If we take modernity as a social phenomenon, that is, as the experience of consciously living in a changing present, then we have never been more modern. But, as its reliance on rupture shows, modernity isn’t merely a timeless sociological category: it is also a period marked by an attitude toward history. To resort to a rather complex construction, modernity is a historiographic concept referring to a period that defined itself by a changed concept of history. Nor is postmodernism different in this respect. If it treats history as pastiche—abandoning progress and mocking modernism’s teleological goals—the pains it takes to do so and the degree to which it insists on understanding itself as a supercession of modernism—underscores that it continues to rely upon history for its very existence.
