THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast
Jason Anânda Josephson Storm on Critique & Listening
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Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm [https://religion.williams.edu/faculty/jason-josephson/] is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College, and the author of “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55623551-metamodernism].” Most recently, he debated Timotheus Vermeulen and Hilary Lawson live at IAI’s “The Metamodernist Turn [https://iai.tv/live/iai-live-august-the-metamodernist-turn],” pressing the same distinction he draws here between his own project and Vermeulen’s. His next book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History, is out from University of Chicago Press in April. This is the third of three interviews. The first is “Myth & Metamodernism [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/p/jason-ananda-josephson-storm-on-myth].” The second is “Revolution & Happiness [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/p/jason-ananda-josephson-storm-on-revolution].” A heads up to regular listeners & readers. My conversations with Jason are unlike others, in that it I am really punching above my weight. I am really attracted to his thinking around metamodernism and sincerely believe it holds real promise for informing how we move forward. I believe in the diagnosis that it makes, and am inspired by the recommendation it offers to build, with full awareness of the critique. This is pre-interview caveat that, even as I don’t always grasp what is being discussed, I am tuned in. I ask that you join me in stretching towards what Jason is showing us. Where the term ‘metamodernism’ comes from I keep fixating on metamodernism. I don’t have a structure for this conversation — full confession. But maybe we start with you giving us a map. What is it you’re doing with the term, and where does it sit relative to everyone else using it? Meta just means the same thing as post, if we’re precise about etymology — beyond. Though it also has a secondary sense post lacks: an over-and-above. People have been gluing “meta” onto isms since the seventies, but in a meaningful way the term metamodernism emerges in two places. First there’s the cultural studies version — Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s work on structures of feeling, a shift in the zeitgeist, an oscillation between modernist and postmodernist projects. I think that stuff is great. It’s not what I do. I’m not interested in analyzing the current paradigm so much as trying to trigger a paradigm shift — not sorting art into modern, postmodern, metamodern. I actually get my use of the term from a different lineage: the Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji. He describes the metamodern artist as someone who deploys, positions, fractures, and reforms both the modern and the postmodern. He’s an artist himself, owning that term for his own project. That’s closer to my version. When I wrote what became Metamodernism and the Future of Theory, it was originally titled Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory After Postmodernism. People wanted me not just to critique postmodernism but to name a movement — and the alternative on the table was “post-postmodernism,” which makes you want to throw up. That’s when I remembered Okediji. Parallel to that, there’s a Scandinavian duo — a sociologist and a political theorist writing under the name Hanzi Freinacht — who wrote The Listening Society. Less interested in characterizing or sorting art than in producing political change under the same term. I like some of their project and not other parts — there’s a developmentalism in it you have to be careful with. So when I started using “metamodern,” I found myself in company with other people also trying to work past postmodernism, in art or philosophy or elsewhere. I love my fellow metamodernistas, but to be clear, mine isn’t an oscillationist account. If I have one criticism of Vermeulen — who seems like a cool dude — it’s that oscillation is hard to falsify and conceptually weak. What’s valuable in that cultural-studies work is characterizing new patterns in cultural production and a change in tone. That’s just not what I’m doing. The postmodernism I’m reacting to was forged as a specific academic model — often as a polemical other, a bricolage of French, American, and German theorists whose inconsistencies got smoothed over into an idea of what humanities scholarship should look like. That model was good at chipping away received wisdom, but it was delivering diminishing returns. For those of us trying to move intellectual life forward, it had stopped helping. It was mostly kneecapping us. I want to be clear my reaction isn’t someone externally mocking postmodernism. I marinated in it. I went to Derrida’s lectures. I studied under Rorty at Stanford when he was emeritus. I read the work, did the graduate seminars on Heidegger and French social thought. That’s the older generation of theory — Derrida was Elvis-generation, there’s a reason he rocked a pompadour his whole life. It’s time to figure out what was good, consolidate the gains, and shed what’s no longer working. I’ve been thinking about people who are part of something and then step outside it — Paul Kingsnorth, the eco-activist turned religious convert; Chuck Marohn, the traffic engineer who renounced his own field’s methodology and started Strong Towns. Do you identify with that as a transition you made? What was it like? Yeah, I identify with that. I first encountered postmodernism — I can be specific — on a drive from Ohio to college in Massachusetts. My parents, both philosophers, had a set of “great ideas” books on tape, and one unit near the end was on postmodern philosophers: Derrida, maybe Lyotard. It seemed exciting and dangerous. I was a punk rocker and a goth — it read as rebellion against the status quo, politically emancipatory. I marinated in it from undergrad through grad school. What turned me away was that it wasn’t a good set of tools. It was leading toward conclusions that made us less informed, less active — the payoff wasn’t there. We started by questioning authority, ended by questioning truth, and authority was still standing when we were done. I had a sense we were learning bad translations from the French as though they described reality — like the medievals who, when they wanted to know how many teeth a horse had, looked it up in Aristotle instead of counting. When people had a question about language, instead of asking what linguists were currently saying, they’d cite Derrida. That’s not to say Derrida had nothing to offer — but the anti-canon movement had just installed a new canon of critical thinkers in place of the old one. I’ve always been someone who naively asks: how did we get here, why do we think this? Over time I became disaffected, while still holding onto what was genuinely useful. And my teachers were part of that movement — this was partly just growing up, recognizing where your teachers and ancestors made mistakes even as you recognize your debt to them. What frustrated me most was hearing peers act as if there’s no “after” certain thinkers — as if philosophy stopped with Heidegger. And practically: when I started my own scholarship, I had real questions — about knowledge, value, translation. I had a stack of nineteenth-century Japanese sources and needed to figure out which to use for my thesis. Being told translation is impossible, in an environment where I was producing a translation, was the opposite of helpful. Or on value — there was a confusion between being neutral and being critical. You could call out racism, which matters, but you couldn’t stand up for a better political order without “violating” cultural relativism. That paradox bothered me more and more. We needed emancipatory theories, not just critical ones, and they were missing. Absolute disruption [This section is dense — Storm is thinking through Hegel out loud. Here’s the short version of where it’s headed: some thinkers argue language traps us so completely that translation and stable meaning are impossible. Storm disagrees. His answer is that language shapes how we see the world, but doesn’t cut us off from it — we just need a world stable enough that people can roughly agree on what they’re pointing at. Everything below is him building the case for that, using Hegel as the springboard.] The title Tell me about the title Absolute Disruption. Where did it come from? From two places. First, a line from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit I used to have memorized — something like: spirit obtains its truth only in its absolute disruption, it finds itself. Hegel was working on the problem of skepticism, of essentializing opposites — he describes skepticism elsewhere as waiting around to hurl anything into the abyss. You can see that in the postmodern moment: deconstruction, anti-essentialism, all different forms of negation. Hegel, as the master thinker of the dialectic, seemed like a clue to the other side of it. The spoiler: his dialectic isn’t thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It’s abstraction, negation, and negation of the negation — that last move is the fulcrum. Absolute Disruption was a signal toward that moment: we need to negate the negation. It was also a gesture at the idea that catastrophe creates the opportunity for new configurations of knowledge. I didn’t have complexity theory in hand yet, but one of its insights is the phase transition — water tips over into boiling, a seed crystal spreads through and the whole thing freezes. Those transitions come at moments of instability. I felt our intellectual world was at a crisis point — a moment of both danger and opportunity. I’m not an accelerationist who wants more crises. But crisis can open a phase transition. Negating the negation Walk me through negating the negation. What’s that move? In his Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel describes three sides of thought. First, you apprehend the specific differences of existing objects and produce a limited abstraction — a generalization, lifting away from the concrete. That process of abstracting hits limits, which challenge the project itself and lead to negating the initial abstraction — a critical stage where things encounter their opposites. Then there’s a third stage: the negation of the negation, the speculative stage, where you get a reconciliation of opposites — what he calls determinate negation, grasping something by determining its boundaries. Here’s where I depart from standard Hegel scholarship: I read this as a response to Kant’s reading of Hume. Hume’s skeptical challenge to causation says, roughly, that because causation can’t be demonstrated, we can’t really know anything about the world. Kant’s negation of the negation is his transcendental categories. He doesn’t deny Hume’s conclusion — he makes it the precondition of his own philosophy: any finite being necessarily experiences the world already structured by space, time, and causation. The cost is that we can never know the thing-in-itself, the Ding an sich. But that’s a limit on confidence, not a collapse into “we can’t know anything.” So the challenge I set for myself in Absolute Disruption was to take postmodernism’s skeptical positions in their clearest form. Take the “prison house of language” — Heidegger’s hermeneutics of being, or Fredric Jameson’s clean statement of it: we think in language, therefore we’re trapped in it. Taken to Saussure’s maximal extension, language only relates to other language, never to the world — so translation is impossible, meaning never stabilizes. Derrida can be read as a reductio of this: there is no outside-the-text. You could respond by ignoring it — a broadly modernist move that just insists the world is the world, and philosophers like Putnam or Kripke tried to make that respectable by arguing language designates natural kinds. That’s a weak view — it generates real paradoxes (look up the Superman/Clark Kent paradox if you want). Hylosemiotics: the payoff What I try to do instead is think seriously about how language could have evolved in the first place. This becomes the longest chapter in the book, on hylosemiotics. The key insight worth granting is that language and perception are connected — linguistic categories do shape perception. But you can show, first, that the skeptical view is self-contradictory: Derrida argues translation is impossible by translating a line of Joyce and telling us why it can’t be done in French — and we read that argument in English. And second, if you don’t presume language and the world are separate — if language always occurs in a world — you don’t need robust natural-kind categories. All you need is a world stable enough to have “clumps” we can roughly coordinate reference to: a building, a mountain, a tree. Language coordinates reference sloppily, not with rigid designation. My spouse and I agree on focal blue but disagree at the edges — languages carve up the color spectrum differently, speakers of the same language disagree on whether a napkin is a piece of clothing, or whether a hot dog is a sandwich. So we’re always interpreting the world. Linguistic categories shape that interpretation without fully constraining it — we never fully encounter the world as it is, but we’re not imprisoned in language either. There’s a naturalized semiotics behind this too: evidence from linguistics and evolutionary biology, animal and plant perception and communication — our tongues and hands may be wired together in the brain because our primate ancestors gestured as communication. Even if that particular biological detail turns out wrong, there are other ways to ground how communication and perception evolved together. That whole edifice — how translation is possible, how meaning shapes thought without imprisoning it — is my negation of the negation, in a way I think Hegel would recognize. Though to be clear, he’s not a meat grinder you feed a problem into and get an answer out. He’s a clue to where to look. The proof is in the payoff: I can give an account of how language evolved, locate humans within it, do sign perception properly. I’ve had responses from animal-communication researchers, and I have a piece under review now building toward more-than-human ethnography — looking at multi-species environments through this lens. The term hylosemiotics — I coined it with my brother, who does animal studies. Hyle, matter or forest in Greek, plus semiotics, signs. It names the error at the root of the skeptical philosophy of language: a hyper-specialization that bifurcated language from the world in the first place. You can’t hear if your eardrums aren’t vibrating, can’t read without light bouncing off something. We exist in a world. That doesn’t settle which cosmology is true — Nahuatl cosmology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, scientific materialism could all be candidates. My theory just needs a world with language speakers in it, stable enough that trees don’t randomly turn into sheep. The payoff has to stand on its own, separate from the ladder that got me there. That’s what I mean by a no-b******t philosophy that doesn’t enshrine canonical figures. I love the anti-canonicity of early postmodernism — we don’t need an enshrined canon. We take inspiration from people without owing them justification. Hegel is about discovery for me, not justification — he was wrong about Asia, Eurocentric, thought the Prussian state was cooler than it was, wrong about the number of planets. He was a dude in a particular period. Great to be inspired by, not an authority to cite as proof. Critique isn’t the end point I took a literary criticism class in the nineties and remember the real feeling of power in applying deconstructive tactics. What drew me to your work is that it escapes that trap and is constructive. Last time we talked about revolutionary happiness, human flourishing — you’re clear you don’t want to just criticize, you want to build. Is that right? It’s a two-step process. We criticize first — we just don’t end there. Some people ask if I’m anti-critique because I spend so much time criticizing the criticizers. I’m against automatic criticism. I want critique to be more fine-grained. It’s important to call out injustice and conceptual hubris — critique is valuable. The problem is when it’s the only move, when it never reflects on its own limits. That’s the swamp postmodernism led us into. Even in the metamodernism book, I open a section with what I call a deconstructive dojo — teaching people to do the critical moves first, but as a starting point, not an endpoint. I think this maps onto how the culture wars get handled: a lot of my fellow lefties terminate in critique; another camp wants to shut down all critique, insisting you can’t criticize the country or its politics. Both are dead ends. We have to be able to say: the founding fathers built terrible institutions, failed on slavery, were sexist — we grant that, we don’t deny it — and also held up ideals worth recuperating even though they themselves couldn’t live up to them. Holding that tension is part of growing up. That language of holding the tension is what I find attractive, and it feels like something we’ve lost — we’re stuck in binary mode. Is there a metamodern way of constructing, once the critique is done? It’s something I’m calling for more than something I’ve fully identified, though I’ve seen people working toward it. We shouldn’t assume one cookie-cutter solution works across all problems. What I’m advocating is an orientation: critique, identify the problems, critique the critique, then figure out what to hold and what to build. I’ve had encouraging responses from people doing movement work — helping people out of their presumptive categories of left or right, recognizing a movement’s problems without getting defensive, and asking what would make it stronger from there. Hanzi Freinacht identified something real here: the importance of listening. There’s a tendency — especially from people in my position, in the ivory tower — to arrive with solutions and impose them without listening to what people are actually looking for. You can see this in how the consultancy class has misguided left politics in recent cycles. One thing Mamdani seems to have gotten right: he did a real tour of listening to different groups in New York, figuring out the actual problems people were encountering rather than telling them what their problems should be. That does two things — it identifies where coalitions and resources should go, and it lets people feel heard, in a society where a lot of people feel ignored and out of control of their own communities. AI: neither boomer nor doomer I sent you some links on AI. It’s happening to all of us whether we like it or not, and maybe it’s a canvas for talking about what it means to be metamodern. How do you think about AI through your work? What AI actually is We have to recognize AI is both profoundly transformative and overhyped. What we’re calling AI — generative pre-trained transformers, large language models — I don’t want to knock the amount of work and potential in them, but they are not general intelligences. There’s confusion in public discourse because the people pushing AI keep promising a series of ever-greater intelligence leaps. That’s misleading, partly because scaling produces diminishing returns. There was a huge leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3.5, but they ate an internet’s worth of data to get there, and there isn’t another internet’s worth waiting. What these models do is transform language into a mathematical vector space — interesting for producing the geometry of certain concepts, but not an innovator. A lot of the discourse presumes a discredited model of intelligence as a linear scale, like IQ. Sociologists of intelligence, even ones who believe in the IQ scale, note that the people who make the biggest innovations don’t have the highest IQs. Intelligence is richly contextual. And there’s a background assumption from Turing that intelligence reduces to fooling a human linguistically — these models are great linguistic agents, great chatbots, a real technological leap, but that’s not general intelligence. I went back and reread a piece by the French AI researcher François Chollet, “The Implausibility of Intelligence Explosion,” which makes the same point. AI has real uses — it’s good at pattern recognition. I saw a phrase somewhere I liked: the best use of AI is going to be boring. Automating the boring stuff — sorting supply chains, finding patterns in thick data sets. It’s not going to produce the transformations people expect. It’s going to reorganize labor, and it’s already eroding trust and notions of authorship in ways that are hard on artists. It has a real environmental cost, and it doesn’t have a profitability model — if these companies start running ads, no one will want to use it, and it’ll enshittify faster than other platforms. It doesn’t scale the way people think — you need exponentially more data for incremental gains, which is why Elon Musk’s self-driving timeline keeps slipping. Where it’s genuinely useful is streamlining existing processes — I use it to write boring bureaucratic reports, turning a meeting transcript into something we can put in a report, where the prose quality doesn’t matter. The ironies of automation There’s a classic piece from the eighties, Lisanne Bainbridge’s “Ironies of Automation” — foundational in industrial design and catastrophe theory. The paradox: automation is good at routine tasks, but humans are still needed when things go wrong. As automation takes over the routine, the human’s skill at that routine atrophies — so when the automation fails, it fails suddenly, in ways the human is no longer prepared for. That’s the problem with a certain kind of self-driving car — my dad loves his Tesla’s self-driving feature, but it presumes he stays hyper-alert for edge cases. I’d rather automation handle it the other way: I do the routine task, and automation intervenes when I make a mistake I don’t catch — the dog running into the road. The same is true teaching undergrads, and I wish more of my colleagues internalized it. Large language models are great at summarizing readings and generating plausible prose — the boring, low-stakes stuff. What’s left to humans is knowing when an argument is wrong, spotting a bad frame, making a judgment call. Those are exactly the skills that atrophy when students lean on the models — and exactly what they’ll need when they hit real problems. When we automate, we atrophy. The more the machine thinks for you, the less you can think when it fails. That echoes the phase transition you described earlier — things happening slowly, then all at once. It sounds like the same progression, applied to our relationship with automation: we keep surrendering activities, assuming we could rescue things if they failed, and then things collapse in front of our atrophied ability to respond. Exactly. Which is why, in higher ed, students need training in the low-stakes basics — precisely because that training prepares them for the high-stakes ruptures. If they have that foundation, they can use AI responsibly later, as long as they know that overusing it accelerates the atrophy. I’m not anti-AI, and I’m not a booster either. There are genuinely new things opening up because of it. But anyone who thinks large language models will replace basic education hasn’t internalized Bainbridge’s point. Even responsible adult users have to guard against their own skills eroding. The environmental impact is a separate, serious conversation. When I raise it with people in the field, they say they know, and the plan is to scale toward more efficient models — I have doubts about whether that’s actually happening, versus functioning as cover for an enormous amount of electrical and water-cooling resources going into things being wedged into places they don’t belong. My college auto-installed Copilot on every student’s Microsoft Word. I don’t want that — we want to be building some barriers, not removing them. People will keep using it. That’s fine, as long as they’ve trained themselves to spot when it’s about to go wrong. Getting past boomer vs. doomer So — is there a way out of the binary? It feels like we’re stuck between accelerationists and doomers, boomers and doomers, and metamodernism might be an escape hatch, a framework for moving past that. True, or am I overreaching? I’d hope so. The concrete stakes are worth thinking through, but as an abstract program: integrate the positive potential the boomers have identified without denying the doomers’ critiques, and figure out an equitable system on the other side. That’s not going to be every AI platform — it’ll have to be a particular, environmentally responsible AI that absorbs some of those critiques. What that looks like around authorship, I don’t know yet — that’s one I’m not sure how we navigate. On the prose side: AI produces derivative prose that all sounds like the same voice, and unfortunately a lot of people seem to want exactly that — maybe it helps people who aren’t confident public speakers or writers find a voice. There’s a real upside there. But I’m sick of the “it’s not X, it’s Y” formulation showing up everywhere, and the AI-generated images that almost look like real people but the lighting’s a hair too uniform. There are real trust questions, and I think we’re going to want watermarking, at least for generated images. There’s concrete policy an AI platform could adopt that would address the doomers’ real concerns and unlock what the boomers have rightly identified — without indulging the utopian fantasy that scaling alone produces superintelligence that solves everything. That fantasy rests on treating Moore’s Law for processor power as if it applied directly to the human mind, which runs against a huge amount of evidence. Large language models are also good at handling complexity in another sense — recognizing that vocabulary is context-rich, that things mean different things in different contexts, and at producing iterative results. Other forms of AI are good at this too — my father did research in evolutionary algorithms, where you launch variations through a design space, keep the ones that succeed, and iterate. That’s brought us real gains — protein folding, pattern identification in shipping — and will keep bringing them. It’s not going to mean nobody works. We’ll lose some jobs, not nearly as many as people fear, but the structure of the jobs we keep will change. What’s the book coming out? With University of Chicago Press, who’s published my last three: The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History. “Genealogy” is a weird term — it’s our word for critical history in parts of the academy, and in ordinary language it means descent or ancestry. The book is a critical history of critical history: why we love criticizing the past, what the blind spots are in how we’ve done it. It blends intellectual history with philosophical analysis, offers fresh readings of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault against the familiar narratives about their relationship to critique, and charts the history of history departments and philosophy as academic disciplines — including genealogy’s own uncomfortable entanglement with eugenics and power. A method built to criticize authority carrying its own unexamined legacies. It’s also a metamodern book. It closes with a call for a new metamodern historiography — new ways of doing history that don’t deny the troubled parts of the past but also look for the occluded histories, the buried germs of positive projects worth recovering and carrying forward. An alternative historiography, encouraging new methods for writing history. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
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