My impression of postmodern and other kindred theories of the academe is they're mostly fraud, with the odd interesting insight cropping up now and again, but very rarely.* What value they hold, apart from providing cushy politically inoffensive academic jobs, I've never been able to determine and no one else seems to know either. From a student perspective I think they are on balance harmful because they result in even more confusion and have little incidental value (at least engagement with analytical philosophy improves logical thinking if totally worthless otherwise) and they engender a way of thinking that make people, if not more credulous, more susceptible to being manipulated.
For better of worse, I think this phase is coming to an end. Students don't take it seriously unless they anticipate an academic career and the theories are so dated they're starting to feel a pretty state--probably the surest test of if not truth relevance of a body of literature is endurance and it appears PM theory will quickly be forgotten.
*When they come to talk out matters outside their area of expertise, if it can regarded as such, such as theoretical physics, they are clearly full of shit, as documented in Fashionable Nonsense. There's nothing irrational in this criticism, you need an in depth understanding in order to have anything to say just as they have no business advising surgeons on how to perform an appendectomy.
> 4. one of the things often remarked on in sociology (say, by Randal
> Collins, pretty much an enemy of the 'postmodern turn' in sociology) is
> that its basic findings seem really banal -- which would be because they
> are so taken up, so embedded in popular thought, that what was once
> unusual, strange is now ordinary and banal.
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