Modernity’s sense of the New was an obligation felt as much as a liberation

Evidence

It is an existential imminence that is interchangeable with so many expressions of the sense of objective change that sweeps the modern, along with a disgust for the survivals of the old, and a feeling that besides being a release and a liberation, the New is also an obligation: something you must do to yourself to rise to the occasion and be worthy of the new world tendentially in emergence all around you. … It is also, as John Berger reminds us, a world whose Utopian promise will be blasted by World War I, save in the now more directed and restricted channel of systemic change and social and political revolution as such, now historically epitomized in the Soviet revolution with its remarkable new modernist cultural effervescence. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 818

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines modernity’s distinctive ‘sense of radical difference’ — the obligation of the New — which later contrasts with postmodernity’s diminished excitement because nothing is ‘old’ anymore.
• XREF: The claim that the Soviet revolution channeled modernist Utopian promise connects to the reader’s interest in periodizing style and how aesthetic form registers political-economic change. — connects to: Modernity names the felt conviction of newness that postmodernity has lost. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 676; Modernity is the permanent urge to modernize, not a destination; Modernity is best understood as compulsive, self-propelling modernization, not a completed state — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 651 (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Modernity names the felt conviction of newness that postmodernity has lost. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 676; Modernity is the permanent urge to modernize, not a destination; Modernity is best understood as compulsive, self-propelling modernization, not a completed state — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 651 (+1 more)