Jean-François Lyotard

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

“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.”

“The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.”

“Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.”

“Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.”

“Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.”

“Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narrative.”

“Consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value.”

“The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself.”

“The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be.”

“The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.”

“A thinker is a filter, a sieve.”

“It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.”

“Our incredulity is now a function of the proliferation of information and the collapse of the grand narratives.”