Sociology as Spiritual Experience: Daniel Görtz on the Meaning of Metamodernism

Daniel Görtz Ph.D is a Sociologist and leading theorist of metamodernism. He is one half of the legendary Hanzi Freinacht who lives ‘at the crossroads of fact and fiction’ and is the author of The Listening Society and The Nordic Ideology. Daniel is also a leading member of the think tank Metamoderna, which can be found here: https://metamoderna.org

This is another interview with an author of a chapter from Perspectiva's anthology, *Dispatches from a Time between Worlds: Crisis and Emergence in Metamodernity*, conduced by the co-editor of that volume, Director of Perspectiva, Jonathan Rowson. You can read more about the book and purchase it via this link: https://systems-souls-society.com/insight/perspectiva-press/dispatches-from-a-time-between-worlds/

The book chapter in question here is:

6. Metamodern Sociology: An ironically sincere invitation to future scholars by Daniel Görtz

The first part of this conversation is about sociology as a discipline, with Daniel using the example of Shoshana Zuboff's book on Surveillance Capitalism as an illustration of the limitations of modernist sociology.

Daniel wonders: ‘If sociology is the social science that views society as society, is then there not an intrinsic link between, on the one hand, sociological understanding and research and, on the other hand, a philosophy that seeks to eject itself from the conceptual, cultural, political and spiritual confines of modern society – metamodernism? He argues that, yes, this is the case’.

One of the major contributions of the chapter is the six-fold classification of metamodernism and we discuss this extensively in the second half of the talk, with references to the numbers below as shorthand in places.

Metamodernism is thus:
1. A cultural phase.
2. A developmental stage of society.
3. An abstracted meta-meme.
4. A stage of personal development.
5. A philosophical paradigm.
6. A movement with a certain project for culture and society’.

Daniel argues that it is imperative to specify which of these is being invoked at any given moment, and that seems right, though due to their overlapping and cross-pollinating nature I would suggest that is easier in slow-motion analysis than in most communicative contexts.

(For more details, please see the book chapter)

The book, Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and Emergence in Metamodernity can be purchased via this link: https://systems-souls-society.com/insight/perspectiva-press/dispatches-from-a-time-between-worlds/

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