Mercer's MetaModern Manifesto
Lyrics were taken _verbatim_ from The Metamodernist Manifesto, published by Luke Turner in 2011, Using the term metamodernism employed by Vermeulen & van den Akker in Notes on metamodernism, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Volume 2, 2010
Summary
Track 6 sets Luke Turner's eight-point Metamodernist Manifesto (2011) to music verbatim — the lyrics are the manifesto, unaltered, credited in the file's own synopsis. As a compositional act, the song performs its subject: the manifesto's call for oscillation, pragmatic romanticism, and a "scientific-poetic synthesis" is delivered as art, enacting the synthesis it describes. The track serves as the album's philosophical backbone, making explicit the theoretical framework that the surrounding songs demonstrate through narrative and persona.
Lyrics
We recognise oscillation to be the natural order of the world.
2.
We must liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child.
3.
Movement shall henceforth be enabled by way of an oscillation between positions, with diametrically opposed ideas operating like the pulsating polarities of a colossal electric machine, propelling the world into action.
4.
We acknowledge the limitations inherent to all movement and experience, and the futility of any attempt to transcend the boundaries set forth therein. The essential incompleteness of a system should necessitate an adherence, not in order to achieve a given end or be slaves to its course, but rather perchance to glimpse by proxy some hidden exteriority. Existence is enriched if we set about our task as if those limits might be exceeded, for such action unfolds the world.
5.
All things are caught within the irrevocable slide towards a state of maximum entropic dissemblance. Artistic creation is contingent upon the origination or revelation of difference therein. Affect at its zenith is the unmediated experience of difference in itself. It must be art’s role to explore the promise of its own paradoxical ambition by coaxing excess towards presence.
6.
The present is a symptom of the twin birth of immediacy and obsolescence. Today, we are nostalgists as much as we are futurists. The new technology enables the simultaneous experience and enactment of events from a multiplicity of positions. Far from signalling its demise, these emergent networks facilitate the democratisation of history, illuminating the forking paths along which its grand narratives may navigate the here and now.
7.
Just as science strives for poetic elegance, artists might assume a quest for truth. All information is grounds for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, no matter its truth-value. We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of a magical realism. Error breeds sense.
8.
We propose a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage. Thus, metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons. We must go forth and oscillate!
Detail
Because the lyrics are Turner's text verbatim (from the Metamodernist Manifesto, 2011, drawing on Vermeulen and van den Akker's "Notes on Metamodernism," 2010), the thematic content belongs to Turner's framework rather than Mercer's original composition. The eight points collectively define metamodernism as oscillation between irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth — the same poles the rest of the album navigates through persona and narrative. Point 4's "essential incompleteness of a system" and Point 6's "democratisation of history" are particularly resonant with the album's other concerns (epistemic humility in "wikiMentinya," influence in "Slow Train"). Point 7 — "error breeds sense" and the "scientific-poetic synthesis" — is close in spirit to the Colloquium's concern with Aletheia (truth-disclosure) and provisional knowledge, though Turner's manifesto predates Colloquium terminology and no canon terms appear here. The decision to set the manifesto verbatim is itself a metamodernist gesture: using found text sincerely, without ironic quotation marks, trusting that the content is worth the act of transmission.
Cross-references
- The Message (is the Medium) (album)