I found Alan Sokal's work to be a useful and enjoyable refutation of
postmodernist pretensions. True, Sokal is a mechanical materialist, not
a dialectical materialist. But it is one thing to criticize him for
being a mechanical materialist, and another to recoil from the
refutation of the fashionable, self-righteous, know-it-all views of
modern anti-materialist subjectivism, such as post-modernism.
I include below the introduction to an article on Sokal's book
that I wrote, and a URL where the entire text can be found. In this
article, I express what I found positive in his work, as well as defend
dialectics against the mechanical views he puts forward. In doing so, I
point to the role of historical materialism, as well as the existence of
contradictions in physical nature and mathematics. In the latter regard,
I both discuss quantum mechanics and point out that Sokal makes a
factual error on the question of infinitesimals in mathematics.
The article can be found at
http://www.communistvoice.org/20cSokalLong.html
A shorter and more pithy review of Sokal's book, by Tim Hall,
the editor of "Struggle", a magazine of proletarian literature,
can be found at
http://www.communistvoice.org/20cSokalShort.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Sokal and Bricmont's book 'Fashionable Nonsense'
Postmodernism versus materialism
by Joseph Green
(from Communist Voice #20, Mach 28, 1999)
Subheads:
One, two, three, many realities
Ad hominem attacks--the new "rationality"
Postmodernism's charlatanism
Relativism and science
The "strong program" in the sociology of science
The paradigms of T.S. Kuhn
Overcoming the crisis of the left
The Enlightenment
Historical materialism
The dialectics of nature
Does science teach anything but technical lessons?
Dialectics, motion, and infinitesimals
The Enlightenment and the masses
The rise of Marxism
The current crisis
In defense of materialism
Text:
The left-wing scientist Alan Sokal became the center of controversy
in 1996 when his spoof on postmodernism, an article with the pompous
title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was accepted as a ser ious article by
the postmodernist journal Social Text and published in its Spring/Summer
1996 issue on the "science wars". This article denied, in the name of
"science", the basic materialist view that people live in an external
world, whose existence and features are independent of the desires and
feelings of human beings. It was full of pseudo-profound assertions
about science that were ludicrously wrong. But as it repeated all the
postmodernist catchwords and referred in glowing terms to various
postmod ernist authors, the editors of Social Text couldn't tell it from
an ordinary postmodernist article. Indeed, they were so impressed by the
article that, even after Sokal revealed that it was a hoax, one of the
editors, Bruce Robbins, still felt it was a serious contribution to
postmodernist philosophy.(1)
The next year Sokal, now joined by Jean Bricmont, a theoretical
physicist from Belgium, continued to poke fun at postmodernist ignorance
of science. They published in France a book entitled Impostures
Intellectuelles which showed the many leading postmo dernist writers,
including the famous psychologist Jacques Lacan and the sociologist of
science Bruno Latour, were spouting nonsense in the name of "science".
For many postmodernists it is a point of honor to write in an obscure
language that is difficult to understand. Sokal and Bricmont showed
that the passages about science in various works of these authors were
incomprehensible not due to their depth of thought, but because they
were mistaken or even meaningless. A good deal of serious postmodernist
writi ng is indeed hard to distinguish from Sokal's spoof of 1996.
Impostures Intellectuelles brought the debate to a new level,
spreading it from the U.S. to France, and the book is currently being
translated into about a dozen languages. Many postmodernists were
outraged that their favorite authors were being judged by the standards
of rational thought and objective knowledge whose relevance
postmodernism denies. Meanwhile the book finally appeared in English
last year in Britain; and at the end of year it was published in the
U.S. under the title Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals'
Abuse of Science.
The book centers on two subjects. Besides puncturing postmodernist
windbaggery about science, it also sets forward some basic materialist
views about the nature of science and its relation to the external
world. Mind you, Sokal and Bricmont rarely use t he word "materialism",
although it is not clear whether they are simply bowing before the
general prejudices of academic circles against such an allegedly crude
doctrine as materialism or whether they themselves share these
prejudices. They avoid the term "materialism" by instead emphasizing
that they are attacking "a potpourri of ideas, often poorly formulated,
that go under the generic name of 'relativism' " (p. 51). "Relativism"
however is a rather broad term that covers many different concepts.
Sokal a nd Bricmont distinguish between "moral or ethical relativism"
about value judgements, "aesthetic relativism" about beauty, and
relativism about the existence of an external world ("cognitive or
epistemic relativism"), which is the only relativism that the y analyze
in this book. They criticize the views on science of such "relativists"
as T.S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Bruno Latour.
Sokal and Bricmont limit their analysis of postmodernism to these two
points: pseudo-scientific jargon, and "relativism" about the existence
of scientific truth. For example, they don't discuss or pass judgment on
the general psychological theories of L acan, only his mathematical
claims, such as "psychoanalytic topology". But for now, their narrowness
serves a useful purpose. Their object is not to assess everything that a
postmodernist author may have said or done, and certainly not to oppose
every pol itical cause that a postmodernist may have championed, but to
focus attention on some basic theoretical issues. They accomplish this
with an admirable flair for irritating the high priests of obscurity.
Fashionable Nonsense is certainly not the last word on the "science
wars". Sokal and Bricmont ignore the question of dialectics; they have
little conception of how to apply materialism outside the sphere of the
physical sciences; they don't know how to deal with the crisis in the
left other than to urge rational thought; they don't deal with how the
official scientific establishment bends before the bourgeoisie and does
its will; etc. But it is long overdue that two scientists should
demolish the scient ific pretensions of the postmodernist philosophers;
indeed, Sokal and Bricmont laughed at them. For myself, I found the book
not just useful, but rather enjoyable as well.(2) It will be welcomed by
all those who have felt oppressed by the high-flown verbiage and
double-talk with which postmodernism has sought to silence criticism. It
has also come as a great relief to some people who had made a serious
attempt to understand the supposed scientific basis of what the
postmodernist authors have been saying.
Notes:
(1) Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross responded on behalf of the editorial
board of Social Text to Sokal's revelation that his article was a hoax
in a statement published in the July/August 1996 issue of the journal
Lingua Franca. They pointed out that one of the editors "suspected that
Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission
represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual
resolve." Bruce Robbins, writing in the September/October 1996 issue of
Tikkun, went still further and approvingly cited someone who wrote that
Sokal's article had "proposed that superstring theory [a speculative new
theory in physics--JG] might help liberate science from 'dependence on
the concept of objective truth'." In reference to this, Robbins claimed
that the editors of Social Text had thought that Sokal had a good point
in this interpretation, "*and we still do*." (emphasis added)
(2) Of course, having a basic grounding in mathematics and physics is
helpful, or even essential, for understanding a number of the examples
that Sokal and Bricmont use; the more background one has, the more
ludicrous the examples will appear. Sokal and Bricmont try hard to help
the reader by providing, for example, simple explanations of a number of
technical terms which are misused by Jacques Lacan and other
postmodernist authors. But this is hard to do in a few words. Those
readers who can't verify for themselves various of the technical
examples in the book may, however, be interested in the fact that no one
has disputed these examples, not at least in the debates that I have
seen. Based on my own assessment of these examples, I am not surprised
by this in the least.
For the rest of the article, see
http://www.communistvoice.org/20cSokalLong.html
---Joseph Green
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
