File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-07-10.220, message 62


Date: Sat, 15 Jun 1996 06:43:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: SOCIAL TEXT POSTSCRIPT


I found some time in the wee hours last night for some bedtime
reading, so I decided to peruse the rest of the infamous SOCIAL
TEXT (#46-47) that carried Alan Sokal's hoax article
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (pp. 217-252).  The title alone
makes me laugh.  The rest of the issue, the contents of which were
presumably written with a straight face, was uninspiring.

What is the problem, exactly?  Years ago I read tons of material
in the social studies of science placing scientific activities in
their social, cultural, and economic context, and there certainly
is enough meaty material to study.  But then, the solid stuff is
not written by people in Cultural Studies, who after all, are
nothing more than carriers of the fetishism of cultural
commodities, no matter how hip they think they are (viz. Stinky
Stanley snapping at Sokal calling him ill-read).  The worst
examples of science studies are not confined to Cultural Studies
as a discipline by a long shot, but I'm using the latter as a
shorthand term to cover a common set of philosophical assumptions
whatever the discipline.

The problem begins with the introduction by Andrew Ross that
frames the issue.  The aim is to defend the pomo-esque Cultural
Studies take on science against the attack from the right, i.e.
>from the National Association of Scholars, Gross and Levitt, etc.
In other words, this group is defending its position in the
culture wars, which renders most of this issue of little worth.
If the right could actually succeed in wiping out the likes of
Andrew Ross or Sandra Harding, they would have performed the one
service to humanity they will ever render.

Beyond the defensive posturing, the confused reasoning, and the
feminist drivel, there is little beyond a recapitulation of some
of the research in science studies.  Not every word is nonsense,
of course, but there is a consistent lack of clarity in what is
being argued -- when one argues about the economic, class, and
other factors that drive science and technology as a social
enterprise, what does that have to say about scientific
rationality or method itself?  Cultural Studies people, who are
incapable of writing a coherent paragraph, are not the most adept
at getting their arguments and their targets straight.

>From a philosophical perspective, I found only a few pages of
interest.  Steve Fuller, in his article "Does science put an end
to history, or history to science?" (pp. 27-42), has a section on
"How Japan taught the west the secret of its own success" (pp.
35-40).  The historical information utilized comes from James
Bartholomew, THE FORMATION OF SCIENCE IN JAPAN and Scott
Montgomery, THE SCIENTIFIC VOICE.  Fuller describes the context n
which science was taught in the western universities in the 19th
century.  Most interesting is the case of Germany (I think it
was), in which science was taught explicitly with the cultural
tradition of western civ as a backdrop.  The Japanese, seeing the
various contradictions involved in this heritage  -- the quarrel
between science and religion, etc. -- were very skeptical of the
cultural package, and learned to see western science not as a
"western" achievement but as a merely conjunctural phenomenon.
They learned to strip off the purely scientific methods from the
cultural packaging and use the former without buying into the
latter.  Perceiving a possible threat to traditional values such
as happened in the west, the Japanese ruling class who bankrolled
science and technology transfer adopted a purely instrumentalist
approach to science, in which methods and techniques that produced
results were accepted, without challenge to traditional religious,
metaphysical, or cultural beliefs.  Too bad Fuller doesn't draw
the logial conclusion from this example, that the petty bourgoeis
obsession with "contextualization" is not an argument for anything
in itself.


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