The Hegelian Egirls as Metamodern Icons
The Hegelian Egirls recently started popping up all over social media. They’re a growing community of women who meet online to discuss Hegel, the 19th-century German philosopher. The three most prominent girls, Nikki, Anna, and Sanje*, are effectively the public face of The Hegelian E-Girl Council.
At first blush, it sounds like they should be comic book superheroes. (The Hegelian Egirls to the rescue! BAM! ZIP! WHAMO! Mediocre shitheads beware—they’re coming for you!) And this is actually instructive:
Just like comic books are vapid yet have the potential to be profound, so too with the Hegelian Egirls. The typical Egirl is focused on superficial things like appearance and audience-growth. The Hegelian Egirls are focused on these things too, but they’re also sincere Hegelians—they’re into discussing and advocating for the dialectic approach to reasoning, as developed by Hegel.
In this respect, the Hegelian Egirls are an exquisite example of metamodernism. Metamodernism is characterized by an oscillation between modern sincerity and postmodern irony. With a metamodern perspective, you can take a hard, scientific approach to the world one moment, and then question the grand narrative of the “scientific approach” the next moment. You can admit to being drawn to religious traditions while also laughing at the hopelessness of trying to find “truth” in ancient texts. Etc.
It's not just that the Hegelian Egirls are themselves simultaneously vapid (ironic) and profound (sincere). The substance of their content is also distinctly metamodern. When they discuss Hegel’s dialectic, they’re effectively using Hegel’s terminology to articulate the metamodern oscillation between modernism and postmodernism.
Metamodernists often reference Hegel’s dialectic directly—almost as if metamodernism is Hegel’s dialectic, just with different terminology, and with an emphasis on being a response to postmodernism. For example, historian and philosopher Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm explicitly defines metamodernism as an Hegelian perspective:
Most fundamentally, metamodernism is an attempt to give rise to the next phase of the dialectic, or to advance the movement of thought in Hegelian terms. Rather than just a response to postmodernism or an oscillation between modernist and postmodernist modes, metamodernism is an overcoming of both.
The Hegelian Egirls, then, really are a metamodern project. And in this respect, they aren’t actually calling us to return to the philosophy of a 19th-century German. Instead, they’re calling us to be up with cutting-edge philosophical thought.
For example, the Hegelian Egirls would never say we should reject postmodernism. Using Hegel’s dialectic, they would say we should take postmodernism into consideration, along with modernism and other perspectives, and move forward toward something new. Although they strictly use Hegel’s terminology, this is metamodernism.
This perspective is refreshing to see on social media. It’s frustrating when people pick a political team (left or right) and dig their heels in without any curiosity or sympathy for conflicting perspectives. Even more frustrating, as the Hegelian Egirls note, are the centrists, who claim to have arrived at some enlightened placed simply by choosing a position between two extremes. Behind a centrist hardens you into the status quo in the same way as if you picked a traditional team on the left or right. Only through Hegelian sublation can you move forward.
As Anna puts it:
“You are articulating opposites, but you’re not collapsing them into the existing middle of those opposites. You’re actually creating something new. And you’re moving the process forward beyond the existing moment in which those opposites are opposed to each other.”
This highlights a distinction between the Hegelian Egirls and metamodernism: Where the Egirls are actively promoting a new way to think and to look at the world, metamodernism is purely descriptive. Metamodernist writers simply observe that much of the art and culture has shifted beyond the postmodern perspective; it’s now common to find films, novels, etc. that oscillate between being ironic and sincere, being anti-religious and traditional, being critical of grand narratives and embracing grand narratives…
Ever since I first encountered metamodernism, I wanted it to be more than descriptive. I wanted to use it as an artistic tool and as an approach to situations in life. The Hegelian Egirls show how this can be done: To describe our current cultural moment in time, use the terminology of metamodernism; but to fight against political extremes without becoming an entrenched, go-nowhere centrist, adopt Hegel’s dialectic.
*Sanje recently tweeted that she left the Hegelian Egirl Council (HEC), explaining: “my concern is that the HEC project claims to do be doing [sic] political mediation but is effectively platforming the worst of both sides and lending them intellectual legitimacy.”
Is there any component of classic virtue signaling here? Are they parroting, or are they transposing the philosophy onto a modern canvas?
Genuine questions.
I want to clarify a few things about metamodernism, at least from my point of view (which I think is relevant because I've discussed metamodernism on your podcast!)
This whole "descriptive" vs. "prescriptive" thing. I think people have latched onto this distinction too hard. And maybe that stems from failing to make a different, more important distinction: Between metamodernism as a phenomenon, and the field of study that is the observation of metamodernism. From my POV, "metamodernism" is not the set of people who talk and write about metamodernism, nor the set of concepts that we use to understand metamodernism. It's the set of phenomena out there in the world that have metamodern qualities.
So metamodernism is not you and me thinking about metamodernism. It's all the movies and songs and TV shows and novels and, yes, social media figures such as the Hegelian E-Girls. Some of these things have a prescriptive dimension and some do not, but that's not a really interesting distinction. Nobody in academic metamodernism research has declared that for a thing to be metamodern, it has to refrain from urging people to do or believe certain things. There is nothing inherently un-metamodern about "prescribing." If you are prescribing ideas that are metamodern, then your project is metamodern. If you are prescribing ideas that are not metamodern, than your prescriptive project is not metamodern.
Meanwhile, I would point out that the main original kickstarters of the metamodernism discourse, Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker take pains to say that the metamodern oscillation they are interested in is DIFFERENT from the Hegelian dialectic. That it involves an ongoing, repeated back-and-forth flip flop between (modern and postmodern) poles, that does not land in the middle, and does not necessarily move "forward" and does not achieve a synthesis. Jason Storm's understanding and definition of metamodernism is not necessarily "wrong" but it should be noted that it is a departure from how most academics use the term, and he himself asserts that he has made little effort to be consistent in his usage of the term with how other established writers have used it.
But this does not mean that the Hegelian E-Girls are not metamodern! I think that their self-description as you've quoted it sounds more metamodern than Hegelian! And, in any case, the oscillation between apparent superciality and depth and other dynamics you've pointed out make them potentially metamodern (in their project -- I generally cringe at the idea of a whole person "being" metamodern, postmodern, etc.), regardless of the "Hegel" part.