Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Hewison

Hewison’s line works because it treats an entire intellectual era like a machine you can open with a screwdriver: same chassis, one missing part. “Optimism” is the key removal. Modernism, for all its quarrels with tradition, still carried a faith that formal rupture could clear space for something better: cleaner design, truer art, a more rational society. Post-modernism, in Hewison’s framing, keeps the restless energy and self-conscious style but swaps the forward drive for a shrug.

The intent is less to define post-modernism than to diagnose its mood. “With the optimism taken out” implies extraction, not evolution. It suggests post-modernism didn’t so much discover new possibilities as inherit modernism’s techniques after the big promises failed: after world wars, after the technocratic dream curdled, after mass media turned originality into a loop. The subtext carries a faint accusation: that post-modernism is modernism living on fumes, recycling irony, pastiche, and skepticism because conviction feels naïve or politically compromised.

As a historian of culture, Hewison is also registering a British, late-20th-century atmosphere: economic turbulence, the marketization of the arts, and a growing suspicion of “grand narratives” that once justified sacrifice in the name of progress. The line’s bite is its economy. It captures why post-modern work so often feels clever rather than urgent, why it prefers quotation marks to manifestos. Not a new building, just the same building with the lights dimmed.