metamodern oscillation involves a movement between — as I said — modernist qualities and postmodern qualities, or at least between oppositional pairs of emotional or aesthetic qualities, not opposing political or intellectual positions.

Oscillation is a way of engaging two oppositional factors without them cancelling each other out, nor landing in the average zone between them. Overall, metamodernism can be understood to revive the positivistic aspects of modernism while retaining postmodernism’s awareness of context and irony, via oscillation.