​
​Process and Pastiche
Metamodernism and Enjoyment of Felt Contrasts

by Jay McDaniel, PhD
8/15/2026
​

What I call metamodern “constructive pastiche,” on the other hand, combines disparate elements to build a space inhabited by a felt experience that is not at home in either element on its own. And/or, constructive pastiche allows – inside a work of art – the kinds of cultural combinations that people experience in real life, despite conventional divisions between them.

Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism


In real life, we are always juxtaposing things; we are always in the process of seeking satisfying contrasts in the objects and subjects we experience; we are always pastiching. That is, we are gathering experiences from different sources and combining them into momentary wholes that form the content of our experience.

​For example, we may see the face of a friend, hear music playing in the background, feel the warmth of sunlight on our skin, remember something that happened years ago, and anticipate a meeting later in the day—all within a single moment of experience. These elements come from different places and times, but they are gathered together in the immediacy of the present. They may fit together harmoniously or pull against one another. Either way, their contrasts contribute to the particular feeling and intensity of the moment.

For process philosophers, this pastiching is not merely psychological; it is also, at the same time, metaphysical. Whitehead’s philosophy, the ultimate metaphysical principle is illustrated and embodied in a single moment of experience, The many entities, feelings, and influences from the past actual world become one in the immediacy of our feeling of them. They ar together in our experience. and this togetherness embodies the interconnectedness of all things.

Their "becoming one" in our experience does not mean that they lose their diversity. It means that they are felt in meaningful contrasts (Whitehead's term) even if they come from radically different sources. A contrast is not necessarily a conflict. It can be a complementarity. To use the language of metamodernism, we can "oscillate" between the poles of the contrast, such that both elements are needed, even as they may be radically different. 

In the arts, this combination of many contrasting elements within a single work or experience is sometimes called collage or, in one of its meanings, pastiche. It is, says Greg Dember, “the juxtaposing of seemingly disparate genre styles in a single work of art.” The juxtaposition can be between styles from different historical periods, forms drawn from different cultures, different artistic media, or contrasting sensibilities such as the sacred and the secular, the comic and the serious, the traditional and the experimental, or the refined and the popular.
​
In the juxtaposition itself, Whitehead adds, a certain kind of satisfying intensity can be felt—an intensity evoked by the juxtaposed elements. The juxtaposition can be felt as consonant or dissonant, conflicting or confluent. Either way, there can be a certain enjoyment of the juxtaposition itself, as felt through the contrasts and the emotions they evoke.

From a Whiteheadian perspective, the enjoyment of such intensity through juxtaposition is found not only in human life but also in other forms of life on Earth—in animals and living cells, and even in the depths of atoms. Pastiche in the arts thus both embodies and supports an ontology of felt juxtapositions. Process is Pastiche.

Metamodern Pastiche

In discussions of the metamodern aesthetic sensibility—or, as Linda Ceriello puts it, its “logic of emotion”—the subject of pastiche inevitably emerges. Indeed, Greg Dember, author of Say Hello to Metamodernism!, identifies “constructive pastiche” as one of eleven sensibilities found in metamodern art, music, television, and film.

Pastiche comes from the French word pastiche, which was borrowed from the Italian pasticcio, meaning a pie, pastry, or mixture of diverse ingredients. The culinary image is revealing: a pastiche brings different elements together in a single composition. In art, literature, music, architecture, and film, the word describes a work made by imitating, borrowing, or combining recognizable styles and materials from other works, artists, genres, or historical periods.

Synonyms for pastiche will depend on whether the word is used primarily to reflect imitation or combining styles and materials to evoke a desired effect. If imitation is emphasized, words such as copy and imitation come to mind. If a mixed collection is emphasized, appropriate terms include medley, potpourri, hodgepodge, patchwork, collage, or mélange. It seems to me that the second meaning, a mixed collection of styles and materials has priority, and that an imitation is itself a mixed combination, albeit with the aim of paying homage to the past.

In the second sense, as a mixed collection, pastiche is related to collage. Dember explains:
​

While collage had been introduced during the modernist period, and even earlier, it especially typifies postmodern art. Collage challenges modernist assumptions about unitary authorship, evokes a sense of visual fracture, and is an example of the general postmodern aesthetic of pastiche, which found expression not only in the visual arts, but also in music (think Hip Hop’s elevation of sampling), literature, architecture, etc. during the postmodern period. Pastiche is the juxtaposing of seemingly disparate elements, often from historically separated genres and/or cultures, with the effect of raising questions about the unexamined assumptions of each source.

- Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism

​
​One of Dember's aims in Say Hello to Metamodernism is to uncouple the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate sources from the aim of raising questions about unexamined assump;tions, so that the juxtaposition can function in a more constructive and life-nourishing way,. He calls it "constructive pastiche." I will turn to what he means shortly, but first I offer a glimpse of how pastiche as such might be understood in a Whiteheadian context.

A Verb and a Noun

Pastiche can be used as either a noun or a verb.

As a noun:
​

• The Beatles’ “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is a pastiche of Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys.
• The building is a pastiche of Renaissance and Baroque architectural styles.
• Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill is a pastiche of martial-arts films, samurai cinema, spaghetti westerns, and American crime thrillers.

As a verb:

• The Beatles pastiched Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys in “Back in the U.S.S.R.”
• The architect pastiched Renaissance and Baroque styles in designing the building.
• In Kill Bill, Tarantino pastiches several cinematic traditions to create a new visual and narrative world.

On the one hand, pastiche as a verb resembles Whitehead’s idea that every moment of lived experience is an act of concrescence: an act of gathering together elements and influences from the past actual world and combining them into a new whole. The elements that are gathered need not come from the same source. For example, a single moment may gather together the sight of a tree, the sound of distant music, the memory of a friend, a feeling of bodily discomfort, and a hope for what might happen next. These diverse elements become aspects of one momentary experience. They are together in the experience as its objective content, but in a collage-like way. They form felt contrasts, and the contrasts make the whole richer. This gathering together is not overseen by a separate subject of the experience; the subject of the experience is the act of gathering.

On the other hand, pastiche as a noun resembles the outcome of that momentary act, which itself becomes a datum for subsequent acts of pastiche. Whitehead uses the phrase subject-superject to explain how the two go together. The verb is the subject, and the noun—the outcome of the gathering insofar as it influences others—is the superject. In other words, the subject is the momentary act of pastiching, of gathering the many into one; the superject is the pastiched noun, the completed outcome of that act, which becomes part of the many inherited by subsequent acts of pastiche.

Imagine, for example, that the person described above paints an image, writes a song, creates a movie, or tells a story about the tree that is seen, the music that is heard, the friend who is remembered, the bodily discomfort that is felt, and the hope for what might come. The resulting work would be a mixed combination—a pastiche in the sense of a noun. It would be publically observale, the outcome of a felt experience.  The internally felt contrast would be objectified for others.

I do not mean to suggest that this is the way artists work, that they have completed images in their minds which they then express. A few do, but most do not. The objective content of their work emerges in the process of creating it, not before, and they are open to surprise. And their aim is not necessarily to express inner feelings. I do want to suggest, however, that all human experience has a collage-like or pastiche-dimension in its subjectivity, At every moment the world comes to us as a pastiche, a collage, and we gather it into unity by copying it, mixing it in new ways, and adding something new of our own - all the while into felt contrasts that have aesthetic and emotional qualities.

Imitation and Oscillation

Moreover, the contrasts that are enjoyed in the objective content, and that can be felt in the concresing process, can be oscillating: that is, shifting back and forth, and shaped by the poles of the contrast. The shift can be, for example, between irony and sincerity, between humor and seriousness, and the inwardly felt contrast can be evoked by the objective content of a work of art, even if it is mimicking or imitating the past. 

In “Metamodern Pastiche: Introduction,” Timotheus Vermeulen and Kim Wilkins, make this point about postmodern pastiche,. They distinguish postmodern pastiche, as theorized by Fredric Jameson, from the metamodern pastiche emerging in our post-postmodern age.

​Their essay introduces the work of authors who explore this newer form of pastiche. Vermeulen and Wilkins find especially persuasive Gry C. Rustad’s suggestion that metamodern pastiche may look much like its postmodern predecessor while functioning very differently:
​

To be sure, as Gry C. Rustad notes in her contribution here, pastiche after postmodernism still looks like postmodern pastiche. It is depthless—or even “empty”—mimicry. But whilst Jameson automatically associated such depthlessness with a waning of affect (Warhol’s decontextualized Diamond Dust Shoes as opposed to Van Gogh’s immediately localizable peasant shoes), the essays in this dossier argue that formal or surface imitations are precisely the means by which affect—sometimes empathy, other times anger, now fear, then enjoyment—is localized.

​The outward form, then, remains one of surface imitation. Metamodern pastiche does not necessarily restore the supposedly “deep” and original self-expression of inherited forms of art that postmodernism called into question. Instead, it uses imitation itself to evoke and, in their term, "localize feeling" in the experiencing subject. A borrowed style, familiar genre, or inherited cultural form can become a vehicle through which empathy, anger, fear, pleasure, nostalgia, or hope is experienced in the present.

Braiding for a Better World

Dember adds the idea of "braiding" to this approach. In some metamodern works of art. As a noun braiding is a product or outcome of creativity as exemplified in an artwork. It is something braided, not unlike hair, textiles, and ropes can be braided. As a verb braiding is the process of braiding itself: of interweaving distinct strands of emotion, thought, or sensibility within an organically felt experience without erasing the uniqueness of the strands. In other words, braiding can be an object in the world with multiple patterns held in contrast, and it can be a subjective act of weaving many influences from the world into a momentary, complex, felt experience. It can be the objective outcome of concrescence, or the act of concrescence itself.

It seems to me that constructive pastiche involves two feelings simultaneously: not being at home in either element on its own, yet being at home in the multiplicity of contrasts.
Recall Dember’s suggestion, in the quotation offered at the outset of this essay, that metamodern “constructive pastiche” can work in two ways.

First, it can combine disparate elements to create a space inhabited by a felt experience that would not be at home in any one of those elements by itself. The experience emerges precisely from the conjunction of disjunction. Second, constructive pastiche can bring together, within a work of art, cultural elements that convention ordinarily keeps separate. In doing so, it reflects the combinations and crossings people already experience in real life.

These are not really separate possibilities. Constructive pastiche brings conventionally separated elements together precisely so that a new feeling can emerge from their juxtaposition—a feeling that belongs to none of them in isolation but feels at home in their multiplicity. I suggest that this is what occurs in braiding: the different strands remain distinguishable, yet they are woven into a lived multiplicity of contrasts that itself becomes home.

In Whitehead's philosophy, braiding is concrescing, and concrescing is pastiching. The question at hand is whether, and how, we might constructively pastiche. Perhaps the answer lies in gathering together possibilities from our local settings and the rest of the world, in respectful ways, so that even as we might experience satisfying forms of wholeness at local levels, we can also braid our way into a world that is good for each and all, and for other forms of life, too. This would be pastiching at one of its highest levels. Or, better, its deepest levels. It is, think process philosophers, what the lure of the deep Pastiching, which is always already in each human heart, is always already about. It is about constructive pastich, another name for which is love.

---

Open Horizon Series on Metamodernism
​

1. ​​Process and Pastiche: Metamodernism and Enjoyment of Felt Contrasts
2. ​​What Do I Do Now? Metamodernism, Discernment, and Empathic Reflexivity
3. Love and Quirkiness: A Metamodern Appreciation of Interior Freedom
4. Braiding the Many: Whitehead, Metamodernism, and Oscillation
5. Normcore, Benedictine Simplicity, and the Metamodern Spirit
6. Beyond Snarkiness: Whitehead on Tenderness, Dember on Meta-Cuteness
7. Metamodern Buddhism: A Process Possibility