A highly contested term used to signify a critical distance from modernism. Since it first came to prominence in the mid-1970s, it has given rise to a vast body of literature in virtually every discipline in the humanities and social sciences. Broadly speaking, though, it has been used in three main ways: (i) to name the present historical period; (ii) to name a specific style in art and architecture; (iii) to name a point of rupture or disjuncture in epistemology (for this reason it is often, mistakenly, equated with post-structuralism and deconstruction). Attempts have been made to standardize usage so that when the historical period is intended the term âpostmodernityâ is used, whereas if it is the aesthetic dimension that is at issue the term âpostmodernismâ is used, with the term âpostmodernâ being reserved for epistemological references. Pedagogically useful as this standardization of terminology is, the uptake of it is very far from universal. In The Origins of Postmodernity (1998), Perry Anderson traces the first appearance of the notion of postmodernism to the work of the literary critic Frederico de OnĂs, who used the word âpostmodernismoâ (in a foreword to a collection of contemporary Hispanophone poetry he edited in 1934) to describe what he saw as a short-lived reactionary reflux within modernism itself (i.e. precisely the opposite meaning to the one it would subsequently attain). Although it gained widespread usage in Spanish and Portuguese criticism, both in Europe and Latin America, it didnât pass into the Anglophone world until 1954, when the great English historian Arnold Toynbee used it in an essentially negative way in the eighth volume of his A Study of History to name the period beginning with the Franco-Prussian War (1870â1). However, Toynbeeâs deployment of the term did not catch on. It was, rather, the contemporaneous usage of the term---initially only in private correspondence---by the âBlack Mountain Poetsâ Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, who were the first to use it in a sense consistent with how the term is understood today, that was to prove influential. Olson and Creeley used the term âpost-modernâ to describe both a shift in history and a specific poetic project they developed in relation to that shift. But neither poet produced a durable doctrine and the term fell into disuse again, only to be picked up a few years later at the dawn of the 1960s by two scions of the New York Left, C. Wright Mills and Irving Howe. If in the hands of Olson and Creeley the term postmodern had acquired a certain affirmative meaning, Mills and Howe quickly restored its pejorative sense: they mobilized the term to describe a general slackening of commitment to the political ideals embodied in the notions of communism and socialism. At the end of the 1960s, its meaning was once more reversed by the literary critic Leslie Fiedler who used it in a CIA-sponsored conference to celebrate the emergence of a new âyouth-cultureâ sensibility prioritizing personal expression and civil rights over work and the needs of the state. To this point, the use of the term postmodern was sporadic and inconsistent, functioning more as a suggestive adjective than a viable concept. But that soon changed. In 1971, Egyptian-born literary and cultural critic Ihab Hassan produced a vast survey of works (across all the arts, but focused particularly on literature and music) that in his view could no longer be described as modern because their organizing impetus was radically different from modernism, and had therefore to be labelled postmodern. Interestingly, his key exhibits of this new style were John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Buckminster Fuller, all names associated with Black Mountain College. Hassan argued that these artists (together with the likes of Ashbery, Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, and Warhol) were anarchic in spirit and inclined towards playful indeterminacy rather than the Olympian aloofness which he associated with modernism. Although willing to see the postmodern as a form of âepistemic breakâ (a term he adapted from Foucault, Michel) akin to other forms of the avant-garde, such as Dada and Surrealism, he refused to see it as a historic break and pulled back from making any connection between the new art form and changes in society. Thus, for Hassan postmodernism was essentially a passing fad in the history of the arts and it was soon overtaken by what he called post-postmodernism. It took the architectural historian Charles Jencks to connect the dots and link the artistic avant-garde with social change and contrive a vision of the postmodern that would finally capture the attention of the mainstream. Somewhat gnomically, Jencks pronounced that the previous era came to an end at precisely 3.32 p.m. on 15 July 1972, with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe social housing estate in St Louis, designed by the architect responsible for the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, Minoru Yamasaki (this coincidence has not gone unremarked, and there are those who suggest that it is the destruction of the latter that actually marks the true advent of postmodernity). Jencks reasoned that the destruction of these buildings marked the end of the idea (largely associated with utopian architects like Le Corbusier) that social change could be effected through architecture, and more generally the end of the idea that it is governmentâs role to attempt to effect social change. It also signalled the acceptance of the idea that the global market is the true arbiter of the social. Jencks saw in this gesture a refreshing willingness to break with the past and it was this aspect of postmodernism that his writing emphasized. But he also hoped that the proliferation of new styles which this changed attitude to tradition enabled would give rise to a kind of polyphony harmony of differences. Now widely used in architectural and artistic circles, the term postmodern was still seen as referring primarily to a new style or fashion in the aesthetic realm and was regarded by many (including those like Hassan who initially touted the term) as suspiciously modish. The next statement of the term would deepen its penetration considerably and apply it to the realm of knowledge itself thus giving the term the intellectual respectability it had hitherto lacked. Commissioned by the Conseil des UniversitĂ©s of the government of Quebec, Lyotard, Jean-Françoisâs La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (1979), translated as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) transformed postmodernism into a concept to be reckoned with, and initiated a two-decade long debate about its existence. Lyotard famously defined the postmodern as incredulity towards what he called grand narrative. By this he meant (i) the idea that revolution was inevitable and that it would bring with it beneficial social change; and (ii) the Enlightenment ideal that progress in social terms would be achieved through technological advancement. The credibility of these grand narratives was destroyed by World War II, which revealed the hollowness of both---revolution gave rise to Stalinism and the Enlightenment gave rise to Nazism (here Lyotardâs argument extends several key tenets of Frankfurt School thinker Adorno, Theodorâs work). The destruction of the grand narratives saw the spawning of a multiplicity of âlittle narrativesâ or what Lyotard more commonly referred to as language games (a notion he adapted from Wittgenstein, Ludwig). Incommensurable with one another, these language games could neither be subsumed by an overarching or totalizing concept such as contradiction nor integrated by processes like Habermas, JĂŒrgenâs notion of consensus or Niklas Luhmannâs systems theory. Lyotard is careful to acknowledge that not all social relations are of this type, but he nonetheless insists that language games are the minimum form of social relation. The resulting image of society, which Lyotard terms ârealismâ, is that of an agonistics or even a polemics in which each language game must compete for legitimacy. Unable to appeal to pre-existing grand narratives for its legitimacy, knowledge now makes do by citing its efficiency and its practicality. It has to be said that Lyotard paints a grim portrait of the university system dominated by economic rationalism, which is only very partially offset by the faith he has in avant-garde art to keep alive thoughts of the future by, as he puts it, âwaging war on totalityâ. Although Lyotard speaks of postmodernism as a historical condition and links the state of knowledge corresponding to that condition to the kinds of social changes theorized by Bell, Daniel and others as the emergence of a *post-industrial society, he does not name the cause of the change. A decade later British Marxist geographer Harvey, David would give a much more thorough answer to this problem in his The Condition of Postmodernity (1989). The first critic to provide an economic answer to the problem Lyotard raised was however Marxist cultural critic Jameson, Fredric. Jamesonâs work on postmodernism was developed in instalments over a period of more than 20 years. One can read traces of it in Marxism and Form (1971) and The Political Unconscious (1981), though in these instances he used the terms consumer society, post-industrial society, and society of the spectacle. He first used the term postmodernism in a talk entitled âPostmodernism and Consumer Societyâ given at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art in the autumn of 1982. A fuller version of the essay was subsequently published in New Left Review in the spring of 1984 under the new title of âPostmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalismâ. This essay has been enormously influential and for many it offers the definitive, but by no means infallible, definition of postmodernism. Jameson builds on Ernest Mandelâs argument in Der SpĂ€tkapitalismus (1972), translated as Late Capitalism (1975), that contemporary capitalism is an intensification of trends in global economics detected by Marx, rather than proof that Marx was wrong (as Daniel Bell and others had argued). Rejecting any suggestion that capitalism has somehow come to an end, radically changed, or worse attained its apotheosis, Jamesonâs thesis is that postmodern culture is the superstructure expression of late capitalism (meaning simply the current state of the mode of production), which for Jameson means a global situation of economic, military, and political dominance by the US. Jameson readily acknowledges that postmodern texts are recognizably different from modern texts, but in contrast to a lot of critics he is unwilling to accept that the symptomatic features of postmodernism are purely textual in origin. Culture, for Jameson, cannot be dissociated from the economic and political situation in which it must make its way because the traditional Marxism distinction between them (i.e. the base and superstructure model) has in fact collapsed. Postmodernism, Jameson argues, is the âcultural revolutionâ needed to enable contemporary society to adjust and respond to these changes. His catalogue of five symptoms of postmodernism---the waning of affect, pastiche, hysterical sublime, geopolitical aesthetic, and a mutation in built space that has discombobulated our global cognitive map---have to be read against this background. For many, however, Jamesonâs account of postmodernism is too âtotalizingâ (which certain careless critics have equated with âtotalitarianismâ, though in reality it means nothing more sinister than trying to account for the historical situation as a whole) and there remains a strong counter-current which resists his comprehensive overview in favour of a highly localized aesthetic and/or epistemological definition. Canadian literary critic, Linda Hutcheon, is probably the leading exponent of the purely aesthetic definition of postmodernism, while the late American philosopher Rorty, Richard was probably the principal authority on the epistemological version of postmodernism. Further Reading: P. Anderson The Origins of Postmodernity (1998). D. Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity (1990). F. Jameson Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). J-F. Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984).