p...p....p.....POST ! Gesundheit.

    A young visiting professor from Chile, whose name unfortunately I did not catch, had an interesting observation at a conference the other day.  He commented that the repetitive labeling of "post" this, "post" that (i.e. post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-industrialism, etc), tended to be of a somewhat vacuous nature with no substantive interpretive contribution.  His colleague interestingly commented that this was probably the case in order to create academic niches in a saturated market, implying that social dynamics were apparently having noxious consequences on internal processes of academic development.  When another scholar, in defense of the 'post', listed a number of academic  terms that had actually been used, she ironically did reveal the somewhat trivial nature of many demarcations and overall academic trend.  In spite of these interesting critiques, however, it is to be noted that classification per se is not a negative exercise in frivolity.  If done appropriately, it can eventually reveal the greater contours of our reality, and hence form the basis of more intellectually sophisticated theories--as occurred in the history of biology and geology.   Network analysis of intellectual exchange, after all, also constitutes a form of categorization as well by the demonstrating the overall patterns and contours of academic collaboration.