Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor

Evidence

If Rushdie is a postmodernist at all, he is so precisely in the sense that his intellectual and artistic formation is essentially modernist, but there are distinct articulations and emphases in which he clearly exceeds that basic formation. I am reminded here of those passages in Lyotard where he argues that postmodernism is a set of tendencies within Late Modernism itself, which distinguishes itself primarily by celebrating human inability to experience reality as a totality, over and beyond its fragments. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 236

Now we come to postmodernism and what I want to know is: is postmodernism a global or a “Western” phenomenon? Is postmodernism the word we give to the rearrangement, the new configuration, which many of the elements that went into the modernist project have now assumed? — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 717

Let’s take the postmodernist argument about the so-called collapse or implosion of “the real.” Three-quarters of the human race have not yet entered the era of what we are pleased to call “the real.” Furthermore, even within the West, ever since the development of modern mass media, and their introduction on a mass scale into cultural production, and their impact on the audiences for cultural products, we have witnessed the undermining of the absolutism of “the real” of the great discourses of realism, and the familiar realist and rationalist guarantees, the dominance of certain types of representational form, etc. I don’t mean to argue that the new discourses and relationships between these things, which is in essence what we called “modernism,” are the same in 1980 as they were in 1900. But I don’t know that with “postmodernism” we are dealing with something totally and fundamentally different from that break at the turn of the century. I don’t mean to deny that we’ve gone through profound qualitative changes between then and now. There are, therefore, now some very perplexing features to contemporary culture that certainly tend to outrun the critical and theoretical concepts generated in the early modernist period. We have, in that sense, to constantly update our theories and to be dealing with new experiences. I also accept that these changes may constitute new subject-positions and social identities for people. But I don’t think there is any such absolutely novel and unified thing as the postmodern condition. It’s another version of that historical amnesia characteristic of American culture—the tyranny of the New. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 718

I do nor wish to construe this juxtaposition of two textsor rather, the two sets of brief quotationsas some kind of fixed difference between modernism and post modernism. If Rushdie is a posrmodernist at all, he is so precisely in the sense that his inre’Ilectual and artistic formation is essentially modernist, but there are distinct articulations and emphases in which he clearly exceeds that basic formation. I am reminded here of those passages in Lyorard where he argues that posrmodernism is a set of tendencies within Late Modernism itself, which distinguishes itself primarily by celebrating human inability to experience reality as a totality, over and beyond its fragments. The attitude towards (self-)exile would be another such shiftbut a shift connected with historically distinct moments within the continuum of the metropolises’ High Culture in the century of modern imperialism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 539

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as an internal tendency of late modernism rather than a separate period is stated compactly.
• XREF: Echoes the Lyotardian framing that follows Jameson’s periodization debates and connects to general modernist/postmodernist scholarship. — connects to: Lash defines postmodernism as imagistic, de-differentiated, and immanent within modernism — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 111; Lyotard defines postmodernism as a modernism that celebrates the loss of ordered totality; Defining Postmodernism as internal to Modernism abandons its periodizing claim (+18 more)
• ADDENDUM: Hall’s skepticism about the tyranny of the New and historical amnesia connects to the anti-sumptuary dress panics of ‘Complaints About Immodesty,’ where each generation treats its own moral novelty as unprecedented.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone who studies intellectual history and periodization debates, since Hall reframes the modernism-postmodernism boundary dispute as a case of American cultural amnesia.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 236; Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 717; Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 718 (+1 more)