is an oscillation. It is, it is a multiplicity. Right. It is a. You can see how it's potentially a question that a metamodern sensibility might, might, might help with.
- [38:39]
B
Yeah. So I want to suggest that viewers and readers of the mystical in pop culture and readers of mystical narratives, I'm calling it secondhand mysticism. So it's, it's. They're reading about or watching or taking in the content of mystical experiences secondhand. They might find that the material performs this transformation in some way. So it's not always through traditional channels or sort of like reading sacred texts or something like that. But also pop cultural texts are performing these negotiations with the real in some way that I'm kind of leaping into this idea and trying to see if. I'm not sure if there's ways to sort of prove that's happening per se. But you know, I have read a fair amount of narratives of people's mystical experiences and sometimes those are, I'll say in quotes, caused by having deeply studied or read or been interacting with people who had mystical experiences. So this is my second hand mysticism kind of theory. And it's why I also think that metamodel cultural products like this, that it's not just about kind of what's trendy right now. Oh, it's trendy to talk about mysticism or to have non ordinary experiences. But there might be actual consciousness shifting going on here because of these sort of borderline qualities of the self and other are getting portrayed and that is then reifying to some extent in culture. So for example, I think there's really important work going on in video gaming culture. And this is not my area, but I think a lot of video games these days, some of them really doing cool things with themes of liminality and self transformation. And I really hope that we'll be able to see more work on how this. How this massively engaging format, more engaging the more I learn about it, even though I'm not a gamer myself, how it is transforming people cognitively and yeah, hopefully we're going to be publishing a couple of articles on video gaming and spirituality in our upcoming volume.
- [40:56]
A
Yeah, that's interesting. So I. There's this long standing notion of some kind of transmission coming from either reading a scripture, having a scripture read to you, reading an Eckhart Tolle book, having, you know, watching on YouTube and somebody's doing a blessing or a shaktipat or whatever. There's all these different ways that different groups have done it. What I hear you saying is sort of like maybe descriptions of experiences and depictions of people having those experiences and so forth just kind of diffusing broadly across the culture provides. I don't know if you would go all the way and say transmission, but it provides some kind of. There's some kind of. There's something in the water, you could say where people are starting to maybe mirror, mirror that somehow or, or it can maybe open up something in. In people as they're consuming this media that opens them up to having these kinds of experiences. Is that. Is that what you're arguing essentially is.
- [41:50]
B
Yeah, that is essentially what I'm arguing. That there's something we can say is. Does seem to be much more in the water than it had been. And I find evidence for that in sort of like the comment sections of certain videos of performances in which people are, you know, revealing things about themselves or saying this. This performance changed me in this way or that way. But. And also again, this freedom for people. This did not exist in the postmodern period. If you were born after the 90s, you might not know that. But if you look back at, you can see like tape of people like Shirley MacLaine being interviewed on late night talk shows. And she was absolutely just lambasted for anytime she would come out with, you know, a channeling thing or a visitation and. And they just couldn't wait to make fun of. And now you just don't. It's not the same anymore. I mean, certainly there are people out there who really still want to fall on biological determinisms. And that's interesting to me. Too. But I like when they all come together.
- [42:56]
A
This is very much on point for me too, where I want to be able to have available to me more than one interpretation, more than one viewpoint, more than one perspective on this. On this experience. Right. Whether it's mystical experiences or, you know, the joy that you felt at the birth of a child or whatever you want to. You want to be able to look at it. Oh, yeah, that was just all brain chemistry, you know, and here's how that works. And that's really interesting. But then also, of course, this is culturally specific to me and my gender and a product of my social
- [43:30]
B
nature and nurture.
- [43:32]
A
Yeah. But then I also want to be able to just revel in the experience and that the ineffability of them and, you know, sometimes those other ways of seeing them kind of feels a little reductive. And you want, you want to be able to, as a full human being, to have the capacity to be able to, you know, have that experience and understand it through these different modes. An invitation to be able to experience things on multiple levels without having to have one ultimate explanatory framework that's going to make sense of all of it.
- [44:03]
B
I think what you're describing there, in part, what it made me think of was trying to understand the attraction to, like, why does any particular aesthetic sensibility come to the fore? Why are we into this or we're not into that? Um, I think there's a reason that metamodern cultural products, one of their signature components, has to do with the kind of effervescence and a kind of wonder that's an undercurrent, that's sort of a permission giving. And sometimes people think of it as a. Like, you can, you can think of the films of Wes Anderson, for example. They're totally secular. There's nothing really, you know, spiritual going on there. But underneath them there's a kind of an un tethered, childlike sense of exploration. I think that you find that sensibility in a lot, not all. A lot of metamonicultural products has this kind of wow. If I just kind of let my, you know, buttoned up self sit over there for a minute and just kind of engage the world. Personally, I want to describe this better and I want to do some work on what, what is this effervescence, you know, because it's, it's. To me, it might be kind of spiritual, but it's also completely secular, which fits with metamodernism. But anyway, it's as yet under theorized But I think that a lot of that attraction again to metamonic cultural products and why we're raving about films like Everything Everywhere, all at once, which is chaotic and multiverse and also very like tender and like the, the family chaos is horrible, but it's also beautiful, you know, while that's all going on at the same time. And why that, why that's palatable to us right now is something I'm interested in.
- [45:52]
A
That's a good segue into one of the kind of traditional wrap up questions that I ask people is what's, what's catching your attention? What are you working on next? I feel like you already talked about developing the books, the book proposals and so forth. Is there or any other projects that you've got going on that are maybe worth mentioning?
- [46:11]
B
Maybe, yeah. There's a new book that came out in our academic book series, as mentioned in Bloomsbury's, carrying our, our book series, Studies in Metamodernism and a new edited volume that came out called Glocal Metamodernisms. Glocal G L O C A L. The premise of that book I think is super important because it's saying, wait a second, Metamodernism is not occurring necessarily the same way in different locales, nor can we say that it necessarily grew out of the same postmodernism which reacts to the same modernism. So what do we make out of that? How do we understand how it's landing globally? And I would love to see this work leave also North America and Europe and also go further flung because we have people writing on metamodernism from, you name it. I mean, there's so many researchers in Asian countries, African, Middle Eastern countries. I just kind of can't wait to see what's going on, culturally speaking, how they're being informed differently, the same, you know, what, what it all means when we put it together.
- [47:22]
A
Great. Well, I think, you know, people that are interested in following all of that will find a lot of interesting stuff to read and look into in our show notes. Yeah. Is there anything else that we forgot to talk about or anything else that you feel is, is worth kind of throwing in here right at the end before we wrap up?
- [47:43]
B
I'm scanning my notes real quick here. Maybe I'll see if you want to add into the show notes at what point we made a disambiguation video because of all the confusion between the different usages of metamodernism. So that's out there for a little bit more in depth discussion.
- [48:01]
A
Yeah. Cool. We can link to that. Well, I think that this has been a great conversation and thank you very much, Linda, for spending some time with me.
- [48:09]
B
Thank you. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. That's it for today from us at the Black Barrel Podcast. If you're listening to us on one of our partner podcasts, you can subscribe directly to us for ad free episodes or look us up on substack to check out members only benefits. This episode is hosted by Pierce Alguero and produced and edited by me, lan Le. Our music is by Jonathan Pettit. Until next time, be happy, be safe, and be well.