Most of the semiotics and sociological content of postmodernism (ie the majority of it) is really simple and intuitive - it's just wrapped in layers of reference to obscure philosophy, invented terms, and overly complicated language.
Social media, and TikTok in particular, push the limits of SotS which is mainly mass media focused.
Thousand Plateaus was extremely poetic but its contents can be converted into more straightforward ideas like deterritorialisation and schizoanalysis. Poetry is just the delivery mechanism.
Also Deleuze is an example of a philosopher who has both done poetic and analytic work (including metaphysics, which is a core analytic discipline) but is generally considered a continental philosopher. I don't think the distinction matters - both "sides" just explore different philosophical topics. I enjoy both of them and the divide seems petty.
If anything, the places where continental philosophy flourished have less of this "turning the western world upside down" than the excesses in US academia (when they don't criticize them) - and some excesses of it they do share, they import them (due to US pop/social/etc culture pressure), not export them.
Well, according to us continentals, who, if not invented, highly developed the thing for 2500+ years (both philosophy and analytic philosophy, it's west-adopted spinoff), analytic philosophy is not philosophy either.
It's more of a technical than a philosophical field, or, if you wish, it's a specific philosophical application of logic, math, and co. that mistook itself for the essense of philosophy.
>what poetry does is defamiliarize language. It's impact is emotional. It isn't philosophy
That's not some general truth - just an specific school/idea idea about poetry's function.
Aristotle, for example, considered poetry more philosophical than history - because it captures the essential and distills it rather than bundle a development with the non-essential, random, and contingent (as history does).
No such path of learning is ever presented for any of postmodernism. The twin obsessions of (a) treating only primary sources as authoritative , coupled with (b) the dense jargon of the primary sources that makes it unreadable to anyone but the experts is what makes postmodern philosophy unapproachable.
This forces people to discredit much if postmodernism. It seems to be a community that refuses to expand and make approachable their work, while claiming that their work has important ramifications. That reeks of snake oil salesmanship to me.
This is who they gave the nobel prize to last year. I don't know how anyone can take these people seriously when this is supposed to be the definitive text on the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation.
Given how many people get upset by even the term "postmodernism", I think it's a worthy exercise to make the concepts more accessible so that less people think it's an exercise in trying to destroy the philosophical foundations of the West, and more an exercise in trying to understand the reality we live in.
Why? As a scientist doing theoretical work, one of my main drives isn't always to discover new things, it's to explain known things "better", where better usually means in terms of simpler concepts or with more lightweight objects, with less accidental complexity. This goal of simplicity is very central in science, with concepts like occam's razor.
> There are very few people complaining about the unreadability of quantum equations in fundamental physics or the jargon of theoretical mathematics.
I can't speak for physics, but in mathematics a lot of people (mathematicians, logicians) criticize the mathematical jargon of category theory. And in fact there are lots of people in the programming language community (around type theory) that imho is trying to make category theory more accessible by using it parcimonously, rewording stuff and making it shine in simple ways (by giving some short hints for categorists but otherwise explaining classic lemma instead of referencing them).
> Yet for philosophy, especially that which criticises the current order, this is somehow seen as discrediting.
There's critic and critic. Having a text full of unnecessary jargon does imho greatly reduces any subversive pretensions. Things will always have some intrinsic complexity, but adding additional complexity in the form of tons of implicit references (when the relevant part could have been explained succintly) or poetic writing style is an obstruction to the sharing of knowledge (which is the actual benchmark for subversivity: how much can it lead to actual actions).