In his emotionally barren 1979 Pulitzer-winning nonfiction behemoth about self-referentiality, Gödel, Escher, Bach, the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter uses 25 different words with the meta- prefix, many of them coinages. Read: H ow ‘I’m Dead’ became a good thing The rise of the Information Age stoked the promise that, through quantitative data and cold computational analysis, certain fundamental truths could emerge that might allow us to transcend our subjectively limited human perspective. Fields of study emerged, like metalinguistics, metahistory, and metanarrative, that attempted to go “beyond” the traditional areas of study to discover fundamental rules underlying all history, all language, all narrative. As academia ran out of rationally explainable things to study, it began to study itself. Whereas The Physics summoned concepts like matter, nature, substance, and motion to describe the inner workings of the visible world, Metaphysics attempted to go beyond the visible-zooming out as much as possible to address questions like “What does it mean to exist?” and “How can we prove anything?” and “What in the Underworld is going on with all of us right now?” Because of the deep and abstract subject matter, many translators erroneously interpreted the prefix meta- as meaning “beyond” or “transcending.”Ī whole new branch of philosophy was born, and this misinterpretation of the prefix meta- proliferated in the critical-theory jargon of the 20th century. But Aristotle’s work in that period was arguably his most intense. He was basically calling it Physics: The Sequel.
editor (maybe Andronicus of Rhodes) was compiling the teachings of a philosopher named Aristotle, and he got to the period right after The Physics, he didn’t put too much thought into calling it Metaphysics. To the ancient Greeks, μετα- simply meant “after.” So when some first-century B.C. The word became ever more ingrained in the national consciousness until, in what felt like a culmination of its journey, the primary social-media company responsible for stirring up said shitstorm announced that it was rebranding itself with the word. To be meta was to flex your self-awareness for social currency, to demonstrate proficiency in the language of smirky dissociative irony that was the trendy cultural refuge from the massive information shitstorm (think: “ Thrift Shop” and Deadpool). But in the 2010s, it also came to signify coolness. On a basic level, meta meant recursive or self-referential-like a warning sign warning you about warning signs or a coffee-table book about coffee tables. I first remember hearing it in high school, an echo across the East River from Brooklyn during the Obama-era hipster boom. Perhaps no morpheme has been more crucial to understanding the current cultural moment than meta. Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.