Postmodernism as the Agent of the Avant-Garde

The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
by Jean Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard writes:
In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
(p. 79)

My interpretation:
Modernism does not stand still. It changes; it undergoes a process. For the sake of clarity, it will help to begin describing the process in the second of three stages—the conventional. This is the accepted standard of modernity—the status quo. However, convention is over-replicated. It becomes a simulacrum of itself and, subsequently, vapid.

The withering of the conventional always inspires invention. The antagonistic nature of discourse promotes constant revival. The stale must be made fresh. The conventional is attacked.

This period of the avant-garde constitutes the postmodern. It is the power that disrupts and redistributes discourse into new games. These disruptions form the beginnings (not the end) of the next stage of modernism which, in turn, will wither and incite further renewal; hence the declaration that "the generations precipitate themselves."

That is also why a work must enter the world as the postmodern before becoming the modern—invention, convention, and disintegration.

[Relevant Link: http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/Lyotard.htm]