@Alephwyr @rechelon To be fair, it's not even possible to have a comprehensive understanding of postmodernism unless you study it professionally. It's hard enough just to get a grasp on what a single postmodern scholar theorized. It's all just so convoluted. This makes it difficult to criticize because there's a lot of nonsense to sift through.
Of course, this points out another problem with Peterson—that he pretends to have a comprehensive understanding of everything.
I mean I definitely disagree that you need to be "professionally" employed in academia or whatever to study and provide critiques of Derrida's use of differance or Foucault's assumptions re the grid or Feyerabend's arguments about method or to point out the wedge problem in the Strong Programme or whatever.
I agree that Jordan Peterson is a fool and impressively lazy, that much is trivially obvious. But a lot of laymen critics of postmodernism nevertheless are a lot less foolish and often hit on good points independently reached by "professional" philosophers. Moreover it's important to note that even a fool like Peterson is often critiqued on things (like his analytic conjunction of postmodernism and marxism) that are actually quite well established and widely admitted.
Peterson seems to get like 100% of his analysis from a Randian right-libertarian who wrote a somewhat problematic book, but there is some substance and engagement with texts even within that book, although it misses the mark in other places. What's funny is Peterson constantly misreads even that text in his lazy regurgitation of its critiques.
God, took me forever to remember what the book was called or who the author was: https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406/ref=sr_1_10?crid=2YYPM11NK7Y5A&keywords=against+postmodernism&qid=1677395161&sprefix=against+postmoderni%2Caps%2C339&sr=8-10
It's definitely simplistic in a number of respects and it frames itself as an intro. I don't think I've read it in a decade, so my memory is also rusty, but everything I remember is like line for line clearly the origin of what familiarity Peterson has with things and the critiques he uses.
@rechelon @Alephwyr What I mean by "study it professionally" is just the amount of time it takes given the volume of scholarship and the complete time sink required to try and make sense of it. It's also full of obscure references and French puns.
This is actually the same reason why I usually avoid criticizing Peterson to his acolytes—I can't invest the time to read/listen to much of his stuff.
For me, the fact that the definition of postmodernism is so elusive and variable is the critique.
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