Pre Class: What is Postmodernism? Jaime Saure

During the establishment of the bourgeoisie, there was a group of gatherers called The Salons. The gatherings were assumed for conversational purposes of debating politics "under the cover of realism". They were commonly associated with French philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries, especially during the Enlightenment, although still questionable that they were a part of the 'Public Sphere'. Capitalism brought derealization among familiarities of objects, societal roles that "realistic representations" were merely used as nostalgic techniques for suffering. And then he makes the claim that Classicism was destabilized reality that only offered experimentation without experience. However, I thought Renaissance Classicism was the introduction of humanism, depictive realism, application of mathematics to art (for example)?

What I believe Lyotard is trying to get the reader to grasp is the inevitability of mechanical and industrial tools that are not replacing the former, but substituting it as a new craft, that it is the reality of progression. "Thus it is possible to ascribe the dialectics of the avant-gardes to the challenge posed by the realisms of industry and mass communication to painting and the narrative arts."

Discussion in class will hopefully bring better clarity to the rest of what Lyotard is representing, but in the section discussing 'The Postmodern', I found an interesting statement. "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." 

If postmodernism is the developmental state establishing future potential, then does that mean the modern is what carries out the realization of philosophically induced ideas and formulations, without being "governed by preestablished rules"(46)?