On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 01:46 PM, Gar Lipow wrote:
> >(....only bill bennett, alan sokal, and richard kimball are missing
> from his pantheon of right-wing betes-noirs of academia)?
>
> As far as I know Alan Sokal is pretty left wing. I know that he enraged
> many post structuralists by making fools of the staff of a major
> academic journal - but that does not make him a right winger...
point taken. he occurred to me in the heat of the moment and i should have been more careful. i was still thinking of the ways that sokal has been (and continues to be) deployed by reactionaries, but that is not the same as calling him one himself, and putting him in with the crowd i did the way i did was inaccurate and unfair.
interestingly, i found myself looking at the text of a talk given by sokal at the 1997 socialist scholars conference, which i accessed from sokal's page on the Social Text/"transgressions" affair.
the page is here: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/
the talk is here (note that clicking the link will probably automatically download the pdf to your hard drive): http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/socialist_scholars_PUBL.pdf
interestingly, the talk goes precisely to the point i was making (even though i was bassackwards in using sokal the way i did).
he opens with the following: "Perhaps i should begin by explaining what led me to write the parody, because it's not what you might at first think. My aim isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit or sociology. I know perfectly well that the main threats to science these days come from budget-cutting politicians and corporate executives, not from a handful of postmodern academics."
i still disagree with him on most everything, but, well, there it is.
j