Masters of mystification
Douglas Johnson
INTELLECTUAL POSTURES by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont Profile, £9.99, pp. 280 Alan Sokal is Professor of Physics at New York University, but his worldly fame arises from a joke, albeit a very academic joke. In 1995, he submitted an article to an American cultural studies magazine, Social Text. This article had been carefully worded in the most obscure style and its contents were deliberately selected so as to be, in Sokal's words, 'brimming with absurdities and blatant non-sequiturs'. Its conclusions were meaningless.
Yet the article was accepted by the mag- azine's editors and duly appeared in 1996. A jubilant Sokal then published a piece in a periodical called Lingua Franca, in which he explained that his article was a joke. In fact, it was a parody which sought to ridicule the sort of writing that was being published in America by magazines such as Social Text. And, developing this point, he argued that, as with the best of academic jokes, he was also making a serious point. The nonsense that he had written was inspired by the nonsense that was being produced by certain modern philosophers. These he called post-modernist, or post- structuralist, or post-constructivist, or what- ever it was that these people wanted to be known as. They were united in rejecting the rationalist traditions of the Enlighten- ment and they relegated science to a rela- tivist position alongside myth, narration and social construction. Some celebrated individuals were therefore writing about subjects which they did not understand, and since there were people who were misguid- ed enough to trust them they had to be denounced, and Sokal had done this by ridiculing them. These post-modernist philosophers were mainly French.
These revelations were seen as a scandal. They were the cause of public meetings and debates, discussions in learned journals and front-page reactions in some of the leading newspapers in America and Europe. Consequently Sokal, joined by Jean Bricmont, the Professor of Theoreti- cal Physics at the University of Louvain, has continued his crusade against the mer- chants of misunderstanding. Hence this book, which was published in French last year and which has now been translated by the authors. It contains the original article in Social Text, with some additional reasons for its publication. The bulk of the book consists of some ten chapters, each dis- cussing or berating some intellectual (notably Jacques Lacan) or examining some theme, such as the sociology of sci- ence as seen by certain thinkers (especially Bruno Latour) or chaos theory and post- modern science.
Naturally, the success of Sokal's joke cannot last indefinitely. It was possible for the editors of Social Text to say, firstly, that it was better for them to publish the origi- nal article than for them to act as censors, and secondly, that amongst the incompre- hensible and difficult sentences a number of sensible remarks were made which were worth considering. Others have agreed with this point of view, arguing that since one of the characteristics of post-modernist thought is to invoke the unpresentable in presentation itself and to refuse the conso- lation of correct forms, then Sokal's article was far from being nonsense. It has been said that Sokal is in a position of the Amer- ican spiritualist Margaret Fox who, sudden- ly in the 1880s, confessed that the miraculous deeds that she had accom- plished before vast audiences were, in fact, the work of trickery, but her confession was not believed. Faith in her powers remained unaffected. So it is with Sokal. He was not being funny. He was serious.
Naturally, Sokal was applauded in Eng- land because it was the French intellectual class that he was attacking. In England we revel in stories about Sartre writing pun- gently about books that he had never opened, relying on the café talk of his friends. Some years ago a book about five leading French intellectuals was widely given the title Five French Frauds. It is no surprise that a writer in the Guardian should seize upon the opportunity provided by Sokal to dismiss modern French philos- ophy as 'a load of old tosh'. Therefore it is disappointing to find in this book that Sokal is anxious to point out that he does not attack all French intellectuals, not even all post-modernist philosophers. Most Jackson Pollock: The Prozac Years' noticeable of all is his determination to make it clear that he is not hostile to Jacques Derrida, the most prominent and successful of them all in America, the man who has said, 'Le post-modernisme, c'est l'Amerique.' In France he protested that the media were mistaken in suggesting that he was attacking Derrida and in the same article (Le Monde, 12 December 1997) he gave a long list of 'celebrated thinkers' whom he was not criticising, including Althusser and Sartre, Barthes and Fou- cault. He is, he says, only interested in those thinkers who have systematically abused the concepts and the terms that come from mathematical physics (hence he is able to ignore Michel Serres, except for one attempt to make him appear ridicu- lous, although this philosopher's wish is for philosophical discourse to bridge the gap between science and the arts).
Some hostility has been expressed to Sokal's insistence on preserving theoretical physics. It is asked whether post- modernism is not justified in rejecting today the authoritarianism and elitism that are inherent in traditional science. Should not science be located in a particular form of culture and its timeless truths fit into some perspective of change? Microbiology, genetics and brain science certainly do. In this volume one can see how Sokal is at times obliged to be hesitant about some of his strictures (concerning Lyotard and Bruno Latour for example) and one admires him for this. (Since Sokal has had his little joke it is surely fair to point out that among the small number of men anx- ious to preserve the elitism of theoretical and high-energy physics is Dr Stanley Fish, said to be the model for David Lodge's character, Professor Morris Zapp, although this is simply to repeat a rumour.) One of the chief, and permanent, objects of criticism by Sokal and Bricmont is Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst. Of him it is claimed that in his use of topology (the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometrical objects, surfaces and solids) as an explanation for mental disorder, he stands for the sort of confu- sion that the authors wish to denounce. Although it is difficult to understand Lacan and almost as difficult to understand Sokal and Bricmont on Lacan, it does seem that they are successful. But this is what one would expect. It is significant that the chap- ter in the book is headed by tributes to Lacan by Althusser and Jean-Claude Milner, when we know that Althusser changed his mind about Lacan and that in the formation of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne relations between Lacan and Milner, his son-in-law, were very difficult. It is not exciting to read yet another con- demnation of this controversial figure.
The attack on post-modernism that is most acute has come from a Frenchman, Jean-Francois Revel. He quotes as a pre- cursor Adolf Hitler, speaking in 1939: `Science is a social phenomenon that is lim- ited by the advantages or the disadvantages that it can procure for a community.' Sci- entific objectivity,' concluded the Fiihrer, `is a slogan invented by professors.' There is not much of a joke about that.
Previous page
