Skip to content

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonition of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.,); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasing called postmodernism.

— Fredric Jameson Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Another quote →

More quotes by Fredric Jameson

If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life.

Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.

The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in utopian or essential fashion.

Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature."

Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.

The Seeds of Time (1994)

All Fredric Jameson quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Fredric Jameson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.