Habermas begins his paper with the idea that our sense of modern is liquid. "With varying content, the term "modern" again and again expresses the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from old to the new." (Habermas p.3) Modern, according to this definition, is not a set time period, but a sense of the current age. What is modern now will be antiquated at some point in the future. With that in mind, how does anything become postmodern? Is postmodern not the next step in the continuum of the modern, simply the next modern?
Criticism seems to line the very fabric of early postmodernist thought. Every essay oozes with a sense that the world that we live is the horrid place of consumerism and faux-reality. Nothing can be done for the self, everything one does is for the gain of some other, or just done out of some robotic impulse to the culture of the time. Durand, in his response to Habermas, states that "those who refuse to reexamine the rules of art pursue successful careers in mass conformism by communicating, by means of the 'correct rules,' the endemic desire for reality with objects and situations of gratifying it. Pornography is the use of photography and film to such an end." The quote is dripping with contempt and dread. Contempt that seems to transcend the art to those that produce it and dread for the people of the world that accept this form of artwork. Economics isn't the dismal science, postmodernism is. If some greater culture machines plans out my every movement, why should I exist? Where is the importance of the individual? In postmodernism, at least so far, the individual has lost control of himself. He finds himself obedient to the will of "the man". Does this really sound like the world we live in? Doesn't some part of your brain want to revolt against this type of thought?
To confine postmodern theory to the realm of "contempt and dread" is certainly one reading of an amalgam of texts. But let's take a step back:
1) Which "postmodern" theory are you talking about?
2) What are the limitations of generalizing an entire discursive trajectory through a single lens?
3) Do the low-points of postmodern thought legitimize its modern counterpart?
Certainly there are important critiques to be had: agency is in trouble; not enough credence is given to the material benefits of capitalistic development; much theory does strike an unnervingly elitist stance. However, your analysis is just as totalizing as the postmodern currents you're criticizing. I, at least, find that many contemporary theorists provide productive outlets for critical thought and intervention that go far beyond the caricatural pessimism that you cite above.
Derrida comes to mind as a theorist who was whole-heartedly committed to finding modes of theory and practice that oppose dominant paradigms without being wholly reducible to that oppositional position - and thus provide spaces for creating as opposed to simply striking down. That being said, often the first step in building something new is exploding (in many sense of the term) the old. As Nietzsche says, "A pessimistic teaching and way of thinking, an ecstatic nihilism, can under certain conditions be indispensable precisely to the philosopher - as a mighty pressure and hammer with which he breaks and removes the degenerate and decaying."
In this vein, I'm glad you brought up economics. In an age where neoliberal discourse is not dismal but, in fact, overly triumphant, the paramount importance of critical theory becomes clear: to sincerely evaluate if the modern truth-claims we hold dear (e.g., technology will save us all, profitable firms good for society, freedom means that the government simply doesn't interven in my life) are, in actuality, hegemonic chimeras.
Lyotard, too, rejects overly pessimistic appraisals of 'the situation.' I'm thinking in particular of the last two paragraphs of our 'The Postmodern Condition' reading (and maybe 'rejects' was too strong a verb - at any rate, he suggests that the 'mourning process' is over).
But I have a question in regard to that: To what extent, if any extent, is Lyotard's optimism - i.e. his faith that 'most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative,' and that legitimation can now 'spring from linguistic practice and communicational interaction' (41) - mappable onto the optimism Derrida outlines at the end of 'Structure, Sign, and Play'? (For reference: 'joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin' [292], all of which reads basically like the 'School's Out For Summer' of critical theory.) The reason I ask is that the pessimism Lyotard addresses certainly is (i.e. mappable onto the pessimism Derrida addresses), and I mean down to the figure of speech (where 'saddened, negative, nostalgic, and guilty' : 'the lost or impossible presence of the origin' :: 'process of mourning' : 'nostalgia for the lost narrative'). But if Lyotard's optimism is simply the affirmation Derrida outlines, and his pessimism simply the sadness/guilt/nostalgia Derrida outlines, is it significant that Lyotard conceives of these interpretations linearly (we've passed out of pessimism into optimism) whereas Derrida conceives of them as being in some way bound up in one another (they are 'two sides of the same thinking,' 'lived simultaneously' but 'irreducible,' sharing some common ground that constitutes the //differance//of their irreducible difference)? And if Lyotard is content to conclude with optimism as a linear end, whereas Derrida calls for a (monstrous!) gestation process via the intra-activity of optimism and pessimism's common ground, are they (i.e. Lyotard and Derrida) in some tacit debate on this point?