Postmodernism Disrobed
by Richard Dawkins
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but
with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a
coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world
anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of
literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for
clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that
you would produce something like the following:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal
correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-
writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential,
multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of
scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive
character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove
us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us
in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised
previously.
This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of
many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and
Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures,
previously published in French and now released in a completely
rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on
indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and
Bricmont, "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-
scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever
encountered". Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles
Deleuze, had a similar talent for writing:
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to
heterogeneous series which are organized into a system
which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable',
endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences
between series are distributed... In the second place,
singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always
mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical
element traverses the series and makes them resonate,
enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single
aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a
single cast.
This calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterization of a
certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the
contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose):
Style has become an object of first importance, and what a
style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality,
full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic
manner, and stopping from time to time in studied
attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had
a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought...
Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar
says:
I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering
campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on
structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has
suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous
by reason of their profundity are most appropriately
expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a
preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid
warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight
seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted
us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on
purpose.
This is from Medawar's 1968 lecture on "Science and Literature",
reprinted in Pluto's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982).
Since Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has raised its
voice.
Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books
described by the celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the
greatest of the great... Some day, perhaps, the century will be
Deleuzian." Sokal and Bricmont, however, think otherwise:
"These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences --
sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous -- and we have
commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we
leave it to the reader to judge."
But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so
profound that most of us will not understand the language in
which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language
designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of
honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it
really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has
clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish
French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but
taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely
profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans?
Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively,
New York University and the University of Louvain in Belgium.
They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured
to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they
know what they are talking about, and their verdict is
unequivocal. On Jacques Lacan, for example, whose name is
revered by many in humanities departments throughout US and
British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a
profound understanding of mathematics:
... although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the
mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up
arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their
meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it
is gibberish.
They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning
by Lacan:
Thus, by calculating that signification according to the
algebraic method used here, namely:
You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous.
It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence
of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the
infinite. In a further piece of reasoning that is entirely typical of
the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ
... is equivalent to the {PRIVATE}of the signification produced above,
of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its
statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).
We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and
Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake.
Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects?
But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the
square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials
when it comes to things that I don't know anything about.
The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets
whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage
reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's
Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a
"sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light
over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of
what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical
of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics.
Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics"
privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine
Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in
(comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably
unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:
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... From this perspective it is no wonder that
science has not been able to arrive at a successful model
for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be
solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women)
have been formulated so as necessarily to leave
unarticulated remainders.
You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity
of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too
familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell
us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem: the
Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve.
In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's
confusion of relativity with relativism, Jean-François Lyotard's
'post-modern science', and the widespread and predictable misuses
of Gödel's Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The
renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos
theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal
and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The
following sentence, "though constructed from scientific
terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view":
Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic
formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity
and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history
definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances
effects from their causes.
I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say,
Baudrillard's text "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense".
They again call attention to "the high density of scientific and
pseudo-scientific terminology -- inserted in sentences that are, as
far as we can make out, devoid of meaning". Their summing up of
Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticized here and
lionized throughout America:
In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion
of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their
meaning and, above all, in a context where they are
manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them
as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play,
except to give an appearance of profundity to trite
observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the
scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific
vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When
all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of
Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were
stripped away.
But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'?
Isn't the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there
is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as
anything else, and no point of view is privileged? Given their own
standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task
for fooling around with word games, and playing little jokes on
readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their
writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be
entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More
tellingly, if they are only joking, why do they react with such
shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense?
The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax
perpetrated by Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup was not
greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for
after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently,
when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when
someone punctures the established bag of wind.
As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the US
journal Social Text a paper called "Transgressing the boundaries:
towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity". From
start to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted
parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this
by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition: The
Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1994), an important book that deserves to
become as well known in Britain as it is in the United States.
Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal followed
up the references to postmodern literature, and found that Gross
and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about
it. In the words of the journalist Gary Kamiya:
Anyone who has spent much time wading through the
pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for
'advanced' thought in the humanities knew it was bound to
happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with
the not-so-secret passwords ('hermeneutics,' 'transgressive,'
'Lacanian,' 'hegemony', to name but a few) would write a
completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant
journal, and have it accepted... Sokal's piece uses all the
right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners
(white men, the 'real world'), applauds the virtuous
(women, general metaphysical lunacy)... And it is
complete, unadulterated bullshit -- a fact that somehow
escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social
Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation
that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that
nice big gift horse into their city.
Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this
was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear,
attacking the 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool
notions as the existence of the real world. They didn't know that
Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific
howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree
in physics would instantly have detected. It was sent to no such
referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that
its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by
references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing
rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for literature.
Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their
feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the
academic establishment. Ross has the boorish, tenured confidence
to say things like, "I am glad to be rid of English departments. I
hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be
full of people who love literature"; and the yahooish complacency
to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words: "This book
is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could
only have been written without them."
He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are
not harmless eccentrics at third-rate state colleges. Many of them
have tenured professorships at some of the best universities in the
United States. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees,
wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire
to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say,
anthropology. I know -- because many of them have told me --
that there are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if
they dared, but who are intimidated into silence. To them, Sokal
will appear as a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a
sense of justice will disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is
strictly irrelevant, that his own left-wing credentials are
impeccable.
In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social
Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere,
Sokal notes that, in addition to numerous half-truths, falsehoods
and non sequiturs, his original article contained some
"syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning
whatsoever". He regrets that there were not more of these: "I tried
hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of
inspiration, I just didn't have the knack." If he were writing his
parody today, he would surely be helped by a virtuoso piece of
computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne,
Australia: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it,
at http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern, it will
spontaneously generate for you, using faultless grammatical
principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before
seen.
I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6,000-word article
called "Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context"
by "David I. L.Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the
Department of English, Cambridge University" (poetic justice
there, for it was Cambridge that saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an
honorary degree). Here is a typical passage from this impressively
erudite work:
If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a
choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude
that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism
holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse
and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said
that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism
that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of
the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality
comes from the collective unconscious.
Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source
of randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense,
distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read.
You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique
and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes.
Manuscripts should be submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of
Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate.
As for the harder task of reclaiming US literary departments for
genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and
Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of
science. We must hope that it will be followed.
Richard Dawkins is at the Oxford University Museum of Natural
History, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PW, UK.
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