Lyotard rejects periodizing the postmodern as a clean break with the past

Evidence

Confusingly enough Lyotard, who helped to get the hare of a new, postmodern epoch running in the first place, also argues that treating the ‘“post-” in the term “postmodernist” … in the sense of a simple succession, of a diachrony of periods, each of them clearly identi­ fiable’ is ‘totally modern … Since we are beginning something completely new, we have to re-set the hands of the clock at zero.’ But the idea of a total break with tradition ‘is, rather, a manner of forgetting or repressing the past. That’s to say of repeating it. Not overcoming it. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 93

Categorization

• XREF: Lyotard — the figure who set ‘postmodern epoch’ running — is caught undermining the linear-succession model Jameson’s periodization rests on; a usable weapon for the counter-thesis.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘a total break is a way of forgetting/repeating the past, not overcoming it’ resonates with the reader’s core question of whether strategic-essentialist positions inevitably collapse into the thing they claim to escape.