What Comes After Post-Modernism?

I saw a talk at MAGfest today by Rym Decoster and Emily Compton which attempted to sketch a theory of current post-post-modern cultural output. It's very much a work in progress, but their concept of "metacontextualism" is the idea that after postmodern deconstruction and irony, we are starting to see a trend emerge towards building meaning through choice out of its ashes: being aware of the fractured contexts of a postmodern world, and that there's no single way of knowing or being, but choosing a forking path and going down it. They argue that art is how a society engages in dialogue with itself, and the art we're seeing now is pushing for something beyond post-modernism.

Their examples in the game world (it is MAGFest, after all) were three games I deeply enjoyed: Night In The Woods, Disco Elysium, and Slay The Princess. These games are all to some degree about the death of the old world and what happens in its wake. I'm not sure if metacontextualism is the right framing for understanding art in this moment - I'm going to need to go bone up a bit on my theory before I engage with that idea in earnest - but I do think there's something there: the loss of a sense of absolute truth and the abject hopelessness of a deeply unequal society are themes that you can find everywhere you look. The time to be tongue-in-cheek in the way the great postmodern artists were feels over. But the path forward feels up for debate. In Night In The Woods and Disco Elysium it's little changes, doing what you can in the world you've been given. In Slay The Princess, you get different options, but ultimately it's growth through absolute destruction any way you slice it.

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."

The old Gramsci line feels truer than ever these days. Postmodernism was marked by the death of truth and the end of history. There was no new world coming anymore. But it turns out they pronounced history's death prematurely, and suddenly the monsters are here and everything seems to be falling apart. In a time like this, people need meaning again. There may not be consensus about what, exactly, can come after, but if art is the mirror society holds to itself, I think one thing is clear. The world, as it is, is wrong. Things are not as they should be. And something has to change: the question is whether we need to let the world break us, or we need to break the world.