Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 17:39:01 -0400 From: Keith Alan Sprouse <kas3f-AT-virginia.edu> Subject: SERIOUS SOKAL/Ross, Aronowitz, and postmarxism... Let me reconstruct this a little... First, Doug Henwood wrote: >"Well, to start with, if they can't smell bullshit, or pass along a >submitted paper to a physicist with an appropriately trained nose, then >maybe it's because their noses have lost all sensitivity to the stuff, >being so deeply immersed in it." Then Jeff Johnson responded: >This is exactly Keith's point. That's a rhetorical answer, not a substantive >one. I myself can't agree with the post-modernists, of which I assume >Ross and Aronowitz are a part. But I myself am not particularly familiar with their >particular views, and would like to see a bit more substantive debate of their >positions. To which Doug responded: >Gee perhaps I can make it clearer. The editors of Social Text profess to >know something about science, or they wouldn't have had a special issue on >Science Wars, right? So they get a paper from a scientist that turns out to >be absolute nonsense, that anyone with a minimum degree of scientific >literacy could have spotted in a minute. In the course of a year of >editorial deliberations, the editors never noticed this simple fact, nor >did they think science an important enough intellectual pursuit to bother >vetting the paper with someone who actually knew the physics, rather than >just assuming a cocky pomo 'tude. This seems to me highly substantive - >conclusive proof that the editors of Social Text hadn't the slightest idea >what they or their contributors were talking about, and that when caught, >Stanley A's reaction was to call Sokal "ill-read" and "half-educated"! In >demotic English we call that bullshit. Actually, I agree with what Doug has to say; I can't imagine how anyone could (or would want to) try to defend Ross and/or Aronowitz's failure to check Sokal's science with a person (scientist or not) capable of submitting it to a rigorous appraisal. But what I really wanted to know, and have only partial seen (in the post that Lisa Rogers sent entitiled "forwarded mail...") is 1) why everyone seems to take Ross and Aronowitz as being so representative of postmodern/postmarxist theory? What about all of the others, from Jameson to Baudrillard? I think that this large field is much more nuanced and complex than that, as anyone in a humanities dept. (or who reads as much as everyone on this list seems to) would know. Personally, I have little to do with Baudraillard, as he typifies alot of what I see as the dangerous vein of postmodern/postmarxism, but Jameson and some of the others are quite different and have something to offer (IMHO). I'm not sure if this wide heterogeneity in the field of postmodern/postmarxist theory is not addressed because of lack of awareness, or just stereotyping, which is why I posed the question. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. 2) also, in a related question (or rather, the extension of the first), what critique would those of you who seem to be against postmodernism/postmarxism in general. Lisa gave her answer to the second, I think, in the post that I mentioned before. And I agree with most of what she said. In fact, one of the funniest things in Sokal's article, for me, was the part where he offered to let anyone who thought that physical laws were ONLY construction to come and test that from his apartment window. I guess what I'm reacting to is the occasional (and surprising) blanket comments such as that people in humanities depts. "should be ashamed to be there" (as Rahul Mahajan said to Santiago Colas) or that all humanities depts. are governed by some postmodern tyranny. The first such comment doesn't deserve a reply, but the second does. The evidence for this claim usually tends to be "well, in my dept, some people are persecuted..." or "where my friend teaches..."--that is, experiential and not based on any studies, experiments, and so on. These sort of arguments are hard to refute, of course, because it is quite possible that these people are in such a situation and I would have no real desire to try to prove or disprove that. The claim that they then make, however, is different. Just because one person (or maybe one person and some of their friends) suffers at the hands of dogmatic postmodern/postmarxist scholars, it does not necessarily follow that all depts., or even the majority of depts., are run by such people. Resorting to my experience (the 5 depts where I've studied/taugh, in 2 different institutions), I can testify that is not the case. At any rate, thanks for the ongoing debate. Keith ____________________________________________________________________ Keith Alan Sprouse e-mail: kas3f-AT-virginia.edu Dept. of French Language and Literatures office: 804.924.4626 University of Virginia home: 804.971.9824 Charlottesville, VA 22903 fax: 804.924.7157 --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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