The true meta-modern masterpiece is the “The Leftovers”. It is widely hailed as one of the greatest shows of all time and it couldn’t be more explicitly metamodern. It deconstructs all meaning, both spiritual and scientific, even the way science fiction and the New Age have become fused at some level, but it then reconstructs sincerity and meaning as intersubjective/interpersonal, even at the metaphysical level (so not just as a pragmatic cultural necessity).
But I wouldn’t take the meta-modern/postmodern distinction too seriously. Its popularity is mostly a product of Ken Wilber’s bad misreadings of philosophy.
Everything in meta-modernism could be seen as part of postmodernism. Deconstruction is only one part of postmodern thought. Derrida just happened to be the most influential on American universities for a time. Deleuze has overtaken him in terms of influence now for decades, and his poststructural philosophy is as affirmative and “metamodern” as it gets.
Metamodernism is just the affirmative, metaphysical side of postmodern philosophy, and it is nothing new. There are academic examples like Deleuze, but it was also right there at the heart of postmodern popular metaphysics, the so-called “New Age”, especially with the most original New Age authors, Carlos Castaneda and Jane Roberts. Castaneda was trained at UCLA by a Heidegger scholar. Deleuze cites Castaneda throughout his most popular work, a work now embraced across the academy.
Damon Lindelof worked an explicit Castaneda reference into his show “Lost”, but in “the Leftovers” he makes the whole show pivot around a character following Castaneda’s basic sorcerer’s journey into creative heart of meaning. He works the metamodern, reflexive New Age themes of Castaneda right into the heart of the story. Basically, as Castaneda put it, “reality is an agreement”, or as Jane Roberts put it, “the reality WAS THE MYTH””.
