Fair point. I think at some point you do have to just go to the text though. You can only read around something for so long before you just have to read the thing itself. That assumes a certain amount of good faith engagement though whereas I get the impression the people railing against postmodernism via Peterson aren't really interested in learning about postmodernism.
Yeah I tend to think that, in general, its tough to meaningfully oppose something if you don't understand its momentum - or at least begin to understand it. Without understanding it, your conception of it can hardly amount to more than a straw man, no?
And suspendedreason is right about the postmodern and poststructural stuff and how dense it is. At certain depths there, you're pretty much having to systematically contrive the ground on which you walk, each step an assertion - seeing as the whole lot of it is mired in psychoanalysis, school of suspicion, no?
And its easier to disregard it if you don't understand what is trying to be done. What is trying to be done? Systematically finding the "whys" of numbingly circuitous and nebulous things, like how the psyche formulates the world, cleaving to the zero-point of meaning, breaking out of hierarchical sensibilities, etc.
Things that have theoretical value, and can meaningfully change how you think about things. But a lot of it seems to be meant for readers already primed for its density, rather than oriented around ground-level intuitive explanations.
@suspendedreason what ends can you discern among poststructural discourse? Are these ends the result of some phase shift undergone by the ends of modernity? What use are they to those among us who aren't versed? Common/intuitive lessons to be extracted?
Can we think of "postmodern" as describing the placement of the discourse in the meta-narrative, and "poststructural" as describing the impetus of the discourse?