Habermas’s critique gave postmodernity its first major negative pole in mainstream thought.

Evidence

The Postmodern Condition was published in the autumn of 1979. Exactly a year later, Jürgen Habermas delivered his address Modernity — an Incomplete Project in Frankfurt, on the occasion of his award of the Adorno prize by the city fathers. The lecture occupies a peculiar place in the discourse of postmodernity. Its substance touches only to a limited degree on the postmodern; yet the effect was to highlight it as a henceforth standard referent. This paradoxical outcome was largely, of course, due to Habermas’s standing in the Anglo-Saxon world as premier European philosopher of the age. But it was also a function of the critical stance of his intervention. For the first time since the take-off of the idea of postmodernity in the late seventies, it received abrasive treatment. If the emergence of an intellectual terrain typically requires a negative pole for its productive tension, it was Habermas who supplied it. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s larger Jameson debate reading — Habermas’s ‘negative pole’ framing parallels how oppositional critics anchor intellectual movements, also relevant to the incommensurability disputes around Lyotard.
• QUESTION: The claim that Habermas wrote in ignorance of Lyotard seems oddly well-documented given their pairing; worth checking how the Lyotard-Habermas debate became canonized despite this.