It's interesting, this business of being categorized as a Postmodernist. I've never really thought of myself as one, but I guess that if we throw it against the wall it'll stick. Essentially, though, I'm a student. I got curious and looked that word up, and it comes from the Latin studens, which is related to studere, to study. Therefore, that would be my job: to study. (I knew that already.) When one studies, one needs tools to understand things with. This is what theory does for me - it provides tools to take things apart.

All I care is that the tool works. I don't care if it's fashionable, just that it's functional. If plain old Structuralism worked for me, then I'd use it. The more I study Postmodernism, the more I see how I can apply to it to the world at large. More and more, I find that it works for me now, at this place and this time. Of course it has flaws, as everything man-made does. When it doesn't hold up, it's time to reach for a different tool in the toolbox. There's no point in using a hammer when what's really needed is a drill. Still, PoMo theory works for me far more often than it doesn't - and certainly more often than anything else does. (Your mileage may vary.)

The other reason I study Postmodernism is that there are things that a successful graduate student is expected to know - in this case, the dominant theories of the field. It's the rules. Besides, one needs to know the lay of the land in order to successfully navigate it. I didn't suggest a Foucault seminar because I'm working for the canonization of Saint Foucault*. I wanted to take a course in this stuff because I need to know about it. It's a requirement of the profession. My thesis has to do with Intellectual Property, and there's no way that any department would let me defend a thesis on that topic that didn't discuss Foucauldian power issues. There are some things that are simply expected, and thusly must be done.

So yeah, I guess I'm PoMo, although never in the most conventional sense of the term. (Stereotypical views of Postmodernism abound. And some of them are funny.) I have no patience for the bleakness of Sartre. I'm not an atheist or an agnostic. I can't help but believe that there has to be a center somewhere, and that it does hold. But bleakness isn't the essence of Postmodernism for me, not by a long shot. What Postmodernism does for me is provide a reminder that we can never stop questioning, that we can't accept things at face value. That seems like quite a worthwhile thing, given the line of work I'm in.

* Actually, what I asked for was a sixteen-week course in the Structuralist Gang of Four, which would have covered Barthes, Lacan, Foucault and Levi-Strauss**. What I got was five weeks of Foucault, and I'm happy to have it.
** Yes, I know that Foucault railed against being categorized as a Structuralist. And in many ways, he was right to do so. But that's not the issue here.