Louis Proyect wrote:
> Joseph Green:
> > So far, although you complain--in essence--that Sokal and
> >Bricmont have taken passages out of context, you have not
> >demonstrated it.
>
> I have no idea what you are talking about. Sokal and Bricmont actually do a
> rather elegant job of exposing the ridiculous pretensions of Lacan and
> company.
That, Mr. Proyect, is because you missed the fact that
I was replying to Doug Henwood, who did in deed complain,
essentially, that Sokal & Bricmont had taken passages out of context.
> I am dealing with an entirely different problem, which is the
> rather widespread perception that this has anything to do with a Marxist
> critique.
As far as I can tell, Sokal and Bricmont do not claim, in their
book, to be Marxist. They even seemed to want to distance themselves
from Marxism. What they say privately, I don't know. But in any case,
they are not Marxists.
However, insofar as Sokal and Bricmont defend a materialist
standpoint that there is such a thing as objective truth, they
have--if only to that extent--a position which is in accord with
Marxism. If it is a widespread perception that Marxism believes that,
despite the inevitable one-sidedness and incompleteness of the
thought of any one human or group of humans, nevertheless human
knownledge and science can reach closer and closer to objective
truth, then this is a correct perception.
> The reason that this is important to understand is that Monthly
> Review Press decided to sell a Pluto Press book titled "Science and the
> Retreat from Reason" on the basis of its "Sokal-like" strengths.
Is it your view that "Science and the Retreat from Reason" is
what Sokal and Bricmont are saying, or do you think that this is a
wrong perception?
> When you fail to make a political and intellectual
> distinction between socialist politics and science as a social institution,
> you end up adapting to the corporate/scientific world. In other venues, the
> authors also endorse nuclear power everywhere and call worries about global
> warming "bad science".
If the authors regard the threat of global warming and various
other global environment threats as absurd, then they are the ones
who are engaged in "bad science". The 21st century will face
many difficult environmental challenges. Whether this is so or not,
however, is not a question of values or socialist politics, but a
question of fact. Any real "Marxist critique of science" would be
very, very clear on this. If it could be shown that the major
environmental problems didn't in fact exist, then all of the
socialist politics in the world couldn't resuscitate these problems.
As far as I am aware, however, serious scientific work is
verifying the existence of these problems or even finding new ones..
Moreover, once the question arises of what to do about these
problems, one is faced even more urgently with knowing the scientific
facts about these problems.
> The politics of this are much clearer when you evaluate Sokal's partner
> Norman Levitt on his own terms.
This is an unworthy style of attack. If you wish to cite actual
theses of Levitt, analyze them, and compare them to Sokal's, I would
find this very interesting. While I read Sokal and Bricmont's book
carefully I have not yet had a chance to do more than browse a few
passages from "The Higher Superstitution" by Gross and Levitt. The
passages I looked at included some displaying a gross ignorance of
and hatred of Marxism, and others that made pointed and accurate
criticism of widespread anti-materialist viewpoints.
> It targeted not just the sort of silliness that Lacan is capable of
> (and that is all it is), but the Marxist critique of science.
The stuff ridiculed by Sokal and Bricmont is not just
silliness. It is the basis of a good deal of fashionable mysticism
and nonsense. It seems to me that the fact that "Social
Text" could publish the Sokal spoof is not an accident, but a
practical result of thsi journal's "critique of science".
--Joseph Green
If
> you want to understand what such a critique is about, I suggest you
> take a look at the chapter "The Commoditization of Science" in
> Lewontin and Levins's "The Dialectical Biologist", which includes
> the following paragraphs:
>
> "MODERN SCIENCE is a product of capitalism. The economic foundation of
> modern science is the need for capitalists not only to expand horizontally
> into new regions, but to transform production, create new products, make
> production methods more profitable, and to do all this ahead of others who
> are doing the same. Its ideological underpinnings are congruent with these
> needs and also with the political philosophy of the bourgeois
> revolution--individualism, belief in a marketplace of internationalism,
> nationalism, and rejection of authority as the basis of knowledge.
>
> "As capitalism developed, so did the ways in which science participated.
> >From a luxury consumption for the aristocracy (along with court musicians
> and fools), science became an important ideological weapon in the struggle
> against feudal theology and a resource for solving practical problems of
> the economy. After the long depression in the last part of the 18th
> century, there was a definite upsurge of inventions and innovations in
> industry and agriculture. The number of patents registered in Great Britain
> rose from 92 during the 1750s to 477 in the 1780s. Agricultural societies
> were established around that time, and advances in animal breeding and
> management resulted in the formation of cattle breeds, such as Hereford.
> The weight of cattle marketed in London doubled in the course of the
> eighteenth century, and that of lambs tripled. In the early nineteenth
> century agricultural journals began to be published.
>
> "The leaders of the bourgeois revolutions recognized the potential of
> scientific research for military and commercial power. Among the earliest
> scientific societies were the Royal Society, in 1662; the American Academy
> of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780 by leaders of the revolution in New
> England; Franklin's American Philosophical Society (1768); and the Naval
> Observatory in Greenwich (1675).In France the Directorate founded the Ecole
> Polytechnique in 1795, and Napoleon urged scientists to develop munitions,
> as well as a synthetic indigo dye to replace the imports from India that
> were cut off by war. The systematic surveying and cataloging of the
> biological resources of tropical regions conquered by European countries
> led to a flowering of systematic biology under the leadership of Linnaeus.
> By 1862 the Morrell Act in the United States set up the land grant colleges
> of agriculture and mechanical arts in recognition of the importance of
> scientific knowledge for the improvement of farming and mining.
>
> "Throughout the first century of the industrial revolution, science
> enlarged its role as an externality of the capitalist expansion, like roads
> and lighthouses, and as a way to solve particular problems (as in Pasteur's
> identification of the Phytophora that threatened to wipe out the French
> wine industry). But science was not yet a commodity. Its application was
> still uncertain, its potential still mostly untapped, its product still
> often an after-the-fact explanation of empirical innovations."
>
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>
>
>
