Postmodernity Quotes

“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

“Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“We have traditionally thought of knowing in terms of subject and object and have struggled to attain objectivity by detaching our subjectivity. It can't be done, and one of the achievements of postmodernity is to demonstrate that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking, subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“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, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

“When they invented the car they invented the collision and the darkness of what time leads the willing body to do.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“God is dead, but so is Reason.”
― Isaiah Senones

“In fact, certainty exists in very different modes. The kind of certainty afforded by a verification that has passed through doubt is different from the immediate living certainty with which all ends and values appear in human consciousness when they make an absolute claim. But the certainty of science is very different from this kind of certainty that is acquired in life. Scientific certainty always has something Cartesian about it. It is the result of a critical method that seeks only to allow what cannot be doubted. This certainty, then, does not proceed from doubts and their being overcome, but is always anterior to any process of being doubted.”
― Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

“General theories are everywhere condemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: 'The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.' We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters--except everything.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“Postmodern people have been rejecting Christianity for years, thinking that it was indistinguishable from moralism.”
― Timothy Keller

“The church that weds itself to modernity is already a widow within postmodernity.”
― Thomas C. Oden, Requiem: A lament in three movements

“The pharaonic era of the country-house technocrats. The dream of an electronic control of things runs up against the traditional stupidity of the masses. Collective demand has never been so elicited, forced or violated as it has in the field of computing. The clash between a philosophical and metaphysical exigency and a present which is no longer in the least philosophical and metaphysical.
The clash between a system of representation and a system of simulation. The clash between a thinking of difference and a thinking of indifference. What is the power of indifference? What would an analytics of indifference be like? Torn between a radical indifference and a radical seduction.

Postmodemity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination. In terms of periods, it is the end of final evaluations and the movement of transcendence, which are replaced by 'teleonomic' evaluation, in terms of retroaction. Everything is always retroactive, including - and, indeed, particularly including - information. The rest is left to the acceleration of values by technology (sex, body, freedom, knowledge).”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“From the holocaust to the hologram: a fine programme.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Not only is myth, myth, not only is the opposition to myth, myth, but the recognition of the opposition to myth as myth is itself, myth.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

“Today's world, whether we like it or not is the work of Hitler, without Hitler, there would have been no partition of Germany and Europe, without Hitler there would have been no Russians and Americans in Berlin, without Hitler there would have been no Israel, without Hitler there would have been no decolonization, at least not such a rapid one, there would be no Asia, Arab or black African emancipation, and no diminution of European preeminence, or more accurately, there would be non of all this without Hitler's mistakes, he certainly did not want any of it.”
― John Lukacs, The Hitler of History

“An diesem Punkt gibt es keinen einzigen ihrer »Werte« [der Zivilisation des Westens] mehr, an den sie noch auf irgendeine Art zu glauben vermöchte, und jede Affirmation wirkt auf sie wie eine schamlose Tat, wie eine Provokation, die man besser zerlegen, dekonstruieren und in den Zustand des Zweifels zurückführen sollte. Der westliche Imperialismus heute, das ist der des Relativismus, des »Das ist deine Ansicht«, das ist der kleine Seitenblick oder der verletzte Protest gegen all das, was dumm genug, primitiv genug oder selbstgefällig genug ist, um noch an etwas zu glauben, um noch irgendetwas zu behaupten. Es ist dieser Dogmatismus der Infragestellung, der in der gesamten universitären und literarischen Intelligenzija komplizenhaft mit dem Auge zwinkert. Unter den postmodernistischen Geistesgrößen ist keine Kritik zu radikal, solange sie ein Nichts an Gewissheit umhüllt. Vor einem Jahrhundert verursachte jede ein wenig lärmmachende Negation einen Skandal, heute liegt er in jeder Affirmation, die nicht zittert.”
― Unsichtbares Komitee, The Coming Insurrection

“Thorough, adamant and uncompromising privatization of all concerns has been the main factor that has rendered postmodern society so spectacularly immune to systemic critique and radical social dissent with revolutionary potential.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence

“It is not necessarily the case that the denizens of postmodern - privatized and commodified - society enjoy the sum-total of greater happiness (one would still wish to know how to measure happiness objectively and compare it), and that they experience their worries as less serious and painful; what does truly matter is that it would not occur to them to lay the blame for such troubles they may suffer at the door of the state, and even less to expect the remedies to be handed over through that door.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence

“In the twenty-seven years since the killing of President Kennedy, there has been a good deal of disturbance in the American dream. The cult of individualism, of a man's (not so often a woman's) ability and right to pull himself up by his own bootstraps and wit, which lies at the heart of that dream, has produced more Oswalds, more Sirhans, more Mansons and Jim Joneses, than Lincolns, of late. The representative figure of American individualism is no longer that log-cabin-to-White-House President, but rather a lone man with a gun, seeking vengeance against a world that will not conform to his own sense of what has worth.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“Melrose Avenue, Santa Monica - Dialogue on a terrace. SHE: You are jealous ? Are you jealous ? You are fucking jealous! . . . Let me say . . . You 're twenty and I am forty-two, and I'll give my fucking ass to fucking anybody . . . Do you know that? * He gets up, crosses Melrose for no reason, comes back, kneels down in front of her (younger, but as theatrical). HE: Do you love me? Do you love me? SHE: Yes . . . Yes, I love you . . . The Italian kneads his meatballs. An Indian is playing a video game and its shrill soundtrack provides a backing to the conversation. The woman herself speaks in a shrill, hysterical voice. It is pleasant in Los Angeles in November, on the Melrose terrace, around the middle of the night. Everyone is smiling somewhere. No passion. A scene American-style. The waiter takes the car keys and drags off the woman, who shows off her black-stockinged legs and pretends to be mad. A black man gets up and, as he passes, says to me: ' Too much love! '

Gliding along the road that runs beside the coast in a black Porsche is like penetrating slowly into the inside of your own body.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“In the postmodern condition, truth and subjectivity is not entirely dead, but it is not fully alive. Weak thought invites humility, listening, and tentative openings [...] It is a groundwork I hope to explore in my poetry more fully.”
― Elia Po, Adagio for the Internally Displaced

“ففي تحوّل عظيم، صار المجتمع يعظّم أيّما تعظيم المرونة في قلب الأشياء رأسًا على عقب، والتخلص منها، والتخلي عنها، فضلًا عن الروابط الإنسانية التي يسهل حلّها والفكاك منها، والواجبات التي يسهل الرجوع عنها، وقواعد اللعب التي لا تدوم أطول من زمن اللعبة، فقد ألقي بنا جميعًا في سباق نلهث فيه وراء كل جديد.”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

“The obligation falls upon us to foster in ourselves the sensibilities that modernity has suppressed or even denigrated. ... Without awe, our lives are impoverished, our society decays.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thunder in the Soul: To Be Known By God

“This aspect of sentimentality also has its cultural forms. The Croatian sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic has described the postmodern condition as 'postemotional.' Drawing on the works of David Riesman, Emile Durkheim, George Ritzer, George Orwell, and others, he contends that emotions are the primary object of manipulation in postmodern culture. Emotion has increasingly been divorced from the intellect and judgement, and thus from responsible action: 'postemotional types,' as he puts it, 'know that they can experience the full range of emotions in any field, domestic or international, and never be called upon to demonstrate the authenticity of their emotions in commitment to appropriate action...Today, everyone knows that emotions carry no burden, no responsibility to act, and above all, that emotions of any sort are accessible to nearly everyone.”
― Jeremy S. Begbie, A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts

“[You forgot] the importance of the lopsided, the thing that's skewed a little. You were looking for balance, beautiful balance, equal parts, equal sides. I know this. I know you. But you should have been tracking the yen in its tics and quirks. The little quirk. The misshape...That's where the answer was, in your body, in your prostate.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis