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IDIOT SAVANTS? | PAGE 1, 2
Although Sokal's hoax lauded au courant theorists like Jacques Derrida, Irigaray and Donna Haraway, it employed little logic and fewer scientific truths. For Sokal, the publication of this nonsense proved that Social Text's editors had lax intellectual standards. He also debunked the editors' alignment of science defenders with conservatism by claiming to vindicate leftism. "For most of the past two centuries," he wrote in his disclosure, "the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful ... The recent turn of many 'progressive' or 'leftist' academic humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage." Sokal's hoax immediately snowballed from commentary about the editorial board of one academic journal to a polemic among leftists about the nature of Leftism. It was also something even more abstract: a rationalist challenge to claims about epistemic relativism. "I didn't write the hoax as a scientist in order to defend science," Sokal stated over the phone from his home in New York City. "I wrote it as a rationalist in order to defend rationalism ... and a rational world view." This defense has proved as provocative as age-old dilemmas like monism vs. pluralism, and it has invested the Science Wars with extraordinary recalcitrance. Questions about epistemology may seem too arcane to have much of a real-world effect, but they have proved plenty incendiary. And Sokal distances himself from even the phrase "Science Wars"; he and Bricmont dub it "unfortunate." But recent friction between natural and human scientists has often sparked conflicts in which Sokal's name, like that of Gross or Levitt, functions like a battle cry. A Princeton University Institute for Advanced Studies faculty position in the sociology of science has been funded but gone unfilled after two candidates were campaigned against on the basis of their positions on the Sokal affair. One candidate was Sokal's object of scorn Bruno Latour; the other, Norman Wise, has credentials in both science and history and conceives of himself as a Science Wars nonpartisan, but was campaigned against partially on the basis of an exchange over the Sokal affair. A Science book-review editor lost her job when she printed a critical review of a collection of essays edited by Gross and Levitt. Meanwhile, at an academic conference on "Left Conservatism" I attended this spring at University of California at Santa Cruz, Sokal was called an "ignoramus," an accomplice to conservatives, and compared to Newt Gingrich. During these months of internecine strife, zealots on both sides have mouthed pleas for respectful dialogue between human and natural scientists or between rationalist leftists and relativist leftists. But like badly dubbed voice-over, the dialogue itself has been shrill, and as in a bad film, the heroes and villains have all been caricatures. Lined up on one side we have naively scientific, unimaginative dogmatists fenced in by their unexamined bias that truth and reality exist untouched by the society that describes them. On the other, we have enigmatic writers and irrelevant nihilists so enamored of their intellectual dithering that they no longer even know that jumping out of a tall building will cause them to fall. Each side diagnoses the other as anti-intellectual and as leftist only in name. Each side claims the other is draining the left of its brainpower. Now -- in a return that some will see as a helpful expansion on a hilarious hoax, and others will see as a bad movie that has just gone serial -- Sokal is back with the next salvo: a book whose title alone is sure to inflame. What does "Fashionable Nonsense" prove? When I talked to Sokal, he rephrased his modest mission: "The contribution we make is limited but I think pretty solid. We show that this part of these people's work is nonsense. What does it imply for the rest of their work? Strictly speaking, nothing." Insofar as it identifies and condemns the grave errors in math and science made by some big thinkers, Sokal and Bricmont's critique is indeed rock-solid. Even as we become convinced, however, that these emperors wear no clothes when it comes to physics and math, the importance of such a conviction remains unclear. Sokal and Bricmont are "explicity agnostic" on the larger bodies of these French theorists' work -- they criticize only their abuses of math and science. But even if these French theorists are naked, they wear an ideological haute couture that has never been admired for its threads of math and science. They are distinguished in precisely those fields that Sokal and Bricmont will not address, i.e. psychoanalysis, feminism, techno-politics and cultural analysis. As Sokal and Bricmont themselves are quick to point out, most of Newton's work was on alchemy and mysticism; Descartes' Physics is bogus. So what? We hail them for their accomplishments. "If the same can be said for the work of our authors," they modestly declare, "then our findings have only marginal relevance." Indeed, when I talked over the phone with French theorist Sylvere Lotringer about what he makes of "Fashionable Nonsense," he dismissed its critique as justified only insofar as it is picayune. Sokal, he quipped, "is like a huge dinosaur with a very small head. He wants to criticize and he has reasons to criticize the details. But who cares? The point is, he doesn't address the theories themselves ... If he had attacked the concept by showing that there's an intrinsic relation between the error in a paragraph and the possibility of the concept, that would become meaningful, but his becoming a cop is not very interesting." Co-editor of Semiotext(e), which has long printed French theory titles for American audiences, including many by "Fashionable Nonsense's" targets, Lotringer said he had talked to Baudrillard and Virilio after the book's French release. "No one that I talked to denies that they could have been wrong [on matters of mathematics and science]. But they think it's not a really important thing -- the argument doesn't rely on the accuracy of the detail." University of California at Santa Cruz history of consciousness professor Donna Haraway, who was backhandedly praised in Sokal's hoax, takes Lotringer's point one step further: "I don't expect people I learn from not to make mistakes. I've made some errors. I've used some metaphors that haven't gone where I wanted them to. Sometimes we're arrogant. But expecting something else is to cast a false impression of what it means to be an intellectual." By implying that these theorists are debunked by errata, she continued, "Sokal and Bricmont produce the phenomenon they attribute to others. If we deify thinkers, it's our fault, our failing, not theirs." It's true that insecure readers leap from the observation that they understand only what's trivial and dumb to the non sequitur that if they don't understand something, it must be important and intelligent. But Haraway's claim that this whole brouhaha is somehow the fault of those who expect intellectual luminaries to write cogent, accurate prose also seems absurd. Besides, why would these intellectuals want to write even one sentence of impenetrable prose? If the material isn't technically accurate, what's their real agenda? Although Sokal and Bricmont at first decline to make sweeping speculations about the purpose of this theoretical gibberish, eventually they argue that the goal of these thinkers "is, no doubt, to impress, and above all, to intimidate the non-scientist reader." Later, they assert that feminist theorist Julia Kristeva "is trying to impress the reader with technical jargon," or "to impress the reader with fancy words that she does not understand." When asked why he thinks he's getting so much attention for pointing out isolated errors, Sokal admits his implied attack is large. "Of course, there's a much larger class of things that we don't claim to have proven but which are raised as reasonable conjectures based on what we've proven," he said. "If we've established that 5 percent or even 1 percent of somebody's writing constitutes either gross incompetence or deliberate fraud, then it's reasonable to be much more skeptical about the rest of the person's work." He added that the critiques extend to the field of cultural theory as a whole: "We are trying to criticize not just these writers but their readers who are impressed by them and in particular the secondary authors who were impressed by them and then made an industry writing about them. So we are trying to criticize their whole culture." Sokal and Bricmont's tone in "Fashionable Nonsense" changes from semitolerant to fatigued as they conclude again and again that this is meaningless, that is ill-defined, this other is obfuscatory. Toward the end of the book, quotations of their targets grow increasingly lengthy, taking up four pages in some cases, while their own commentary grows terse -- shrinking in one case to "This ... needs no comment." As the frames grow thin and the quoted passages of mind-numbing prose thicken, another point gets forcefully made: "Fashionable Nonsense" is in large part a reprint of the very nonsense Sokal and Bricmont ask us to dismiss. It is unpleasantly, if justifiably, derivative. It becomes hard to know why anyone not already convinced of their conclusions would care to wade through it. Sokal's hoax and the challenging, often witty papers he wrote to reveal and then defend it, which are included in the appendix, made the same points better. Sokal and Bricmont are at their best when attacking what they call their secondary target: epistemic relativism. They argue convincingly that the idea -- which is often a foregone conclusion in American language departments -- that modern science is nothing more than another story, a "social construction," is by no means proved conclusively, despite the arguments of philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend, who call into question the possibility of absolute truth. Ideas from the philosophy of science, such as the underdetermination of theory by evidence or the theory-dependence of observation, do not, it turns out, easily translate into radical relativism. If "Fashionable Nonsense" gains strength from its modest scope, these limitations also constitute its weakness. In the end, Sokal and Bricmont recommend that leftist postmodernism shed its relativism and reduce itself to claims based on good old-fashioned empirical evidence. But they are careful to give us no idea what such claims might be -- since this subject falls outside their expertise. It's easy to admire their consistency and modesty. But without such positive suggestions, they end up coming off as dogmatic and censorious. As Haraway has put it: "Sokal is working as an inquisitor. He's the Kenneth Starr of the intellectual world." Even if Sokal and Bricmont's broadest allegations of fraud and incompetence are warranted, it's hard to see why humanists would want to follow along their denunciatory path. How could a physics-worthy slash diet of rational skepticism satisfy scholars' desires to unscientifically understand hopelessly complex phenomena like the human psyche, or racism, or modern culture. Why should it? Even so, if Sokal and Brimont do have an effect on the state of contemporary theory, many of these changes will no doubt do some good. During six years of graduate study in comparative literature, I saw plenty of lazy, dull scholars truss up their claims with jargon that required more effort to decode than it was worth. I saw smarmy censorship in the form of blanket claims that truth, meaning, reality, certainty and clarity are dead. I saw one of my best students replace her political activism with talk about how the Mall of America is a Foucaultian panopticon. People say stupid things in order to appear smart; it's nothing new. But cultural theory has also made enormous strides in softening entrenched traditions enough to let in fresh voices and formerly excluded scholars. Besides, if the French theory we're supplied is truly bogus, wouldn't we do better to kill it off with lack of demand, than to react to it ad infinitum? If Sokal and Bricmont are right, why would scientists want to spend precious hours monitoring the fatuous when they could do fruitful, valid work? "It seems to us," Sokal and Bricmont conclude in the epigraph of "Fashionable Nonsense," "that postmodernism, whatever usefulness it originally had as a corrective to hardened orthodoxies, has lived this out and is now running its natural course." Whether postmodernism will be injured by their critique remains to be seen. Lotringer reported to me that Virilio, for one, who is now an old man, was excited by the book. After the two of them perused a passage in "Fashionable Nonsense" that calls a paragraph of Virilio's writing "the most perfect example of diarrhea of the pen that we have even encountered," Lotringer said, "he just rolled up his sleeve and showed me his biceps and said, 'That's good. Because I'm preparing my book for the year 2000 and I know that now they are trying to get us and I'm going to get them.'" Even as the bell opening round two of the Science Wars dings, I discern the din of round three.
Kristina Zarlengo is a freelance writer living San Francisco. She received her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1997. |
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