December 7, 1998
CONNECTIONS
It's a Battlefield Out There, Culturally Speaking
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By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
D oes anything exist outside culture? Is there anything that we do
that is free of the distortions of our tastes and customs? That
isn't irrevocably shaped by the languages we speak or our material
interests? Is there anything out there that we can assume to be
noncultural or transcultural or even universal?
Don't count on it. Two years ago, Alan Sokal, a New York University
physicist, wrote a satirical paper full of absurdities and
scientific howlers arguing that even "physical reality" was at
bottom a "social and linguistic construct," that even famous
numerical constants like pi are culturally dependent, that science
-- presumably the most "objective" of human enterprises -- is
culturally determined. He submitted the paper to the trendy
academic journal Social Text as if he was serious. The journal's
editors didn't get the joke, neither catching the errors nor
thinking the paper's assertions absurd. They published it with
pride in a special issue devoted to challenging scientific claims
of objective truth.
The firestorm set off by Mr. Sokal's hoax became an international
scandal; more than a hundred reviews, philosophical papers and
debates are now posted on Mr. Sokal's Web site
(www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal). Yet what was the result?
Mr. Sokal meant to undermine the extreme relativism latent in the
field of "science studies," but the editors defended themselves,
and allies stood up for the mocked positions. There were no
recantations even after the hoax was revealed. It would have been
encouraging if, for instance, even the unchanging nature of pi had
been affirmed, but no such luck. Maybe the whole mess suggested
that there really is no common ground on which proofs can be made,
arguments won, convictions overturned. Science is culture-bound,
and so is argument about it. We are all post-modern (colloquially,
pomo) relativists: You go your way and I'll go mine. If we meet,
it's beautiful. And if we don't, well, that's only to be expected.
But now it's happening again. This time, Mr. Sokal, joined by Jean
Bricmont, a Belgian theoretical physicist, wrote a full-scale
polemic that was published in French last year and has just been
released here as "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals'
Abuse of Science" (Picador U.S.A.); it is also being translated
into Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese
and other languages.
The authors focus their attack not on American relativists but on
the ornate French intellectuals who are celebrities at American
universities, ranging from the critic Julia Kristeva and the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to the sociologist Bruno Latour and the
philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
The accusation: that these star intellectuals display a broad and
deep ignorance of science that is matched only by their nerve in
cryptically using its vocabulary as a smoke screen, often
diminishing science along the way. Thus, the "erectile organ" is
compared to the square root of minus one (Mr. Lacan); poetic
language is described with bumbling allusions to set theory (Ms.
Kristeva); even Einstein's equation E=mc2 , is considered a "sexed
equation" giving "privilege" to the presumably male speed of light
because it's the fastest (Luce Irigaray).
The book's detailed attack on French intellectual life helped make
it a best seller in France. At least 20 essays appeared in Le Monde
alone. And many of the French critics focused not on issues of
substance but on cultural matters. Mr. Sokal and Mr. Bricmont were
accused of being pedantic foreign grammarians picking apart elegant
(French) love letters. One offended opponent suggested that they
were engaged in a typically American spasm of hatred that was
reminiscent of Kenneth Starr's report. Another critic proposed that
the two authors were like American militarists who, deprived of
cold war Government support, sought a new menace to oppose.
In other words, proclaimed the French counterattacks, this is a
cultural battle, even a political battle, not an intellectual one.
This also resembles a response to the first Sokal affair: many
arguments made it seem that there aren't just two cultures, as C.
P. Snow once famously described the sciences and the humanities;
there are only cultures: French and American, left and right,
poetic and scientistic. Arguments become battles of taste or the
scrabbling of political opponents.
Even Mr. Sokal is side choosing, explaining that in his attack on
post-modern relativism "my concern is explicitly political": to
rescue the left from its pomo taste makers. Meanwhile, he and his
supporters have been denounced for raising the "specter of left
conservatism." And science itself becomes another terrain for
cultural battles.
There are, to be sure, good reasons to ask questions about science.
In recent decades, serious scholars have been able to show how
culturally dependent it is. Everything from styles of experiments
to the choices of subjects for research are shaped by politics,
finance and other time-bound forces. Of course this does not mean
that the results of scientific discovery are merely cultural.
(Pi is not a variable.) But nonetheless such assertion are often
made by more orthodox post-modernists, who suggest that science has
no right to special claims of truth.
This position has been more influential than it might seem. Eager
to jump on that bandwagon, even some mathematicians have been
straining (unsuccessfully) to find an example of a culture-bound
mathematical fact.
If everything is culture, nothing is immune to challenge,
including, as Mr. Sokal and Mr. Bricmont argue, courtroom evidence
and archeological evaluations.
And science loses its status. Many of the French writers attacked
in "Fashionable Nonsense," even if they are not relativists, invoke
science not to suggest something rational and ordered but something
baffling and surreal: the origins of the self (Mr. Lacan), the
nature of poetry (Ms. Kristeva), the oddities of modern war (Jean
Baudrillard). Science becomes an emblem of obscurity and
oppression.
Much of this is praised in the name of progressive change, but Mr.
Sokal and Mr. Bricmont dissent. They are disturbed that the
anti-rationalist attack on science is so closely associated with
the political left. They suggest that frustration with the failures
of communism and the success of capitalism may be a reason.
So, too, they say pomo has been influenced by political movements
based on cultural, ethnic and sexual identity, and by the hostility
science has inspired with its military applications.
But this would make pomo a matter of sociological exasperation. The
science debates go to the very heart of the divisions between the
political left and right during the last two centuries. How much is
nature and how much culture? How much is given and how much is
made?
The extremes of the right celebrate the rule of nature, the
unchangeable character of hierarchies, the call of destiny.
The extremes of the left celebrate the relativity of nature, the
malleability of human societies, the self-interest inherent in all
authority. Pomo is a strand of left-wing thinking, just as
fundamentalism is a strand of right-wing thinking.
Mr. Sokal has been attacked as a "left conservative" because he is
trying to stake out a territory free from the political claims of
culture. That would be the territory of reasoned argument,
objective fact and Enlightenment insight, where even debates like
these might take place. But he is opposing those who consider
themselves to be the most progressive and enlightened: those able
to step outside the prison of culture and see all its distortions.
The irony is that culture is still all they see.
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Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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