Postmodern Theory Quotes & Sayings

Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it. — D. Harlan Wilson

There was a sense that the one true theory had been discovered. Nothing else was important or worth thinking about. Seminars devoted to string theory sprang up at many of the major universities and research institutes. At Harvard, the string theory seminar was called the Postmodern Physics seminar.
This appellation was not meant ironically. — Lee Smolin

Relativism is not a philosophical theory. It is a spiritual truth, a protective dogma designed to fend off any power that might claim our loyalty. It is a habit of mind that insulates postmodern life from the sober potency of arguments and the force of evidence, from the rightful claims of reason and the wisdom of the past. — R. R. Reno

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art. — Noah Baumbach

[I]n so far as postmodern politics involves a '[t]heoretical retreat from the problem of domination within capitalism,' it is here, in this silent suspension of class analysis, that we are dealing with an exemplary case of the mechanism of ideological displacement: when class antagonism is disavowed, when its key structuring role is suspended, 'other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight; indeed, they may bear all the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that attributable to the explicitly politicized marking.' In other words, this displacement accounts for the somewhat 'excessive' way the discourse of postmodern identity politics insists on the horrors of sexism, racism, and so on - this 'excess' comes from the fact that these other '-isms' have to bear the surplus-investment from the class struggle whose extent is not acknowledged. — Slavoj Zizek

I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve. — Dave Eggers

Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Like priests with their backs to the world and their faces to the altar, the postmodern protectors of shame need to turn around, face the people, and exchange their sackcloth of shame for robes of celebration. The dangers of assertion, of generality and theory, meet their match in, and only in, a tireless devotion to self-criticism and the search for correction.
Truth, — Wesley J. Wildman