/lit/ - Literature

>>9182371
Yep.

I think Peterson matters. The culture war that he is fighting is a semiological deadlock, but it's real. He believes what he's saying and to some degree I do also.

The problem is that there's a gap in there, a missing space to be filled in. Peterson does a lot of hand-waving about postmodern nihilism, but it doesn't seem as though he engages charitably with the intellectual project of the guys he blames for the current academic climate: Derrida, Foucault, Lacan. This compounds the problem, no doubt; those three guys are legitimate beasts and all triple-A, no joke, philosoraptors. Peterson is not on their level.

However...things have changed. If anything, the postmodernist project has been incredibly successful, and now Peterson is feeling suffocated by that. As I think many of his students and followers are as well. To me that is worth paying attention to.

Why is there a redpill movement going on today? Why is Trump in the White House? Why is Steve Bannon one of the most important men in America right now? This didn't happen out of nowhere. This happened as a *reaction:* Zizek is always saying, for example, that the left failed, and that is why Trump is there. And yet that is only one-half of the picture, because in another sense, the left and the thinkers with it have been successful almost beyond measure.

To me at least the point is manifestly not to take sides, but rather to see how these things came to pass. What Peterson is reacting to is this idea of the Universal Subject, the subject of pure ideology. Zizek isn't a meme, and he's saying the same thing. Unlike Z, however, Peterson has no interest in social progress. He's entirely on the mythic side of things.

What I would like to see filled in is that space between his thought and those of the pomo guys he is upset about. Because it doesn't seem as though he's about to do that for himself: he's pretty much set in his ways, and all things poststructural seem to him to point to totalitarianism. To some degree this is being born out in mass culture, though of course, only with the best of intentions. Look at Twitter or Facebook. Look at the highly dubious merits of the anti-Islamophobia bill that passed in Canada. Even Sam Harris has identified this stuff as well.

Once upon a time Baudrillard used to lament the disappearance of the real and its replacement by the virtual. I would say, today, the problem is that the virtual is in and the problem is that you almost can't take a step without trespassing on someone else's sense of virtual identity. This is what Peterson is reacting to. And to pick some of the locks on this mechanism and try to understand the arguments being made really is the task of a philosopher.

(cont'd)