Modernity defines itself by a radical break with all prior and non-Western peoples

Evidence

For theological modernism seems to share with the other modernisms their constitutive sense of that radical otherness or difference of the past that constitutes us as modern people: the sense that everyone who went before us was therefore not modern, but was traditional, and in that sense radically different in their ways of thinking and behaving. All the old worlds die and become radically other from us at the moment of the birth of true modernity. The moderns thus, with their religion of the new, believed that they were somehow distinct from all the other human beings who ever lived in the past — and also from those nonmodern human beings still alive in the present, such as colonial peoples, backward cultures, non-Western societies, and “undeveloped” enclaves. (For the postmodern, then, the break stands or falls with some putative opening onto these forms of psychic, social, and cultural otherness, which raises the issue of a political Third Worldism in a new way, as it does the breakdown of the Western “canon,” and the possibility of some new reception of other, global cultures.) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 834

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis on periodization — modernity’s self-definition by rupture is the very logic Jameson will flip for the postmodern break, linking to their interest in whether ‘cultural dominant’ is falsifiable. — connects to: Postmodernism’s defining move is proclaiming a radical break in Western civilization — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 126
• DEFINE: Defines the constitutive self-understanding of modernism as the felt radical otherness of the past, which is prerequisite to grasping the postmodern difference.