Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 20:22:31 -0500
Subject: Hoodwinking the Postmodernists


This was posted to M1 by Louis Proyect. All those who are sympathetic to
postmodernism should think twice after reading this -- of course, they
won't.

Rahul

>I took great glee in the article that appeared in the May 18 New York
>Times entitled "Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly". Alan
>Sokal, an NYU physics professor and former Tecnica volunteer,
>hoodwinked the trendy, postmodernist, postmarxist journal "Social Text"
>into publishing an article he wrote called "Transgressing the
>Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
>Gravity." The article was nothing but a parody on the type of
>gobbledygook that usually fills this publication edited by Stanley
>Aronowitz, DSA bigwig.
>
>(Tecnica was an organization I helped to found that sent hundreds of
>volunteers to work in Nicaragua and Southern Africa during the
>1980s. Sokal was a member of the New York chapter who taught
>mathematics in Nicaragua. The DSA is a major Social Democratic
>group that Sokal is also a member of.)
>
>Here's a sample passage from Sokal's article: "Here my aim is to carry
>these deep analyses one step further, by taking account of recent
>developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in
>which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general
>relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity,
>as we shall se, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective
>physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the
>foundational conceptual categories of prior science--among them,
>existence itself--become problematized and relativized. This
>conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the
>content of a future postmodern and liberatory science."
>
>This, as any sane person would recognize, is total jive.
>
>Alan says that while his method was satirical, his motivation was
>utterly serious. He said in an accompanying article that appeared in
>Lingua Franca, a journal that our estimable Scott McClemee helps to
>edit, that "What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense
>and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and
>sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities."
>
>The article was inspired by controversies surrounding postmodernist
>attacks on science. Postmodernism has targeted science as being just
>one more "metanarrative" that can oppress people. Science joins
>traditional Marxism as being a hierarchical and rigid way of viewing
>reality. Liberation then is tied up with a fragmentary view of reality
>and the physical world. This trend appalled Sokal and he originally
>intended to just write a straightforward critique. He decided that a
>critique would be boring and came up with a parody instead.
>
>According to the NY Times, the article "appears to be an impenetrable
>hodgepodge of jargon, buzzwords, footnotes and other references to
>the work of the likes of Jacques Derrida and Professor Aronowitz.
>Words like hegemony, counterhegemonic and epistemological
>abound."
>
>Sokal's exploit is one more nail in the coffin of postmodernism.
>Postmodernism is an intellectual novelty that reflected the mood of
>tenured intellectuals who became either infatuated or mystified by the
>capitalist boom of the mid 1980s. They tried to explain capitalism's
>power in terms of its ability to seduce people with imagery drawn from
>popular culture. Disneyland, Madonna videos and shopping malls
>became the focus of attention rather than such boring topics as
>unemployment and racial oppression. All this is changing, of course,
>under the impact of the continuing assault by capitalism on the
>working-class. This working-class includes many teaching assistants
>at places like Yale who find themselves on strike more often than at
>art galleries in Soho.
>
>(I realize that probably most people who are on Marxism 1 have never
>heard the word postmodernism before, so would somebody in contact
>with Marxism 2 send this their way. The navel-gazers over there
>might get a kick out of this.)
>
>Louis Proyect
>
>
>
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