In ancient Greek, the preposition meta meant “beside,” “beyond,” or “in common with.” It was this sense of being “beyond” something else that led to its use in the phrase meta ta physika (“coming after the Physics”) to describe those works of Aristotle’s which were usually placed after his works on physics when all his writings were gathered together.
This led in turn to one of the more significant verbal confusions in philosophical history, as Latin writers began to use the label metaphysica as the actual title of Aristotle’s major philosophical works, rather than simply a description of the location of these books.
Metaphysics soon became enshrined as the branch of learning concerned with matters “beyond physics”—and so the near-mystical sense of the word was born, and with it the birth of “meta-” as a prefix denoting not simply location, but anything concerned with the most fundamental or underlying nature of a field.
It’s a term that has existed in more rarefied English vocabulary for centuries, but it began truly to come into its own with the rising interest in so-called meta-theories at the start of the twentieth century (that is, theories about the nature of other theories). This usage of the term was inspired by mathematician David Hilbert, who in 1904 announced his intention to demonstrate the consistency of logic and arithmetic by developing a theory of metamathematics.70
The great popularizer of the term meta for contemporary purposes, however, was the American writer, physicist and mathematician Douglas Hofstadter, whose 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, explored—among many other things—the idea of self-referential and self-generating theories, equations, and frames of reference.
Hofstadter’s work has continued to be hugely influential, not least because his ideas have proved a perfect match for the endlessly self-referential loops of the internet itself. It’s probably thanks to Hofstadter that the prefix “meta-” has today become a fully independent adjective in its own right, typically used online to describe something self-referential or knowingly oblique. A satirical six-word “autobiography” of Hofstadter was even devised by cult web comic xkcd, paying tribute to his reflexive theories: “I’m So Meta, Even This Autobiography . . .” (you have to read the first letter of each word to appreciate the depths of this particular meta-ness).71
In parallel to this broad cultural sense, meta is also frequently found today in the important field of metadata. It’s a vital discipline in an information-rich world, and most commonly describes the information “tags” attached to data sets in everything from blogs and archives to vast experimental data sets.
It offers, in other words, a kind of floating, higher layer of information about information itself—and with it the possibility of a whole new phase of self-organizing digital culture (not to mention higher and higher levels of self-referential irony; simply search social media for the hashtag #meta and you’ll wish you’d never begun to explore people’s capacity for referencing their self-referentiality with a self-referencing reference).
We might have to wait longer than you’d think for this future fully to arrive, however. As Hofstadter surmised in his eponymous law of expectations: “Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”