Date: Thu, 13 Jun 1996 19:22:43 -0600 (MDT)
From: maria regina firmino-castillo <amauta-AT-unm.edu>
Subject:  (fwd) "PO(st) - M0(dern) - LOTOV COCKTAIL"



THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE OF INTEREST TO SOME....

---------- Forwarded message ---------

     KATHA POLLITT

     SUBJECT TO DEBATE

     Pomolotov Cocktail

     You've got to hand it to Alan Sokal, the New York
     University physicist who tricked Social Text, the cultural
     studies journal, into publishing in its special "Science
     Wars" issue as a straight academic article his over-the-
     top parody of postmodern science critique.

     "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
     Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" is a hilarious
     compilation of pomo gibberish, studded with worshipful
     quotations from all the trendy thinkers - Derrida, Lacan,
     Lyotard, Irigaray, Social Text board member Stanley
     Aronowitz (cited thirteen times) and issue editor Andrew
     Ross (four times). Its thesis, barely discernible through
     the smoke and fog of jargon, is that the theory of
     quantum gravity has important affinities with assorted
     New Age and postrnodern ideas; it concludes with a call
     for "emancipatory mathematics." The whole production
     was rigged so that anyone who knew physics would
     realize how preposterous it was. I tried it out on the Last
     Marxist and had to leave the room, he was laughing so
     hard. To judge by the gleeful e-mail that's been zipping
     around academia since Sokal revealed his prank in the
     current issue of Lingua Franca, the L.M. is far from
     alone.

     When one has been duped so incontrovertibly and so
     publicly there's only one thing to say: Is my face red!
     Instead, Ross has circulated an editorial response that
     stakes out some very dubious turf, much of it seeded
     with land mines. "A breach of professional ethics"? Talk
     about the transgressor transgressed! A "hokey" article,
     "not really our cup of tea"? And yet they published it.
     Social Text not a peer-reviewed journal? Maybe it should
     be.

     Certainly Ross's claim (see "Science Backlash on
     Technoskeptics," The Nation, October 2, 1995) that
     people need no expertise in science to direct its social
     uses has been done no favors by this rather spectacular
     display of credulity. And surely it does not help matters
     to impugn Sokal's motives, as Ross did when I spoke
     with him - to insist that this self-described leftist and
     feminist who taught math in Nicaragua under the
     Sandinistas (more than I ever did) is not on the level.
     Equally foolish is his attempt to play the gender card
     calling the parody a "boy stunt" and urging responses
     from "women's voices, since this affair, at least as it has
     been presented in the press so far, has been a boy
     debate." It's chicks up front all over again.

     It's hard not to enjoy the way this incident has made
     certain humanities profs look self-infatuated and silly -
     most recently, Stanley Fish, who defended Social Text
     on the Times Op-Ed page by comparing scientific laws to
     the rules of baseball. Sokal's demonstration of the high
     hot-air quotient in cultural studies - how it combines
     covert slavishness to authority with the most outlandish
     radical posturing - is, if anything, long overdue.
     Unfortunately, another effect of his prank will be to feed
     the anti-intellectualism of the media and the public. Now
     people who have been doing brilliant, useful work for
     years in the social construction of science-some of
     whom (Dorothy Nelkin, Hilary Rose, Ruth Hubbard) are
     represented in that same issue of Social Text - will have
     to suffer, for a while, the slings and arrows of journalists
     like the Times's Janny Scott, who thinks
     "epistemological" is a funny word, and who portrays the
     debate over science studies as being between
     "conservatives" who "have argued that there is truth, or
     at least an approach to truth, and that scholars have a
     responsibility to pursue it" and academic leftists who,
     since they believe nothing is real, can just make up any
     old damn thing. No light can come from a discussion
     whose premises are so fundamentally misconstrued
     (including by Sokal, who in his Lingua Franca piece cites
     as ridiculous postmodern "dogma" the argument that the
     world is real but unknowable, a position put forward by
     Kant in 1781, and that I have to say exactly accords
     with my everyday experience).

     And the biggest misconstruction, of course, is that "the
     academic left," aka postmodernists and
     deconstructionists, is the left, even on campus. When I
     think of scholars who are doing important and valuable
     intellectual work on the left I think of Noam Chomsky
     and Adolph Reed, of historians like Linda Gordon and Eric
     Foner and Rickie Solinger and Natalie Zemon Davis; I
     think of scientists like Richard C. Lewontin, Stephen Jay
     Gould; feminists like Ann Snitow and Susan Bordo. None
     of these people - and the many others like them - dismiss
     reason, logic, evidence and other Enlightenment
     watchwords. All write clearly, some extremely well. All
     build carefully on previous scholarly work-the sociology
     and history of science, for example, goes back to the
     1930s-to approach that "truth" that has somehow
     become the right's possession. As if Charles Murray is a
     disinterested scholar!

     How "the left" came to be identified as the pomo left
     would make an interesting Ph.D. thesis. I suspect it has
     something to do with the decline of actual left - wing
     movements outside academia, with the development in
     the 1980s of an academic celebrity system that meshes
     in funny, glitzy ways with the worlds of art and
     entertainment, with careerism - the need for graduate
     students, in today's miserable job market, to defer to
     their advisers' penchant for bad puns and multiple
     parentheses, as well as their stranger and less
     investigated notions. What results is a pseudo-politics, in
     which everything is claimed in the name of revolution
     and democracy and equality and anti-authoritarianism,
     and nothing is risked, nothing, except maybe a bit of
     harmless cross-dressing, is even expected to happen
     outside the classroom.

     How else explain how pomo leftists can talk constantly
     about the need to democratize knowledge and write in a
     way that excludes all but the initiated few? Indeed, the
     comedy of the Sokal incident is that it suggests that
     even the postmodernists don't really understand one
     another's writing and make their way through the text by
     moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like
     a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads.
     Lacan...performativity...Judith Butler...scandal...
     (en)gendering (w)holeness...Lunch!--The Nation, June 10, 1996




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