Modernity versus Postmodernity

Habermas, Jürgen. (1981). New German Critique, 22 (Special Issue on Modernism, 3-14.

Habermas's primary focus lies in a disturbed communicative infrastructure of everyday life, which is caused in the process of social modernization for economic growth and accomplishments of the state by subordinating human life-world to systems' imperatives.

In this ground, he sheds light on cultural modernity, which he notes stems from a doubt of the project of modernity and criticism of modernity. Habermas draws the conceptual framework of cultural modernity from Max Weber, who characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason of religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres: science, morality and art. From this foundation, Habermas finds the root of the modernity in the project of Enlightenment in the 18th century. According to Habermas, the Enlightenment, which aimed at the rationalization of every day life by developing objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art under the control of specialists, came to impoverish real life and diminish everyday communication.

Observing surrealists' approach to art, negation of art, Habermas asserts, "nothing remains form a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory does not follow". Looking for alternatives, Habermas contests that the project of modernity has not yet fulfilled, suggesting that the project should relink modern culture with everyday life and a new kind of societal modernization is a prior condition of the cultural reconnection.

Habermas distinguishes three conceptions surrounding modenity: the antimodernism of young conservatives, the remodernism of old conservatives and the postmodernism of neoconservatives.[my emphasis... This analysis is somewhat ambiguous.]