ken hanly wrote:
Sokal's spoof was not meaningless. The point was not to be humurous by making fun of post modernist language. After all postmodernist readers did not even take it as poking fun at them. To use PM language Sokal's text deconstructed postmodernism by showing that those who use it do not even understand it since they could not distinguish a spoof from a serious discourse. This may be funny but it also makes a serious po int and there is nothing low about it. Surely people who promote a language should understand it.
I'd be the last to defend Stanley Aronowitz, the ST editor most responsible for publishing the Sokal piece. And I'll leave aside the fact that what Sokal did had nothing to do with deconstruction. But I do want to say that I had several long chats with Sokal in the weeks after the prank and it quickly became clear to me that he has a very conventional idea of scientific knowledge - and the problem with the ST crowd, from his point of view, was not that they weren't doing science studies very well (i.e., informed by a knowledge of both science and politics), but that they were doing it at all. I asked him how he'd feel about a Frankfurt-style critique of instrumental reason, and he had no idea what I was talking about. I don't think his prank did very much to improve the quality of science studies; it just confirmed a lot of pre-existing prejudices about the authority of science. Doug
