[Reader-list] postmodernism disrobed

[Janice Pariat]

interesting.....



Postmodernism disrobed


by Richard Dawkins

[Published in Nature, 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143.]




Intellectual Impostures
by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
Profile: 1998. Pp. 274. £9.99
To be published in the USA by Picador as Fashionable Nonsense in November 1998





Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with
strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of
reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your
pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style
would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose
your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something
like the following:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between
linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and
this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The
symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive
character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the
logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the
ontological binarism we criticised previously.

This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many
fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean
Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously
published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and
revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein
and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant
mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that
we have ever encountered". Guattari's close collaborator, the late
Gilles Deleuze, had a similar talent for writing:
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous
series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor
unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy
wherein the differences between series are distributed... In the
second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification,
always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element
traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the
corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the
emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.

This calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterization of a
certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the
contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose):
Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it
is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of
self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and
stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an
outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality
of modern thought...

Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says:
I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign
against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times
Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and
tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately
expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously
silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who,
when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the
blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being
funny on purpose.

This is from Medawar's 1968 lecture on "Science and Literature",
reprinted in Pluto's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982). Since
Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has raised its voice.

Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described
by the celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the greatest of the
great... Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian." Sokal and
Bricmont, however, think otherwise: "These texts contain a handful of
intelligible sentences -- sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous -- and
we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we
leave it to the reader to judge."

But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so
profound that most of us will not understand the language in which
they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be
unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But
how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert
eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how
shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples
and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American
academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of
mountebanks and charlatans?

Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively, New
York University and the University of Louvain in Belgium. They have
limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke
concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are
talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal. On Jacques Lacan, for
example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments
throughout US and British universities, no doubt partly because he
simulates a profound understanding of mathematics:
... although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical
theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the
slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is
not just false: it is gibberish.

They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan:
Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic
method used here, namely:




You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous.
It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God
by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a
further piece of reasoning that is entirely typical of the genre,
Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ
... is equivalent to the of the signification produced above, of the
jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the
function of lack of signifier (-1).

We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to
assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is
genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher
who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus
one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things
that I don't know anything about.

The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets
whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage
reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia
(a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation".
Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that
are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming
to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought
is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been
unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid
things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of
re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language.
For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and,
yes, he has no clothes:
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the
inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she
attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men
have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings
that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective
it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a
successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot
be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been
formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.

You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of
this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar),
but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real
reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem: the Navier-Stokes
equations are difficult to solve.

In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion
of relativity with relativism, Jean-François Lyotard's 'post-modern
science', and the widespread and predictable misuses of Gödel's
Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean
Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for
bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by
analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, "though
constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a
scientific point of view":
Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in
which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created
by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as
such turbulence distances effects from their causes.

I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's
text "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense". They again call
attention to "the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific
terminology -- inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make
out, devoid of meaning". Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand
for any of the authors criticized here and lionized throughout
America:
In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific
terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in
a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one
interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could
play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations
about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is
mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal
sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left
of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were
stripped away.

But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't
the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no
absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else,
and no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of
relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for
fooling around with word games, and playing little jokes on readers?
Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so
stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not
po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only
joking, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody
plays a joke at their expense? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures
was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Sokal, and the stunning success of
his coup was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might
have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing.
Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be
funny when someone punctures the established bag of wind.

As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the US journal
Social Text a paper called "Transgressing the boundaries: towards a
transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity" . From start to finish
the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of
postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross
and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its
Quarrels with Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), an
important book that deserves to become as well known in Britain as it
is in the United States. Hardly able to believe what he read in this
book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and
found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do
something about it. In the words of the journalist Gary Kamiya:
Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist,
jargon-filled cant that now passes for 'advanced' thought in the
humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever
academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords ('hermeneutics,'
'transgressive,' 'Lacanian,' 'hegemony', to name but a few) would
write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal,
and have it accepted... Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It
cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the 'real
world'), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy)...
And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit -- a fact that somehow
escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who
must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the
Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into
their city.

Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was
a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear,
attacking the 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool notions as
the existence of the real world. They didn't know that Sokal had also
crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that
any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly
have detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew
Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their
own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This
ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel
prize for literature.

Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their
feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic
establishment. Ross has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things
like, "I am glad to be rid of English departments. I hate literature,
for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who
love literature"; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on
'science studies' with these words: "This book is dedicated to all of
the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written
without them."

He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are
not harmless eccentrics at third-rate state colleges. Many of them
have tenured professorships at some of the best universities in the
United States. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees,
wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an
honest academic career in literary studies or, say, anthropology. I
know -- because many of them have told me -- that there are sincere
scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but who are
intimidated into silence. To them, Sokal will appear as a hero, and
nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree. It
helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant, that his own
left-wing credentials are impeccable.

In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text
but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal notes
that, in addition to numerous half-truths, falsehoods and non
sequiturs, his original article contained some "syntactically correct
sentences that have no meaning whatsoever". He regrets that there were
not more of these: "I tried hard to produce them, but I found that,
save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack." If
he were writing his parody today, he would surely be helped by a
virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne,
Australia: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it, at
http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern, it will spontaneously
generate for you, using faultless grammatical principles, a spanking
new postmodern discourse, never before seen.

I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6,000-word article
called "Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context" by
"David I. L.Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of
English, Cambridge University" (poetic justice there, for it was
Cambridge that saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree).
Here is a typical passage from this impressively erudite work:
If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either
reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective
value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between
Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could
be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism
that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the
subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the
collective unconscious.

Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source
of randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable
from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate
thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for
publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be
submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced
and in triplicate.

As for the harder task of reclaiming US literary departments for
genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in
giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We
must hope that it will be followed.

--
not all who wander are lost
Tolkien