Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm is primarily a book for scholars—philosophers, sociologists, ethologists, biologists, linguists, and many others. It is especially suited to readers acquainted with discussions of modernism and postmodernism over the past century of Western academic life. Just as importantly, it addresses the characteristic moods associated with these movements, especially the postmodern mood: its emphasis on social construction and language, its doubts about the mind-independent objectivity of things, its sense that reality is—or has always been—fragmented, and its preference for irony over sincerity.
The book is far too complex and beautiful to summarize in any simple way. The publisher’s description, offered below, provides a helpful general overview. It is also extraordinarily well documented: Josephson-Storm draws on a vast range of scholarly sources from many different fields. Here I focus on three especially helpful ideas developed in the book: process social ontology, metarealism, and hylosemiotics.
Among the book’s most important contributions is what Josephson-Storm calls a process social ontology. He places himself within the broad tradition of process philosophy and recognizes a growing interest in Whitehead within some academic circles, even though he is not as drawn to Whitehead specifically as some other process thinkers are. He writes:
The book is far too complex and beautiful to summarize in any simple way. The publisher’s description, offered below, provides a helpful general overview. It is also extraordinarily well documented: Josephson-Storm draws on a vast range of scholarly sources from many different fields. Here I focus on three especially helpful ideas developed in the book: process social ontology, metarealism, and hylosemiotics.
Among the book’s most important contributions is what Josephson-Storm calls a process social ontology. He places himself within the broad tradition of process philosophy and recognizes a growing interest in Whitehead within some academic circles, even though he is not as drawn to Whitehead specifically as some other process thinkers are. He writes:
For those unfamiliar with “process metaphysics” or “process ontology,” it is primarily identified with Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of becoming. But he was not alone in his thinking; a number of philosophers—a handful in the European tradition and many more globally (such as classical Chinese, Indian, and Nahua philosophers)—have argued for the ontological primacy of process over substance, of becoming over being. Process theorists generally reject the notion that everlasting substances are the most basic constituents of existence and argue instead that what appear to be enduring entities are really temporary stabilities in unfolding processes. They also often reject the grounding assumption of much of analytical philosophy: that what is real is what is pure, independent, or unadulterated. Process thinkers tend instead to describe existence in terms of dynamics, change, transformation, impermanence, creation, destruction, entanglement, emergence, interdependence, and interrelation.
Later, he adds:
There has already been a small turn toward Whitehead in some theory circles. While I’m not as enamored with Whitehead specifically, I am sympathetic to all types of processual thinking.
It is in this broader processual spirit that Josephson-Storm develops his process social ontology. Whereas classical ontology often asks about being or existence as such, process social ontology asks how the fundamental entities and categories of social life come into being, acquire temporary stability, undergo transformation, and disappear. Social realities are not fixed things possessing timeless essences. They are dynamic formations produced, sustained, and altered through identifiable processes.
With regard to ontology more broadly, Josephson-Storm proposes what he calls metarealism, which is reducible to neither materialism nor idealism. Metarealism recognizes that reality comes in different modes. Physical objects, events, social institutions, fictional characters, mathematical entities, absences, and signs may all be real, but they are not real—or existent—in the same way. The pertinent question is therefore not simply whether something is real, but in what sense it is real, in contrast to what, and through what mode it exists.
In this context, Josephson-Storm draws a helpful distinction between reality and existence, arguing that more things are real than exist. Something may be real in a particular sense without existing as a present physical object. Sherlock Holmes, for example, is a real fictional character, although he does not exist as a flesh-and-blood person. Likewise, an object that once existed but has been destroyed may remain real as a historical object even though it no longer exists materially. Reality is therefore broader than existence, and both reality and existence can occur in different modes. Metarealism makes room for this plurality without reducing everything either to matter or to mind.
A third key idea is hylosemiotics, Josephson-Storm’s expansion of semiotics beyond human language and human-to-human communication. Semiosis—the perception and interpretation of signs—occurs wherever sentient beings perceive and respond to signs. Sentience, on this account, need not mean humanlike consciousness. It refers more broadly to a capacity for responsiveness and interpretation, present in differing forms and degrees among animals, plants, bacteria, fungi, and perhaps even certain information-processing machines. Meaning-making thus belongs not only to human culture but to a much wider world of living—and perhaps technological—activity.
Taken together, these three ideas offer a vision of reality as processual, plural, and semiotic. Social realities arise through changing processes; different kinds of things are real and exist in different ways; and sentient beings participate in a world alive with signs.
