Lyotard redefined the postmodern as a perennial inner renewal of the modern

Evidence

The postmodern did not come after the modern, but was a motion of internal renewal within it from the first — that current whose response to the shattering of the real was the opposite of nostalgia for its unity: rather a jubilant acceptance of the freedom of invention it released. But this was no luxuriance. The avant-garde art Lyotard singled out for approval a year later was Minimalism — the sublime as privation. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 74

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Lyotard’s crucial recategorization of postmodernity as a movable principle inside modernism rather than a period after it — essential for the periodization debate.
• XREF: Directly contrasts with Jameson’s period-based postmodernism; the reader is reading this as entry to exactly that dispute. — connects to: Lyotard defines postmodernism as a modernism that celebrates the loss of ordered totality; Certain modernist precursors already contained what became postmodern; Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: the word ‘postmodern’ as a battlefield between a philosophical perennialism (Lyotard) and a historical periodization (Jameson) — a tidy intellectual-history essay.

Broader Connections

• The modern’s present-absolute nature generates recurring postmodern markers #expands (0.88) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 28
• Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives #qualifies (0.85) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65
• Defining Postmodernism as internal to Modernism abandons its periodizing claim #expands (0.85)
• Certain modernist precursors already contained what became postmodern #qualifies (0.82)
• Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor #corroborates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 236