Metamodernism Quotes

“Flourishing is a process, not a product. Happiness is impossible to attain as a fixed state. Indeed, it has been argued that flourishing is incompatible with stasis or even being only one thing.89 Flourishing is rather the ability to change or to become something else.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory

“Sociology suffers from a certain problem: any social knowledge it produces gets fed back into the system, which is thereby changed. This means that sociology is always describing the social field the way it was before sociology described it.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory

“The universe—or at least the sentient constituents of it—comes to know itself through hermeneutic mediation. Put more personally, we come to know—and even become—ourselves through interacting with the world. You would not be able
to recognize your own face if you had never seen it mirrored in a reflective surface or photographed.... Moreover, in very basic ways, we are permeable, such that with every breath and every meal we are constantly exchanging matter with our surroundings. All of this should begin to put pressure on the commonsense bifurcation between mental inside and physical outside.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory

“for theories in the human sciences to move beyond weak inductive inference to more robust abductive explanation we need to be able to specify the common properties of the entity we are talking about and the causal, anchoring processes that have produced those properties. We need to not just identify patterns, but explain why they hold. Yet we have historically been missing the right account of the basic structuring entities addressed by our scholarship.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory

“We need the right admixture of self-assurance and doubt.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory