[Reader-list] postmodernism disrobed... thoughts on sokal-bricmont

[Dwaipayan Banerjee]

He who laughs last, laughs best?
Dwaipayan Banerjee



A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can
one not dream while writing? It is the pen which
dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. 

         Gaston Bachelard 


Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence,
carries with it a system of rules for producing
analogous things and thus an outline of methodology. 

If this work seems so threatening, this is because it
isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent,
rigorously argued, and carrying conviction. 

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier
and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible? 

             Jacques Derrida 



I read the post on the Sokal-Bricmont affair a couple
of days ago, and I have to say the currency it
continues to hold years after the event is
disconcerting to say the least.

To put it briefly, I cannot find many ways of
distinguishing between those who blindly toe the Sokal
line and the editors of the journal (not peer-reviewed
let us remember) that the hoax was sent to.  To me,
they both represent the highest forms of intellectual
laziness and lack of rigour.  Why?  Simply, because
when Sokal and Bricmont make sweeping accusations
about disciplinary masters such as Deleuze, Latour,
Irigiray and Lacan, they have simply not bothered to
train themselves in the disciplines they think they
are at such liberty to condemn.  To me, it is
precisely the equivalent of someone 'debunking'
Eistein's theory of relativity because it did not make
immediate sense to him as he flipped through it before
bedtime.  I am not for a moment arguing that there is
no such thing as bad social science writing.  I am
just wary of people making judgements on such writing
without the adequate training to do so.  

I am honestly scared of a world and people that would
walk into a Picasso exhibition without any
understanding of painting and dismiss it summarily
without any curiousity or desire to learn.  I am also
scared of a world with only the literature that is
'easy' to read and has no place for Joyce, Eliot and
countless others.  I certainly would not enjoy living
in a world that ridiculed the hootings of a Charlie
Parker because it did not make them immediately want
to dance.  In academics, as I make place for a host of
mathematics and physics that I do not understand, I
wish simultaneously that a similiar place would be
made for philosophy and social studies of science
rooted in philosophy (which of course are strengthened
by a fundamental knowledge of the science examined). 
I am glad therefore for the many scientists and
mathematicians who have come out over the last ten
years against Sokal and debunked his 'debunking' so to
speak.

More specifically, the rubric 'science studies' is now
so broad that is it as meaningless an analytical
category as it is to ludicruously criticise it in a
sweeping generality.  There is good writing on science
and bad writing on science, but picking on Latour
whose understanding of the most complex theoretical
physics (thanks to a training in science, which is
more than te can say for Sokal's knowledge of
philosophy) really fails to make much sense to me. 
Also to pick on arbitrary extracts from Deleuze -
while ignoring the vast philosophical tradition
beginning with Spinoza - seems to me to represent the
worst excesses of intellectual laziness that
characterise so many critics of 'science studies'.  It
is fortunate now that social studies of science
represent a high degree of knowledge of their objects
of knowledge; it is unforunate that the same can't be
said of their critics.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater also means
making redundant the path-breaking work done by Bohr,
Heisenberg and countless others who have done
pioneering work (much before 'science studies') at the
intersections of science and philosophy.  I mention
those two specifically because of their intersections
with Lacan that Sokal is so critical of.  For more on
this:
http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/sokalhoax.html

To put it succintly, I am sure Guattari does not
fascinate the everyday reader, and that neither do
Deleuze or Lacan.  But perhaps it would not be too
much to ask that you be trained to some reasonable
extent in psychoanalysis or philosophy before
judgements on their work are so pronounced with such
forthright candour?  If their works were next in line
for the Pulitzer I would understand some apprehension.
 However they are not, and in the same way we
appreciate the specificity of the use of language in
scientific languages, let us accord some of the same
to serious social sciences?  Honestly, I cannot
respect academic thinking that is too parochial to
understand that different forms of academic enterprise
require different styles and logics of writing.

If we do not malign the languages of science such as
mathematics as 'jargonistic' and unreadable, perhaps
non-specialists should similiarly attempt to
understand that some good social science writing
demands a similiar exactness and specificity that
should not be confused with 'jargon' and posturing. 
'Style comes in many shapes and sizes'.  Some
scientists write to communicate to lay audiences, some
do to their trained peers.  In the same way, social
scientists too have different sets of audience in
mind. Deleuze and Guattari are no bed-time reads, I am
in fact glad that such rigour exists alongside
similiar other exciting social science writing
(Latour's for example) that keep a larger audience in
mind and style their prose with such a purpose.  

This is perhaps not the place to enter into a
discussion about the crucial intermingling of writing,
method and thought - the interlinkings of form and
concent about which poetry teaches us so much, but it
would do us a whole lot of good to begin to realise
that style is deployed for a reason - be it
intellectual, aesthetic, technical or combinations of
these.

And as regards Dawkin's quoting of Foucault's 'One day
perhaps this century will be Deleuzian', he woefully
missed the equally wonderfuly reply.  Deleuze replied
thus to Foucault's comment: "A joke meant to make
people who like us laugh, and make everyone else
livid".  Poor livid Dawkins.  He who laughs last,
laughs best?

I have no quarrel with those who wish for simplicity
and clarity in writing.  To me, poetry remains the
form of expression for which I reserve the most
respect and adulation. However - try as we may - we
are not all poets and the men of genius who
encapsulate beauty and truth in one pithy phrase come
few and far in between.  In the meanwhile, we are left
with the task of saying what we know in the best
possible way.


		
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