Stephen — With all due respect to Pierce, I would offer a correction to the idea that metamodernism fosters “a paradoxical appreciation that all understandings of reality are both right and wrong simultaneously.”

I mean, there are people who use the term metamodernism to mean that, but that is not what Vermeulen and van den Akker seemed to intend in their original “Notes on Metamodernism” article. They were specifically observing an oscillation between Modernist/Postmodernist dualities such as earnestness/irony, hope/cynicism, universalism/relativism, etc… not between all pairs of opposites (chocolate/vanilla, conservative/progressive, etc.). The position you find problematic “All perspectives are equally valid” is, in my view, more characteristic of postmodernism than metamodernism. In fact, one could explain metamodernism as a sensibility that escapes the multi-perspectival dilemma by bringing back modernist conviction while maintaining an awareness of postmodernism’s critical insights, and oscillating between the two.