Lyotard defines postmodernism as a modernism that celebrates the loss of ordered totality

Evidence

The postmodern did not come after the modern, but was a motion of internal renewal within it from the first — that current whose response to the shattering of the real was the opposite of nostalgia for its unity: rather a jubilant acceptance of the freedom of invention it released. But this was no luxuriance. The avant-garde art Lyotard singled out for approval a year later was Minimalism — the sublime as privation. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 74 (#expands, via linked claim)

Scott Lash proposes that we see Postmodernism as ‘a figurai, as distinct from discursive, regime of signification. To signify via figures rather than words is to signify iconically. Images or other figures which signify iconically do so through their resemblance to the referent.’ Consequently Postmodern art involves ‘de-differentiation’, so that, on the one hand, the signified (meaning) tends ‘to wither away and the signifier to function as a referent’, and, on the other hand, ‘the referent functions as a signifier’. Contemporary film (Blue Velvet) and criticism (Susan Sontag’s attack on interpretation) provide Lash with examples of this essentially Imagist art, but, like Lyotard, he sees Postmodernism as immanent within Modernism, particularly in the shape of Surrealism, which ‘understood reality to be composed of signifying elements. Thus Naville enthused that we should get pleasure from the streets of the city in which kiosks, autos and lights were in a sense already representations, and Breton spoke of the world itself as “automatic writing”. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 111 (#expands, via linked claim)

The defining trait of the postmodern condition, by contrast, is the loss of credibility of these meta-narratives. For Lyotard, they have been undone by the immanent development of the sciences themselves: on the one hand, by a pluralization of types of argument, with the proliferation of paradox and paralogism — anticipated within philosophy by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Levinas; and on the other hand, by a technification of proof, in which costly apparatuses, commanded by capital or the state, reduce ‘truth’ to ‘performativity’. Science in the service of power finds a new legitimation in efficiency. But the genuine pragmatics of postmodern science lies not in the pursuit of the performative, but in the production of the paralogistic — in micro-physics, fractals, discoveries of chaos, ‘theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable and paradoxical’. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Lyotard redefined the postmodern as a perennial inner renewal of the modern — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 74; Postmodernism transformed the modernist experience of self-loss into a celebrated utopia of unbelonging — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 271; Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65 (+7 more)

Related

• Lyotard redefined the postmodern as a perennial inner renewal of the modern (similarity 0.92)
• Lash defines postmodernism as imagistic, de-differentiated, and immanent within modernism (similarity 0.90)
• Defining Postmodernism as internal to Modernism abandons its periodizing claim (similarity 0.85)
• Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives (similarity 0.85)
• Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor (similarity 0.83)
• Lyotard defines postmodernism as a refusal to mourn lost totality (similarity 0.83)
• Postmodernism’s self-definition depends on an inadequate account of what it opposes. (similarity 0.82)
• Postmodernism is modernity’s completion, erasing the archaic that modernism still struggled against. (similarity 0.81)
• Lyotard defines the modern by its appeal to grand legitimating narratives (similarity 0.81)
• Postmodernism precedes and enables modernism rather than following it. (similarity 0.81)
• Postmodernism can only be defined relative to the equally confused term modernism (similarity 0.80)
• Modernism pursues the New substantively while postmodernism only clocks variations (similarity 0.80)
• Locating Postmodernism within Modernism severs its link to stages of social development (similarity 0.80)
• Modernism reacts to lost totality with nostalgia while postmodernism stops looking backward. (similarity 0.80)
• So-called postmodern trends merely continue capitalist processes begun under modernism (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Lyotard redefined the postmodern as a perennial inner renewal of the modern #expands (0.92) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 74
• Lash defines postmodernism as imagistic, de-differentiated, and immanent within modernism #expands (0.88) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 111
• Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives #expands (0.85) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65
• Defining Postmodernism as internal to Modernism abandons its periodizing claim #qualifies (0.85)
• Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor #expands (0.84) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 236
• Postmodernism elevates modernist aberrations into its dominant cultural logic #expands (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 216
• Postmodernism is modernity’s completion, erasing the archaic that modernism still struggled against. #qualifies (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 675
• Modernism pursues the New substantively while postmodernism only clocks variations #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 8
• Postmodernism transformed the modernist experience of self-loss into a celebrated utopia of unbelonging #complicates (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 271