What Do We Do With Progress Conceptually?

The title of the book, The End of Progress, certainly makes it sound like I'm trying to get rid of it completely. It also has another meaning, which is that I was trying to think about what are the ends that the discourse of progress serves and contemporary critical theory. On my reading, the whole normative edifice doesn't work unless this claim about modernity as a story of historical progress is there. So we can't really rethink the notion of progress and critical theory without also thinking the understanding of normativity.