>Third, your comment
>
>"If you think Lacan is full of it, you should show that by taking
>on the body of his work, not mocking some badly appropriated
>scientific
>metaphors. The exercise proves nothing."
>
>seems to demand a very restrictive mode of debate. Evidently you
>think that one must criticize the overall positions of one's
>opponents. E.g., one must show that Lacan is "full of it," and,
>if one doesn't, one is "silly." So if S & B do not take up
>"Lacan" as a whole, they supposedly "prove nothing."
>
>Intellectual debate rarely works the way you seem to demand. And
>for good reason: intellectuals try to resolve things in debate,
>and they simply can't do so by criticizing each others'
>*positions*. When that occurs, the discussion degenerates into
>"your opinion" vs. "my opinion," nothing gets resolved, and the
>whole thing gets replayed ad infinitum. So instead, in order to
>resolve things, intellectual debate (when it is honest) is almost
>always a debate over *arguments*. One weakens the other position
>by demolishing one or more arguments that support it.
A debate should acknowledge, explore, ransack positions. The Sokal affair is just another phase in an idiotic exchange of volleys between camps who have barely read each others canons and rarely cite a text to make a point. This, I'm sad to say, is especially true of people who claim to be defending classical Marxism (though not all of them - Tom Dickens [you here?] told me at URPE summer camp that he thought Disicipline & Punish was as important as Capital vol. 1). Terry Eagleton wrote a book, which is often very good, against a postmodernist "mood," while barely specifying the pathology. Sokal reinforced a popular and unfortunate prejudice that certain writers and certain kinds of thinking are absurd to the core and not worth taking seriously. That's stupid.
Doug