Postmodernism is modernity’s completion, erasing the archaic that modernism still struggled against.

Evidence

What follows paradoxically as a consequence is that in that case the postmodern must be characterized as a situation in which the survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic, has finally been swept away without a trace. In the postmodern, then, the past itself has disappeared (along with the well-known “sense of the past” or historicity and collective memory). Where its buildings still remain, renovation and restoration allow them to be transferred to the present in their entirety as those other, very different and postmodern things called simulacra. Everything is now organized and planned; nature has been triumphantly blotted out, along with peasants, petit-bourgeois commerce, handicraft, feudal aristocracies and imperial bureaucracies. Ours is a more homogeneously modernized condition; we no longer are encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of the “West”). This is the sense in which we can affirm, either that modernism is characterized by a situation of incomplete modernization, or that Postmodernism is more modern than modernism itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 675

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines postmodernism in opposition to modernism: complete modernization vs. incomplete modernization — central to the reader’s task of periodizing style.
• QUESTION: The falsifiability question turns on this ‘everything has reached the same hour’ claim — is homogeneous modernity empirically testable, especially from non-Western vantage points?
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own position-mapping: ‘non-simultaneities’ as experienced in places like Pakistan (Home Boy) or Nigeria (Things Fall Apart) suggest the claim is Western-centric and contestable. — connects to: Lyotard defines postmodernism as a modernism that celebrates the loss of ordered totality; In postmodern fragmentation, the library becomes a contested space for forging historical identity. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2006