ABSTRACT
The “postmodern” intellectuals sampled in previous sections produced their most widely-known works in the decade of the 1970s, before the term “postmodern” itself came to signify anything outside the realm ofthe arts and architecture. It was left to a small group of texts, clustering together between the end ofthe 70s and the early 80s, to announce the emergence ofthe postmodern as not merely an aesthetic school but as a new periodization in Western history. That Jacques Derrida, minority identity politics, and economic restructuring should all be taken together to represent a new, distinct historical epoch was not immediately apparent before the presentation of these arguments in the late 70s.
