Modernism reacts to lost totality with nostalgia while postmodernism stops looking backward.

Evidence

Postmodern art therefore differs from Modernism in the attitude it takes up towards our inability to experience the world as a coherent and harmonious whole. Modernism reacts to ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history’ by looking back nostalgically to a time before our sense of totality was lost, as Eliot does when he claims that in the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century there was ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling’, which disappeared after the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ already evident in Milton and Dryden. Postmodernism, by contrast, ceases to look back. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 98

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Contemporary pop’s return to modernism may overcome the postmodernism it recycles — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 983