We Have Never Been Modern (Enough)

This article offers a philosophical-political commentary of Jason Ā. Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021). We welcome Josephson Storm’s integrated interdisciplinary distillation and ambitious ethico-political perspective, but we also point out the necessity to go further in the cross-disciplinary theoretical effort to rebuild a post-postmodernist academia. In particular, we identify the very modern/postmodern dialectic as problematic, and we contend that a materialist philosophy able to rethink politics and non-human agency through all the sciences would better serve the project. We also highlight how the metamodernist project might benefit from the adoption of a Simondonian approach insofar as the conceptualisation of both biology and technology is concerned. Finally, we end with a plea for an ongoing vigilance of the material conditions of possibility that support cutting-edge inter- and cross-disciplinary research, for they are fragile and need institutional and societal support.