​Embracing the Whole Mess
Metamodernism and Process Theology

See Also: ​An Aesthetics of Oscillation: Whitehead, Felt Experience, and Metamodern Sensibilities 

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Metamodern Aesthetics

“Sufjan Stevens’ metamodern creative approach is more than just a braiding of modernist and postmodern impulses—it’s almost a braiding of braids. I’m not sure my metaphor works perfectly enough to say which elements wrap specifically together in pairs, so I’ll just list the whole mess: butterfly wings, grief, banjos, orchestras, songs about Polish holidays as celebrated in Illinois, honest contemplation of Christian themes, a secular fanbase, sexual ambiguity and revelation, a wackily ambitious fifty-state album project that was never intended to be completed, tender vocals, electronic experimentalism, bombast, and preciousness. Metamodern.”

​—Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism! Understanding Today’s Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity, p. 146, Kindle edition

Venturing Along the Borders of Chaos

If there is to be progress beyond limited ideals, the course of history by way of escape must venture along the borders of chaos in its substitution of higher for lower types of order...The right chaos, and the right vagueness, are jointly required for any effective harmony. 
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- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: A Philosophy of Organism

Contrasts of Contrasts

Here ‘complexity’ means the realization of contrasts, of contrasts of contrasts, and so on; and ‘balance’ means the absence of at­tenuations due to the elimination of contrasts which some elements in the pattern would introduce and other elements inhibit.

- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: A Philosophy of Organism

The Production of Novel Togetherness

Thus the ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion em­bodied in the term ‘concrescence.’ These ultimate notions of ‘production of novelty’ and of ‘concrete togetherness’ are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence.

Embracing the Whole Mess
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Greg Dember’s description of Sufjan Stevens’ creative approach to music and life calls to mind an idea essential to Whitehead’s aesthetics: harmony consists in braiding together objects of individual and social experience—and the emotions associated with them—into wholes that become “contrasts of contrasts.”

More precisely, they are felt contrasts: contrasts that are prehensively enjoyed and that possess a kind of beauty precisely because of their differences—and, yes, their messiness.

Indeed, such contrasts carry within them elements of chaos. As Whitehead writes, all creativity works at the borders of chaos. All harmony needs "the right chaos" and "the right vagueness."

Dember’s description also reminds us that creativity can involve the creation of wider contrasts: contrasts that include and coordinate more diverse elements than do simple or narrow contrasts. For Whitehead, such width is one measure of intensified beauty. In many instances, the wider the contrasts, the better.

The braiding is an act of concrescence, and concrescence is, in Whitehead’s words, “the production of novel togetherness”: banjos with butterflies, bombast with preciousness, sexual ambiguity with Polish holidays, secularity with Christ.

Something like this is happening anywhere and everywhere in the universe. All actual entities in the universe have interiority of some type: all are gathering the many of their worlds into the oneness of their experience through feeling, and then adding something to the universe throuh their creative responses. The many become one and are increased by one.

There is, for Whitehead, a theological dimension of this.  The living whole of the universe, the divine concrescence, is an ongoing act of braiding the happenings of the universe into a single, messy whole which is itself evolving through time. Whitehead speaks of the living whole as "the consequent nature of God."  It is the universe itself as a a soul whose very body is the universe, the whole mess.

There is much more to a metamodern aesthetic than contrasts and braiding, chaos and braiding. Much more than messiness. But not less. 

There is an existential value for all of us in recognizing the positive importance of creative messiness. This recognition helps us avoid the futile demand that our lives be perfectly ordered, consistent, and complete. It helps us embrace the ambiguities, contrasts, surprises, and unfinished possibilities through which new forms of beauty and meaning can emerge.

Perhaps, at a deeper level, recognizing messiness enables us to reach out in love—to other people in their complexity and imperfection, and to ourselves in ours. Love does not require that the messiness be resolved before relationship can begin. It meets others amid the tangles, contradictions, and unfinished possibilities of life and says: You belong here, too.

That reaching out is metamodernism, too. Metamodernism is a name for what comes after—but also includes—modernism and postmodernism. It includes aspects of both: modernism’s hope, sincerity, and desire to build, along with postmodernism’s irony, skepticism, and readiness to deconstruct. It often oscillates between the two while adding something new through the oscillation itself. In Whitehead’s words, “The many become one, and are increased by one.”

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As I understand it, metamodernism is like a cultural river with four currents: an aesthetic sensibility, an emerging worldview, a social project, and an academic project. That is what I propose in "An Aesthetics of Oscillation: Notes on Metamodernism and Process Philosophy."

I am drawn to all four currents, but especially to metamodernism as an aesthetic sensibility, represented, among others, by Greg Dember, with its emphasis on felt experience in the here and now. There is a first-person, phenomenological quality to Dember's approach: a desire to be honest about lived experience, even in its messiness, and also, which I appreciate, a focus on popular culture, music much included. 

But there is, to my mind, also an ethics to metamodernism. And this ethic includes the messy. Not simply a recognition that life is messy, but also a willingness to enter the mess with empathy, vulnerability, and hope—seeking connection without pretending that all differences have been or even need be resolved.

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​Dember finds the spirit of metamodernism in the music of Sufjan Stevens. I do, too. I am drawn to his embrace of the manyness, and also to his sense that, amid the manyness there is a spirit of silence, of openness, of love, that embraces the whole of it. See Sufjan Stevens: Spirit of My Silence. 

Sufjan Stevens knows that there is a spirit of silence that permeates the universe and that is within us, too. It is our own inner silence as we listen to, and hear, the messiness of the world. It has a solitariness to it what Whitehead recognized as well: "Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. Collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches, rituals, bibles, codes of behaviour, are the trappings of religion, its passing forms."

Strangely, ironically, or perhaps obviously, this silence, too, is metamodernism

- Jay McDaniel. 9/17/2026