[Pokerdemic]

FWIW, the thinkers Chomsky references in that quote are more closely aligned with high post-structuralism, not necessarily postmodernism; Baudrillard and Lyotard are two of the highest of high postmodernists, and I haven't seen them surface in this thread.

We should probably make a distinction between some of the useful insights of postmodernism and the sometimes preposterous way it swept through academic circles, a phenomenon that led to odd slogans about death of the real in favor of the image.

Many of the thinkers Chomsky references came to the United States from France via departments of comparative literature and then through English departments. At the same time these ideas surfaced, comp lit and English departments went through an employment crisis due to budget cuts, and less than 50% of PhDs who were graduating were getting jobs. I think this in some way contributes to the radical obfuscation of much of the writing of the thinkers who took up PM in America. It simply paid to say outrageous things and that was one way to professional advancement. There was a similar culture in France at the time, much of it because of the sheer competitiveness of academics.

I think the intellectual legacy PM will be known for was its rebellion against “grand narratives” and its insistence that we know the contemporary world more so through fragmentation than any sort of complete picture. While I am not in total agreement with some of its heavy emphasis on subjectivity and its insistence on lack of agency, its ideas did lead to a healthy reassessment of the way knowledge is made, especially in some of the social sciences, where it was wrongly assumed during high positivism that you could observe human behavior objectively without bringing any of your own cultural baggage.

Slavoj Zizek is the most entertaining philosopher I know that argues against PM. Terry Eagleton does it as well in some of his literary criticism. For a good history of the Sokal Hoax, you can check out Michael Berube’s essay in his book _Rhetorical Occasions_. FWIW, I think much of Berube’s writings are an example of how postmodernism’s ideas can be used responsibly and lucidly with the goal of political action.