Brave But Not Entirely New World: Six Images of a Metamodern Future

Brave But Not Entirely New World:
Six Images of a Metamodern Future

Anticipating what is to come with help from Jason Josephson-Storm

What to Expect in a Metamodern Future

The Persistence of Enchantment: Magic, spirituality, spirits, and religious experience will not disappear but will continue to assume new forms within modern life.
Increasingly Fluid Social Realities: Religions, cultures, identities, and institutions will continue to evolve as changing patterns of relationship, activity, and interpretation.
A Relativization of Genealogical Analyses: Genealogy will itself be subjected to historical and critical examination, revealing its assumptions, limitations, and entanglements with racism and colonialism.
Recognition of More-than-Human Meaning: Animals, plants, cells, bodies, and ecosystems will increasingly be recognized as participants in processes of signification and communication.
The Emergence of New Spirits: Modernization will continue to transform older spirits and generate new ones, with technologies increasingly functioning as spirit-like presences endowed with agency, personality, knowledge, and power.
The Rise of Techno-Animism: As people interact with artificial intelligence, robots, and other responsive technologies, they will increasingly experience machines as animated presences—entities with apparent personalities, intentions, and powers—and a new technological animism will become part of everyday life.

My aim on this page is to suggest six images of a metamodern future by thinking with one of the leading metamodern thinkers, Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm. (See below.) The six image are offered above. I do not mean to suggest that they are desirable or undesirable, just that they are plausible, given the wisdom of Josephson-Storm's analyses.

Metamodernism has several different and sometimes conflicting meanings. I use the term here in its simplest sense to mean post-postmodern: an emerging outlook that incorporates important postmodern insights while moving beyond postmodernism’s characteristic skepticism, deconstruction, and suspicion of comprehensive visions. Other thinkers use metamodern more specifically to name a particular cultural sensibility, philosophical system, developmental stage, or oscillation between modern confidence and postmodern irony. These richer meanings deserve consideration, but they are not presupposed here.

If you listen to interviews with Josephson-Storm or read his books, or even accounts of them, you will encounter six myths—six false or misleading narratives—that shape how many people understand modernity, society, knowledge, and the more-than-human world. Josephson-Storm invites us not merely to reject these narratives but also to understand how they arose, why they remain persuasive, and what becomes visible when we move beyond them. Below are six myths to leave behind, followed by six proposals about what we might expect in the foreseeable future. The page concludes with an introduction to Josephson-Storm for readers unfamiliar with his work.

Six Myths

The Myth of Disenchantment: Received wisdom has it that modernity steadily replaced magic, spirits, and religious experience with a purely rational and mechanistic worldview. In fact, modernity has remained deeply entangled with magic, spirituality, and religious experience.
The Myth of Fixed Social Realities: Received wisdom has it that religions, cultures, identities, and institutions are fixed substances with enduring essences. In fact, they are evolving patterns of relationship, activity, and interpretation.
The Myth of Genealogy: Received wisdom has it that genealogy is a timeless and universally liberating method of critique. In fact, genealogy is itself a historically conditioned practice, shaped partly by colonialism, racism, and particular intellectual traditions.
The Myth of Exclusively Human Meaning: Received wisdom has it that meaning-making belongs to human beings alone. In fact, animals, plants, cells, bodies, and ecosystems also generate, transmit, and respond to signs.
The Myth of Vanishing Spirits: Received wisdom has it that modernization causes traditional spirits and other invisible beings simply to disappear. In fact, some disappeared, while others were transformed, globalized, or recast within the broader category of “spirits”; moreover, new forms of technology can themselves function as spirits, becoming agents to which people attribute presence, personality, knowledge, and power.
The Myth of Declining Animism: Received wisdom has it that primitive animism gradually gives way to modern disenchantment. In fact, modernization has generated new forms of animism, producing more—not less—attribution of agency and vitality to the world.

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an American scholar, philosopher, social scientist, and author. He is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and Chair of Science and Technology Studies at Williams College, where he is also affiliated with Asian Studies and Comparative Literature. His scholarship ranges across Japanese religions, European intellectual history, the history and theory of religion, disenchantment, and the philosophy of the human sciences.

He is the author of four books: The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), and The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History (2026).

His works in progress include Transcendent Machines: Religion and the Philosophy of Technology, under contract with Cambridge University Press, which explores the intrinsic entanglement of religion and technology, and Glimmering Gods of the Electric Age, which takes the Japanese deification of Thomas Edison as a point of departure for examining how electricity, esoteric currents, and techno-animism helped shape the modern transnational categories of “religion” and “science.”

Jason Josephson Storm’s Webpage at Williams College

Glimmering Gods of the Electric Age

Harvard Divinity School, Center for the Study of World Religions

Glimmering Gods of the Electric Age is a short, public-facing essay rather than a book. It was published by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School as part of its “Research Reflections” series, which introduces the work of its scholars to a general audience. Below, I offer an excerpt:

"The Japanese government officially recognized Denshinkyō or The Religion of the Electric Gods on June 1, 1949. Founded by an Osaka-based electric appliance dealer, this new faith worshipped The Great God of Heaven-Earth-and-Electricity, electricity deified. It also revered lesser entities including a defied Thomas Edison, who, in a play on the phonetics of his name, was revered as “the August Glimmering Magnetic Divine Lord” (Eijison no Mikoto).

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"Electric deities were never limited to Japan. Closer to Harvard, John Murray Spear, a Boston-born radical abolitionist and Universalist turned Spiritualist, claimed he was contacted by spirits known as Electrizers—including the ghost of Ben Franklin. These spirits directed Spear to build a combination electric messiah and perpetual motion machine called the New Motive Power. It was reportedly destroyed by hostile spiritualists. Yet a number of mainstream European and American scientists and philosophers also thought electricity was sacred, a divine link between life and death, material and spiritual worlds. Mary Shelley’s’ Frankenstein was considered plausible by many of her science-minded peers. Even Thomas Edison, unaware of his coming afterlife as a Japanese electrical god, dabbled with a ghost machine, postulating that technology could verify the survival of personality after death.

In conclusion, disenchantment is a myth. Ghosts were globalized. Séance and science were entwined, often through electricity. An American inventor was transformed into a Japanese deity. Modernization not only preserved beliefs in some ancient spirits and invisible forces but also gave rise to new ones. Some traditions did vanish, but other local entities were recast into the global category of “spirits.” Far from dispelling popular beliefs in the supernatural, technological change merely transformed beliefs through new media and metaphors, like the Spiritual Telegraph. Ultimately, instead of primitive animism giving way to modern disenchantment, modernization produced more, not less, animism."

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory

Winner of the 2022 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence (Constructive-Reflexive Studies). For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism.

Metamodernism works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society's ever-changing nature—what he calls a "Process Social Ontology"—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or "social kinds." Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.

Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.

Interview with the Author

The Myth of Disenchantment

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines' founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.

By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Interview with the Author (I)

Interview with the Author (II)

The Genealogy of Genealogy

A daring reassessment of the critical method that reshaped the humanities and an invitation to imagine new ways of doing history.

The genealogical method—a mode of historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is in fact contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—has become the dominant paradigm of humanistic inquiry.

In The Genealogy of Genealogy, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm turns this influential practice back on itself, tracing its unlikely rise through Nietzsche and Foucault and uncovering its suppressed ties to eugenics and racism. He rethinks the very stakes of critical history and proposes new tools for thinking about historical continuity, change, and difference.

Provocative and timely, The Genealogy of Genealogy offers both a diagnosis and a vision, challenging scholars across the humanities and social sciences to rethink how we write history and whether our most trusted methods are fit for the futures we seek to build.

The Invention of Religion in Japan

Winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion: 2013 Distinguished Book AwardThroughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call "religion." There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea.

In this book, Jason Ānanda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson's account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity.

In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of "superstitions"--and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.

Click here for Youtube interview with Author: