Casting Off the Skin – Nietzsche, Metamodernism, and the Practice of Becoming
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At Radio Lear, we often find ourselves drawn to the deeper metaphors that underpin cultural transformation—not only as themes for broadcast but as clues for how we might live and create differently. One image that recurs with quiet insistence is Nietzsche’s notion of the snake shedding its skin—a vivid symbol of renewal through release. This image, while ancient, offers a compelling lens through which to explore the nature of metamodern culture and its continuous oscillation between deconstruction and reconstruction.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes:
“A snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. So too with minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
This is more than a comment on flexibility or adaptability. The act of shedding skin is radical: it is a leaving-behind of that which once protected and defined us. For Nietzsche, it symbolised a mode of becoming—uncomfortable, necessary, and cyclical. The snake does not shed its skin just once, but again and again, throughout its life. Each skin represents a past identity, a worldview, or a mode of understanding that has become constrictive. The act of shedding is painful, but to refuse it is to stagnate.
This metaphor sits at the heart of Radio Lear’s creative orientation, and it resonates deeply with the condition of metamodern culture.
Metamodernism, as proposed by thinkers like Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, and later elaborated by Hanzi Freinacht, is not simply a style or an aesthetic. It is a structure of feeling, a cultural sensibility that emerges after the disillusionment of postmodern irony and the collapse of grand narratives. Unlike postmodernism, which revelled in fragmentation and critique, metamodernism steps into the ruins of certainty not to restore the old foundations, but to explore how we might rebuild—with care, with openness, and with a kind of earnest irony.
This mode is inherently a form of skin-shedding. It acknowledges that our former ways of thinking—about identity, community, culture, and truth—no longer suffice. But it also recognises that we cannot simply leap into the new. We must move through a process of disassembling and reassembling, guided not by dogma but by felt experience and provisional hope.
The metamodern subject is, like Nietzsche’s snake, engaged in a continual process of molting. In media, this looks like a turning away from broadcast certainties and formulaic production, and a movement toward layered storytelling, collaborative authorship, and experiential forms of expression. It asks: What happens when we acknowledge the limits of our categories and still choose to build? What if we can hold both critique and belief—temporarily, tentatively, but sincerely?
At Radio Lear, we experiment with these questions in sonic form. We build dreamspaces. We unpick the tropes of radio and invite listeners to inhabit new textures of sound and story. This is not to reject the past, but to shed it where it no longer fits—to compost it, even. In its place, we cultivate new skins: porous, experimental, receptive.
Shedding the skin is not about reinvention for its own sake. It is not a spectacle of transformation. It is an interior act of letting go, an outward sign of inner change. In Nietzschean terms, it is the work of becoming what we are—not once, but always. In metamodern terms, it is the art of inhabiting multiple selves and truths with both suspicion and sincerity.
So the invitation, in this moment of cultural and technological flux, is to listen for the sound of old skins being left behind—not in shame or denial, but as part of an honest metamorphosis. The challenge is to allow our creative practices to mirror this rhythm: to deconstruct not out of cynicism, but to make room for the possibility of meaning anew.
As we cast off yesterday’s certainties, what are we willing to grow into?
And when the next skin itches and tightens—will we have the courage to shed again.
