Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 13:43:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: SOKAL/SOCIAL TEXT AFFAIR: INTERDISCIPLINARITY MY ASS The fact that certain opportunists are being ever so serious about the ever so serious ethical and scholarly issues surrounding the Sokal/Social Text flap has me howling with laughter. That one would with a straight face -- completely deadpan -- dare to suggest that this incident raises ever so serious issues of interdisciplinarity has me in stitches. That a bunch of intellectual frauds with their pants around their ankles and their wee-wees hanging out would caterwaul with solemn indignation about how they were tricked into dropping their drawers, only calls further attention to the spectacle that the very existence of SOCIAL TEXT is the academic fraud that has been perpetrated. Is SOCIAL TEXT the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE? Are serious and harmful decisions in the pursuit of research and application of knowledge going to be made as a result of faked lab results? Or is that the controversy itself is yet another venue for generating cultural capital? I predict that Snott McLemee is going to get himself set up as editor of a forthcoming volume on the Sokal/Social Text flap, and the intellectual gossip industry will have more intellectual junk food to gorge on. Snott can be the Paul Berman of the latest installment of the culture wars. He is well suited to this task. Leo Casey is upset over my reactions to Smelly Stanley, yet the stench emanating from the likes of him and Snott is even more overpowering. Now if I can stop laughing long enough to focus my attention, maybe I will tackle this so solemn and serious hand-wringing over interdisciplinarity. Have you all read the SOCIAL TEXT piece? Do you think it would take a physicist to understand that the article was nothing more than fraudulent gibberish? The reason the article passed publication was not that it could not be evaluated by non-physicists, but that it so resembles the piles and piles of garbage that already get published by supposedly qualified people in humanities departments. In other words, the very fraudulence of SOCIAL TEXT as an intellectual force already primed it to accept the same kind of childish jibber-jabber these people all crank out already. Sokal exploited the same technique that many before him have exploited to produce nonsense, and they could no more see through him than they could see through themselves. Now what is the technique in question? Sokal uses a very simple technique, which should be transparent to every mildly educated reader: juxtaposition and analogy. Basically, he cites all kinds of specialized literature; some of it must have been scientific literature with which he was familiar, and then humanistic literature which he had also consulted. I don't have the background in mathematics or physics or logic to be able to comprehend the specialist literature in those fields. But that doesn't matter here. The point is: Sokal would cite some specialized literature from mathematics or physics, then he would juxtapose quotes from the postmodern bullshit literature, thus building up a commonality between the two based on the most strained and arbitrary analogies. This is not new. The pomos are only doing what the New Agers did for years. And people trained in physics and mathematics can also be intellectual charlatans, and they can get away with it when they enter outside their own areas of professional expertise. Did you ever read Fritjof Capra's THE TAO OF PHYSICS or Douglas Hofstadter's GODEL, ESCHER, BACH? There are many people who get away with this kind of nonsense; some get big rewards out of it. It does not take a genius to take words like complementarity or relativity and match them up with the words of Zen masters or postmodernists. How debased must our intellectual culture be when the most infantile sort of reasoning possible -- vacuous analogy -- becomes the overriding intellectual method? The pomos have a word for silly reasoning by juxtaposition -- they call it intertextuality. It is juvenile beyond belief. The juvenility is compounded by pretending to take seriously that which is preposterous to the casual, uncorrupted observer. The controversy over science and pomo has been going on for years; it is not new. Like the analysis of race and class, it did not commence in 1996. I was involved in this business in the 1980s and I've got many memories. Thanks to the culture industry it has now reached the general public through intellectual gossip sheets like LINGUA FRANCA, which also reflects an advanced stage of the commodification of intellectual capital. The people involved in the likes of SOCIAL TEXT have been caught with their pants down and now they invoke professional standards and ethics -- entities to which they have been total strangers up to now. The best thing they could do would be to shut up and let the "scandal" blow over, but by persistently calling attention to their exposed pee-pees waving in the wind, they undermine their own position more and more. And by trying to retaliate against the bearer of bad news in the most reprehensible and vicious manner, these social democratic swindlers laughably termed leftists deserve to have their heads taken off. If these bastards go after Sokal, then a fightback will have to be organized. Andrew Ross has a very cushy job. He ought to sit back on his overprivileged ass and enjoy his stardom. He's gotten himself in trouble before with his stupid remarks about science. Too bad he thinks he is qualified to engage whatever issue he wants, but he can't be held accountable for anything. That is the mentality of the professional class anyway. These people expose their own class loyalties by their behavior. Let us keep their little maneuverings under scrutiny, and if they get into doing harm to others in order to cover up their own misdeeds, let's nail their sorry asses for it. --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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