Distraction Therapy – On Impermanence, Power and the Metamodern Moment
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There are moments in Shakespeare when the illusion of theatre dissolves and something deeper stirs—something that reminds us of our own impermanence, the fragility of our stories, our systems, our certainties. One of the most resonant of these comes in The Tempest, when Prospero, sorcerer and exile, breaks the spell he has conjured for his daughter’s betrothal. His words, “Our revels now are ended,” carry more than the weariness of age—they echo with an ancient reckoning: that all we build, imagine, and control must one day vanish “into thin air.”
At Radio Lear, we return to this speech not as a literary artefact, but as a cultural mirror. What does it show us today, when spectacle persists at every turn, when illusion is endlessly broadcast, and when the towers we construct—whether ideological, technological, or symbolic—seem ever more brittle?
From a metamodern perspective, Prospero’s moment of reflection is more than resignation. It’s a reckoning with the limits of human power, especially the kind that pretends to know too much, to explain too cleanly, or to control too completely. In a world saturated with meaning-making systems—economic, political, moral—The Tempest reminds us that assigning fixed motives to human intent is a dangerous sleight of hand. It’s not that meaning is absent, but that meaning, like magic, is always provisional. To believe otherwise is to mistake the masque for the world.
Prospero is often read as Shakespeare’s alter ego, and this speech as his farewell to the stage. But it’s also a warning. Hubris is not a singular sin—it’s a recurrent pattern. Each age rediscovers it in new clothes: the Renaissance courtier, the Enlightenment rationalist, the algorithmic planner. The illusion isn’t just in the spectacle we watch—it’s in the certainty with which we believe we are the authors of the future.
So what do we do with this? Metamodernism doesn’t resolve the tension between sincerity and irony, between knowing and unknowing. It holds the contradiction. It listens. And in that listening, perhaps, it begins to resist the need to dominate meaning.
At Radio Lear, we try to make space for that resistance. We don’t pretend to explain everything. We don’t chase spectacle for its own sake. Instead, we ask: What echoes remain when the masque is over? What truths emerge when we stop speaking in absolutes? And who are we, really, when the set collapses and the lights dim?
In a time when everyone claims to have a theory, a solution, or a brand, it might be worth listening again to the quiet in Prospero’s voice. His magic was never the point. His renunciation was.
Perhaps ours should be, too.
