Postmodernism’s rejection of innovation still depends on the very notion of novelty.

Evidence

Everything turns, then, on whether you think the “free plan” is just another room, albeit of a novel type, or whether it transcends that category altogether (just as a language beyond the sentence would transcend our Western conceptuality and our sociality alike). Nor is it only a question of demolishing the older forms, as in the iconoclastic and purifying therapy of dada: this kind of modernism promised the articulation of new spatial categories that might properly merit characterization as Utopian. It is well known that Postmodernism is at one with a negative judgment on these aspirations of the high modern, which it claims to have abandoned — but the new name, the sense of a radical break, the enthusiasm that greeted the new kinds of buildings, all testify to the persistence of some notion of novelty or innovation that seems to have survived the modern itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 276

Categorization

• QUESTION: Directly useful for the reader’s falsifiability push: if postmodernism denies the modern’s novelty-aspirations but itself greets new buildings with the enthusiasm of a radical break, the ‘cultural dominant’ boundary blurs.
• STORYSTEM: The ‘free plan’ as a category to dwell in differently — the idea of a room that is not ‘a room’ could seed a story whose setting works by a logic that transcends its own spatial category.
• XREF: connects to: The demand for novelty paradoxically strengthens the conventions it appears to escape — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100; Postmodernists borrow modernism’s features to claim a false novelty — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 128; Modernity’s cult of novelty masks a sameness produced by industrial reproducibility. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 257 (+2 more)