Postmodernism Quotes

“Let me tell you about my trouble with post-modernism. I've been listening to it for 20 years, and I'm still not sure what it is.”

“The postmodernist belief that all values are subjective and arbitrary is a recipe for nihilism.”

“Postmodernism is the contemporary name for the crisis of the Enlightenment project.”

“I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme.”

“We know today that truth does not exist. There are only versions.”

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

“Postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism.”

“Conspiracy theory is the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age.”

“The problem to be solved is that of breaking out of the windless present of the postmodern back into real history, into the reality of the historical process.”

“The truth of experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place.”

“Panic is the key mood of the postmodern condition.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“History is not a simple narrative of progress but a discontinuous series of ruptures and transformations.”

“Less is a bore.”