> SNIP
>
> Derrida came along and based his philosophical inquiries on difference,
> even
> arguing the foundations of the French tradition (Rousseau etc) relied on
> difference and the reality constructed by the other even as they attemped
> to
> negate .
>
> I think he struck a blow against reactionary political forces *as they
> existed* in his own discipline, something that Alan Sokal certainly does
> not
> seem willing to do.
>
> the key is which reactionaries you're talking about... Sokal, it seems to
me, wants politics and science separated so he can take on reactionary
politics in physics - from funding to research programs to right wing
scientists - but believes this is only possible because he separates
politics and science. He hates, and buys into, a inaccurate and largely
uninformed idealist caricature of constructivism because he sees it
destroying the foundation of the kinds of objective, scientific critique of
bad politics, bad policy, and bad science by finding politics inextricably
embedded in science.
For materialist constructivists - and all of the leading science studies scholars are materialist constructivists - Sokal's very modernist stance, a stance they understand full well as lying at the heart of modernity's progressive moment (and at the core of some of its most regressive moments), is now reactive, if not reactionary. Over the course of the 20th C, the relation between science and society has become ever-more clearly fraught - it has taken on ever-less "natural" and ever-more transparently social (read: political) forms. Here, Haraway's situated knowledges, Star and Griesemer's boundary practices, Pickering's mangle of practice, Barad's agential realism, and Latour's actor-networks are all attempts to deal with the always-already embedded politics in science - from the apparatus to the lab to the institution and beyond (though, of course, Haraway makes her politics transparent, while Star and Barad assert but don't clearly work out the role of sex/gender in their work, Pickering presents his stuff comes off as apolitical and Latour's idea of a politics without subjectivity is just plain messed up).
Most interesting to me is the ways that the socialist feminist interactionists (and deconstructivists) end up in a place where what they are endorsing is a radical democratization of Merton's communalism... they are pushing for scientifically transparent engagements w/r/t social interests and technical consequences when it comes to science... something that ought not to be threatening to leftist scientists committed to democratizing workplaces, bureaucracies and civil society but is, perhaps because it threatens the Progressive Expertise scientists believe separates them from the igernant lay public. But, if Our Bodies, Our Selves, if ACT-UP, anf if environmental justice struggles have taught us anything it is that the lay public is pretty damn smart and capable of getting up to high scientific and technological speed really fast when they want/need/are-given-the-opportunity to.
Typing with one hand is tiring, more after the reactions... (hi Damian)