Note on the dates of postmodernism

 

Sometimes you will find textbooks, magazine articles, etc., that date postmodernism as having arisen in the 1960s.  I think this is a perfectly silly, stupid, and arbitrary way of dating it, which should be completely scrapped.  If, by postmodernism, we mean something that arose in the 1960s, then postmodernism is truly meaningless, a totally arbitrary non-concept.  (And even in the sources that cite 1960 as the beginning of postmodernism usually hedge their bets, by putting in disclaimers that say something along the lines of "but we can find precursors of postmodernism even earlier" yadda yadda.)

If postmodernism is to be a meaningful division of cultural history, then the most reasonable way of sketching it would be to say that postmodernism gradually arose during the great crisis that spanned from 1914 to 1948, and that it had been fully established by 1945, with the development of nuclear weaponry and the defeat of that particular wave of fascism.  I would also say that postmodernism had ended by about 1992.  Finally, despite it's silly and unfortunate name, I would consider postmodernism to be a specific phase within the larger history of modernism.

 

That having been said, however, something did happen starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s - what has been called the cognitive revolution.  That is, the development of what is called "cognitive psychology" - that is, the move away from behaviorist trends not only in psychology but also in anthropology, in economics, in politics, and so on, and which would have consequences for almost every field of study and every human endeavor - art, music, sports, architecture, etc., etc..