JŸrgen Habermas, 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project' in Hal Foster, Postmodern Culture, pp.3-15.

Preempting Jameson's preference for the phrase late-modernity rather than postmodernity, Habermas responds to ideas of postmodernity and posthistory in this essay 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project' (written as a talk in 1980 in receipt of the Theodor Adorno prize by the city of Frankfurt and later published under the title 'Modernity versus Postmodernity'). Firstly, and with some irony, he looks historically at the idea of modernity and traces the term 'modern', from its latin roots 'modernus' used in the 5th century to distinguish the present Christian times from the former Pagan past. To add some more detail here: Raymond Williams charts its early usage in English as something like 'just now', nearer the term 'contemporary' (which until the 19th century was 'co-temporary' - making it more 'of the same period' than 'of our own immediate time'). This is consistent with the association of the 'modern' in opposition to the 'ancient', but generally only in the 19th century did it become a positive term associated with improvement rather than mere alteration that needed further justification (Williams, 208-9). This for Habermas, serves to express the common understanding of 'modernity' as a transitional state between the old and the new - appearing at times of acknowledged renewal and fundamental change. Importantly, this coming obsession with 'the new' and the 19th century kind of aesthetic modernity is distinguished from being merely 'stylish' and therefore easily outmoded and in turn superseded - or should I say needing constant upgrades. Contemporary consumer culture is entirely contradictory in this respect as it is both obsessed with nostalgia and at the same time with the idea of almost instantaneous obsolescence, and can therefore be dismissed as ahistorical. New technology is the exemplary expression of this wanton post-modern consumerist condition of newness never being allowed to settle in the present, and without this remains useless unless attached to a concept of betterment. Habermas says 'the emphatically modern document no longer borrows this power of being a classic from the authority of a past epoch; instead a modern work becomes a classic because it has once been authentically modern' (4).
 
Aesthetic modernity is characterised by a changed consciousness of the time and particularly through the metaphors of the vanguard and avant-garde. In this conception, newness is potentially revolutionary. He says: 

'The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. ... [but] this anticipation of an undefined future and the cult of the new mean in fact the exaltation of the present. The new time consciousness... does more than express the experience of mobility in society, of acceleration in history, of discontinuity in everyday life. The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses a longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.' (5) 

In this way he accounts for the interruption of the continuum of history as 'modernity revolts against the normalising functions of tradition'; not ahistorical at all but rather against false history and historicism - in a version of posthistoricism even. He is drawing upon Benjamin's concept of 'Jetztzeit' in articulating the present as a moment of revelation. But this approach appears to be waning according to Habermas and he cites Peter BŸrger's notion of the 'post avant-garde' that appear to repeating the failed gestures of the early twentieth century (a trajectory more recently refashioned in Eric Hobsbawm 'Behind the Times' - this is not a classic text at all) - think of all the limp neo-Duchampian work of the past decade. And yet inherent in the any term that carries the prefix 'post', is that it suggests not a distinct break 9otherwise it would simply be a new word) but in some degree a continuation of the project it seeks to replace - Modernity as 'an incomplete project' is a case in point. This is in keeping with the classical root of the term itself according to the earlier etymological sources. The specific dangers of the distinct break thesis are covered elsewhere in this study as neoconservative, ahistorical and apolitical fashion. Having made such a bold statement, there are of course reasons to dispute the project of cultural and aesthetic modernity too, but this has always been the case with its internal critiques expressed in debates over art's autonomy from wider culture (although to questionable effect it must be admitted). 

The question of whether art is best served as a critical mirror to society or whether the separation of art and everyday life should be reconciled is a complex and contradictory undertaking and I hesitate to begin to engage with it as it lies outside the scope of my study. Following Adorno and no doubt with postmodernist art practice in mind (but citing the anarchism of dada and surrealism), Habermas is keen to point to the contradictions in the dissolution of distinctions between art and life, along with attempts to declare that everything is art and everyone is an artist, as the critical function of art requires its relative autonomy. I'm not so sure that one should conflate art's separation from society quite so clearly with modernity but it probably is the case that the negation of art merely destabilises its possible critical function outside of art (and this would be consistent with Adorno's view - (remember this was first delivered in receipt of the prize in honour of Adorno). Adorno's negative committment proposes aesthetics as potentially subversive but under present conditions, even this stance is less sure - or rather 'its criticality is now largely illusory (and so instrumental)' (Foster, 1993: xiii). Habermas calls this 'the false negation of culture' as for him reification is a much more complex business than a concern with mere art or the radical practice of individual artists. (1993: 11) 

Reification, remains a useful concept under consumer capitalism, more in fact a precondition, as traditionally the 'transformation of social relations into things' but also the 'effacement of the traces of production' (Jameson, 1991: 314), leaving people to happily consume free of guilt. Getting your computer connected requires disconnection from such productive issues, ironically displaced to another part of the globe that is supposedly made more accessible. And despite any new descriptions of the blurring of consumers and producers in trendy terms like users, reification continues to emphasis their separation in 'a Promethean inferiority complex in front of the machine' (Jameson quoting Gunther Anders, 1991: 315). In the cultural arena, it is as much a case of deification as reification; people or things only become part of the canon when they are already already dead, on the walls or in the vaults of the museum/masoleum, dead monuments to dead people and dead ideas. The idea of a radical canon is paradoxical - even Che Guevara and Mao ended up on T-shirts. The contemporary arts is full of tired old reproduction of all the worst aspects of modernist practice - individualist and self-validating to efface all traces of production. But rather than give up on modernity, Habermas's suggestion is to learn from past mistakes and from previous attempts at negating modernity. The problem is the way that these previous failures have become a defence for conservative positions that make resistance appear quite hopeless - he cites the premodernism, anti-modernism (and its notion of decentred subjectivity), and postmodernism (by now collapsed into anti-modernism or even worse post-postmodernism) as symptoms of this tendency (dare I add trans-modernism?).

The Habermas essay was in contradistinction (at the time) to the other essays in the collection Postmodern Culture (or The Anti-Aesthetic, its American title) edited by Hal Foster (1993) although perhaps with similar purpose. Taking its cue from the incorporation of Modernism's once oppositional project, the collection of essays sought to revitalise this critical stance by rejecting the conservative stance that Habermas identifies. The difficulties were highlighted from the start: 'How can we exceed the modern? How can we break with a program that makes a value out of crisis (modernism), or progress beyond the idea of Progress (modernity), or transgress the ideology of the transgressive (avant-gardism)?' (Foster, 1993: vii) Taking its cue from Habermas, and the idea that modernity has lost its fixed historical reference, the idea was to trace the limits and the extent of change. Foster is keen to oppose the view that postmodernism is necessarily relativist or that it signals the end of ideology or history and that the engine of late-capitalism is so highly developed, so 'total', that resistance is impossible. However, he agrees that definitions revolve around the conflicts of new and old modes of cultural and economic exchange, and identifies a postmodernism of resistance that connects the cultural and social; whereas a postmodernism of reaction disconnects these spheres (x). he claims it tackles the 'false normativity' of the conservative form of postmodernism but isn't this what Habermas claimed was the project of critical modernism. Such contradictions abound. The term 'anti-aesthetic' (the alternative title in the States) is of further interest in this regard, as although intended to engage political questioning, it uses the modernist technique of 'negation'. For me, this simply suggests some hope in the debate (a well-worn one over modernism versus postmodernism) and stresses that conflict is in itself a useful preoccupation, and terms like modernity (with or without whatever adage) need to remain under suspicion but only after an understanding of its dynamics of resistance.