An Aesthetics of Oscillation: Notes on Metamodernism and Process Philosophy

An Aesthetics of Oscillation:
Notes on Metamodernism and Process Philosophy

Jay McDaniel
9/3/2026

The purpose of this page is to offer readers springboards for reflection on how a metamodern "aesthetics of oscillation" and process philosophy might enter into fruitful conversation with one another.

Metamodern Oscillation: A Working Definition

Three Characteristics of Metamodern Oscillation

“First, it refers specifically to a dynamic between oppositional pairs in which one part of the pair is a modernist quality and the other part is its postmodern opposite. Second, it differs from modernist synthesis in that it does not imply some sort of progression to a new and better state, nor to a resolution of the contradiction inherent in the duality. Third, it differs from postmodern deconstruction in that the two sides of the oscillating duality do not cancel each other out, thereby leaving nothing. Instead, they remain in dynamic tension with each other, creating a ‘space’ for something.”

—Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism!: Understanding Today’s Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity (Boise: Exact Rush Multimedia Publishing, 2024).

Braiding as Complement to Metamodern Oscillation

“In this book, I will sometimes use the term braiding, which is very similar to oscillation. The major difference is in how the metaphor works. In oscillation, you have a thing that is shifting back and forth between two states. With braiding, the image is of two opposing qualities coexisting throughout an artwork over time, in relation to one another but always maintaining their own distinctiveness, like two strands wrapped together in a braid. Each metaphor—oscillation and braiding—applies more accurately to some metamodern exemplars than to others.”

—Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism!: Understanding Today’s Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity (Boise: Exact Rush Multimedia Publishing, 2024). Publisher’s page

Metamodern oscillation is the dynamic interplay between a modernist quality and its postmodern opposite, in which neither side defeats, absorbs, resolves, or cancels the other. The two remain distinct but mutually active, creating a generative space for felt experience, meaning, and creative possibility.

Sometimes this interplay takes the form of oscillation: an artwork, person, or culture moves back and forth between the two poles. At other times, it takes the form of braiding: the opposing qualities coexist throughout the work, intertwined but still distinguishable, like two strands in a braid. Oscillation emphasizes movement between the poles; braiding emphasizes their sustained coexistence. Both differ from modernist synthesis, which seeks resolution in a higher unity, and from postmodern deconstruction, which may dissolve the opposition altogether.

Concrescence as the Place
Where Oscillation and Braiding Occur

Whitehead uses the word concrescence to name the process by which the many elements of the world are gathered into the unity of a single moment of experience. Each moment receives influences from the past, responds to possibilities for the future, and weaves what it receives into a partly novel whole. Concrescence is thus the place where contrasts are felt, coordinated, intensified, muted, rejected, or transformed.

Oscillation can occur between objects of experience. Attention may move between a remembered loss and an imagined possibility, between a religious tradition and a contemporary criticism of it, or between a modern ideal and its postmodern deconstruction. The objects remain different, but both become ingredients in the developing experience. Across a succession of moments, one may move repeatedly from one object or pole to another.

Oscillation can also occur between the feelings associated with those objects. The same event may be felt with hope and anxiety, attraction and resistance, sincerity and irony, gratitude and grief. In Whitehead’s language, an object is always experienced with a subjective form—an emotional tone that expresses how the subject receives it. Oscillation may therefore involve not only movement between different things but also movement among different ways of feeling them.

Finally, these objects and feelings may be braided rather than alternately emphasized. Hope and grief, belief and doubt, sincerity and irony may be felt together within a single developing experience, each retaining its distinctiveness while contributing to the whole.

Concrescence does not necessarily resolve their tension or reduce them to a midpoint. It can weave them into a contrast whose richness depends upon their continuing difference. In this sense, concrescence is the experiential process through which both oscillation and braiding become possible.

Four Currents of Metamodernism

Metamodernism is a cultural phenomenon that emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and is still unfolding. To my mind, it is like a river containing many currents, sometimes flowing together and sometimes pulling in different directions. Here are four of those currents, along with thinkers associated with each:

An Aesthetic Sensibility—Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, and Greg Dember. This trajectory understands metamodernism as a sensibility emerging after postmodernism, emphasizing oscillation or braiding between modern and postmodern qualities and a recovery of felt experience.
An Emerging Worldview—Brendan Graham Dempsey. This trajectory presents metamodernism as an emerging worldview that integrates insights from many disciplines, traditions, and fields of interest into a larger, developmentally informed picture.
A Social Project—Hanzi Freinacht This trajectory approaches metamodernism as a social and cultural project aimed at helping bring about a more just, sustainable, compassionate, psychologically mature, and spiritually satisfying world.
An Academic Project—Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm. This trajectory understands metamodernism somewhat more narrowly as a movement within the academy that seeks to reconstruct knowledge after postmodern critique and rethink the assumptions and methods of the humanities and social sciences.

These are not isolated schools but overlapping currents within a wider river.

These four currents are not incompatible. Many who see it in the second way (an integrative worldview) also see it in the third way (a social project). And some who see it the first way (an aesthetic sensibility) find aspects of that sensibility in contemporary cosmology, as illustrated in Greg Dember's turn toward cosmologies of consciousness and to panpsychism at the end of his book exploring aesthetic sensibilities.

Most participants think of metamodernism as something that is now happening in different parts of the world, such that it can be described and not simply prescribed. As they see things, the spirit of metamodernism is now found in Africa and Asia. in Latin America and the Middle East, in Europe and North America, albeit expressed in different ways.

The Aesthetics of Oscillation, The Affective Turn,
and a Novel Politics (the Bloomsbury Series)

Rather than adjudicting between these various meanings, I want to use the word metamodernism in the first sense for the moment, and talk about it as an aesthetic sensibility with three expressions:

Here i am drawing directly upon a series on metamodernism developed by Bloomsbuery Press called Studies in Metamodernism: Theory and Criticism across the Disciplines, edited by Linda C. Ceriello and Timotheus Vermeulen. The publisher describes both the interdisciplinary scope of the series and the kinds of projects it seeks:

"We welcome contributions from scholars in any number of disciplines, including (but not limited to) cultural studies, literary studies, film and media studies, history (inclusive of art and architecture), and religion.

Relevant projects may build from or expand upon existing theoretical bases for the study of metamodernism—including those that query the limits of its theoretical reach or efficacy—as well as metamodern genres, sensibilities and tropes. These topics may include (but are not limited to) the return to historicity, the aesthetics of oscillation, the affective turn, and novel politics of belief, community, network, and identity."

For my part, as a process philosopher, I find the phrases “the aesthetics of oscillation,” “the affective turn,” and “novel politics of belief, community, network, and identity” especially interesting.

What might these three phrases refer to? I offer my own interpretation, letting the notion of an aesthetics of oscillation be my springboard.

At an affective level, oscillations can occur between sincerity and irony, assuredness and uncertainty, innocence and knowingness, construction and deconstruction. If we think of the metamodern world of art and cultural products, these works—and our experience of them—will not resolve such tensions or settle permanently at some midpoint between them. They will move back and forth, allowing the different poles to remain active. Oscillation is a creative way of inhabiting tensions that cannot—and perhaps should not—be finally resolved.

Moreover, and importantly, there can be more than two poles. Oscillation can occur among four or five poles. Consider, for example, a metamodern response to what we may today call the polycrisis: ecological, economic, political, psychological, and spiritual. The response might move among grief over what has been lost, anger at the forces causing destruction, despair over the apparent impossibility of change, hope for unrealized possibilities, and determination to act without guarantees. Or consider a metamodern expression of religion. A metamodern life of faith might likewise oscillate among trust, doubt, wonder, lament, and protest. These feelings need not be reconciled into a single dominant attitude. Their unresolved interplay may itself constitute the depth and vitality of felt experience.

The “affective turn” refers to a renewed attention to felt experience: emotions, moods, bodily intensities, attachments, atmospheres, longings, and forms of vulnerability that precede or exceed conscious interpretation. After a period in which cultural theory often concentrated on language, representation, discourse, and power, the affective turn asks how art and culture are actually felt—how they move us, unsettle us, attract or repel us, and awaken hope, wonder, grief, tenderness, or belonging. Meaning is found not only in what a work says or represents but also in what it enables people to feel.

The “novel politics of belief, community, network, and identity” might then name emerging ways of living together that embody this affective and oscillatory sensibility. A metamodern politics of belief would move between conviction and humility, allowing people to commit themselves without pretending to possess final truth. A politics of community would braid belonging with individuality, shared purposes with internal diversity, and local loyalties with planetary responsibility. A politics of network would combine decentralized participation with forms of coordination capable of addressing large and complex problems. A politics of identity would recognize the importance of particular identities while acknowledging their fluidity, relationality, and overlap with other identities.

Such a politics would not seek to abolish tensions between unity and plurality, stability and change, leadership and participation, or tradition and innovation. It would try to inhabit them creatively. Its aim would be neither a return to modernist images of a perfectly unified society (right or left) nor an acquiescence to postmodern fragmentation, but the cultivation of communities in which multiple perspectives and forms of life can interact without being reduced to sameness. From a process perspective, these would be communities of becoming: experimental, relational, self-correcting, and responsive to new possibilities. At their best, they would be compassionate, participatory, ecologically responsible, spiritually satisfying, and committed to leaving no one behind.

Three Contributions from Whitehead

Oscillation in the Fabric of Reality. A philosophy of organism proposes that oscillation belongs to the very nature of reality. More specifically, reality consists of dynamic relations among sentient beings as they create and enjoy felt contrasts. Contrasts can be oscillating, in the sense of experience moving from one pole to another, or braided, in the sense that different poles are felt simultaneously while retaining their distinctiveness.
Such patterns are evident throughout the more-than-human world. Consider the oscillations within birdsong between repetition and novelty, constancy and improvisation, silence and sound. Consider a young animal at play, moving between approach and retreat, safety and danger, cooperation and competition. Consider the rhythms of courtship, in which attraction may be intensified through alternating movements of display and withdrawal. Even the life of a plant unfolds through contrasts: light and darkness, activity and rest, outward growth and inward conservation, seasonal flourishing and dormancy.

Such contrasts need not be understood as conflicts to be eliminated. They can become forms of what Whitehead calls “beauty,” or what might alternatively be called “richness of experience.” Beauty arises when differences are woven together in ways that preserve their distinctiveness while creating intensity, harmony, and richness.

The Affective Turn: Feeling All the Way Down. Whitehead’s philosophy takes felt experience as a building block of reality. It understands reality as composed of “occasions of experience,” each constituted by acts of feeling, or “prehensions.” Felt experience is therefore not merely a private human response added to an otherwise lifeless world. It belongs to the fabric of reality itself, although it assumes widely different forms and degrees of complexity in different kinds of beings. “Apart from the experiences of subjects,” Whitehead says, “there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.” He adds that prehensions, or feelings, need not be conscious in order to be experienced and enjoyed. Living cells may not encounter their worlds through clear and distinct perceptions—that is, through consciousness—but they nevertheless feel and respond to their surroundings.

Novel Politics: Local Beauty and World-Loyalty. A process-relational approach, as developed by many process philosophers and theologians—including John Cobb, Andrew Schwartz, and Mary Elizabeth Moore—proposes a social project aimed at embodying beauty in local settings within planetary horizons. Here beauty means the creation of richly felt contrasts: forms of community in which unity and diversity, individuality and interdependence, stability and novelty, and tradition and innovation can be held together without one side erasing the other. Local communities are especially important because they are often where contrasts are felt most immediately and intensely. Yet local commitments must be complemented by planetary horizons—by what Whitehead calls “world-loyalty.” World-loyalty widens concern beyond the interests of any single community, nation, religion, or species toward the well-being of the larger world. The aspirational ideal is therefore locally embodied but globally and ecologically oriented. It includes the more-than-human world as well as human life and seeks communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, ecologically responsible, and hospitable to the flourishing of life

Eight Whiteheadian Contrasts

The focus of metamodernism, as represented in the Bloomsbury series, is primarily human experience. Does Whitehead have anything to offer here? He was, after all, a “modern” thinker, writing before the spell of postmodern irony and deconstruction had been fully cast. He can seem—and in some respects is—old-fashioned and perhaps outdated. And yet his philosophy highlights contrasts that may speak powerfully to a metamodern mind amid the polycrisis of our time.

These contrasts would not need to be resolved through synthesis or weakened into compromise. They could be braided, in Greg Dember’s sense: held together over time as distinct but mutually enriching strands of experience. Each would remain itself while entering into a dynamic relationship with its opposite. Some examples are in order.

Hope and Despair
Hope is trust in unrealized possibilities: the feeling that the future remains partly open and that something better might emerge. Despair responds to suffering, destruction, and irreversible loss; it reminds us that many possibilities will never be realized and that no happy ending is guaranteed.
Order and Novelty
Order provides stability, continuity, and the dependable patterns without which life becomes chaotic. Novelty introduces surprise, creativity, adventure, and transformation. A satisfying life needs enough order to remain coherent and enough novelty to remain alive.
Individuality and Interdependence
Each person is a distinct center of experience with a perspective, agency, and value of their own. Yet each person is also constituted by relationships with other people, the more-than-human world, and the universe itself. We become ourselves through what we receive from others.
Self-Enjoyment and Self-Transcendence
Self-enjoyment is the immediate feeling of being alive—the enjoyment of one’s own experience for its own sake. Self-transcendence occurs when attention moves beyond preoccupation with the private self toward participation in relationships, communities, purposes, and realities wider than the individual.
Zest and Peace
Zest is energetic engagement in life’s adventures: the desire to explore possibilities, create contrasts, and participate intensely in the world. Peace is a self-forgetful release from acquisitive feeling and preoccupation with the private self. It calms destructive turbulence while preserving, rather than extinguishing, the springs of energy.
The Temporal and the Timeless
The temporal is the felt passage of life: the movement from the settled past through the immediacy of the present toward an open future, in which everything arises, becomes, and passes away. The timeless is our feeling for possibilities, patterns, ideals, and forms of beauty that are not exhausted by any particular moment. A meaningful life participates fully in time while remaining receptive to values that seem to transcend it.
God and the World
God and the world are distinct but deeply interdependent. God receives the world with tender care and offers each moment fresh possibilities for becoming, while the world contributes its joys, sufferings, achievements, and failures to the ongoing life of God. Neither is reducible to the other: God is not simply the world, and the world is not merely the enactment of a divine plan. Their relationship is a living contrast between divine possibility and worldly actuality, timeless valuation and temporal becoming, creative calling and creaturely response.

Of course, not everyone will recognize or experience all these contrasts, and no single list can encompass the full range of human experience. Some may find certain contrasts deeply meaningful while finding others irrelevant, unconvincing, or foreign to their lives. The contrast between God and the world, for example, will resonate with theists but not necessarily with nontheists. These contrasts are therefore possibilities for interpreting felt experience, not universal requirements for a meaningful life.

Whether some or all of these contrasts are relevant to a metamodern moment, I am not qualified to say. But two points seem especially “metamodern” in spirit. First, the contrasts are not resolved into sameness, nor is one pole subordinated to another. Second, the contrasts can be part of the richness of lived experience. Their tensions can become sources of intensity, depth, creativity, and beauty.

The Aesthetics of Oscillation:
Religion in a Metamodern Age

The Bloomsbury series notes religion as one place where metamodern sensibilities might be at work. Whitehead’s four concepts--triviality, vagueness, narrowness, and width—can help us interpret the religious dimensions of such an aesthetics of oscillation. When coordinated successfully, they can contribute to depth of religious experience.

Triviality. Religious oscillation becomes trivial when its contrasting poles are entertained without existential consequence. A person may move fashionably between belief and doubt, devotion and detachment, or tradition and experimentation without allowing any of them to shape how they live. Religion then becomes an identity marker, intellectual pastime, or aesthetic accessory. Nevertheless, ordinary and seemingly trivial practices—a familiar hymn, a shared meal, a candle, a moment of silence—may provide the background from which deeper religious feelings emerge.
Vagueness. Religious experience often begins with a vague sense that something more is present: a dim awareness of mystery, sacredness, interconnection, or beckoning possibility. A person may feel spiritually drawn without knowing whether the source is God, the universe, the depths of the psyche, the community of life, or some combination of these. Such vagueness need not be a failure of faith. It can protect mystery from premature definition and leave room for wonder, exploration, and spiritual growth.
Narrowness. Religious life requires concentration. Prayer may focus attention on God; meditation may attend closely to breathing; ritual may gather experience around a sacred story, symbol, or practice. Such narrowness can create intensity, devotion, and clarity. It becomes destructive when a limited perspective mistakes itself for the whole—when one scripture, doctrine, community, or image of God excludes every other possibility and becomes a justification for intolerance.
Width. Religious experience acquires width when it becomes receptive to many dimensions of life and many sources of wisdom. A wide faith can hold together belief and doubt, joy and grief, divine transcendence and divine immanence, personal devotion and social responsibility, loyalty to one tradition and openness to others. Its concern extends beyond humanity to animals, plants, ecosystems, and the Earth. Width does not require abandoning a particular religious home; it means inhabiting that home with windows and doors open.

A religious life of depth would coordinate all four. It would emerge from a vague but compelling sense of mystery, find intensity through particular beliefs and practices, widen into receptivity to other people and the more-than-human world, and avoid becoming trivial by making a genuine difference in how a person lives. Such a life might oscillate—or braid—faith and doubt, tradition and novelty, solitude and community, transcendence and immanence. From a Whiteheadian perspective, the resulting richness of experience would itself be a form of spiritual beauty.

Interestingly, these categories czn help illuminate the religious lives of people who are spiritual-but-not-religious in their own self-understanding and also those who are religiously identified.

Artists in an Ecological Civilization

Process philosophers and theologians use the phrase "ecological civilization" to name the kinds of communities needed in, to quote the Bloomsbury series, a "novel politics of belief, community, network, and identity."

The Bloomsbury series may be most interested in sociological analyses of where such politics are now emerging throughout the world, but process philosopy adds "ecological civilization" as an aspirational ideal that may well be at work in these novel politics, at least among some. An ecological civilization embodies a new way of organizing society, namely around the well-beeing of life rather than ever-increasing GDP. It seeks to replace Economism with what Planetism, albeit not in a way that obviates local community. Planetism is an awkward way of pointing toward societies tha live with respect and care for the community of life, and understand themselves as part of, not apart from, the larger web of life. It has an indigenous and yet post-postmodern feel to it. A "metamodern" feel. Amid those who share this aspirational ideal, artists can play a special role. I will name some of these roles, and supply links to essays in Open Horizons where they have been developed,

Artistically, Whitehead offers more than a theory of aesthetic appreciation. He offers a way of understanding the universe itself as an artistic activity and human creativity as participation in a wider creativity. Every moment of experience receives influences from its world, responds to possibilities, and creates itself from what it has inherited. Human artists do something similar in more conscious and complex ways. They work with sounds, colors, words, movements, images, memories, inherited traditions, and materials from the more-than-human world. Creativity is therefore always relational and ecological—an eco-creativity.

From this perspective, artworks are not simply objects to be analyzed. They are lures for feeling. A painting, song, poem, film, dance, garden, story, or theatrical performance can invite people to feel the world differently. Art can awaken people to the aliveness of the Earth, disturb complacency, deepen empathy, evoke wonder, preserve grief, and make unrealized possibilities emotionally available. It can help us recognize forms of value that dominant habits of perception have concealed. This revelatory function is especially important in a culture that has learned to view nature as lifeless matter and other creatures chiefly as instruments for human use.

Artists can consequently serve as awakeners, motivators, disturbers, philosophers, wonder-makers, and explorers. They can disclose ecological and social suffering—the bad news—while also making beauty, courage, tenderness, and alternative futures imaginable—the good news. Art need not offer optimism in a shallow sense. It may carry grief, anger, despair, wonder, hope, and determination at the same time. It can hold these feelings in tension without pretending that suffering has been overcome. In this way, art can embody the aesthetics of oscillation and sometimes achieve a tragic beauty in which hope is intensified, rather than negated, by an honest encounter with loss.

An ecological civilization cannot be built by policies and technologies alone. It also requires transformed habits of perception, feeling, imagination, and desire. The arts can help bring about that transformation. They can give sensuous and emotional form to possibilities that do not yet exist socially, allowing people to feel the future before they know how to build it. In this sense, artists are not peripheral to ecological civilization. They are among its prophets, critics, healers, and creators.

Links in Open Horizons:

Back to the Four Currents

]In concluding this extended essay, I want to say a word about the other currents of metamodernism. I have already moved beyond the first current—metamodernism as an aesthetic sensibility—into the terrain of the second and third currents: metamodernism as an emerging worldview and as a social project. Perhaps some of the ideas developed here can help build bridges between those two currents and the aesthetic current. In subsequent Open Horizons essays, I will deal still more explicitly with metamodernism as a worldview and social aspiration.

Here, however, I want to emphasize the importance of the first current on its own terms and for its own sake. One thing missing from almost everything I have said above is sustained attention to particular artworks and cultural products. Nor have I explored what is actually happening in popular culture around the world. An aesthetic sensibility cannot be understood through philosophical reflection alone. It must be discovered in films, television programs, music, literature, visual art, comedy, architecture, fashion, religious expression, and the countless other forms through which people feel and interpret their lives.

Toward this end, I have learned a great deal from Greg Dember’s Say Hello to Metamodernism! and from What Is Metamodern?, the website he co-edits with Linda C. Ceriello. More specifically, I have learned from Dember’s eleven categories of metamodern art, which illuminate contemporary artworks and cultural products by attending closely to what they do and how they feel.

My hope is that the process-relational ideas developed above might inspire the kind of focused interpretive work found in Dember’s book and on the website. They are meant to encourage such work, not to supplant it. Metaphysical speculation, reflection on worldview, and social aspiration can enrich the interpretation of art and popular culture, but they cannot substitute for close attention to particular works and the felt experience they make possible. The traffic can move in both directions: artworks can illuminate emerging worldviews and social possibilities, while those worldviews and aspirations can help us recognize what is at stake in the art.

Attention can also rightly be given to metamodernism as an academic project, the fourth current identified at the outset. I explore that current in an Open Horizons essay on Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm: Process Social Ontology: Three Metamodern Ideas from Jason Josephson-Storm. Taken together, these four currents—aesthetic, worldview-oriented, social, and academic—need not compete for ownership of metamodernism. They can themselves be braided, each retaining its distinctiveness while enriching the others.

A Concluding Remark on the Affective Turn

I close with a remark on the affective turn. While Whitehead’s philosophy in particular, and process philosophy more generally, take felt experience as a fundamental category for understanding human life and the rest of the world, much of the process literature approaches experience from a third-person perspective. Experience is something attributed to others: quantum events in the depths of atoms, living cells, animals, and other human beings—but not, as it were, to me, here and now.

Process philosophy has too often lacked a fully developed phenomenological dimension—an approach beginning with the textures, moods, ambiguities, and intensities of first-person experience. This is striking, given Whitehead’s statement that “the elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought.” A philosophy of experience should illuminate not only the experience of entities throughout the universe but also the felt immediacy of our own lives.

One contribution that metamodernism in its first mode—as an aesthetic sensibility—can make to the process tradition is precisely this renewed attention to first-person lived experience. It can help process thinkers explore how contrasts are actually felt: how sincerity and irony, hope and despair, belief and doubt, zest and peace, attachment and detachment move within a life. This is one among many contributions that the metamodern movement can make to the process tradition.

Thus, just as process philosophy may help us understand metamodernism, metamodernism may help us understand—and more fully inhabit—process philosophy. That, too, is an oscillation: a movement back and forth in which each tradition affects and is affected by the other. Who knows? There may even be a braiding.