#postmodern

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#post-modernism #postmodern #age

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

#called #destroys #expression #good #kind

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#media #postmodern #power #science-fiction #motivational

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#literature #postmodernism #humor

Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't. ↗

— Brad Holland

#artists #because #come #compromise #contradictions

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

#academic #elite #feminist #men #originating

Postmodernism refuses to privilege any one perspective, and recognizes only difference, never inequality, only fragments, never conflict. ↗

— Elizabeth Wilson

#conflict #difference #fragments #inequality #never

All discourses and disciplines proceed from commitments and beliefs that are ultimately religious in nature. No scientific discourse (whether natural science or social science) simply discloses to us the facts of reality to which theology must submit; rather, every discourse is, in some sense, religious. The playing field has been leveled. Theology is most persistently postmodern when it rejects a lingering correlational false humility and instead speaks unapologetically from the the primacy of Christian revelation and the church's confessional language. ↗

— James K.A. Smith

#discipline #postmodernism #proof #religious-claims #revelation

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

#postmodernism #death

Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn't — not because it's optimistic, but because it can't take ideals seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is Absurdism. A postmodern magazine may be irreverent, but not bitterly irreverent, for it's not purposefully irreverent; its aim is indiscriminate, because everyone is equally ridiculous. And anyway, there's no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show. ↗

— Robert Wright

#darwinism #evolution #morality #postmodernism #attitude