Perhaps market society will remain forever in mourning for the socialist illusion without which it cannot conceive its own freedom. This is something we can hardly know while we ourselves remain in this phase. At any rate, if a catastrophe occurs to take us out of it, we will know of that soon enough. If this view of the postmodern is correct, then the truly postmodern way of thinking is not deconstruction or any of its victimary avatars but Generative Anthropology . Yet neither GA nor mimetic theory in general has been integrated into mainstream thought.
Popularity is no index of truth in mathematics or the natural sciences.
The situation is different in the social sciences, not because data cannot be obtained and hypotheses tested and falsified, but because there is no fundamental agreement as to the significance of the results. We know what questions to ask the natural world because our place in this world generally makes it clear to us what manipulations, whether practical or merely theoretical, we desire to exercise on it. The academic discipline of Anthropology can be counted on to ask and answer a fairly well-defined set of questions about human behavior. Historically, GA may well be the last significant attempt to understand the human on the basis of the textual perspective that defines the Humanities, and whose current decline presages the end of the Humanities claim to a shaping influence on the public dialogue. I recall hearing many years ago a professor of European history reproach the French Department for teaching Proust , who was little known during his lifetime, rather than Romain Rolland , whose works were influential best-sellers.