Modernism pursues the New substantively while postmodernism only clocks variations

Evidence

Modernism also thought compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being (inventing for that purpose the registering and inscription devices akin to historical time-lapse photography), but the postmodern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the “When-it-all-changed,” as Gibson puts it, or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and of the way they change. The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in Utopian or essential fashion. Postmodernism is more formal in that sense, and more “distracted,” as Benjamin might put it; it only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 8

Categorization

• DEFINE: Draws the key modernism/postmodernism contrast: substantive vs. formal relation to change.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s core task of distinguishing parody and pastiche — same formal-vs-substantive axis. — connects to: Lyotard defines postmodernism as a modernism that celebrates the loss of ordered totality; Postmodernists borrow modernism’s features to claim a false novelty — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 128; Late modern and postmodern architecture differ on allusion to the past — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 61 (+5 more)