Modernity names the felt conviction of newness that postmodernity has lost.

Evidence

Perhaps it can also be added that what is also thereby lost from the postmodern is modernity as such, in the sense in which that word can be taken to mean something specific and distinct from either modernism and modernization. Indeed, our old friends base and superstructure seem fatally to reimpose themselves: if modernization is something that happens to the base, and modernism the form the superstructure takes in reaction to that ambivalent development, then perhaps modernity characterizes the attempt to make something coherent out of their relationship. Modernity would then in that case describe the way “modern” people feel about themselves; the word would seem to have something to do not with the products (either cultural or industrial) but with the producers and the consumers, and how they feel either producing the products or living among them. This modern feeling now seems to consist in the conviction that we ourselves are somehow new, that a new age is beginning, that everything is possible and nothing can ever be the same again; nor do we want anything to be the same again, we want to “make it new,” get rid of all those old objects, values, mentalities, and ways of doing things, and to be somehow transfigured. “Il faut etre absolument moderne,” cried Rimbaud; we have to be somehow absolutely, radically modern; which is to say (presumably) that we have to make ourselves modern, too; it’s something we do, not merely something that happens to us. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 676

Categorization

• DEFINE: Tripartite distinction — modernization (base), modernism (superstructure), modernity (the felt coherence of their relation) — is a key conceptual toolkit for the reader.
• XREF: The ‘make it new’ imperative connects to the reader’s cognitive map — whether one’s own relation to novelty is modernist or postmodern can be self-tested here. — connects to: Postmodern subjectivity loses active historical consciousness and lives in a perpetual present. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 152; The blanked-out past signals a present hollowed of genuine newness — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1314