Did William James 'explain postmodernism'?

William James' The Principles of Psychology was ahead of its time by at least a century.[1]

Consider the following passages from volume one [pp. 263-5], which I will quote at some length in order to reduce the risk of taking his words out of context:

Usually, the vague perception that all the words we hear belong to the same language and to the same special vocabulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that what we hear is sense. [...]

So delicate and incessant is this recognition by the mind of the mere fitness of words to be mentioned together that the slightest misreading, such as 'casualty' for 'causality,' or 'perpetual' for 'perceptual,' will be corrected by a listener whose attention is so relaxed that he gets no idea of the meaning of the sentence at all.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. [...]

"The birds filled the tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire volume of 784 pages lately published in Boston [Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, Jean Story, 1879] is composed of stuff like this passage picked out at random:

The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their outlets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitage up the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmostophered by like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes, - those sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms, - they descend, and become assimilated by the afferences of the nuclear organism.

Does this type of passage seem as familiar to you as it does to me?

Perhaps the answer depends on the content of your academic education. In my case, a postgraduate degree in 'critical theory', which introduced me to the wonders of postmodernism.
Replicating James' wonderfully wistful way of doing psychological research, I picked up my copy of Critical Theory: A Reader, (Edited by Douglas Tallack, head of my critical theory department) and picked out, as James did, a passage at random:

All history is inseparable from economy in the limited sense of the word, that of a certain kind of savings. Man's return - the relationship linking him profitably to man-being, conserving it. The economy, as a law of appropriation, is a phallocentric production. The opposition appropriate/inappropriate, proper/improper, clean/unclean, mine/not mine (the valorization of the sameself), organises the opposition identity/difference. Everything takes place as if, in a split second, man and being had propiated each other.

What James wrote next, after quoting Jean Story, seems equally appropriate to my quote of Helene Cixous:

There are every year works published whose contents show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to end. It is impossible to divide, in such a case, just that soft of feeling of rational relation between the words may have appeared to the author's mind. The border line between the objective sense and nonsense, impossible. Subjectively, any collection of words may make sense - event the wildest words in a dream - if one only does not doubt their belonging together.

The next passage is even more illustrative, for anyone with a passing familiarity with the intellectual genealogy of critical theory and postmodern theory [be glad if you don't have this]:

Take the obscurer passages in Hegel: it is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation, - immediacy, self-relation, and what not, - which has habitually recurred. Yet there there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.

As Noam Chomsky said: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

Given the capacity of language to construct 'semantically empty' sentences, I wonder how much, and to what extent, further education - and indeed what we have in mind when we talk of 'class' and 'culture' more generally - involves helping people to write collections of words which have this 'vague perception' of belonging "to the same language and to the same special vocabulary". Perhaps being middle-class, or a university graduate, allows us [for I fear only people who have been to university will read this] to better speak, write, and read an economically and culturally privileged 'specialised vocabulary' than other people, without ever quite being aware of it?

As Tony Blair said: "Britain forward not back."

[1]Of course, in making this statement, I'm suggesting a teleological view of history and human scientific progress, with 'knowledge' some form of ever expanding monument to humanity's benevolent dominion over all other aspects of the physical and biological world, directed towards some form of as-yet-unrealised-but-ultimately-inevitable technotopia: a 'singularity' perhaps.
I don't, in fact, believe this teleological narrative, especially with respect to social knowledge (an ongoing 'motif' the reader may pick up from my writings is the sense that many aspects of social theory seemed somehow more impressive and persuasive in the middle of the Twentieth Century than at the century's end). Nevertheless, the statement is the most concise (if philosophically inaccurate) one I can present as to my views on James, who managed to use introspection more effectively as an empirical research method than anyone else I have read. James' programme of 'radical empiricism' - treating subjective experiences as valid datums with with psychological theories may be tested and developed - was simply too radical for most of the Twentieth Century, and a 'Jamesian' research programme, for example with the relatively recent growth in the field of 'consciousness studies', only seems to have emerged within the last decade or so.