Postmodern Pranksters

2,578 words

Alan Sokal

Postmodernism is the first ruthlessly consistent statement of the consequences of rejecting reason.
-Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism

The story of this book begins with a hoax.
-Sokal & Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense

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Postmodernism is a natural enemy of the political right. It invokes the idea of a “post-truth society”, raises the specter of epistemic relativism, and privileges subjectivity over objectivity. If it can be reduced to a “movement”, then that movement is primarily French, and there is a roll-call of offenders from the 20th-century French philosophical tradition which usually includes writers such as Derrida, Baudrillard and Lacan.

One of the charges levelled against postmodernism is that it illegitimately uses terms and concepts from the sciences in order to bolster its academic credibility, and this subterfuge was exposed for the first time in 1996, when physicist Alan Sokal published an article in an influential American journal of cultural studies. The article was entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” and was very well received by the academic community. There was only one problem; the article was a hoax. Here is a sample from Sokal’s piece:

In quantum gravity, as we shall see, 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.

When the hoax was exposed, Sokal and fellow physicist Jean Bricmont published a further book in 1998, Impostures Intellectuelles, published in English as Fashionable Nonsense, which expanded on (and includes) Sokal’s article, and looked individually at postmodern writers guilty of this academic charlatanry. The hall of shame included the usual suspects noted (although there is no separate chapter on Derrida, of which more later) along with several others.

Sokal’s article was not simple ridicule, but “a parody article crammed with nonsensical, but unfortunately authentic, quotations drawn about physics and mathematics by prominent French and American intellectuals.” The aim is not to show that the Emperor has no clothes, but that he is wearing someone else’s. Nor is the aim to strike at philosophy or social theory as a whole, but simply to point out impostures by thinkers who are wandering onto territory they are not competent to occupy, and their work in their respective fields is not held to be invalid simply because of these transgressions. Most of Descartes’ physics was wrong, the authors point out, but the philosophical points he raised remain valid.

Not all the writers criticized are postmodernists, and indeed some explicitly reject the label. But the authors are aware that post-structuralism and other converging trends of Continental and American thought operate in congruent areas. And this throws up another salient point. I have just used the word “congruent”, a geometrical term which would presumably be inadmissible to the authors. But there is nothing wrong with metaphor, analogue, or any other literary device being used in philosophical texts, they maintain (correctly, in my view). It is the coercion of science itself into realms where it ought not to operate legitimately – and indeed does not, cannot – which rankles.

Sokal and Bricmont were not entirely original in their critique of philosophers trading under false pretenses. A passage from sociologist Stanislav Andreski in 1972 serves almost as a mission statement for the two physicists, and is worth quoting in full:

The recipe for authorship in this line of business is as simple as it is rewarding: just get hold of a textbook of mathematics, copy the less complicated parts, put in some references to the literature in one or two branches of the social studies without worrying unduly about whether the formulae which you wrote down have any bearing on the real human actions, and give your product a good-sounding title, which suggests that you have found a key to an exact science of collective behaviour.

Widening Andreski’s remit to include the sciences as a whole, Sokal and Bricmont go about their detective work, and the first culprit is Jacques Lacan.

I tried Lacan years ago and couldn’t make head nor tail of him, and Sokal and Bricmont go some way to explaining why. Apart from anything else, I view psychoanalysis as a sort of luxury mental massage for people who don’t know how to have ordinary conversations with ordinary people. America was always going to be the perfect breeding-ground for this pampering, this psychological spa-day, as many middle-class Americans believe that if a service is expensive then it must be doing them some good. As for Freud, to whom Lacan is seen as an adjunct, although my doctoral thesis had a whole chapter on him, it was purely his philosophical insights that interested me. The case studies of neurotic fin de siècle Viennese women who actually just needed some decent and energetic sex is of no interest to me.

The authors’ charge against Lacan centers around his use of the geometric field of topology, using the figure of the torus (a complex geometrical concept I don’t quite follow) as a stand-in for the psyche or deep self. But Lacan also plays fast and loose with mathematics:

Lacan shows off, to non-experts, his knowledge in mathematical logic; but his account is neither original nor pedagogical from a mathematical point of view, and the link with psychoanalysis is not supported by any argument.

The Frenchman is simply being what the English used to call a “Flash Harry.” The authors grant a certain knowledge of mathematics in the man who wished to quantify Freudian psychoanalysis, but ultimately he is guilty of shanghaiing key terms from recognized mathematicians. It’s mere Gallic intellectual posturing, not an unknown phenomenon.

Next, its Ladies’ Night, with a consideration of Julia Kristeva, a supposed polymath shown to be as much of a poseur – poseuse? -as her male counterparts. Her works “cannot properly be called poststructuralist; they belong, rather, to the worst excesses of structuralism” and, although she claims her use of set theory is “only metaphorical”, she still makes gross mathematical errors in co-opting various theories without justification or even understanding what it is she is utilizing to support her poetics. It is the sort of writing which makes the keen postmodern student feel, to quote Ray Bradbury, “brilliant with information”, even if that information is spurious. “Her sentences”, the authors conclude, “are more meaningful than those of Lacan, but she surpasses even him for the superficiality of her erudition”.

Next is a break in the duck-shoot, an “Intermezzo”, which focuses on epistemic relativism in the philosophy of science. This is an important chapter in making clear exactly what is meant by “relativism”, and is more relevant than ever today, in these times of “her truth” and rampant identity politics:

Roughly speaking, we shall use the term ‘relativism’ to designate any philosophy that claims that the truth or falsity of a statement is relative to an individual or to a social group.

This chapter could easily be read first, particularly for the non-philosopher, as it is a tour through some of the leading names in scientific theory. It also foreshadows the wider implications of the rejection of accepted and rationally grounded research and outcomes in a wider societal setting than merely the enclave of the scientistic: “Relativism (as well as other postmodern ideas) has effects on the culture in general and on people’s ways of thinking.”

The chapter also includes considerations of relativism with regard to criminology, education, and the Third World which are more relevant now than they were when the book was published.

The intermezzo over, it’s time for the opera once more and our next diva, Luce Irigaray. There is a constant, whining drone from the Left about the under-representation of women in philosophy and its associates, but as bullshit artists the numbers are good. How like life. Irigaray’s range of interests include psychoanalysis, linguistics, and the philosophy of science, and she is the first writer considered to be obsessed with what we now know as “toxic masculinity”, an expression of weakness all dressed up as a valid argument. “Is E= Mc² a sexed equation?”, she asks. “Perhaps it is”. Mathematics, fluid mechanics, quantum physics: all of these are masculine enterprises which relate more to primordial – and anatomical – sexuality than to scientific endeavor, and become dressing-up boxes which Irigaray can open and choose a costume whenever her analysis seems a bit drab. A good example of the transmission of this type of absurdist, gender-based, quasi-analysis comes from a female American student writing on Irigaray:

In the context provided by Irigaray we can see an opposition between the linear time of mathematics problems of related rates, distance formulas, and linear acceleration versus the dominant experiential cyclical time of the menstrual body.

We are all familiar with the feminist observation that rockets and missiles are phallic. No one seems to have done much work on the likelihood of a vagina-shaped rocket making it to the Moon. At best, Irigaray is a deranged feminist. At worst, say the authors, a mystic.

The name Bruno Latour was not familiar to me when I first read Sokal and Bricmont’s book 20 years ago, but the bedrock of his thesis is that “the content of any science is social through and through”. The authors consider Latour’s treatment of Einstein and his Relativity Theories, in particular his misreading of a key principle of physics: the frame of reference. Another non-scientist at the wrong end of the playground, Latour is dismissive of scientists at the heart of their whole endeavor:

First, the opinions of scientists about science studies are not of much importance. Scientists are the informants for our investigations of science, not our judges. The vision we develop of science does not have to resemble what scientists think about science.

This is an extraordinary statement, and is exemplary of the tendency of epistemic relativists constantly to think that they are being judged in some court of law. Scientists judge reality by rigorous method, they don’t take people to task for coming up with a garbled view of their mission.

Next, another intermezzo, this time on a subject which got many non-scientists into a frisson of excitement when it first became popularized in the 1990s, and its examination of unpredictability and the instability of the outside world suits the relativist perfectly: Chaos Theory. This was one of those outbreaks of populist science that became all the rage, and spawned many a Sunday newspaper color-supplement spread. And I remember wasting time in seminars discussing Chaos Theory in preparation for which myself and my fellow students had read little more on the subject than James Gleick’s bestseller Chaos: Making a New Science. It was a gift for the postmodernists, as is anything tending towards the chaotic rather than the orderly.

Again, this is a useful stand-alone chapter, and the authors provide a potted introduction to Chaos Theory. It is centered on the unpredictability of differing systems which obey the same physical laws but become chaotic when they interact, and gave birth to a famous image:

This phenomenon is expressed figuratively by saying that a butterfly flapping its wings today in Madagascar could provoke a hurricane three weeks from now in Florida.

Again, the authors have no problem with the theory within the confines of the systems proper to scientific enquiry. It is the application of Chaos Theory to economics or society with which they take issue, deeming that it “borders on the absurd”:

[H]uman societies are complicated systems involving a vast number of variables, for which one is unable (at least at present) to write down any sensible equations. To speak of chaos for these systems does not take us much further than the intuition already contained in the popular wisdom.

Back to the rogues’ gallery, and one of the most infamous names of all: Jean Baudrillard. He it was who notoriously claimed that war “takes place in a non-Euclidean space”. I imagine there are soldiers who have lost limbs in battle who would have liked to put the Frenchman in a very Euclidean space. Like a coffin.

Baudrillard is outed as a serial abuser of scientific terms and concepts as one text “continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense”.

We shall not reach the destination, even if that destination is the Last Judgment, since we are henceforth separated from it by a variable refraction hyperspace.

These terms, and many others, are strewn about Baudrillard’s work like baubles on a Christmas tree, designed to add sparkle and color. The authors see his work less as philosophy and more as a magpie’s nest of trinkets stolen from others.

The old Marxists Deleuze and Guattari are next, and the list of offences becomes processional. In the work of the philosopher and the psychoanalyst:

One sees that there is a great concentration of scientific terms, employed out of context and without any apparent logic, at least if one attributes to these terms their usual scientific meanings.

I had never heard of Paul Virilio 20 years ago, and I have failed to acquaint myself with his oeuvre in the interim, but he is the last of the sinners.

A chapter on various abuses of Gödel’s Theorem and set theory (neither of which mean much to me as I am averse to mathematics) follows, and then it is Sokal’s hoax, still crazy after all these years, a masterpiece of deliberately contrived gobbledegook arranged so as to resemble innovative academic brilliance. It glitters, but it is not gold, except as satire.

The authors, writing at the very end of last century, do not see postmodernism as a danger, whereas we see from our vantage point that it very much is once it has flowed downstream from the universities and taken root in actual social, cultural, and even political practice. There is nothing wrong with postmodernism provided it remains a field exercise and does not seep into government legislation, for example, as it is now doing.

A note on Jacques Derrida, who does not merit his own chapter, but whose one quote with which the authors find fault found its way into Sokal’s hoax article:

[A]lthough the quotation from Derrida contained in Sokal’s parody is rather amusing, it is a one-shot abuse; since there is no systematic misuse of (or indeed attention to) science in Derrida’s work, there is no chapter on Derrida in this book.

I have a bit of a soft spot for Derrida which I explain here at Counter Currents, and he is often unfairly tarred with the same brush as Foucault et al as a malevolent spirit within Western thought. Well, at least he doesn’t really transgress Sokal and Bricmont’s stringent rules.

It is more important than ever to understand what is happening to thought and truth in the modern West since it fell into the hands of epistemic relativists, and this type of debunking is required in the field of Critical Race Theory today. It would not require the technical detail provided by Sokal and Bricmont, however, as the modern left are intellectually negligible. But the striking down of tin-pot idols is a worthwhile enterprise from the point of view of the right.

The book teaches an important lesson; don’t pretend to knowledge you don’t have or don’t fully understand simply to give the impression either of unique insight or academic rigor. Someone, like the mischievous physicists Sokal and Bricmont, will find you out.