>It is impossible to understand the writers who compose postmodernity
>without understanding their period and its own material history, its
>own symbolic moment.
I think there's a lot to this. I remember reading an interview with Carlo Ginzburg, who would probably be called a postmodernist if he wasn't accepted as a traditional historian. He was talking about reading Foucault in the '60s and the main impression he got was there was something afoot, some evident shift in the way people were thinking and writing about things. To me that's always been the most important contribution of so-called postmodernism. Debates about this or that Foucault are as uninteresting to me as talking about early Marx or late Marx. Those are the kinds of cul-de-sac discussions that come when thinkers gain followers. The important thing is if someone can help you see things in a different way. Who cares if they're Marxist enough? A lot of people were led to Marx through Foucault and it seems to me that's good enough to give him Marxian cred if that's what counts for you.