Towards a poetics of postmodernism: simulation, parody, and history

I want to conclude by outlining some of the links between postmodernism and the expressionist avant-garde, and by discussing some of the central issues defining the various cultural formations of the modern and the postmodern period.

The modernist movement is characterized by its all-encompassing fascination with innovation and “the shock of the new.” As Habermas has noted in a key essay in the debate on postmodernism, “Modernity – An Incomplete Project,” from the time of the dispute between the “Ancients and Moderns” the term “modern” has regularly expressed “the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new.” Modernism similarly constitutes itself primarily in relation to the tradition it simultaneously shrugs off, that is by making “an abstract opposition between tradition and the present.” Consequently, it defines itself by negating a past seen as extending up to all but the “dernier cri.” For the “distinguishing mark of such modern works is ‘the new’ which will be overcome and made obsolete through the novelty of the next style” (4). Paradoxically it is this sense of being authentically “modern” and independent of the past that now articulates the work's claim to belong to the “classics.”