Modernism and newness

A thought after an interesting talk by Michael North yesterday on the catchphrase, "Make it new!".
One branch of what will become "modernism" happens when the oppositions between 1) the general and the particular, 2) the abstract and the concrete; 3) the old and the new begin not just to coalesce but to join together under the force of a will to what is in effect a cultural revolution.  Finally these come together for political reasons: the sense that the twentieth century (and the first world war) will mark the decisive failure of progressive democratic humanism. I am thinking here of the modernism invented by Eliot, Pound and Hulme in London 1910-1920 and which will lead to imagism and to Eliotian literary criticism; not to Mallarmean modernism for instance.
Two other elements of this structure are worth noting: it seems to rely on a physiological pyschological extension of Lockean empiricism for which, to put it too crudely, propositional thoughts, which tend to cliche, are generalised reductions of sensations. (That's how the particular and the concrete come together).
And it thinks of the "new" either as an objectiving subtraction from the abstract, the general, the cliche, or as a recombination of particulars (a montage, a constellation).