Postmodernism Timeline

Jane Jacobs's 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a sustained critique of urban planning as it had developed within modernism, playing a major role in turning public opinion against modernist planners, notably Robert Moses.

Image source: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

In 1981, Vivienne Westwood's first runway show, "Pirate", merged British history, 18th- and 19th-century dress, and African textile design, with a rap and ethnic music soundtrack—a hallmark postmodern pastiche in fashion.

Image source: Vivienne Westwood

Madonna's self-aware constructs of gender and identity, and classic film references in music videos like "Material Girl" (1984), made her a favorite of cultural theorists who saw her as "enacting postmodernist models of subjectivity," embodying fragmentation, pastiche, retrospection, anti-foundationalism, and de-differentiation.

Image source: Madonna

Issey Miyake's 1985 dreadlocks hat "offered an immediate, yet impermanent, 'multi-culti' fashion experience," exemplifying postmodern fashion's playful mixing of cultural references and rejection of fixed identities.

Image source: Issey Miyake

Madonna's "Express Yourself" (1989) continued her self-aware play with gender and identity, reinforcing her status among cultural theorists as an embodiment of postmodernist models of subjectivity, including her analyzed "subversion of the subversion of the subversion of the male gaze."

Image source: Express Yourself (Madonna song)

In 1992, the Los Angeles Times reported on "a group of increasingly influential psychologists – postmodern psychologists seems to be the name that is sticking", who had concluded that "the American conception of an isolated, unified self" does not exist.

Writing in 1993, Stephen Brown observed that "Marketers know about consumers, consumers know about marketers…" and stated that the postmodern approach rejects attempts to impose order and work in silos, reshaping marketing theory.

Image source: Postmodern marketing

One manifestation of postmodernism in fashion explored alternatives to conventional elegance: Rei Kawakubo's Spring/Summer 1997 collection featured "dresses asymmetrically padded with goose down, creating bumps in unexpected areas of the body," challenging norms of the body and beauty.

Image source: Rei Kawakubo

In 2001, Kenneth Gergen, a pioneer in postmodern psychological theory, identified "emphasis on the individual mind, an objectively knowable world, and language as carrier of truth" as the cornerstones of traditional modernist psychology, which postmodern psychology challenged.

Kuhn's 1962 publication laid the basis for what became known as the Science Wars. In his framework, assumptions introduced by new paradigms make them "mutually incommensurable" with previous ones, although they may provide improved explanations of the material world.

Image source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Although postmodern criticism drew on philosophical ideas early on, "postmodernism" was only introduced to the expressly philosophical lexicon by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, which critiqued grand narratives.

Image source: Jean-François Lyotard

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a prominent critic of philosophical postmodernism, argued in his 1985 work The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that postmodern thinkers were caught in a performative contradiction: their critiques of modernity rely on concepts and methods that are themselves products of modern reason.

Image source: Jürgen Habermas

The French political philosophers Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry began a series of responses to the interpretation of postmodernism associated with French thought; these responses inspired physicist Alan Sokal's famous hoax.

Image source: Luc Ferry

Inspired by Renaut and Ferry's critique, physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical paper to a postmodernist journal, where it was accepted and published in 1996—an episode central to the Science Wars.

Image source: Sokal affair

The connection between postmodernism, posthumanism, and cyborgism led to a challenge to postmodernism, for which the terms Post-postmodernism and postpoststructuralism were first coined in 2003.

McHale's "What Was Postmodernism?" (2007) followed Raymond Federman's lead in using the past tense when discussing postmodernism, signaling a growing sense that the movement had ended or transformed.

A 2020 study investigated the reported transition from postmodernism to post-postmodernism, examining those "changing social conditions that lead the consumer to consume in a particular manner" and how consumption culture has shifted beyond postmodern frameworks.

In 2021, psychologist Jan Smedslund discussed how psychology tried for decades to emulate the natural sciences and address unpredictable individual behavior, reflecting ongoing postmodern-influenced skepticism toward universal scientific models of mind.

Writing in 2022, Steven Connor argues that, despite continuing reports of its death or imminent demise, postmodernism has instead undergone a kind of disappearance into the general culture by way of assimilation—its ideas now so widespread they no longer appear distinctively postmodern.