Modernist temporality grew from uneven development rather than modernization itself

Evidence

Arno Mayer has reminded us, with a salutary shock, of the persistence of the old regime well up into the twentieth century, and the very partial nature of the “triumph of the bourgeoisie” or of industrial capitalism in the modernist period, still predominantly rural and at least statistically dominated by peasants and landlords with feudal habits, among which the occasional motorcar strikes a jarring but exciting note, along with intermittent electrification and even the sparse aviational pyrotechnics of World War I. … The very value of the New and of innovation (as these are reflected in everything from First World hermetic forms to the great drama of Old and New played out variously in the Third and Second World countries) clearly enough presupposes the exceptionality of what is felt to be “modern”; while deep memory itself, which inscribes and scars the differentiation of experience into time and evokes something like the intermittencies of alternate worlds, would seem also to depend on “uneven development” of an existential and psychic, fully as much as on an economic, kind. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 780

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in periodizing style — this grounds the modern/postmodern distinction in economic unevenness, relevant to testing whether the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis is falsifiable. — connects to: The concept of the future itself has mutated across the twentieth century; The concept of civilization emerged only in the modern era — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 37; Modernization transforms concepts of time wherever it spreads — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 144
• QUESTION: Does postmodernism’s ‘waning of affect’ and spatial turn then correspond to a phase where modernization has fully colonized social space and uneven development has collapsed? Worth tracing the argument’s completeness.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the very value of the New presupposes a not-yet-modernized background — and that deep memory depends on ‘uneven development’ — is a paradigm-shifting reframe of modernism’s psychic structure as economically grounded.