000ooo000ooo Habermas

I am still struggling a lot to really get a grip of what "postmodernity" is. Every author we've read has a lot to say about every other school of thought and a lot to say about what postmodernity is not, but no one has actually said what it is, what it means, or why it is useful. Given this the readings continue to confuse and, sometimes, frustrate me as authors go around in circles talking about movements and ideas that I know very little about while never actually coming to any concrete conclusions. However, with each author we read I find one more possibility for what postmodernity might be. This time I find an explanation in this quote on page 99: "This most recent form of modernism simply makes an abstract opposition between tradition and the present..." This thought seemed to be echoed throughout most of the article. There are things we deem "traditional", things that try to remake that tradition, and things that are genuinely new. Modernism then is the things that are genuinely new. This still begs the question, what is postmodernism?
From this the best explanation I can see is that postmodernism is a way of thinking that denies the dichotomy between "old and new" or "classic and modern". Postmodernism realizes that everything we do is connected to our past because everything that we know, believe, fear, desire, etc. all comes from both our personal and cultural history. Thus, any distinction we draw between classic and modern is both untrue and useless. We need to recognize our connection to the past and incorporate that into the present. We need to do this because our past is all we know. Even someone who thinks they are being entirely modern and breaking off from the past is using ideas, signifiers, and concepts from the past. This is how we operate and we can't escape from it. If we totally left the past behind us w would have nothing left, nothing would have any meaning to us. Hence, there is no modern, no classic or tradition. Everything we have done accumulates into the here and now and gives us the broad category of postmodern.