Interesting post, Michael P., though I guess I feel a little more cantankerous than you in a couple of respects:
>Frankly, I've always thought the interesting postmodern ideas
>have all appeared several times before -- at the turn of the
>century, post World War I, post World War II -- when everything
>seemed open to question.
I think that's right, and hence part of the animus I feel regarding the arcane private language of the postmodernist/poststructuralist crowd--many valid insights, though I've yet to encounter one that couldn't be rendered much more forcefully in plain English. Second, it often seems to me that this school of analysis amounts to a rationalization (even a celebration) of the fragmentation and powerlessness of which it presumes to mount a critique. In this sense, what I'm saying is reminiscent of what the critics of functionalism in sociology said in the '50s and '60s--the language and the worldview brought to bear by the posties effectively *embraces* fragmentation and powerlessness, and gets itself trapped in a linguistic box that leaves no room for denying, for fighting, these phenomena. (I've even been so presumptuous as to think that this is part of the deep-psych of academe, which does not really want--in my opinion--to engage the world beyond its boundaries.)