Blinded By Science
by Eric Lott
It has been two years now since a nearly quantum gravity settled upon New York intellectual life. In a special "Science Wars" issue of the journal Social Text edited by NYU cultural critic Andrew Ross, physicist Alan Sokal (also of NYU) managed to place an essay parodying the critiques of "objective" science mounted over the last couple of decades by writers from Luce Irigaray to Donna Haraway, Stanley Aronowitz to Ross himself. As soon as the spoof appeared, with its call for a "transformative hermeneutics" that would help purge the teaching of math and science of "its authoritarian
and elitist characteristics," Sokal went public with news of the hoax in the magazine Lingua Franca. Whereupon a leaden chorus came down. People left and right who had never liked Social Text now got to scold; major newspapers made stertorous reference to the abuse of science; Sokal, in the press and in symposia, made the most of his skunk hour. Ross and Bruce Robbins, ST's editors at the time, wrote a lengthy rationale for their gaffe but earned little of the attention initially paid to the fracas. Ross later complained that l'affaire Sokal had wasted months of his time, while ST board member Aronowitz concluded that, in not seeking the advice of a trained scientist on the Sokal essay, "Social Text fucked up."
Now it's Sokal's turn. Fashionable Nonsense is Sokal and Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont's attempt to seize the moment and extinguish the half-life of postmodern thought. As believers in Truth, Objectivity, and Scientific Method, they seek to show how influential French thinkers have occasionally thrown around "scientific jargon in front of their non-scientist readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning." The authors apparently believe their case casts a long shadow of "charlatanism" over the entire careers of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Irigaray, Jean Baudrillard, and others.
Having at various times entertained similar doubts myself, I was nonetheless unmoved by Sokal and Bricmont's plod through the writers' mathematical and scientific references— Lacan's forays into topology, for instance, and Kristeva's interest in set theory. I'm like, Their science is iffy? You shoulda seen their grammar. There are maybe one or two things a critic of poststructuralism might want to tackle before laying low its proponents' math skills. Plus, it isn't as though scoring the science vagaries in Gilles Deleuze is going to cancel his interest. But "it is natural," S & B write, "to want to examine more critically the rest of his or her work" when evidence of "incompetence" is found in "even a marginal part" of someone's writings. They compare their enterprise to the geological discoveries that cast doubt on the Bible's 5000-year history of the earth, and triumphantly proclaim that "the king is naked (and the queen too)."
If you're going to invoke the Enlightenment, you'd better have something enlightening to say. Fashionable Nonsense carries a heavy aura of tendentious ignorance, its overblown dismissals seeming to grow in proportion to its fatuity. As hapless as it is breathless, the book answers "Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" with abuses of rhetoric, logic, and argumentation that have the odd effect of making Lacan sound as sensible as Edmund Wilson. For some reason, Sokal and Bricmont avoid a head-on critique of the science-revisionists (Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Emily Martin), who have shown how narratively and ideologically mediated "objective" science is; they name-check and drive-by some of these, but carefully hew to the really important task of busting psychoanalysts and cultural critics for poaching on other disciplines.
Indeed the great irony of the book is that Sokal and Bricmont come up with instances of alleged science-abuse that show poststructuralist theorists trying their best to take old-fashioned science straight, not revise or postmodernize it. When Kristeva invokes set theory she's a wannabe mathematician, not a debunker. This may owe in part to the fact that many of these offenders were just coming into widespread popularity in the mid 1970s, perhaps a less intellectually jaded time than ours. Fashionable Nonsense might have had just a smidgen more impact if it had appeared 20 years ago. By now, most poststructuralists have been so thoroughly absorbed (and in several cases sweated out) that S & B's project is irrelevant.
Besides, one comes to find in Fashionable Nonsense not the expected demonstrations that Lacan et al. have their science wrong— that is, commit the "nonsense" of the book's title— but only that science is not necessary to their work. Write Sokal and Bricmont, "[O]ur criticism does not deal primarily with errors, but with the manifest irrelevance of the scientific terminology." Go ahead, trust the opinion of two physicists short on literary talent. And while you're at it, ask them why they spend so much time getting hot about terminology that they claim isn't relevant to the writings they discuss.
Perhaps anxious about the critical condition of their argument, Sokal and Bricmont practice a style of "analysis" that by comparison puts TV's McLaughlin pundits on a par with Dorothy Parker's Algonquin roundtable. "Meaningless" is their favored epithet, though "bizarre" and "beneath comment" are also typical S & B responses to the passages they cite. Standard operating procedure in Fashionable Nonsense is to quote anywhere from one to four pages of a given theorist (a few of these folks ought to get royalty checks) and then condemn the passage in a sentence or two of unimaginative abuse. Baudrillard is too full of "metaphors," S & B assert; his sentences are "devoid of meaning," and his writing, they claim, borrowing a phrase from ideologues Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, "is as pompous as it is meaningless."
Deleuze and Guattari, meanwhile, are found to be "often meaningless," "utterly meaningless," "devoid of meaning," "meaningless," and "devoid of both logic and sense," all in one 15-page chapter (almost 10 pages of which are filled with quotations from Deleuze and Guattari)! Faced with such depressing stuff, I began to long for even the most recent bullshit of Baudrillard just to restore my faith in the creative imagination.
Fashionable Nonsense was published last year in Paris as Impostures Intellectuelles, and amid the predictably polarized responses drew heavy fire that has evidently made the authors rather nervous about the release of the English edition. Their attempts to forestall criticism only compound the cross-purposes. "It goes without saying that we are not competent to judge the non-scientific aspects of these authors' work," they write, as though this incompetence doesn't affect their ability to judge the relevance of the scientific aspects as well.
They recognize that their subjects "differ enormously" and "should not be lumped together in a single category," yet what they call their "limited but original contribution toward the critique of the admittedly nebulous Zeitgeist that we have called 'postmodernism' " depends on doing just that; a few lines later they admit Kristeva's math jones was "abandoned . . . more than twenty years ago," but attack these earlier writings anyway "because we consider them symptomatic of a certain intellectual style." Justifying their necessarily selective survey of a few representative big names, Sokal and Bricmont say they "have no desire to write a ten-volume encyclopedia on 'nonsense since Plato,' nor do we have the competence to do so." It figures that these two would drop such a genuinely catchy idea, and exempt genuinely qualified writers from the project.
Sokal and Bricmont make a big fuss about their leftist politics, and though I don't doubt their claim to be driven solely by a passion for rigorous thought, it's not difficult to spy the political stakes of this intellectual investment. "Our aim is not to criticize the left, but to help defend it from a trendy segment of itself," they nobly suggest, and this sounds a lot like the new Enlightenment-embracing front of boomer neoliberals, from Todd Gitlin to Paul Berman.
Like Richard Rorty, the bland old man of this camp, Sokal and Bricmont lament that "remnants of the left have collaborated in driving the last nail in the coffin of the ideals of justice and progress," which, translated, means the new social movements make us exNew Left white guys feel unimportant. So: back to basics! The old science rather than critical scrutiny of it; the old class politics rather than social movements from all quarters for civil and economic equality. Sokal in an appendix confesses, "I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class," and the demagoguery of the remark reeks if you happen to wonder about the similarly remedial effects of the academic study of physics. A major aspect of Fashionable Nonsense is the tale of how the New Left got old. On this theme, Sokal and Bricmont have written the best parody of all.
Eric Lott is the author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)