Danny Yee reviews FASHIOnABLE NONSENSE

William S. Lear rael at zopyra.com
Sun Jan 24 06:41:11 PST 1999


On Sat, January 23, 1999 at 17:27:04 (-0500) Doug Henwood writes:
>...
>Now what about these progressive hoaxes? There was that great trick that
>the Sub Pop person played on the lamestains at the New York Times, the
>invented glossary of grunge, but 1) the NYT deserved it, 2) it did no
>political or intellectual harm to those that didn't deserve harm, and 3) it
>was clever, original, and funny. Social Text may publish some silly stuff,
>but it's not the New York Times, it did more intellectual/political harm
>than good, and it wasn't at all original.

You imply that Sokal "did harm" by exposing the fatuous b.s. he did? Are pomos in such pathetic intellectual shape that they should be so damaged? Are you saying Sokal's piece wasn't original? I'd never seen anything like it ... Katha Pollitt thought it was a gas...


>They're being coy. The point of Sokal's initial prank was to discredit a
>whole kind of thought, most of which he was ignorant of - and still is. To
>retreat now to saying they're just cataloguing the abuse of scientific
>metaphor, without commenting on the rest, is either silly or dishonest.
>Silly in that the enterprise is trivial if you're not going to engage the
>rest of the thought, and dishonest if they really are trying to discredit
>it all the easy way.

Well, to discredit a whole kind of thought of people who felt that they could simply invent things out of thin air and claim things like objective truth is simply a social construction. Sokal says that his aim is "to combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist/social-constructivist discourse --- and more generally a penchant for subjectivism --- which is, I believe, inimical to the values and future of the Left." This isn't too far from Chomsky's view of left intellectuals, cited by Sokal:

George Orwell once remarked that political thought, especially on the

left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact

hardly matters. That's true, unfortunately, and it's part of the

reason that our society lacks a genuine, responsible, serious

left-wing movement.

It's very true: we do lack a serious left in this country, for a variety of reasons. I've asked before, probably a half-dozen times, and I'll ask again: what novel *and* useful stuff can we pull out of Butler? What is there that cannot be expressed in plain English? If Pomos are so important, how have they contributed to a strong left? What have they done for us (and by "us" I mean, among other things, people who are not religiously attached to Marxist dogma in the first place)?

Bill



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