It was about form, not substance, which I see as a major feature of post-modernist and linguistic studies, particularly those where they try to influence reality. It was also so blatantly leftist it made me sick.
I think what you encountered would be called semiotics rather than linguistics (by the people involved, to get around the fact that linguistics could probably be considered a subset of semiotics), or maybe even something rather different.

My impression is that most linguists are just interested in describing regularities within and between languages, and how people use them.