Postmodernism precedes and enables modernism rather than following it.

Evidence

What, then, is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work of the questions hurled at the rules of image and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday (modo, modo, Petronius used to say), must be suspected. What space does Cezanne challenge? The Impressionists’. What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cezanne’s. What presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must make a painting, be it cubist. And Buren questions that other presupposition which he believes had survived untouched by the work of Duchamp: the place of presentation of the work. In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 502

Categorization

• XREF: Directly answers the reader’s core question: this is the conceptual target Jameson’s ‘postmodernism is late capitalist culture’ thesis contradicts. Jameson sees postmodernism as a periodizing break; Lyotard sees it as the perpetual nascent state of modernism. — connects to: End-of-epoch crisis feeling was endemic to modernism, not postmodernism. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 62; Toynbee introduced ‘post-modern’ as an epochal category, not an aesthetic one. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 12; Modernism was named retroactively while postmodernism preceded its practices — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 238 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Lyotard’s counterintuitive definition: postmodern is not a sequel to modern but its precondition and constant state.
• SEED: A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern’ — an essay angle on how period labels disguised as chronology are really logical priorities.

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor #contradicts (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 236
• Two further positions reject the modern-postmodern break, dissolving postmodernism into modernism #contradicts (0.85)