You've often asked on the occasion of these eruptions why people care at all now, so late in the game. I can't really speak directly to deconstruction, Derrida or his cohort, mostly because what little I've understood or had cogently explained to me didn't strike me as compelling (I'm not including Foucault here). I'll get to the video once I get a home computer that post-dates YouTube.
But I think it's worth thinking about some of the effect of arguments that at least claim to appeal to this line of thinking, whether or not it did, because as a science undergrad around 1990 with an interest in social issues I got exposed to the fallout, and later found plenty of others with similar experiences, among them Alan Sokal and Barbara Ehrenreich. There were many humanities and particularly social science students who did indeed take the "project to undermine Western rationality", however that was intended, to mean that science and its attendant appeals to math, evidence and careful reasoning were bunk. The one SS prof I worked with seemed to embrace this notion (but he was an inconsiderate prick generally). And so you'd find people who declared themselves indifferent to evidence on principle. It was very weird.
The anti-rationality would have been easier to dismiss if it hadn't been so wrapped up in arguments for the sorts of social causes that listmembers take for granted. It might have not caused the weakness of theory associated with "activistism" and the like, but it sure reinforced it. Doug, you often express frustration and annoyance with some of the tropes in what passes for the left in the US, like Nader, Ron Paul, shadowstats, the valorization of small business, and the circus at WBAI -- that sounds very familiar to me. Also familiar is the relabelling of traditionally rightwing faves like anti-rationality and obscurantism (or competition and anti-regulation) as "radical critique". It was alienating, not to mention worrisome seeing worthy causes supported with arguments that could be knocked down with the flick of a pinky.
So when Sokal pulled his stunt, and then explained in his apologia:
<http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/afterword_v1a/afterword_v1a_singlefile.html>
[...]
But why did I do it? I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. (If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be ``true'', why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it? I don't aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory.3)
But my main concern isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you). Rather, my concern is explicitly political: to combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist/social-constructivist discourse -- and more generally a penchant for subjectivism -- which is, I believe, inimical to the values and future of the Left.
[...]
It came as a breath of fresh air knowing that somebody else had been wondering more or less the same thing.
As I said, maybe that all has as much to do with Derrida as Nazis did with Darwin. But then I don't recall every seeing anybody defending Derrida against anti-rationalism.
-- Andy