Date: Sat, 1 Jun 1996 15:04:06 +0100 (BST)
From: D Hugh-Jones <dash2-AT-hermes.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: More Pro-Sokal 


On Sat, 1 Jun 1996, Ian Leong wrote:

> Hi.  I've been lurking around for a while now, and seeing as everyone is 
> pitching their pennies into the kitty, I thought I'd reply to Dave 
> Hugh-Jones' comparison of "Derrida and that lot" to a bunch of "twats."  
> Now maybe the term "twat" means something different in the UK than it 
> usually does in America, but comparing and demonizing those who 
> seem to produce jargon-laden ideas to female sexal organs seems typical 
> of Sokal and his supporters, especially the NY Times, Newsweek, et al.  
> The degradation and feminization of the confusing, the convoluted, and the 
> playful--of writing in general--has been a sucessful strategy for a long 
> time.  So Hugh-Jones' remarks come as no real surprise even if they 
> deserve commentary.

Oh dear I'm in trouble again. OK, first of all, to someone else - no I 
wasn't issuing an ultimatum but a challenge. Second: Derrida and that 
lot? Bunch of wankers. Or dicks. Or whatever. I don't buy the whole 
'phallocentric discourse' thing. The !Kung (old drinking mates of mine) 
insult women by calling them 'long black labia'. For men it's 'may death 
pull back your foreskin'. They have (had) by all accounts a very 
egalitarian society, sexually and otherwise. Second, confusing and 
convoluted may be playful for you, but for most of my friends struggling 
to read them they are elitist and off-putting. Specifically they 
discriminate against people who may not have gone to private schools, had 
brilliant educations etc., but who are just as intelligent as the rest of 
us. I think this is a real shame.


> Sokal's whole attitude seems pretty typical of many (not all) aging white 
> male lefties to me.  He seems very paranoid about constantly flashing his 
> revolutionary credentials and his Progressive Thinkers of America (PTA) 
> membership as if being a leftist and a feminist were a get-out-of-jail-free 
> card; the thing about teaching for the Sandinista government really gets me 
> ("look kids, teaching can be useful to the party").  It seems to me that 
> his call to reclaim the Enlightenment and to _purify_ the academy of shoddy 
> scholarship, shoddy politicos, and basically of shoddy people is simply the 
> rearing of "the Left"'s ugly masculinist head. The fragmentation and 
> complication of the Left, or perhaps more accurately of its fantasy of itself,
> always seems to be equated with some sort of loss of power, really of 
> _potency_, to effect "progress," whatever that means.  While I agree 
> with a lot of the defenses of the groovy edge of science, Sokal's repeated 
> boasts of revealing, exposing, laying bare, and taking the emperor's 
> clothes off invokes scientific discourse's phallocratic attractor.

Grrrrr....
  
> Celebrating and gloating over his _penetration_ of Social Text seems to 
> be a calculated flexing of the pecs (though maybe this is what D&G meant 
> by creating monsters by fucking philosophy in the ass--the 
> experimental _effects_ of Sokal's bastard is questionable especially 
> when the Times and Newsweek are such friendly playmates).  So the whole 
> thing doesn't really surprise me.  It was just funny the way Sokal went about 
> performing his critique.  What's more funny is that I kind of agree with 
> all of the things that he was criticizing Cultural Studies for.  He totally 
> proves that scholarship _is_ performance, and people, like himself, get 
> famous for putting on a good show.  I mean so what if scholarship is 
> basically just cocking your hat
                 ^^^^^^^
-well if you're going to get all deconstructive of phallogocentricism on 
my ass, isn't that an interesting metaphor?

 at a certain angle or cupping your 
> postmodern literary cigarette in your palm.  Who the hell is Sokal to tell 
> anyone that their ideas don't deserve to be in print?  The call for 
> _rigor_, or better tumescence and swelling, is power/knowledge at its 
> best.  
> 
> The issue of _Lingua Franca_ in which Sokal first revealed his guile 
> features a cover article titled something like, "Who Owns the Sixties?"   
> It seems to me that the editors of _LF_ were smart enough to figure out 
> that this is really the central question of the whole "Sokal Text" debacle.
> It's about whether or not smoking dope and tripping is useful.  Sokal
> really seems to be having trouble with the regimes of pleasure and 
> consumption that underpin Cultural Studies.

There's nothing wrong with writing for pleasure. It's being subsidized 
for what is basically a hobby that disturbs me. Who is paying for these 
pleasures?

  And Andrew Ross & Co. are 
> scrambling to justify the supposedly unproductive and obscure pleasure that 
> those grandiose, humanities-types (who write books the way Daedalus built 
> bullpens) are having in all those shadowy, decrepit buildings on campuses 
> across the nation.  And the question of the pleasure of cultural studies and 
> all that confusing goobledygook that passes for political ideas is 
> central to Sokal's "good left" critique of postmodern theorists whose 
> theroies don't _WORK_.  Somehow pleasure becomes leisure, somehow the 
> libidinal becomes loafing.   
> 
Is it not true that theory should produce something? In fact not merely 
produce something - which it does already, viz. articles for conspicuous 
intellectual consumption (there's a lovely bit in Baudrillard about 
theories as empty signifiers that can simply be exchanged for each 
other): shouldn't it aim to have specific effects?

For example, I find the 'deconstruction' of sexualities very liberating. 
But you only need to be told once that 'sexuality is not a given entity' 
et cetera. In fact 'I am what I am' says it all pretty much; or the 
actress who when asked if she was bisexual replied "I'm Holly!" (her name).
More on this later. Bet you can't wait

Dave Hugh-Jones
A Rush and a Push and the Land is ours
dash2-AT-cam.ac.uk



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