By 1959 the postmodern was a pejorative marker of cultural decline

Evidence

By the end of the fifties, when the term reappeared, it had passed into other — more or less casual — hands, as a negative marker of what was less, not more, than modern. In 1959 C. Wright Mills and Irving Howe — not coincidentally: they belonged to a common milieu of the New York Left — both employed it in this sense. The sociologist, in more caustic-fashion, used the term to denote an age in which the modern ideals of liberalism and socialism had all but collapsed, as 13 reason and freedom parted company in a postmodern society of blind drift and empty conformity. The critic, in milder tones, borrowed it to describe a contemporary fiction unable to sustain modernist tension with a surrounding society whose class divisions had become increasingly amorphous with post-war prosperity. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 26

Categorization

• DEFINE: Documents the exact reversal: from Olson’s affirmative avant-garde sense to Mills and Howe’s negative one within a decade.
• XREF: Stakes out the Mills vs. Fiedler polarity that today’s periodization disputes still orbit — directly feeds the reader’s Jameson framing. — connects to: Postmodernism’s case rests on a radical break dated to 1960 — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 35

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism’s case rests on a radical break dated to 1960 #qualifies (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 35