File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-06-08.010, message 34


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.


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