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. — Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. — Jean-Francois Lyotard
We live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain. — Vaclav Havel
Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted. — Catharine MacKinnon
Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on. — Robert Venturi
I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists. — Kathy Acker
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants. — David Foster Wallace
In a sense, New Age gurus are akin to postmodernists within academia. They dispense meaningless drivel that masquerades as profound truths whilst in reality it is a mere exercise in obscurantism — Gad Saad
Mystery Science Theater is really a postmodern show, it's really derived of many influences. — Joel Hodgson
A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque. — Juan Goytisolo
If exposure of body is modernism, then animals are more modern than humans. — Zakir Naik
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. — Donna J. Haraway
Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion. — Odd Nerdrum
Perversity is the muse of modern literature. — Susan Sontag
Much of the problems of modernity is taking religion literally and science metaphorically, rather than the reverse. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Short Postmodern Quotes
Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable? — Catharine MacKinnon
Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer's. — Walter Darby Bannard
Postmodernism is silly and joyless at the same time. — Walter Darby Bannard
Plastic surgery is a postmodern veil. — Nawal El Saadawi
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style. — Ada Louise Huxtable
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism. — Terry Eagleton
Postmodernism cost literature its audience. — Scott Turow
I don't love the postmodern statement: "You shouldn't be spiritual if you are the artist." — Hiroshi Sugimoto
The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose. — Christopher Hitchens
Postmodernism Quotes
Sometimes...we don't want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake. — Nigella Lawson
"Integrative" simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible-from East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality. — Ken Wilber
The Chavez-Obama pictures will join a postmodern photo array that includes Donald Rumsfeld gifting Saddam Hussein with spurs from President Reagan. — Christine Pelosi
The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code. — Donna J. Haraway
What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense. — Catharine MacKinnon
Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide. — Gertrude Himmelfarb
It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. — Fredric Jameson
Don't you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn't going to change the truth. Any more than it's going to topple a skyscraper. There's truth, and there's belief. Don't call a mule a stallion. — Carol Plum-Ucci
In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words. — Aldous Huxley
There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind? — David Harvey
Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals. — Jean Baudrillard
The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with 'critical theory,' postmodernism and its perception-based relatives. Since the creation in 1960s and '70s of novel, justice-oriented fields, these incompatible worldviews have repelled one another. — Bret Weinstein
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. — Paul Johnson
Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want. — Chuck Klosterman
In theatre, presence is the matrix of power; the postmodern theatre of resistance must therefore both expose the collusion of presence with authority and resist such collusion by refusing to establish itself as the charismatic Other. — Philip Auslander
The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression. — Sigmund Freud
In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism. You have to be very learned to be that wrong. — Steven Weinberg
Postmodernism lives in the academy, where words abandon reality to serve ambition, and reputations rise on hot air. — Walter Darby Bannard
The most important thing, in order to forge one's own creative personality, is to travel, to see different environments, different cultures. I wanted to try to imagine a new kind of structure in architecture. In general, architects follow fashions. They're neoclassical, postmodern. — Shigeru Ban
Our culture is becoming more hostile to the gospel. This trend may be more established in Australia than in the USA, but it's now certainly the case that the postmodern mindset is dominant, particularly in the media. Therefore, when we start speaking in terms of certainties, we sound scary to other people. — Mark Dever
Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination. — Jean Baudrillard
In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant. — David F. Wells
As a cosmion incarnating the cells of a new body, New Lights will function as transitional vessels through which transforming energy can renew the divine image in the world, moving postmoderns from one state of embodiment to another. — Leonard Sweet
If the kingdom of God had departments, we’d want to work in research and development. We felt like Jesus didn’t hang out at the synagogue, he hung out at wells. Coffeehouses are postmodern wells. Let’s not wait for people to come to us, let’s go to them. — Mark Batterson
The postmodern worldview denies that there is such a thing as truth: historical, moral, or otherwise. It denies that truth exists independently of our perspectives and interests. — Mark Earley
Postmodernism shifts the basis of the work of art from the object to the transaction between the spectator and the object and further deconstructs this by negating the presence of a representative objective viewer. — Arnold Aronson
It's impossible in our postmodern era for anyone to be original - for anybody to do what Jackson Pollock did. — Irving Sandler
Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths. — Miguel Syjuco
In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique. — Charles Jencks
In Conclusion
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