- Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont.
Fashionable Nonsense.
New York: Picador, [1997] 1998.
ISBN 978-0-312-20407-5.
-
There are many things to mock in the writings of
“postmodern”, “deconstructionist”,
and “critical” intellectuals, but one of the
most entertaining for readers with a basic knowledge of
science and mathematics is the propensity of many of
these “scholars” to sprinkle their
texts with words and concepts from mathematics and
the physical sciences, all used entirely out of
context and in total ignorance of their precise
technical definitions, and without the slightest
persuasive argument that there is any connection,
even at a metaphorical level, between the mis-quoted
science and the topic being discussed. This book,
written by two physicists, collects some of the most
egregious examples of such obscurantist writing by
authors (all French—who would have guessed?)
considered eminent in their fields. From
Jacques Lacan's
hilariously muddled attempts to apply
topology and mathematical logic to psychoanalysis
to
Luce Irigaray's
invoking fluid mechanics to
argue that science is a male social construct,
the passages quoted here at length are a laugh riot
for those willing to momentarily put aside the consequences
of their being taken seriously by many in the squishier
parts of academia. Let me quote just one to give you
a flavour—this passage is by
Paul Virilio:
When depth of time replaces depths of sensible space;
when the commutation of interface supplants the delimitation
of surfaces; when transparence re-establishes appearances;
then we begin to wonder whether that which we insist
on calling space isn't actually light, a subliminary, para-optical
light of which sunlight is only one phase or reflection. This
light occurs in a duration measured in instantaneous time exposure
rather than the historical and chronological passage of
time. The time of this instant without duration is “exposure
time”, be it over- or underexposure. Its photographic and cinematographic
technologies already predicted the existence
and the time of a continuum stripped of all physical dimensions,
in which the quantum of energetic action and the punctum
of cinematic observation have suddenly become the last
vestiges of a vanished morphological reality. Transferred into
the eternal present of a relativity whose topological and teleological
thickness and depth belong to this final measuring instrument,
this speed of light possesses one direction, which is
both its size and dimension and which propagates itself at the
same speed in all radial directions that measure the universe.
(pp. 174–175)
This paragraph, which recalls those bright college days punctuated
by deferred exhalations accompanied by “Great weed, man!”,
was a single 193 word sentence in the original French; the
authors deem it “the most perfect example of diarrhea of the
pen that we have ever encountered.”
The authors survey several topics in science and mathematics which
are particularly attractive to these cargo cult confidence men
and women, and, dare I say, deconstruct their babblings. In
all, I found the authors' treatment of the postmodernists
remarkably gentle. While they do not hesitate to ridicule their
gross errors and misappropriation of scientific concepts, they
carefully avoid drawing the (obvious) conclusion that such
ignorant nonsense invalidates the entire arguments being made.
I suspect this is due to the authors, both of whom
identify themselves as men of the Left, being sympathetic to
the conclusions of those they mock. They're kind of stuck, forced
to identify and scorn the irrational misuse of concepts from
the hard sciences, while declining to examine the absurdity of
the rest of the argument, which the
chart
from
Explaining Postmodernism (May 2007)
so brilliantly explains.
Alan Sokal is
the perpetrator of the famous
hoax
which took in the editors of Social Text with
his paper
“Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity”,
which appears in full here, along with comments on construction
of the parody and remarks on the motivation behind it.
This book was originally published in French under the title
Impostures intellectuelles.
This English edition contains some material added to address critical
comments on the French edition, and includes the original French
language text of passages whose translation might be challenged as
unfaithful to whatever the heck the original was trying to say.
June 2011 