The Four or Five Postmodernisms

The first was postmodern literature and architecture. These are postmodern movements in actual art forms. In fiction, for example, it was metafiction. In architecture, pastiche elements and the break from architectural modernism. This chugged along until the second postmodernism took hold.

This was based on Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, published shortly after people were getting used to postmodernism in actual art forms. Lyotard wiped out the first definition of postmodernism by making the postmodern the name for a philosophical tendency to distrust grands récits, or sweeping narratives that could explain everything.

In Lyotard's wake, postmodernism becomes synonymous with everything that we ought to call poststructuralism. All of sudden, Derrida was postmodernist.  It must have been news to him.

In the social sciences and fields removed from philosophy and literary studies, postmodernism then became all of that, but divorced from its intellectual contexts. In some fields they began to quote Foucault without really studying him. Postmodernism became "anything goes" bullshit.

Then, of course, it was ripe for right-wing satire and critique.  Postmodernism meant there was not truth, etc... To the point where anti-postmodern movement like gender essentialism and Marxism could be called postmodern too. Now I've lost count of how many postmodernisms there are.