Top 97 Quotes About Postmodernism
#1. From my perspective, 'postmodernism' merely names an interesting set of developments in the social order that is based on the presumption that God does not matter.
Stanley Hauerwas
#2. The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.
Bell Hooks
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide.
Gertrude Himmelfarb
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for real powers that always originate elsewhere.
Geoffrey Batchen
#11. Postmodernism cost literature its audience.
Scott Turow
#12. Today, religious fanatics and scientific rejectionists flourish under the protective wing of postmodernism, claiming that theirs is just one more valid viewpoint - a form of mental aikido (using the opponent's strength against him).
Gudjon Bergmann
#13. Japanese horror films take the business of being frightening seriously. There is no attempt at postmodernism or humour. They are incredibly melancholy, with a strong emotional core, while remaining absolutely terrifying.
Jane Goldman
#14. The shadow that comes with postmodernism is a profound self-involvement. We lose all perspective on the collective endeavors that have made the extraordinarily lives we live possible.
James M. Fallows
#15. By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.
Martin Filler
#16. In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.
Charles Jencks
#18. [Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism.
Nicholas Gane
#19. In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'
Brad Holland
#20. Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
Ada Louise Huxtable
#21. I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.
Stanley Hauerwas
#22. They were postmodernism up the pole.
Morrissey
#23. Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement.
Martin Filler
#24. Postmodernism: The cultural condition marked by the absolute gratification of human desires and the absolute neglect of human needs.
Peter K. Fallon
#25. Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.
John Walford
#26. One of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.
Junot Diaz
#27. What exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
Jonathan Lethem
#28. Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.
Terry Eagleton
#29. The advent of postmodernism, the enshrinement of Darwinian orthodoxy in the educational systems of Western society, and the rise of blatant humanism as the religion-by-default of large subcultures have brought no end of new challenges to biblical sufficiency.
James R. White
#30. Postmodernism is an outlook that depends not a little on what are perceived to be the fundamental limitations on the power of interpretation: that is, since interpretation can never be more than my interpretation or our interpretation, no purely objective stance is possible.
D. A. Carson
#31. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith
Terry Eagleton
#32. Unless you plan on making academia your life, all you need to know about postmodernism is that its premises are fundamentally wrong.
Tucker Max
#33. Prior to postmodernism, it was all but impossible to claim that one was a cultural Christian, Jew, or Muslim. There was no such thing. Now, being culturally religious is a widely accepted stance.
Gudjon Bergmann
#34. Postmodernism does not facilitate better art. It rationalizes inferior art by wrapping it in words - a suit of armor with nobody inside.
Walter Darby Bannard
#35. Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.
Robert Venturi
#36. May one plead, Your Honor, postmodernism as an involuntary condition?
Jonathan Lethem
#37. 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
#38. God may normally work through ordinary means. But he is not limited by them. That is why all the military muscle in the world cannot itself guarantee victory, and all the secularization, postmodernism, naturalism, and paganism in the world cannot by themselves prevent revival. Let God be God.
D. A. Carson
#39. As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.
David Mitchell
#40. The Christian worldview, contra-postmodernism, understands language not as a Self-referential, merely human and ultimately arbitrary system of signs that is reducible to contingent cultural factors, but it has the gift of a rational God entrusted to beings made in his own image and likeness.
Douglas Groothuis
#41. Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.
Andrew Eldritch
#42. There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.
Twyla Tharp
#43. In the '50s, to appropriate was a real no-no. However, once you go from Duchamp to Jasper Johns to Warhol, appropriation becomes not only a common thing to do, but possibly the central way of working in the era we call postmodernism.
Irving Sandler
#44. 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-Francois Lyotard
#45. Postmodernism lives in the academy, where words abandon reality to serve ambition, and reputations rise on hot air.
Walter Darby Bannard
#46. 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
#47. Some ways of naming a generation are fruitful and some are not. Postmodernism is not. It doesn't really say anything.
Robert Coover
#48. Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery.
Walter Darby Bannard
#50. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.
Harold Pinter
#51. We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion.
James K.A. Smith
#52. He started low and remained there, sure that safety embraced felicity on a mattress of obscurity. He knew that vertical activity invited dazzling exposure, and that to seek is to be sucked. He recognized loneliness as the mother of virtues and sat in her lap whenever he could.
David Ohle
#53. Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?"
"No.
Neil Gaiman
#54. Postmodernity means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything, yet mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.
Zygmunt Bauman
#55. I believe that there are no innate, intrinsic differences among a human being , a baboon or a grain of sand.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#56. I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
Lydia Davis
#57. The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?
Steven Pinker
#58. The common-sense notion that 'There is a time and place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.
David Harvey
#60. Saying, "I don't agree with you," or going so far as to say, "I think your belief structure is childish," does not amount to persecution. Insensitivity is not the same as harassment or oppression.
Gudjon Bergmann
#61. She spun the car through a right turn that would have killed us all had we been minor characters.
Daniel Handler
#62. [Concerning Lyotard's ideology:]... Theory ought to be recognized as part of the problem, not as a potential solution.
Bill Readings
#63. The central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.
Jacques Derrida
#64. We're the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago!
Taylor Mali
#66. Gazing from the moon, we see one earth, without borders, Mother Earth, her embrace encircling one people, humankind.
Frederick Glaysher
#67. Charles Jencks is the most notable landscape and garden designer to carry forward the 3500 BCE-1800CE landscape and garden design agenda.
Tom Turner
#68. It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.
G.K. Chesterton
#69. So who is cruel? You, cruel reader, you are.
Johnny Rich
#70. The e-mail lands like a mortar in the Hum suzerainty.
Evan Dara
#71. And guess what he finds. Nothing. And I mean that literally. Not a de Brogliesque absence of presence but a Tertullian presence of absence.
Evan Dara
#72. The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.
Christopher Hitchens
#73. Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?
John Leonard
#74. These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.
Noam Chomsky
#75. The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.
Harvey Cox
#76. Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
Flannery O'Connor
#77. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
Jonathan Lethem
#79. This is a bright place, filled with frightened people, and fast hard things that hurt and wound. No matter. I swore I would remain by her side forever, and until death divided us.
Neil Gaiman
#80. By exclaiming that "there are no absolute truths" the postmodern stance is also claiming that the statement it just made is an absolute truth - trying to have it both ways, rejecting absolutism with absolutism.
Gudjon Bergmann
#81. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.
Don DeLillo
#82. Dimension, Existence, Culture and Identity all splinter and are left behind.
Pink Sound, brothers and sisters. Pinkness. It's dark. It's... flat. It is unexplainable... it is peaceful... it is love...
...it is...
Gus Van Sant
#83. Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.
Noam Chomsky
#84. The fact is: our faith is more rational than the most elaborate paradigm of the atheistic foundationalist, more romantic than the wildest dreams of the unbelieving postmodernist. our faith is a dogma that makes you dance.
Reggie M. Kidd
#85. As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.
Johnny Rich
#86. But these are sad times, the 'prentices wanting to be masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every dirty little urchin thinking he can give
impudence to his betters!
Hope Mirrlees
#87. This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products
Larry McCaffrey
#88. Conclusion: better to be a thinking monk than a postmodern
thinker.
Muriel Barbery
#89. Such public shaming is rampant and sometimes appropriate, but unfortunately, in recent years, shaming has morphed into coordinated reputation murders, and anyone who is slightly insensitive or not PC enough can be led to a public character lynching without due process.
Gudjon Bergmann
#90. In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.
David F. Wells
#91. Whatever the issue, there is always something else to be said, another voice to be heard.
Michael Billig
#92. It is almost impossible to get anyone with a postmodern slant to say "I think" and stand by what follows, without making sure that the person listening understands, "Of course, there are other things to consider.
Gudjon Bergmann
#93. Change. Change. Change. Change ... change. Change. Chaaange. When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.
Neil Gaiman
#94. Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#95. ... is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#96. In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.
Theodor W. Adorno
#97. So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
David Mitchell
