Postmodernism Quotes

Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable? (Catharine MacKinnon)
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. View quote
Miguel Syjuco
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism. View quote
Terry Eagleton
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
... one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away. View quote
Junot Diaz
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. View quote
Steven Weinberg
Postmodernism cost literature its audience. View quote
Scott Turow
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. View quote
Jane Goldman
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. View quote
Twyla Tharp
Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone. (Andrew Eldritch)
Postmodernism poisons everything. View quote
Jerry Coyne
This implicit denigration of objectivity, and of the way science is done, irritates me immensely. It privileges anecdotes over data, "lived experience” over objective tests, and confirmation bias over uncomfortable truths. But that is the way that many humanities scholars, corrupted by postmodernism, have operated. Denying or denigrating an objective search for truth, they're free to say whatever they want, or "discover” whatever they find ideologically convenient. View quote
Jerry Coyne
postmodernism contemporaneity, a morass of deferred solutions on every level, featuring ambiguity, the refusal to ponder either origins or ends, as well as the denial of oppositional approaches, "the new realism." Signifying nothing and going nowhere, pm [postmodernism] is an inverted millenarianism, a gathering fruition of the technological "life"-system of universal capital. View quote
John Zerzan
The most influential specific postmodern approach has been Jacques Derrida's, known since the 60's as deconstruction. Postmodernism is philosophy means above all the writings of Derrida, and this earliest and most extreme outlook has found a resonance well beyond philosophy, in the popular culture and its mores. View quote
John Zerzan
Although Postmodernism was certainly a fad, it was also a zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. It meant something, despite its own best efforts, at least as a symptom. The disappearance of reality that it announced was itself real, as was the realm of simulation that replaced it. View quote
Nick Land
Bunge: In September I will be 90 years old. Reporter: You look very youthful. Bunge: That's because I avoid alcohol, tobacco, and postmodernism. View quote
Mario Bunge
But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing! View quote
Larry Wall
Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature." View quote
Fredric Jameson
Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all. View quote
Fredric Jameson
The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonition of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.,); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasing called postmodernism. (Fredric Jameson)
The problem of postmodernism - how its fundamental characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary, a mystification - this problem is a t one and the same time an aesthetic and political one. View quote
Fredric Jameson
The success story of the word postmodernism demands to be written, no doubt in best-seller format; such lexical neoevents, in which the coinage of a neologism has all the reality impact of a corporate merger, are among the novelties of media society which require not merely study but the establishment of a whole new media-lexicological subdiscipline. View quote
Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism theory is one of those attempts: the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an "age,"or zeitgeist or "system" or "current situation"any longer. Postmodernism theory is then dialectical at least insofar as it has the wit to seize on that very uncertainty as its first clue and to hold to its Ariadne's thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall. View quote
Fredric Jameson
In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique. View quote
Charles Jencks