What is modernism, post-modernism, and modernity?

my diary desu explains them all

Ok, here goes a wall of text: I'll go chronologically from modernity, through modernism, to postmodernity to postmodernism.
Modernity
is the period after ~1700, approximately, sometimes we discuss things after the Renaissance as "early modern".
The major traits of modernity are: rapid technological and scientific development, globalization, print and then media culture etc.
However, modernity is also defined in a philosophical and historically specific way.
First, modernity was characterized by the entrenchment of humanism: valuing the role of man over nature or God.
Second, the centrality of man and "death of god" meant that societies underwent rapid changes around utopian ideologies around the question of how to live properly: how to organize society and how to understand, shape, or even fix humanity.

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>>9398895
Didn't you read the cartoon you posted?

>>9398899
Modernism
is when these ideologies became acutely felt across the whole of Western society: in arts and politics.
By "acutely felt" I mean the uprootings and chaos of the French, Communist and fascist and Nazi revolutions, the New Deal, the two world wars etc.
But also, the artistic avant garde, the concurrent revolutions in music, literature art etc.
When people discuss modernism in art and literature, they typically mean works from this period (1790-1950), experimental and interested in testing the limits and potentialities of either their medium or of expression in general.
All these works are typically driven by powerful impulses similar to those that drove political events of the time: the possibility of discovering the essence of humanity, of fundamentally changing the world, unlocking the mysteries if space and the human mind, fixing poverty or inequality or if you want to be more sinister, purging the human race of "impurities", or killing the ruling classes once and for all.
Modernism is of Freud and Picasso, but also of Hitler and Stalinism.
Postmodernity
is the period following WW2.
Postmodernity is sometimes called late modernism, or late capitalism. It is characterized by a growing, society-wide skepticism and even collapse in faith in modern values.
After the Holocaust, industrial progress no longer seemed to be hurtling humankind to a bright shiny future. After Nagasaki and Hiroshima, wars no longer seemed like glorious affairs (as the futurist manifesto proclaimed just 40 years prior), but carried the potential for total annihilation. Nothing that seemed certain for the modernist activists (be they capitalist or communist or fascist, or anarchist, or even cubist) of the 1920s, seemed as sure in 1960.
Postmodernity was also the time of the Cold War, when the ideologies that only activists lived acutely in the 1920s were suddenly issues of global importance. This made the issues seem more estranged: after the ideological purity of WW2 both the major Empires-- the Americans and Russians-- were suddenly more ambivalent: Russia because the Western way didn't seem nearly as evil as the information emerging about the Gulag.
The same was true in the West because the student and civil rights protest movements made clear that Western liberal democracy had obvious blind spots.
Postmodernity is the time of ambivalence following the certainties of modernism.

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>>9398904
Postmodernism

is the philosophical direction that develops as a critique of postmodernity through a critique of modernism.
Much the way postmodernity was just a historical continuation of modernity, postmodernism is a philosophical continuation of modernism.
Modernism is a perpetual declaration: "Man is this! Life is that! Society is the other!" etc.
Postmodernism is the same problems and the same issues, but in a questioning, not a declaratory mode : "Man is this? Life is that? Society is the other? etc"
Since the realization of modernist projects was often so cataclysmic: e.g. again the Holocaust, nukes etc, postmodernism attacked them at their root: claims to Truth.
If the central drive of modernism was finding Truth with a capitol T (and then using that truth to organize life in modernity), the central drive of postmodernism is showing that the very category of "Truth with a capitol T" is a modernist myth, and a very dangerous one at that.
Postmodernism is investment in ambivalence, it takes in the vast confusion of postmodernity and smiles contented: all is in flux, and therefore all is as it should be.
Postmodernism suggests that our societies' neurotic insistence on believing The Truth is both the root and consequence of our societies continuous efforts to impose contingent forms of The Truth through violence and indoctrination.
Postmodernism instead seeks free (well free-er) models of subjectivity and existence: this is a goal straight from modernism, but if modernism started with large "objective" truth claims, postmodernism starts with the subjective: the body, personal experience and identity etc.
e.g.
Take a medieval country, throw in a printing press, a steam engine and a brutal war machine hellbent on colonizing the globe and let it stir for a few centuries: welcome to modernity! As good as it gets!!
Within modernity, people attached to one of the many philosophies of Modernism declare marriage abolished and claim free love reigns! Or they declare Revolution on the ruling classes and claim that equality reigns.
Trouble ensues.
We never get free love, or equality and we keep marriage and the ruling class, but suddenly issues previously invisible (women's rights, existence of gay people, chronic social inequality etc.) become visible, if confusing. In fact, with the media revolution everything becomes visible, if confusing. Welcome to postmodernity! As good as it gets!(?)
Then people attached to one of the many philosophies of Postmodernism start asking pesky critical questions about gender inequality, consent, power etc, etc. We still don't get "free love", but people who were previously marginalized can express their love etc. etc.
same idea more or less applies to every part of Western society, to a certain point of view, in a historically specific context (can you tell I am a postmodernist yet?)

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