Pre-modernism, modernism, postmodernism and metamodernism
In: 13
These are all hard to pin down. They all refer to broad styles/periods of thought and discourse, particularly in the arts and humanities. They tend to take on different shades depending on which area of academia or society you’re talking about. And different people take different views on how these periods should be divided up and labelled.
Modernism usually includes ideas that were popular during roughly the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and postmodernism usually includes ideas that were popular in roughly the latter half of the 20th century. The terms “premodernism” and “metamodernism” are much less widely accepted, but usually refer to things that came before modernism and after postmodernism, respectively.
It varies slightly depending on the exact discipline. This is a huge question without any real shortcuts to understanding it.
In the simplest terms…
Modernism is when various types of art began abiding by conventions and rules that, aided by mass media and globalization could be easily understood by almost anyone. In film, modernism would be a suitable description of the films of the Studio system and made under the Hays Code. The classics with obvious good guys and bad guys, and clear cut morality, all made in much the same fashion.
Post-Modernism is when artists decided to rebel against those very conventions and rules. It was a return to experimental art. Post-modernism in film really started in the late-60’s with countercultural films like The Trip and Easy Rider, but carried through to the 70’s with the New Hollywood movement who were a group of young filmmakers that broke all the rules and people loved it. This is when morality in film became gray and you were allowed to root for the bad guys.
Meta modernism is a revolt against post-modernism, essentially calling it out for not being experimental enough. Deadpool and Rick & Morty are metamodernism. The constant fourth wall breaks and extreme edginess with all the references to other pieces of contemporary art… yeah, metamodernism is just running around screaming “Rules are just a construct! They’re not even real!”
And since I skipped it… Pre-Modernism is anything from before the modernism trend crystallized and became identifiable. It’s actually not even really a thing in its own right, just a collection of earlier, less notable trends.
This (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xprzqBFv1M&pp=ygUXSkogTWNDdWxsb3VnaCBtb2Rlcm5pc20%3D) from Canadian cultural commentator J.J. McCullough is probably the best intro-level summary of these movements.
Pre-Modernism is everything that happened before the Industrial Revolution. Broadly speaking, people lived and died in one area and adopted or rejected the major social norms in this area. In other words, day-to-day life in the pre-modern period wasn’t typically influenced by someone living halfway around the globe, because there was no way to access that information.
After the Industrial Revolution though, the average person had way more access to technology than ever before in human history. Some of these technological advances (e.g., telephones, newspaper and rail expansions, etc.) made it easier for people to know what was happening on the other side of the world. As a result, trends could happen on a larger scale than ever before, and the concept of a “global culture” took root.*
This “global culture” – everyone thinking and doing things simultaneously, in response to one another – became known as modernism. Modernism began in the early 20th century (exact decade is really dependent on the discipline you’re looking at) and, over time, yielded a specific set of “rules” for any given discipline. As another comment mentions, for the film industry, this was articulated as the Hollywood studio system. In architecture, this was the International Style (which is also sometimes just called “Modern Architecture.”) The main ideals of Modernism are nostalgia, order, and patriotism.
Post-modernism came about as a reaction to Modernism, rejecting this homogenization – rebelling against these established “rules,” in other words. The time period of this reaction depends, again, on the discipline. Post-modern architecture arose in the 1940s(ish), but post-modern filmmaking didn’t hit its stride until roughly the 1960s. Post-modernism rejects the Modernist ideas of nostalgia, order, and patriotism, instead embracing moral relativism, irony, diversity.**
But then by the 2000s, Modernism and Post-Modernism had existed for decades, and the rise of the Information Age meant we had even MORE ways to know exactly what everyone across the globe was doing at any given time. The term Meta-modernism is used by some critics and academics to refer to the cycle of constant nostalgia (a Modern idea) and cynicism (a Post-Modern idea) we find ourselves in. For example, think about how every movie and musical and TV show seems like a reboot or a spin-off. (We’ve had three Spidermen since 2000!) The push-pull of nostalgia (recycling established properties that remind us of a simpler time) and cynicism (the endless churn of these properties to make large corporations money) has been described by some as meta-modernism. Meta-modernism is one way to look at what people call Post-Post-Modernism – aka, what now, now that Post-Modernism has been around for so long? However, due in part to its recency, meta-modernism is not as standard a term as Modernism and Post-Modernism. It’s more of a lens to describe how we respond to and create culture in the Digital Age.
TL;DR:
Pre-Modernism: Before Industrial Revolution. No one knows what anyone else is doing.
Modernism: After Industrial Revolution. Everyone knows what each other is doing on a large scale, and culture trends toward nostalgia, order, and patriotism. Things are kind of “same-y.”
Post-Modernism: The rejection of Modernism and rules in favor of embracing irony and moral relativism.
Meta-modernism: Post-2000/Digital Revolution. A way to describe how everything feels both nostalgic and cynical, hopeful and ironic.
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Notes:
*Granted, this “global culture” was white and centered in the US/Western Europe, but for the purposes of this explanation, I simplified.
**Though not (always) racial/socioeconomic/gender diversity as we think of it nowadays; just the concept of “not everything should be the same.”
Pre modernism – A medieval king has a portrait of himself painted, wearing a ceremonial hat which was common at the time
Modernism – The current monarchs wear ceremonial crowns made of gold and jewels and they always wear them in media
Postmodernism – A movie comes out about the original king, he wears a golden crown with jewels because that is what people associate with Kings wearing these days
Metamodernism – Movies start popping up messing with the trope of Kings wearing crowns, showing the king of the underworld wearing a crown made of bones or skulls
This is an ELI5 example about the use of crowns across media but this can be a very complicated subject as other comments point out
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