Short answers, pulled from the story.
The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex occurred on the 15th of July 1972 at 3:32 p.m. in St. Louis, Missouri. Architectural critic Charles Jencks declared this event the symbolic death of modern architecture and the birth of postmodernism in the architectural lexicon.
Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives in his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. He argued that no single narrative can claim universal truth in a postmodern society, leaving us with a collection of heterogeneous language games.
Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans series from the 1960s brought postmodern sensibility to mainstream attention by challenging distinctions between fine art and commercial design. Artists like Madonna, David Bowie, and Talking Heads became icons of postmodernism in music by using irony, humor, and self-parody to challenge dominant musical structures.
The Science Wars began with the 1962 publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn and escalated when physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical paper to a postmodernist journal in 1996. This hoax highlighted tensions between the scientific community and postmodern theorists regarding whether scientific knowledge is socially constructed.
Postmodern feminism mixes postmodern theory and French feminism to reject a universal female subject and destabilize patriarchal norms entrenched in society. Postmodern psychologists argue that the American conception of an isolated, unified self does not exist and that humans are composed of many different selves constructed for different situations.
A 2020 study found that postmodernism remains vibrant and re-inventive despite claims that it had gone out of fashion by the late 1990s. Steven Connor wrote in 2022 that postmodernism has undergone a disappearance into culture by way of assimilation, making the general postmodern condition universal and irreversible.