20 quotes
The body might be considered the hardware of the complex technical device that is human thought.
Thought Without a Body? (1994)
Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is authorized to promulgate such a law as a norm.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable, let us activate the different and save the honor of the name.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
It is generally accepted that nature is an indifferent, not deceptive opponent, and it is upon this basis that the distinction is made between the natural and the human sciences.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
The moment knowledge ceases to be an end in itself—its realization of The Idea or the emancipation of men—it’s transmission is no longer the exclusive responsibility of scholars and students.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new product.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter the postmodern age.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification is uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
True knowledge, in this perspective, is always indirect knowledge; it is composed of reported statements, that are incorporated into metanarratives of a subject that source their legitimacy.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
Here is the question: is a legitimization of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
Matter asks no questions, expects no answers of us. It ignores us. It made us the way it makes all bodies—by chance and according to its laws.
Thought Without a Body? (1994)
Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of imperiling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multinational corporations.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
What is new in all this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction. And it does not look as though they will be replaced, at least not on their former scale.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
For the mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with increasing strength of the opposing principle.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
There’s a necessity for physical experience and a recourse to exemplary cases of bodily ascesis to understand and make understood a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think. This obviously has nothing to do with tabula rasa, with what Descartes (vainly) wanted to be a starting from scratch on the part of knowing thought.
Thought Without a Body? (1994)
The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will be increasingly tend to, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume--that is, the form of knowledge.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)
…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 narratives in the interest of simplicity.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977)