Book: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals` Abuse of Science

Author: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
Publisher:

The authors explain their objective for writing the book under review as follows:

Our goal is to say that the king is naked (and the queen too). But let us be clear. We are not attacking philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general; on the contrary, we feel that these fields are of the utmost importance and we want to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism. In particular, we want to “deconstruct” the reputation that certain texts have of being difficult because the ideas in them are so profound. In many cases we shall demonstrate that if the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing.

The authors then have provided numerous examples of such pedantic superficiality from several authors who are motivated to denigrate natural sciences with specific agenda of their own. Some of them are in fact guilty of deliberate obscurantism in the name of profundity. They weave metaphorical verbiage saying effectively nothing of any substance. Some feminists are so obsessed with feminine social issues that they cannot resist the urge to take worthless potshots at natural sciences which they believe are masculine in character because they are dominated by males. The authors have provided startling (at least, they startled me) examples of such pedantic puffery to successfully make their point. Quoting, for example, from Luce Irigaray, the authors give the following extract from one of her books:

Is E = M c^2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is in so far as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest.

I truly wonder how such nonsensical rubbish gets published. What does Einstein’s equation have to do with sex? I believed and still do that science is a human activity which is devoid of religion, human culture, nationality, geographical location, etc. and is sexless. The scientists do have these attributes, but science? Science is above and beyond all these restrictive attributes.

She (Irigaray) excels herself when she comments on Fluid Mechanics as follows:

The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids….It is the rigidity of the male organs that counts, not its complicity in fluid flow. These idealizations are reinscribed in mathematics which conceives of fluids as laminated planes and other modified solid forms…

This garbled discourse continues in a similar vein and is taken to the limit of absurdity. Does it contain any new information, any new meaningful interpretation, any purposeful knowledge, one wonders. Who reads this garbage and benefits from it? How is one going to categorize epistemologically this aggregation of vacuous words? Is the style erudite? What does mathematics have to do with femininity and vaginal fluids? Unless of course one is considering to measure the viscosity and density of the vagina fluids. And probably they have already been measured, so what? In my early twenties when I started reading Freud, I used to wonder why he saw sex in everything. At that time in my life, sex was quite a mysterious reality to me; I didn’t quite comprehend any psychology or sociology of sex. Some of Freud’s interpretations appeared ludicrous. They are not so ludicrous after reading the ‘prestigious’ and ‘erudite’ compositions of Iragaray and others to whom the authors drew the reader’s attention in their book.

For instance, in their chapter on the French writer Jacques Lacan, the authors quote from one of Lacan’s books as follows:

Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance (whatever this is, reviewer), not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the square root (-1) of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of the statement to the function of lack of significance (-1).

The coefficient, the statement, and the signifier to which reference is made in the text are related ostensibly in a mathematical relationship which is totally inane and meaningless. It is a shame to indulge in abusing mathematical symbols and notations for totally meaningless garbage. This is intellectual fraud, trickery and cheating.

These postmodern philosophers do not indulge in sexual imagery only, they make mockery of logic and mathematics also.

Among the noteworthy writers of postmodern linkages that the authors have described in their book are Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Paul Virilio. Each one of them has his or her own story to tell through his (or her) parodies of erudite writings. One wonders where they acquired their knowledge from and to whom are they imparting their worthless treasures.

The authors’ onslaught is aimed at the postmodernists, poststructuralists, post-culturalists, and the likes. The authors describe postmodernism in the Epilogue of the book as follows:

Over the past two decades, much ink has been spilled about postmodernism, an intellectual current that is supposed to have replaced modern rationalist thought. However, the term postmodernism covers an ill-defined galaxy of ideas – ranging from art and architecture to the social sciences and philosophy.

To see if he could get a pseudo-scientific paper published in a journal of cultural studies, in which some deliberate inaccuracies and postmodernist verbiage were deliberately planted, Sokal wrote his turgid paper captioned “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermenutics of Quantum Gravity” and submitted it to a trendy cultural-studies journal, Social Text, in the fall of 1994. Since the paper was written in the popular postmodern style and the theme appealed to the editor, it was accepted for publication without a careful review, although five members of the editorial board had performed this chore. Sokal asked the editor for the review comments and none were furnished to him. The paper was published in April 1996.


Sokal described this bold venture in his own words, “I wrote a parody of postmodern science criticism entitled “Transgressing…..”, and submitted it to the cultural-studies journal Social Text (of course without telling the editors that it was a parody). They published it as a serious scholarly article in their spring 1996 special issue devoted to what they call the ‘science wars’. Three weeks later I revealed the hoax in an article in Lingua Franca and all hell broke loose, “(What the SOCIAL Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove, in ‘A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science,’ ed. Noretta Koertge, 1998). The fallout from Sokal’s caper is still there and the science wars have not completely ceased.

Describing his hoax paper, Sokal explains (A House Built on Sand:…), “…one important point has gotten lost in much of the discussion of my article. Yes, the article is screamingly funny.. I’m not modest, I’m proud of my work.. but the most hilarious parts of my article were not written by me. Rather, they’re direct quotes from the postmodern Masters, whom I shower with mock praise. In fact, the article is structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics (and the philosophy of mathematics and physics) from some of the most prominent French and American intellectuals; my only contribution was to invent a nonsensical argument linking these quotations together and praising them. This involved, of course, advocating an incoherent mishmash of trendy ideas.. deconstructive literary theory, New Age ecology, so-called ‘feminist epistemology’, extreme social-constructivist philosophy of science, even Lacanian psychoanalysis..but that just made the parody all the more fun. Indeed, in some cases I took the liberty of parodying extreme or ambiguously stated versions of views that I myself hold in a more moderate and precisely stated form.”

Sokal, a theoretical physicist by profession described his motive for writing this book in these words:

..my main concern isn’t to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we’ll survive just fine, thank you). Rather, my concern is explicitly political: to combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist/ social-constructivist discourse- and more generally a penchant for subjectivism- which is, I believe, inimical to the values and future of the Left.

He also said, “All works cited in my article are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented.”

The book consists of twelve (12) chapters including Introduction and Epilogue and is spread over 300 pages. It has three appendices. Appendix A gives the text of the complete hoax paper, Appendix B includes ‘Some Comments on the Parody, and Appendix C is ‘An Afterword’. It was published by Picador/USA/New York in 1998.

Postscript: I had come across the hoax paper when I was busy writing “Quandary in Quantum Mechanics” which was published on Chowk on May 5, 2003. The title of the paper and its various captions appeared somewhat unusual to me but I didn’t find time to read the whole paper. I just skimmed through it and found a quotation from Heisenberg in it rather interesting and appropriate for my paper. I used it and accorded the credit to Sokal’s paper for the quotation. I had put off serious study of the paper for later. Then I discovered that Sokal had foisted a hoax on the postmodernists – what a son of gun!