This essay first appeared in slightly edited form at Splice Today.
——————————–
Art is by most objective standards a useless endeavor. You can’t repair our nation’s crumbling infrastructure with a sonnet; you can’t beat back a terrorist-affiliated insurgency with a performance piece, even if it involves some combination of meat, elephant dung, and/or Lady Gaga. Go ahead and sing “We Are the World” till even starving Ethiopian children with giant bellies cover their ears and pray for death and/or earplugs, but the fact remains that the last best hope of man isn’t Bono finding what he’s looking for or Angelina Jolie adopting it but the loose change in Bill Gates’ underwear drawer. Relevant artists are the white elephants of our times — uselessly bloated, irritatingly stentorian, semi-sentient tschotskes. The only real difference between the two is that you can imagine situations in which someone might actually want to look at a white elephant.
The idea of artists as white elephants isn’t mine — it comes from a famous 1962 essay by Manny Farber titled “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” Farber isn’t talking about political art precisely, but his concepts are analogous. For him, white elephant art is “Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago.” White elephant art, then, is huckster art with a patina of pomposity, art that insists on Meaning with a capital MMMM. As Farber says:
The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.
In contrast to white elephant art and its demand for control and big sweeping import, Farber lauds what he calls “termite art.” Termite art is small art, which burrows inward away from all that tiresomely bourgeois signification.
A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.
Where white elephant art stomps about demanding attention and piles of hay, termite art is self-sufficient and self-sustaining, turning its mandibles resolutely from the upper world and towards an existence in cracks and crevices. Art thrives in the small spaces, away from the spotlight or the filthy gleam of lucre. “The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area,” Farber declares, “sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter, from Motherwell to Andy Warhol.”
Critic Terry Eagleton, in his book After Theory, makes a similar argument, contrasting the doughty superfluity of art with the crushing systemization of capitalism.
In its ruthlessly instrumental logic, [capitalism] has no time for the idea of nature — for that whose whole existence consists simply in fulfilling and unfolding itself, purely for is own sake and without any thought of a goal. This is one reason why this social order has a boorish horror of art, which can be seen as the very image of such gloriously pointless fulfillment. It is also one reason why aesthetics has played such a surprisingly important moral and political role in the modern age.
Thus, if you were to construct an Eagleton/Farber homunculus, you might imagine it standing athwart a well-regulated chunk of real estate shouting, “Interior monologue!” Farm-Aid or (for Farber) Citizen Kane, through their very instrumentality, capitulate to the capitalism they claim to critique. The pantomime of self-pleasuring insects, on the other hand, provides an alternate way of thinking and being; it burrows beneath and into the hegemony — perhaps even undermining it from within.
One contradiction inherent in this notion of termite art is that it’s gratuitousness is filled with intention; it is praised for the usefulness of its uselessness. Thus, termite art is actually more, not less, dependent on capitalism for its meaning and content than is white elephant art. White elephant art says what it has to say (“Crime Does Not Pay!” “Do Unto Others.” “Eat Your Vegetables!”) and could presumably do the same whether it were talking to theocrats, oligarchs, or robber barons. Termite art, on the other hand, is by nature subcultural, which means it needs a culture to sub in. It’s not a mistake that Farber begins his essay by talking about the dried-up hulk of elephants before moving to the insects crawling about inside them. You can have the first without the second, but not the second without the first.
From this perspective, termite art seems even more well-regulated than elephant art, flinging itself about in random patterns whose very randomness is overdetermined. The termites furious play reeks of the desperate grant-bound verbiage in the artist’s statement of a tenured radical.
The uselessness of art, in short, ends up looking not like a way to undermine capitalism, but rather as part and parcel of it. Art doesn’t matter not because art is in itself useless, but rather because capitalism has put all the mattering elsewhere; in the pocket of Gates rather than the performance of Gaga. To praise irrelevance is to make a virtue of necessity — or even to make a necessity of something that maybe doesn’t need to be as much of a necessity as all that. Surely there’s some way for art to move the world?
***
Paul Feyerabend thought there were, anyway. Feyerabend isn’t an artist or a critic; he’s a philosopher of science. And as a philosopher, his method was what you might call termite-like. He rejected broad generalizations about science and the scientific method, choosing instead to focus on historical particularity — “a concentration” as Farber said, “on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it.” Thus, Feyerabend argued that there was no scientific method; no formulation of hypothesis which were then tested by evidence. Instead, he explained that scientists bung together theory and experiment and hypothesis all in one go…and when the result has ugly holes, the scientists paper them over over with approximations and guesses — which is to say, they make shit up. Or, as Feyerabend put it:
<>Ad hoc approximations abound in modern mathematical physics. They play a very important part in quantum theory of fields and they are an essential ingredient of the correspondence principle […] Science gives us theories of great beauty and sophistication. Modern science has developed mathematical structures which exceed anything that has existed so far in coherence, generality, and empirical success. But in order to achieve this miracle all the existing troubles […]had to be concealed by ad hoc hypotheses, ad hoc approximations and other procedures.
One of Feyerabend’s main examples for this process is Galileo. In Galileo’s day, Feyerabend notes, there was no particular reason to believe that looking through a telescope would give you a particularly accurate view of the heavens. The telescope itself was not constructed on the basis of a deep study of optics (a study which Galileo had not made) — it was put together by trial and error. Furthermore, while the telescope clearly worked very well in looking at objects on land, when pointed to the stars different people invariably saw different phenomena through it. Thus, there was neither theoretical or empirical grounds for changing the entire cosmology of the universe on the basis of Galileo’s observations.
Nonetheless, the cosmology changed — not because of evidence or theory, but because Galileo was an imaginative and skilled propagandist. As Feyerabend says,
How can we lure [people] away from a well-defined, sophisticated and empirically successful system and make them transfer their allegiance to an unfinished and absurd hypothesis? To a hypothesis, moreover, that is contradicted by one observation after another if we only take the trouble to compare it with what is plainly shown to be the case by our senses? [….] It is clear that allegiance to the new ideas will have to be brought about by means other than arguments. It will have to be brought about by irrational means such as propaganda, emotion, ad hoc hypotheses, and appeal to prejudices of all kinds. We need these ‘irrational means’ in order to uphold what is nothing but a blind faith until we have found the auxiliary sciences, the facts, the arguments that turn the faith into sound ‘knowledge.’
In short, Galileo didn’t use the methods of science and reason. He used the methods of propaganda and unreason — or of art.
Feyerabend insists that Galileo was not wrong; he wasn’t betraying science. On the contrary, he was doing what scientists do when they do science successfully — imagining and persuading. Galileo was a white elephant artist, putting meaning in every part of his canvas, and indeed, every part of the universe. Compared to such successful aesthetic hubris, Bill Gates looks like a beaming half-grown yokel in knee-britches. (Oh, how cute! The little merchant wants to save the babies! Just wait a second, okay Billie? After I’m done getting this thing to circle the sun you can do whatever you want with Africa.)
Interestingly, Feyerabend at times speaks of scientists in much the same way as Farber speaks of white elephant art — as presumptuous, bloated, intolerant, self-satisfied, and overbearing. In fact, Feyerabend says that “the motive force” behind his book was “Anger at the […] conceited assurance with which some intellectuals interfere with the lives of people, and the contempt for the treacly phrases they use to embellish their misdeeds.” Feyerabend, too, has a vision of a termite world. Or as he says, “I thought that regarding all achievements as transitory, restricted and personal and every truth as created by our love for it and not as ‘found’ would prevent the deterioration of once promising fairy-tales….” Even white elephants must be seen as termites, burrowing in upon themselves. The key is not to celebrate artists like Galileo for changing the universe, but to see that Galileo, like Gates, is a tapeworm, a fungus, a moss, “leaving nothing in its path but the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”
Ultimately, Feyerabend concluded that his wish for a new insect view of the world was “just another example of intellectualistic conceit and folly.” Farber, too — in true termite-art fashion — disavowed his essay on termite art. Demanding an end to white elephants is a white elephant way to behave; ultimately termites to stay termites must eat themselves. What they leave behind them is, perhaps, a small space filled with meaning — the not-termite, trumpeting its victory.
I didn’t realize Farber went back on his manifesto. But did he change his mind on Citizen Kane?
I’ve seen several sources say that Farber repudiated it, but I haven’t been able to find the actual article or source, so I don’t know exactly what he said, unfortunately. And I don’t know if he ever went back on Citizen Kane!
The idea of “termite art,” if I’m at all grasping the concept here, seems to square fairly well with my own experience of the creative process: writing things down here and there as they come, picking up ideas half-expressed a year ago (or in high school, or childhood), nursing images and carrying them around in my head,going to the library to search for flame fuel (but with no exact idea of what that fuel might look like), and switching back and forth between inklings, images, projects which are all connected in some way.
Big ideas are important, but they’re subsumed – along with characters, color palettes, imagined places, overheard bits of conversation – into the termite “infestation,” and become reconfigured, transformed and linked with other crucial elements as the infestation takes further shape and expands its borders.
I think Chris Ware can be seen to work like this – look at how his sketches in Acme Novelty Datebook form into formal pieces and short works, which themselves further gestate the ideas which are pulled back into the sketchbook to form longer works – and the whole thing is stitched together into a great interrelated tapestry, which is published as Acme Novelty Library: the Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown pages along with the Rocket Sam, the humorous ads, the paper model designs… In the end, the final product is the tapestry itself. That’s one of the things that makes him so vital and engaging to me.
He’s not a manifesto artist – not Dada or Pop or Feminist. That certainly does NOT make him devoid of ideas; it just means that the ideas are an intimate and personal part of a larger intimate and personal work.
…and now I’m imagining my apartment/studio infested by tiny Chris Wares, nibbling at my comics, my reference books, my supplies, my ephemera, and pooping out complex tapestries of work better than I could ever manage.
Thanks for that, Noah. Heh.
Hey Anja!
It’s hard to say exactly what Farber meant by termite art. Lots of comics folks like the idea because it seems to suggest that less valued arts, or less mainstream arts (like comics rather than, say literature) are more valuable. I think Farber even mentions comics positively in the essay.
He’s kind of deliberately vague, though. Your version of termite art seems as likely to be right as anyone’s.
Hey, Noah!
I don’t really see the idea of “termite art” I brought up as being itself a manifesto position in favor of “lowbrow” arts – it’s more a destabilization and subsequent abandonment of the “high versus low” or “concept versus intuitive” type of argument in favor of an integrative framework that’s more useful for me (and others, I imagine) as a creator, and truer to what the process is really like. The phrase brings to my mind a space in which Bertrand Russell and his ideas get to share the same primal soup with Victorian erotica, my fondness for the British-intellectual-gentleman-with-a-pipe image he embodied, my thoughts about what that fondness might signify for me and others: secret nostalgia for colonial times/patriarchy = I’m secretly a power-loving secret sexist/racist? Flip it around and like Russell because he was both that image AND against the social signifiers it carried – a queering of the British colonial image! Hey, that explains my wanting to make gay Russell porn (just for a lark, you know)! And then from there I wonder how his treatment of the women he loved complicates my love for him (oh, that feminism!), and from there I’m to thoughts of my mother, which leads me to childhood prepubescent awkwardness, which leads to nunsploitation movies somehow – and it all ties together somehow, although I’m not always sure HOW when I’m doing it. Do you see?
The elements reconfigure in relation to each other, and may well become unrecognizable in the process; they build on each other as well as on newly introduced elements.
There’s space for low and high, for cosmology and porn. It’s an idea of art as a system with different pieces delivering on different functions, not as a single-minded endeavor as with an artist who paints non-figurative abstract color studies for 30 years. It’s all tied together, though – it’s not simply about generating or appropriating ideas and throwing them out into the nether, but integrating them, building them into an ever-moving, ever-expanding and morphing -something-.
Am I just babbling here? :D
I should say “truer to what the process is really like FOR ME.” I don’t mean to invalidate other ways of creative working and thinking – it’s all about what’s suited to you, to the creative task, to the concepts and the intuitions you’re working with, and to the way your mind works. Some people are more mentally configured to nurse an idea for 30 years, and sometimes I really like what the come up with! This is not me dissing on Rene Magritte or anything.
These ideas are maps, anyway – too loose to be formed exactly to the process of creation itself, but useful anyhow.
Bla bla bla.
I think the process/product argument you’re using (if I get your ight) is definitely one thing Farber was circling round. There was also lowbrow/highbrow in there…and capitalism is implicated too. It’s also an argument about moments in art; his wanting to privilege interesting moments rather than the work as a whole.
Are we supposed to infer that the Church was less of a white elephant than science? That’s ridiculous. I can’t think of anything more overdetermining than religious anthropocentrism. Surely science is far more piecemeal than religious dogma. Alright, maybe there’s a bigger elephant in the room: Feyerabend’s (or at least Berlatsky’s Feyerabend’s) view that knowledge is reducible to power struggles. That’s some strong propaganda and rhetoric on Galileo’s part to ensure that to this day we still haven’t returned to a geocentric worldview. And why didn’t such strong rhetoric work with the phrenologists or the eugenicists or the Lamarckians? It’s as if propaganda sometimes works against objectivity (Nazis, geocentrism) and other times for it (Galileo), which can only make the use of a term like ‘propaganda’ a matter of rhetorical nonsense.
Charles, I think you’ve kind of decided what I must be saying and gotten upset with that rather than with anything that’s actually in the article. Just for starters, the article is actually quite skeptical of the white elephant bad/termite art good distinction. And I call Galileo a termite artist.
Feyerabend tends to argue, as I understand him, that different scientific paradigms win out for historical reasons. The victory of the objectively true isn’t historically convincing, to him, in part because most theories have incoherent and contradictory bits which get papered over or ignored by scientists because they need to do that sort of thing in order to pursue their work. (He lists many in his book, if you care to look through it.) He makes a very good case, at least, from looking at the historical record, that there was little objective in Galileo’s push for geocentrism. That’s why Galileo was a termite dreaming he was an elephant, rather than an elephant dreaming he was a termite.
Also…of course propaganda is a rhetorical term. Certainly it’s not objective.
“I can’t think of anything more overdetermining than religious anthropocentrism. ”
That seems like a fairly silly thing to say. Conceptions of god within the Christian church are at least as proliferating and crawly as scientific theories. If you were going to argue that they were more totalizing, I’d think you’d want to do it on the grounds that they’re more termite-like than science, not less.
The focus on moments over works brings me to the concept of “queer viewing,” in which a queer person isolated from queer media takes in heterosexist movies, for example, and mentally reconfigures them to be queer. Little cues, clues and possibilities are latched onto and mentally enlarged: a female vampire biting a woman becomes steamy and torrid lesbian romance. A nasty “queer villain” character becomes the sympathetic protagonist. Greta Garbo’s main love interest in Queen Christina becomes the young female courtier, not the male ambassador – or perhaps Queen Christina becomes a transman, and she sails off at the end of the film to live as Christopher.
That sort of strategic viewing requires an emphasis on emotionally powerful and mentally enticing moments from which to extrapolate, and so it tends to happen a lot with “lowbrow” pop culture media and flights of fancy which (apart from being readily available to isolated queer viewers, unlike, say, an exhibition of Katherine Opie or Robert Mapplethorpe photographs) portray a very “other” environment, and thus throw off many cues and hooks for possible queer readings. Superhero comics, Steamboat Willie-era animation, vampire movies and B-movie horror and sci fi vehicles are all very open to this, as are brightly colored fantasyland “family” films (The Wizard of Oz being the great classic in that field).
Drag, of course, involves a lot of queer viewing and re-presentation of heterosexist media – actresses and singers, for example – and the camp aesthetic (in the original, queer sense of the word “camp”) is in large part, if not entirely, an act of queer viewing. John Waters’ “trash” aesthetic strikes me as an assemblage of reclaimed and queered moments, glimmering cultural objects reclaimed from the “lowbrow” slag heap not to be recreated as somehow “highbrow,” but to be queered and used to build a space in which queerness can breathe.
Contemporary “alt” cartoonists often perform the same act of seizing on moments in the works of past cartoonists. I recall Dan Clowes at his APE panel this year talking about how he constructs a sort of emotional history of comics in his head, seizing on the places where these guys who were really just illustrators putting food on the table were able to produce something really new and weird and interesting. He openly acknowledged that a lot of those old works weren’t actually that “great” taken as whole pieces, but then went on to describe at least one of that old stable of artists – a Mad Magazine guy, I think – as a “genius” and pointed out all these unique things about his work that made him emotionally revere the guy as an artistic hero, even while he intellectually thinks that his output was just hack stuff.
It seems like a lot of that goes on in comics crit – the pieces here on TCJ about early Wonder Woman, for example – and I think it’s a good and interesting thing.
—-
Re: my argument, capitalism certainly is implicated. It can’t help but be implicated; the variety of tools and resources available to the artist, the accessibility of those tools, the variety and accessibility of information and the types of art considered desirable and admirable (and worth paying for) by different groups of people are all shaped by capitalism.
That’s a big ol’ can of worms, though, and I’m craving some nachos followed by time at the coffee shop with my sketchpad.
Thanks for humoring me here. :D
“It seems like a lot of that goes on in comics crit – the pieces here on TCJ about early Wonder Woman, for example – and I think it’s a good and interesting thing.”
There may or may not be a lot of that in comics crit…but I wouldn’t extrapolate from my WW articles. For better or worse, they’re not really especially typical of comics crit I don’t think.
Your point about queer viewing against the intention or structure of the whole piece is nicely put….and especially entertaining in the context of the last couple of weeks on the blog. There’s been a lot (a lot of discussion about how much context a critic is or is not obligated to take into account when reading a work, and some about whether discussing feminism (or queer studies) in that context is relevant. You can start here if that sounds interesting…..
Sorry for mis-characterizing your Wonder Woman pieces.
I had a brief skim of the Hernandez discussion when it started – I recall finding myself agog at the idea that the Hernandez bros. fetishize women (and then good and ready to fire up my sex-positive feminist engines in defense of respectful, context-appropriate fetishization of women, men, and everyone else). It had simply never occur to me before to lump Maria (or Penny Century, etc.) in with, I don’t know, Olivia’s images of Bettie Page, or Playboy bunnies.
I really should have a closer look at that whole discussion, though. I’m quite interested in how the concept of “aesthetic value” and aesthetic reading relates to, meshes with or even does war with political readings. It would be interesting to look at the cognitive science of aesthetics vs. that of cultural/political values as well, to see how they’re linked.
This Manny Farber essay – is it decipherable to a lay audience, and more importantly, is it available? Is his retraction of said essay still around to be read? Where might I look for these items?
Oh, yeah, the Manny Farber is totally accessible. I think this is the whole thing here.
I’m not clear that he retracted it in an essay; it may have been reported comments? In any case, I haven’t been able to find him making the retraction.
“I recall finding myself agog at the idea that the Hernandez bros. fetishize women ”
I was just talking about Gilbert; Jaime didn’t come up!
I’m reading more of his stuff now (with some reluctance — I’m not that into it) and it hasn’t changed my mind about the fetishization. I don’t think that necessarily makes him evil or anything, but it’s definitely an interest (and one way his comics are marketed, if Fanta’s decision to feature semi-clad women on the front and back cover of the volume I have is any indication.)
You know, that Farber white elephant/termite contrast brings to mind the Nouvelle Vague’s fierce disdain for high-minded artistic “qualite francaise” films as opposed to the freewheeling B-movies of an Edgar Ulmer…
That makes sense…though I think Farber was actually skepticla of the Nouvelle Vague as being too high-minded, white elephanty, if I understand him aright….
I’ll have to re-read Farber on cinema to chack that.
This being said, I think people have, retrospectively, a false idea of the Nouvelle Vague crew as a bunch of stuffy intellectuals.
This is probably because with age they became bowed down with honors; also, I think the adoption of the word “auteur” wholesale from the French was very misleading. In English it sounds very hoity-toity: in French it just means ‘author’ or ‘doer’ or ‘maker’. For example, someone who causes an accident can be called “l’auteur de l’accident”; one’s father is commonly called “l’auteur de ses jours” (the maker of one’s days– a rather poetic formulation.)
In other words, “auteur” is not a big deal word in French as it seems to be in English. I blame Andrew Sarris…
Furthermore, the Nouvelle Vague group didn’t necessarily elevate ‘auteur’ films above others. They had enormous respect for the Hollywood studio system. Indeed, they’d argue that the author of films such as ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’– legendary creative clusterfucks — was the studio itself!
Finally, they didn’t, as some allege, limit authorship to the director. A producer with a strong will and aesthetic like David Selznick could be accounted an author; likewise a distinctive screenwriter. The definitions varied from individual to individual: Truffaut judged a director’s authorship by the extent to which he was involved in the writing of the script.
He was at pains to point out that this criterion wasn’t a gauge of quality, citing ‘Bobby Deerfield’ as a non-author film of excellent quality, and ‘Les Ripoux’ (a popular French comedy about corrupt cops) as an author film of questionable interest.
By and large, the Nouvelle Vague critics (and, later, filmmakers) of the ’50s were a bunch of wise-ass punks; their enemy was the true and ultimate enemy of all art: academism.
Alex: “the true and ultimate enemy of all art: academism.”
I dislike commercialism a lot more than I dislike academism, but I can easily assemble the two under “kitsch.”
Hmmm… kitsch is a common flaw in both commercial and academic art, but it’s by no means universal in either.
It’s deadliest when the academic and the commercial intersect…that’s the breeding-ground for kitsch.
(BTW, when I say ‘academic’ it isn’t a reference to higher education or to scholarship. It’s art-crit shorthand for ‘officially’ acceptable art… as was sanctioned by the stultifying Academies of old Europe. I believe Domingos means, at least roughly, the same thing here.)
“I think you’ve kind of decided what I must be saying and gotten upset with that rather than with anything that’s actually in the article. […] I call Galileo a termite artist.”
Eh? I think you need to reread what you said:
“Galileo was a white elephant artist, putting meaning in every part of his canvas, and indeed, every part of the universe.”
And I’m not upset in the least.
“[Feyerabend] makes a very good case, at least, from looking at the historical record, that there was little objective in Galileo’s push for [helio]centrism.”
I certainly don’t have the knowledge to go toe-to-toe with him on the history of science, or Galileo in particular. This guy does a remarkable job, though. I can however recognize a reductionist view of epistemology when I come across one, though, and that’s my problem with the likes of Feyerabend. To summarize what I consider a better take on epistemology: knowledge is based on knowledge of our own minds, knowledge of other minds and knowledge of the world. Take out one or more of these and you get into tons of philosophical problems. Suggesting that Galileo only won any arguments because of propaganda or rhetoric is such a reduction. The man seemed to about as far away from a propagandist as one could imagine (particularly, if we don’t redefine propaganda to mean rhetoric or art, as is your wont). Consider this quote (from the above link):
“There is not a single effect in Nature, not even the least that exists, such that the most ingenious theorists can ever arrive at a complete understanding of it. This vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is attained, would recognise that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing.”
At any rate, that certainly doesn’t sound like a committed “white elephant” scientist.
I’ve never been able to make heads or tails out what’s supposed to be termite or white elephant art. As best I can tell, the former is whatever Farber happened to like in Hollywood films. And he was definitely a fan of Godard.
You’ve got to read the whole thing though, Charles.
“he key is not to celebrate artists like Galileo for changing the universe, but to see that Galileo, like Gates, is a tapeworm, a fungus, a moss, “leaving nothing in its path but the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.””
The essay is in part about mixing and matching the ideas of termite and elephant art, not about indicting somebody for being one or the other.
Feyerabend’s point was not that Galileo was stupid or theoretically unsophisticated, but that he figured out a theory and then went out looking for facts to prove it in a nonobjective way. Feyerabend argues that this is how science advances.
I’ll take a look at the link, but…
“Suggesting that Galileo only won any arguments because of propaganda or rhetoric is such a reduction. ”
Feyerabend points to historical factors as well…and to the knowledge being useful for various reasons to various people. The point is that you can’t map the adaptation and acceptance onto just being “right” in some sort of straightforward science always progresses manner.
Skimming that article, I don’t see that it’s a particularly devastating critique of Feyerabend’s position. In fact, in many cases it seems to just beg the question. For instance, it argues that Galileo was not dishonest in that he was really convinced of the Copernican view — but I didn’t get the sense from reading Feyerabend that he thought that Galileo was deliberately lying. The point was that he used rhetoric to present as strong, and in some cases, a stronger case than he had. That doesn’t mean he didn’t believe in his own rhetoric.
“Galileo’s use of the telescope has caused much discussion, too. As we noted above, many people refused to look through the telescope or, having done so, refused to believe what they saw. Although we may regard the former position as ridiculous, the latter was rather more justified. The telescope was a new invention and to some it must have seemed like magic. How, Clavius asked, could it be known that what was seen was actually there, rather than a trick of the lenses? As Feyerabend (op cit) and Kuhn (1975: 224) have remarked, Galileo had no theory of optics to answer this criticism, so he relied instead on demonstrations. By pointing his telescope at something terrestrial in the distance, observers could verify for themselves that it had shown a true representation of what was there. There was no guarantee, however, that this should hold when the telescope was raised to the heavens. The situation changed somewhat when the Jesuits announced that they had confirmed Galileo’s studies with the telescope, but this, too, was merely a useful (albeit powerful) aid and not a proof. The effect of Galileo’s public shows was nevertheless such that this objection remains a recent (and philosophical) one, particularly in the reductio form employed by Feyerabend.”
This pretty much entirely ignores everything Feyerabend says about the telescope. His point was that, at the time, different people saw different things through it when they looked at the heavens. He presents evidence, for example, that Galileo’s drawings of the moon, based on telescope viewing, are completely divorced from the moon we now see. Saying this is a “recent objection” doesn’t seem to me to be an especially devastating critique — the moon’s the moon. If Galileo saw it differently than we do, it seems you need to address that, not argue that it doesn’t matter because people back then didn’t notice that there was something wrong with the way he saw the moon (how would they notice?)
Holbling’s discussion of Galileo’s epistemology actually sounds quite close to Feyerabend’s. His account of what the Church should and should not have done is somewhat different…but the view here isn’t on the surface clearly more likely than Feyerabend’s, as far as I can tell.
“knowledge is based on knowledge of our own minds, knowledge of other minds and knowledge of the world. Take out one or more of these and you get into tons of philosophical problems. ”
The only problem being that you’re kind of ignoring at least 400 years of philosophy by simplifying the problem in this way. The question of what is accessible to knowledge is one that’s obviously concentrated minds since at least Descartes. You do get into tons of philosophical problems if you start to question the common-sense version of epistemology. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the common-sense version of epistemology is correct though. Common sense often isn’t.
“You’ve got to read the whole thing though, Charles.”
Which is a pretty funny thing for me to say at the end of this last couple of weeks. I do try to complicate the white elephant/termite distinction and shuffle Galileo from one to the other. I may not have been entirely successful (perhaps depending on how much of the essay one wants to read!)
Here’s Feyerabend on Galileo and the telescope:
“the telescope…produces new and strange phenomena, some of them exposable as illusotry by observation with the naked eye, some contradictory, some having even the appearnce of being illusory, while the only theory that could have brought order into this chaos, Kepler’s theory of vision, is refuted by evidence of the plainest kind possible. But — and with this I come to what I think is a central feature of Galileo’s procedure — there are telescopic phenomena, namely the telescopic variation of the brightness of the planets, which agree more closely with Copernicus than do the results of naked-eye observation….It is this harmony, rather than any deep understanding of cosmology and of optics which for Galileo proves Copernicus and the veracity of the telescope in terrestrial as well as celestial matters. And it is this harmony on which he builds an entirely new view of the universe.”
So Feyerabend’s point is not that Galileo didn’t believe what he said, nor that there was no “objective” correspondence between what he saw and the theories he used. Rather, he argues that Galileo fit together a theory with certain bits of data and privileged that connection for reasons which didn’t necessarily add up to “this is objectively and absolutely the best explanation of things we have.”
Feyerabend makes a very good case, I think, that Galileo basically knew nothing at all about optics (he complained about not being able to finish reading Leibnitz, who was the most advanced optical text of the day.) And if he didn’t have a theoretical grounding in optics, how did he know that the telescope was showing him something true? Observations of terrestrial matters wasn’t good evidence, because theory at the time claimed that the heavens were different, and indeed the telescope didn’t show things nearly as clearly in the heavens as in terrestrial situations. So Galileo’s use of the telescope as evidence was basically not based on the best theory available at the time, but simply ad hoc. Not white elephant, but termite.
Noah,
I did read the whole thing. As best I can tell, you were saying that Galileo was a white elephant scientist (quite literally, I note), but it’s better to see his successes as termitic. I would suggest that Galileo saw his own role as “termitic” (cf. my quote) and that’s the guiding operational view of what Kuhn called normal science. That link does a pretty good job of demonstrating that Galileo was well aware that he wasn’t “objectively and absolutely” proving Ptolemy or Aristotle wrong, only that their predictions weren’t fitting the facts. What he knew (objectively) was that geocentrism couldn’t account for his telescopic discoveries.
Regardless, what your account (of dueling propagandas) doesn’t capture is that his view had objectivity on its side. Overturning geocentrism, even if it involved persuasion, marketing, lacunae in knowledge, etc. isn’t just like Bill Gates taking over the world of software. Do you want to argue that sometime in the future, Earth will be objectively the center of the universe provided enough people buy it?
“If Galileo saw it differently than we do, it seems you need to address that, not argue that it doesn’t matter because people back then didn’t notice that there was something wrong with the way he saw the moon (how would they notice?)”
This difference between common sense (by the “naked eye,” or naive realism) and truth (by reason) was addressed (quite brilliantly) by Galileo. To quote Newall (Holbling seems to have posted it), regarding the tower argument (things fall straight down, so Earth must not be moving):
Galileo sketched the scene of two friends in a ship’s cabin, throwing a ball to each other and taking note of the movements of fish, butterflies and the like that happen to be with them. On the first occasion this situation plays out while the ship is at rest alongside; on the second, it is underway. The friends in the former notice no difference in the force needed to throw the ball in one direction rather than another and observe no similar difficulty in the animal sharing the cabin with them. This remains the case, according to Galileo, for the latter, too.
This is the introduction of Galilean relativity, which was relied on much later by Einstein. From the perspective of the friends in the cabin, the motion of the ship relative to land has no effect on the motion of the ball relative to the cabin, since the additional motion imparted to the ball by the motion of the ship is also granted to the cabin. This implied that the stone dropped from the mast of a moving ship appears to fall straight down because its motion in any other direction is shared by the ship—or the inertial frame in modern parlance—so that the observer sees only a straight descent. Likewise, the stone dropped from a tower on a moving Earth is not viewed from an absolute point of reference but relative to the tower and its immediate surroundings, which are (according to the assumption of geokineticism) also moving.
The importance of relativity can scarcely be overstated, but what Galileo was able to do was take an observation that refuted geokineticism, re-describe it, and so turn it into a confirmation of the Earth’s movement. This is an example of meaning variance between theories, a concept that would later form the basis of the notion of incommensurability. It shows Galileo not to be rejecting observation on the basis of theory, or vice versa, but using reasoning to invite his readers to consider the evidence of their senses in a new way in support of a different worldview. Any effort to cast him solely as an empiricist or a rationalist, then, is bound to fail.
By the way, I in no way think Feyerabend is accusing Galileo of fraud. Instead, Feyerabend thinks the whole world (as filtered through human existence) is essentially fraudulent (he’s an eliminative materialist, believing all mental states are illusions, for example). I’m also not questioning his history, only your (and his) spin on it, “that he figured out a theory and then went out looking for facts to prove it in a nonobjective way.” Galileo wasn’t working sui generis, he increasingly and laboriously found one of two extant views (the most common and ideologically powerful one) to be wanting, that it couldn’t account for things that the rival view could. Geocentrism was not objectively fitting the facts, even if Galileo couldn’t further justify, or break down, those facts to a more elementary or causal level. As Newell makes clear, Galileo was quite of aware and open about the limits of his research.
You run into a similar problem to that of Rorty’s “reader-response” theory of interpretation (he was another eliminative materialist, so some dots could be connected here). You can’t have a recognition of error, even the concept ‘error’, if you don’t have ‘objectivity’, that what you’re interpreting isn’t solely up to (constituted by) you. So why would one ever change one’s view on anything? Propaganda, rhetoric, cultural standards? All of which were largely against Galileo at the time. If knowledge is merely socially constructed, then why would the social ever change to fit the individual? Objectivity has and had a role to play.
“The only problem being that you’re kind of ignoring at least 400 years of philosophy by simplifying the problem in this way. The question of what is accessible to knowledge is one that’s obviously concentrated minds since at least Descartes. You do get into tons of philosophical problems if you start to question the common-sense version of epistemology. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the common-sense version of epistemology is correct though. Common sense often isn’t.”
I agree with you and Galileo on that one. In addition to one’s own mind, acknowledging other minds and an objective world is only the beginning of an epistemology. I was just saying that I prefer holism (a la Donald Davidson) to all the reductive approaches that have been offered (our minds are an illusion, no it’s the world that’s the illusion, etc.).
Newall’s discussion of Galileo on relativity seems heavily indebted to Feyerabend’s discussion actually. Both agree that Galileo argued that appearances don’t have to fit reality.
Which doesn’t at all answer the question, why did Galileo’s view of the moon not fit with what we see as reality? Was there something wrong with his telescope? And if so, why does it make sense to use the telescope’s evidence to change our view of reality?
“Galileo wasn’t working sui generis, he increasingly and laboriously found one of two extant views (the most common and ideologically powerful one) to be wanting, that it couldn’t account for things that the rival view could”
Sure. But Feyerabend is at some pains to show that Galileo’s view couldn’t account for everything either. In fact, Galileo’s view was built not on deductions from theory, nor on inductions to theorry, but on a mixture of theory, facts, and ad hoc approximations.
“You can’t have a recognition of error, even the concept ‘error’, if you don’t have ‘objectivity’, that what you’re interpreting isn’t solely up to (constituted by) you. So why would one ever change one’s view on anything? Propaganda, rhetoric, cultural standards? All of which were largely against Galileo at the time. ”
The thing is, propaganda, rhetoric, and cultural standards aren’t monolithic. Again, this is kind of central to Feyerabend’s arguments. There are lots of ideas about how the world works at any one time. Many of them can explain certain phenomena but not others; all are self-contradictory to some extent. People use one or the other based on historical and power relationships of various sorts. One of those historical and power relationships is objective truth, which is a historical concept and is connected to certain kinds of rhetoric and power structures.
You can certainly have error — but there needs to be some sort of recognition that errors occur within certain frameworks. That is, an error is dependent not only on the facts before you, but on the theory you’re using as well. That’s only reductive if you insist that there is a totalizing theory which can be used to measure all truth. Which is, to me, reductive. For example:
” In addition to one’s own mind, acknowledging other minds and an objective world is only the beginning of an epistemology.”
It’s the beginning of one epistemology. There are lots which don’t acknowledge other minds, or an objective world. Many of the most fruitful of modern epistemologies (such as Freud) don’t acknowledge one’s own mind. Again, you’re eliminating most of the most important questions philosophers have struggled with for centuries before you even get started.
“As best I can tell, you were saying that Galileo was a white elephant scientist (quite literally, I note), but it’s better to see his successes as termitic. I would suggest that Galileo saw his own role as “termitic” (cf. my quote) and that’s the guiding operational view of what Kuhn called normal science. ”
Oh…and I think that’s a reasonable reading of me, though I’m not sure it’s exactly what I intended. Among other things, I was trying to argue that white elephants are actually termites and termites white elephants…that meaning and crawling both inhere in all artistic practices (of which science is one.)
So, this is the point at which I mention Alain Sokal’s hoax in Social Text in 1996 and accidentally reignite the Science Wars from here to Geneva and back, right? I can see the headlines:
SCIENCE WARS REIGNITED – THOUSANDS DEAD.
Flame lit at comic book journal; the grief of those who survive.
Alex, we’ve bickered before about your claiming the New Wave isn’t intellectual, but it still bugs me. The Left Bank filmmakers were fairly conventionally intellectual, and the Cahiers crowd, along with Lacan and the existentialists and a handful of others, essentially established “intellectualism” as a kind of public theater. The only way they’re not intellectuals is if Allen Ginsberg isn’t either.
I’ll grant you they’re not “stuffy,” but that’s an incredibly narrow definition of intellectual. What exactly is the purpose of trying to disclaim the label for them?
Noah,
“Which doesn’t at all answer the question, why did Galileo’s view of the moon not fit with what we see as reality? Was there something wrong with his telescope? And if so, why does it make sense to use the telescope’s evidence to change our view of reality?”
I don’t know squat about optics, much less than Galileo did, but when I look through a telescope, what appears to me isn’t so unconnected to what I can see with my own eyes that the reality of the telescopic percept becomes highly improbable (as if it doesn’t connect up with reality). He was able to detect regularities, object constancies, etc. that could then be used for calculations and tested. You make it sound like it’s random chaos that requires some leap of faith to believe that maybe the tool is, in fact, aiding one’s naked perception. I’m assuming you don’t know much about optics, either: would you be able to make a telescope on “trial and error”? He seems to have known something about what would be required to make such a device, what it did, since (1) his trials and errors led him to something approaching a more correct view of the Earth’s place in the solar system, that Jupiter had moons and a better view of what our own moon’s surface was like, and (2) he was able to replicate an existing telescope on his own. Surely, his use of the telescope was something more than a blind mouse running through a maze, retreating when he bumped his head.
“But Feyerabend is at some pains to show that Galileo’s view couldn’t account for everything either.”
Galileo himself acknowledged that, so it shouldn’t have been too painful to point it out. What I think you’re getting at is that Galileo and science in general involves what Charles Peirce called abduction. I agree with that. I just don’t think Feyerabend is being as radical as he or you would like to be.
“One of those historical and power relationships is objective truth, which is a historical concept and is connected to certain kinds of rhetoric and power structures.”
I agree that some errors and some objective facts come out of frameworks (e.g., a strike in baseball isn’t going to happen without the rules of baseball, and those rules are objective). It seems to me that objectivity comes about from a variety of sources. Some of it’s dependent on a compact (explicit or implicit) among people and some of it’s not. There were those things we now call the moons of Jupiter before anyone saw them, they were there when someone finally did see them through a telescope and, barring physical destruction, they’ll be there should all knowledge of how to make a telescope cease to exist in the future. To suggest that Jupiter’s moons exist only in the way that a strike in baseball exists is a reductive conception of objectivity. Granted, it’s more radical that my own, but radicalism is often another name for reductionism. Bringing me to my suggestion:
“In addition to one’s own mind, acknowledging other minds and an objective world is only the beginning of an epistemology.”
That you say is “beginning of one epistemology,” but I’d point out that I said “an epistemology,” not simply “epistemology.” There are certainly others, including Freud’s (who was another radical reductionist).
We’re probably wheel-spinning by now, so I’ll leave you with the final word if you want it. Thanks for the conversation. I’m sure this will all come up again.
And I thought the Sokal Hoax was brilliant and pretty devastating towards its targets.
I don’t know a ton about the Sokal Hoax. I’m pretty sure, though, that if Feyerabend had been a peer reviewer, it would not have happened.
Caro:
“Alex, we’ve bickered before about your claiming the New Wave isn’t intellectual, but it still bugs me. The Left Bank filmmakers were fairly conventionally intellectual, and the Cahiers crowd, along with Lacan and the existentialists and a handful of others, essentially established “intellectualism” as a kind of public theater. The only way they’re not intellectuals is if Allen Ginsberg isn’t either.
I’ll grant you they’re not “stuffy,” but that’s an incredibly narrow definition of intellectual. What exactly is the purpose of trying to disclaim the label for them?”
I don’t understand. Where in this thread have I said they weren’t intellectuals? I said they were against academism in art. Not at all the same thing.
Noah, you should read “Fashionable Nonsense” by Sokal and Briquemont. It relates in detail the Sokal hoax and expands to criticise some modern intellectual pundits.
I’m not sure Feyerabend would have blocked the article, which parodies the notion that objective truth is determined by power relationships.
My understanding was that the article contained scientific nonsense (thus the parody.)
The thing about Feyerabend that distinguishes him from Derrida or literary critics is that he’s a history and philosopher of science. He doesn’t use philosophy of language to undermine the notion of objectivity; rather, he deploys history against science. That’s why Charles is reduced to common sense rule of thumb argumentation (“I see okay through a telescope, so….”) rather than actually refuting his point (which is that the historical record strongly suggests that people at the time could not see through a telescope in that way when looking at the heavens.)
Basically, Feyerabend had a lot of expertise in science. Sokal was kicking people who were trying to apply theories from linguistic to science without knowing what they were doing (or that’s my understanding of the controversy anyway.) I don’t think Feyerabend would have been quite that easy to dupe.
Just one more point, Charles; the fact that Jupiter’s moons will exist forever and a day tells you nothing in particular about the nature of the universe. They could be fairy globes that exist forever and a day. They could be optical illusions. You’re conflating facts and theories, and trying to paper it over by saying that Galileo’s theory was derived from the facts. But Feyerabend shows that it was derived from theories, facts, and ad hoc hypothesis. The epistemological objectivity you’re arguing for considerably cleans up the historical record and Galileo’s place in it in order to make an ideological point. I don’t see how that’s any less reductionist than what I’m doing — and, indeed, it’s unclear how one can make any statement about the world without being reductionist. Reductionism is one of the major ways we understand and manipulate existence; setting yourself against it doesn’t make you a friend of science as far as I can tell.
Oh, and thanks for the last word Charles! I look forward to doing it again….
Alex, I’m immensely pleased to have misunderstood you! I was basing my comment on your describing them as not “a bunch of stuffy intellectuals” (which grammatically emphasizes ‘intellectual’ more than stuffy, as the word that’s the same part of speech as the main noun — how’s that for intuitive formalism?), and also on this:
Isn’t that you?
Maybe switch from using “intellectual” in this context to “academic” to avoid the misunderstanding? Even “intellectual theory” as you used it previously, in the mid-century French context, isn’t something I equate with “the French academy.” If you’d said “stuffy academics” your point would have been perfectly clear (although I still dispute your saying the NV had no connection to Lacan, since there was that direct connection through Langlois.)
The Sokal hoax was absolutely brilliant towards its targets — which were straw men, except for the fact that the straw men were first constructed by bad historians and philosophers of science as horrific misapplications of perfectly decent theory and philosophy. Trying to make Hegel into Kant is bad philosophy, and the incredibly complex philosophical attempts to reconcile them can’t be reduced to “questioning objective reality.” It shouldn’t have taken Alan Sokal’s multi-thousands of words to point that out.
That said, I’ll wager dollars to donuts that the folks at Social Text were so validated by having a Actual Scientist (TM, PhD) submit something to their journal they didn’t even read the article before accepting it.
The whole Sokal enchilada.
Haha, Stanley Fish on baseball and physics.
Sokal: “I intentionally wrote the article so that any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize that it is a spoof. ”
Which means Feyerabend certainly would have.
I also note that Sokal didn’t go after Feyerabend (or Shapin and Schaffer); it’s all Derrida and Lacan. This article suggests he did talk about Feyerabend at some point though.
“Alan Sokal put forward his own undertakings as reliable, and he took care, as he boasts, to surround his deception with all the marks of authenticity, including dozens of “real” footnotes and an introductory section that enlists a roster of the century’s greatest scientists in support of a line of argument he says he never believed in. He carefully packaged his deception so as not to be detected except by someone who began with a deep and corrosive attitude of suspicion that may now be in full flower in the offices of learned journals because of what he has done.”
I think the Fish article makes sense in general…but that paragraph above, eesh. Beg or borrow a sense of humor, and some vague sense of professional pride, man. You can argue with his points while still admitting he made y’all look like idiots.
I didn’t know that there was a chapter on Bergson in the original French edition of _Intellectual Impostures_ that stemmed from the hoax. When looking for info, I came across this excellent critique by Val Dusek of the book that you and Caro should appreciate. I’m a sucker for philosophers who mix relativism and objectivism (e.g., Nelson Goodman) and Dusek touches on some of that.
Oh, that looks awesome. I’ll read it tonight.
One of the worst comics I ever read was a droolingly hagiographic retelling of various Feynman anecdotes. I think it actually won a Xeric…had a cover by Paul Chadwick…Christ it was horrible.
Putting aside Sokal’s actual arguments, can anyone think of other cases where people attacked their ideological opponents by impersonating them? The only other example I can think of is Jim Goad putting out a zine supposedly by an interracial lesbian couple and sending it to his liberal zine enemies, who gave it glowing reviews. But it’s such a devastating tactic that I can see it catching on–liberals publishing articles in The National Review and then saying, “Ha ha, my arguments were deliberately ridiculous, you’re losers,” right-wingers doing the same thing to The Nation, etc.
I mean, obviously there’s a long tradition of parodies, but they’re usually not created with the hope that they’ll be taken seriously, right?
I think it’s hard to do effectively unless you’re working with something like science that has a really effective system for making and evaluating truth claims. You could do it with history too by making nonsensical claims and then citing fallacious sources; if they were accepted you’d make your opponents look like idiots.
But if you just parrot the other sides arguments and say they’re ridiculous…well, the other side already knew you thought their arguments were ridiculous. It just proves you’ve read enough to write an argument you don’t agree with, but the argument isn’t necessarily wrong on those grounds. Even the zine thing above…it seems like your opponents could just say, well, this zine was better than the other ones you’ve been making, perhaps in part because you learned something from your critics.
There’s a blistering attack on Feyerabend by Martin Gardner somewhere…I’ll try to dig it up. As I recall, Stephen Gould was also critical of him.
Noah, if Feyerabend had been on the peer board of ‘Social Text’– I doubt very much Sokal would have submitted there! But do you think Feyerabend WOULD have reviewed for that journal? I doubt that too.
One of the points Sokal was trying to make was that academics in the so-called ‘soft sciences’were incapable of judgeing the validity of statements about the ‘hard sciences’. I think his hoax proved the point very thoroughly.
His other point was that his target intellectuals were dangerously overfond of using hard-science metaphors. His takedown of Lacan on this point is particularly hilarious.
I remember the sensation this hoax produced in France at the time. His targets reacted quite stupidly, Kristeva suggesting that the hoax was a C.I.A. plot.
Wikipedia should always be taken with a grain of salt, but their article on the affair is fair and balanced (and not in a Fox-y way):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_hoax
Caro- friends again! Huzzah!
It should be pointed out that, in the ’50s and ’60s, Lacan was very much an outsider from the psychoanalytic establishment (which is far, far stronger in France than in the States.) This is hard to believe given his current respectability. He was a rebel just as the Cahiers crowd were rebels.
An irrelevant aside, but I love this anecdote about Lacan.
While he was giving a lecture, a student ran up to the podium and started bombarding him with breadcrumbs.
In reaction, Lacan declaimed:
“This young man is an Archangel of the Apocalypse!”
BTW– no, Sokal’s targets were by no means ‘straw men’. In the book, he quotes extensively– and damningly — from each.
Jack:
“Putting aside Sokal’s actual arguments, can anyone think of other cases where people attacked their ideological opponents by impersonating them? The only other example I can think of is Jim Goad putting out a zine supposedly by an interracial lesbian couple and sending it to his liberal zine enemies, who gave it glowing reviews. But it’s such a devastating tactic that I can see it catching on–liberals publishing articles in The National Review and then saying, “Ha ha, my arguments were deliberately ridiculous, you’re losers,” right-wingers doing the same thing to The Nation, etc.”
Actually, James Randi and other skeptics use this tactic regularly to show up idiotic and/or scoundrellous enemies of reason.
You might like to google Joey Skaggs and his use of hoaxing to satirise society.
The Trickster has ever been a gateway to wisdom…
“One of the points Sokal was trying to make was that academics in the so-called ‘soft sciences’were incapable of judgeing the validity of statements about the ‘hard sciences’.”
I think it’s possible for laymen to judge statements about the hard sciences, and to discuss epistemology in general. Having said that, you do need to have some vague sense of what you don’t know, as well as a lot of respect for science’s extremely impressive truth-making mechanisms.
For example, in his article about the hoax, Sokol uses the common-sense argument that gravity must exist because if he stepped out of his window he’d fall and hit the ground. It’s fairly easy to show, without knowing a whole lot about science, that that formulation is completely fallacious; you could develop any number of theories about why you fall out of the window which have nothing to do with gravity.
That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m competent to explain the latest theories of how gravity works, or that I’d accept a paper about such things without showing it to somebody who does. I mean, if I were doing peer review, I wouldn’t accept a paper about rugby either. If you don’t know the rules, you don’t know the rules.
And the ‘Social Text’ editors didn’t know the rules. They were incompetent to judge the article. That didn’t stop them.
That was the whole point of the hoax.
Really, Noah, dig up a copy of the book. It’s intelligent, by no means whatsoever anti-intellectual as its opponents have decreed.
It’s also a sardonic view into the way ‘publish or perish’ academics get their papers accepted…
“And the ‘Social Text’ editors didn’t know the rules. They were incompetent to judge the article. That didn’t stop them.”
Oh, absolutely. And Stanley Fish’s defense is only more embarrassing for him.
I’ve got no problem with showing that academics are (in many instances) stupid, pompous, and desperate.
I just remembered The Yes Men.
Fish’s basic complaint was that Sokal’s actions embarrassed the academic clique that Fish fancies himself and Sokal to be a part of. Whether or not the journal was publishing rubbish isn’t really an issue to him.
The old Shaw quote about a profession being a conspiracy against the public good is illustrated perfectly by Fish’s attitudes and career. Everything is about benefitting the members of the group, and the hell with everyone else. He destroyed the pedagogical standards and reputation of Duke University’s English department while he was running it, all in the name of making it as attractive as possible to “star” professors in the field. He has also used his academic connections and clout to create a second career as a legal scholar and a law professor despite the fact that he hasn’t taken a single class on law in his life. (And no, he hasn’t taken or passed the bar, either.) But, hey, the academic community is willing to acknowledge him as such, so that’s all right, then. Students and readers–screw ’em.
I discussed this with him in an interminable e-mail exchange some time back. He’s one of the most thin-skinned and long-windedly defensive individuals I’ve ever encountered.
Alex – I’m not taking sides here, but quoting a source is not exclusive to making a straw man out of that source. Quoting is, after all, an act of editing – of selecting out of an entire book a paragraph here and a sentence there that serve your purposes.
Julia Kristeva thought that the Sokal Hoax was a CIA plot? For realses? Is there documentation of this?
If you look at Caro’s original reference to straw men, she argues that the straw men were real. I don’t think she and Alex are actually in disagreement.
The funniest thing about the Kristeva thing is the assumption that the C.I.A. could possibly care at all about what idiocy Stanley Fish prints in his journal. I guess if you’re French it might be hard to understand the extent to which America doesn’t care about its intellectuals….
Well, haven’t you heard? Intellectuals (other than Ayn Rand, The Greatest Philosopher on The Face of The Planet) are useless, because they’re not Prime Movers in Teh Markets.
Really, though, the idea of a CIA plot sounds beyond out-of-touch with America’s social functioning – it sounds totally paranoid, like she thinks she’s some sort of Black Panther being pursued by COINTELPRO.
If a “straw man” is real, isn’t it therefore not straw?
“If a “straw man” is real, isn’t it therefore not straw?”
Well, metaphors sometimes get mixed in the blog comments…these things happen…
Some discussion of Kristeva’s response to Sokal here. No C.I.A. reference alas…and the response she does give sounds reasonable and not at all conspiracy theory laden. Can’t find anything with google. It may be one of those things that’s just a little too good to be true…
That does indeed seem a reasonable, conspiracy theory-free response. I’m guessing that this image of her as a frothing conspiracist is just an academic urban legend whipped up to confirm the suspicions of logical positivist types that Those Damned Postmodernists are all nuts.
Read that article you linked to Charles. It seems pretty brutal…though it’s hard to tell since I don’t know all the mathematics. Fun to read anyway.
I was actually introduced to Feyerabend by a graduate student in math, now a math professor — and still a Feyerabend fan I think…. (I believe he’s the one who first mentioned the Sokal hoax to me too, now that I think about it.)
The last paragraph of this is pretty entertaining too.
Alex-
“There’s a blistering attack on Feyerabend by Martin Gardner somewhere…”
It’s in his essay collection “Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?” and it’s called “Alan Sokal’s Hilarious Hoax.” Great stuff- really cutting analysis of the events. The book version of the essay has an addendum that summarizes the fallout.
from Luce Irigaray- “Is E=Mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us.”…
The Irigary is pretty clearly using the equation as a metaphor though; it’s being treated as language. It’s kind of a silly thing to say, but it’s silly the way bad poetry is silly, not the way that bad science is silly (that is, it’s not formally nonsensical; it’s just clunky and ridiculous.)
I’ve never read Marvin Gardner; maybe I’ll give it a shot.
I noticed that Sokal wanted to run a follow-up essay in Social Text (or whatever it’s called) and they refused to print it on the grounds that it wasn’t intellectually rigorous enough, or some such. Good of them to miss no opportunity for making themselves look like idiots….
Maybe it’s supposed to be metaphoric- I’d have to see more of the context than I have to be sure, but it sure doesn’t seem that way to me- it seems like someone writing about a complex subject of which they have absolutely no knowledge. Irigary is the same person who claimed that men studied the dynamics of solids before fluid dynamics because of the rigidity of the penis versus vaginal secretions. That particular argument doesn’t seem very metaphoric to me.
I wish I could remember the Michael Shermer book that has a chapter that deals with Sokol and Temple University… you might find him more readable than Martin Gardner.
“Irigary is the same person who claimed that men studied the dynamics of solids before fluid dynamics because of the rigidity of the penis versus vaginal secretions.”
That’s a historical claim rather than a scientific one — but yeah, obviously that’s fairly silly. I can see such a thing being fun to read and maybe evocative or provocative in an outsider-art kind of way — it made me laugh, which is worth something. But again you’d (or at least I’d) have to read it as metaphor rather than an actual historical project….
I haven’t actually read any Irigary, though I’ve read things about her recently that make her seem pretty interesting and thoughtful (in her interpretation of Lacan, not of science.) I’m sure Caro knows her work well, though….
Okay, so I don’t know how I misread something I quoted, but >>>>“There’s a blistering attack on Feyerabend by Martin Gardner somewhere…”>>>
The article I pointed to is Martin Gardner’s reaction to the Social Text scandal, and doesn’t address Feyerabend. Sorry! Don’t know where that one’s located.
Here it is, though not the text unfortunately. Feyerabend responded briefly in a footnote in an updated edition of “Against Method,” calling Gardner the “pitbull of scientism.” Which is pretty funny.
Another thing that distinguishes Feyerabend from Derrida/Lacan/etc. is that his writing is extremely clear. Sokol is making fun of/criticizing some of these folks for using science they don’t understand to make their work more abstruse. That really is not a charge that can be leveled at Feyerabend, who’s actually very good at glossing complex issues in a readable manner.
Aha! Will check it out. And “pitbull of scientism” is a fine turn of phrase, and, like our discussion in the early thread, has the added bonus of being true even if you disagree on how to feel about it.
Last little note- this seems like an interesting kerfuffle along the same lines, but in a different field. I quite like the poem quoted here as well- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley
Ha! That’s a perfect example of why this can’t work the same way in the arts. This:
“They had written the whole of The Darkening Ecliptic in an afternoon, writing down the first thing that came into their heads, lifting words and phrases from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare and a Dictionary of Quotations: “We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them in nonsensical sentences.”
That’s a perfectly acceptable avante-garde technique. The fact that the poets themselves thought it wasn’t just makes it a post modern triumph rather than a modernist one.
There was a similar literature event that played on the biographical importance of the author… can’t remember enough to look it up right now, but also certainly relevant to the discussion, but possibly wit the opposite result as the previous example. Someone submitted a corpus of poetry attributed to a fictional Hiroshima survivor. Sound familiar?
Alex said “BTW– no, Sokal’s targets were by no means ‘straw men’. In the book, he quotes extensively– and damningly — from each.”
They’re only damning if you’ve read very little of the writers he quotes from, are completely unfamiliar with their argumentative strategies and proofs, and reject Hegel. If that doesn’t describe you, then his interpretations of those quotes are just as glaringly wrong as his “scientific claims” are to anybody who’s taken undergraduate physics.
Irigaray and Derrida both use a methodology where they try to make things mean the opposite of what they seem to mean, where the logical order of things is reversed, where truth claims are examined as power plays. That’s vastly oversimplifying, but it should be easy to see how that often makes for awkward, very theatrical, performative or poetic prose that sometimes even seems internally contradictory and that is always full of double entendres and game play. (I don’t know where the Irigaray quote above is from: I thought it was from “To Speak is Never Neutral”, but it’s not, and the citation isn’t visible in the Google Books version of the Sokal book, so I can’t address that specific example.)
Derrida’s response to the kerfuffle was that Sokal isn’t “serious” — he meant the hoax, surely, fond of doubles as he was, but also and more importantly that Sokal doesn’t have the philosophical chops to figure out why his bluster over “postmodernism’s abuse of science” (which is a meaningless catch-all term) is also “fashionable nonsense.”
People have been getting exercised over the Hegelian tendency to put the “glass darkly” between scientists and perfect knowledge since Hegel. Almost every serious philosopher has touched on it since Hegel’s time. Derrida’s philosophical problem is an OLD philosophical problem, and he is far more Kantian than Sokal gives him credit for. Derrida’s working within a branch of his discipline, which he is an expert in, and he is doing so with extensive and very subtle and learned references to about 200 years of philosophical thinking and writing.
Sokal, on the other hand, is writing about something he barely knows anything about, something that also clashes violently with an ideology he holds very dear.
Scientists like Sokal expect to be treated like a serious player in a conversation that they demonstrably don’t understand and are palpably ill-equipped to participate in, just because that conversation loosely has something to do with something they know a great deal about. The history and philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy, not science. If you don’t know Hegel and Kant and Feyerabend and Popper (et al) like the back of your hand, you aren’t having the same conversation as serious academic philosophers on the subject.
Andrew Ross obviously didn’t know his Derrida any better than Sokal, and he consequently fell for Sokal’s demand for that respect, and the only thing more disgraced by the debacle than Ross himself was academic publishing.
That’s why it’s a straw man. Sokal doesn’t shed any light at all on what Derrida and Irigaray have to say about science, because he misunderstands them. All he manages to do is take on the intermediaries, like Ross.
The hoax, and Sokal’s book, are just like those books people write about religion and science. It’s a political ploy, a mix of intra-academic politics and a — completely unfounded — fear that some people other than us entirely marginal humanities academics might actually like Derrida more than Sanjay Gupta. It’s too bad Sokal wasn’t spending the energy he spent on this colossally hubristic and ignorant project doing scientific research instead — he might have actually accomplished something.
Caroline-
Luce Irigaray, Parler n’est jamais neutre. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1987
If you google the second sentence of my quote in parenthesis, the text will pop up in google books, but it’s out of context.
I don’t think I have the energy and inclination to argue this with you, and I’m not sure it would be useful for either of us. Just thought I’d point out that “Sokal… is writing about something he barely knows anything about” pretty clearly applies to the situation, but from my perspective it’s the philosophers he targets that are clearly out of their leagues.
Sokal does talk in Fashionable Nonsense (which is not a hoax) about Irigaray’s essay “Is the Subject of Science Sexed” which is online here.
One early quote he attacks/mocks her for not knowing what a plus sign means: not only is he unaware that she’s talking about Frege’s mathematical logic, not only is he unaware that she basically gets her Frege right — you can read about Frege’s proof that the plus sign is not additive but definitional here — he doesn’t even catch that she tells him in the next paragraph that she’s talking about Frege.
I’m supposed to take this guy seriously? Really?
Sean – that’s the only citation I’ve found for it, but I can’t find the quote or anything similar in the book. The citation I keep finding is this:
1. Luce Irigaray, Parler n’est jamais neutre. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1987, p.110. (Quoted in and translated by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, London: Profile Books, 1998, p.100.)
I don’t have the French and there’s no similar quote in the English edition on Google Books; it wouldn’t be identical to what you quote since that’s Sokal’s translation, but I’m not pulling anything related.
If you can find it in context, please post a link.
If you can show me something that indicates even slightly that Sokal knows even a fraction as much about mathematical logic and the history of philosophy as even Irigaray — let alone Derrida, who I feel pretty certain could wipe the floor with Irigaray’s most flawless work — then I’ll accept that maybe there’s something to his criticism of them. But it just seems to me that people from a strongly empirical background generally are not only less familiar with formal logic than they are with higher-level analytic philosophy — with which they’re often quite well-acquainted — but that they’re completely unfamiliar with and hostile to the non-analytic tradition. That doesn’t make the philosophers who work in that traditions idiots. It just makes them interested in different questions. Claiming otherwise is politics, not scholarship. And politics that pretends to objectivity is propaganda.
I think revealing Stanley Fish’s idiocy is accomplishing something. As is revealing the gaping holes in the peer review process.
“Sokal doesn’t shed any light at all on what Derrida and Irigaray have to say about science, because he misunderstands them.”
But surely creative misunderstanding can be useful in its own way?
I’m pretty reluctant to say that scientists have nothing to contribute to the history of science. I mean, I’m not necessarily willing to dismiss everything Lacan has to say just because he’s not a scientist; I don’t want to dismiss everything Sokol has to say just because he is one.
Some of the discussions around this seem fairly productive and interesting. For instance, this discussion of Lacan’s metaphorical use of mathematics, and Sokol’s blistering and highly technical response seem like they’d both be quite useful in trying to figure out what on earth Lacan is or thinks he is talking about. And I don’t think Sokol is wrong in suggesting that Lacan is deliberately obscure or nonsensical at times (though why he’s obscure or nonsensical is probably a good deal more complicated than Sokol wants it to be.)
I guess I just feel like sneering at Sokol for wanting to engage these writers seems wrong to me (and yes, attacking them is definitely an engagement.) And suggesting that he’s hubristic just seems silly in a conversation involving Derrida and Lacan and Stanley Fish. Everybody involved is hugely pompous and self-impressed or they wouldn’t be in the room.
Besides, he’s quite clear about his motives; he’s a Marxist. Marxists have really legitimate political and philosophical reasons for disliking Derrida’s, et. al, challenge to objectivity in science (Terry Eagleton expresses these quite well in various places.) Obviously you can work them out to some extent (as Zizek and others do) but I don’t think it’s wrong of Sokol to have wanted to go after the Social Text folks on these grounds.
And finally…I have to say, even writers who are wonderful in many ways can have a painful tendency to seek justification and prestige through shaky references to half-understood scientific phenomena or half-baked scientific theories. It’s one of the things that I like least about Freud. And that Irigary quote…it’s out of context, but unless she’s doing outright self-parody, it’s hard for me to imagine how I wouldn’t still find that a misstep.
If you guys want to read something from an analytic perspective about the philosophy of science, don’t waste your time with some idiot like Sokal. Read something like this.
THAT’s what the analytic philosophy of math looks like.
Compare it to Sokal’s pathetic attempt to use mathematical logic to debunk Irigary (page 119 and cont, Fashionable Nonsense), and then tell me who is out of his league.
Noah — there are plenty of scientists contributing to the history of science — as well as to the analysis of science as a political practice. The philosophy of science is harder to do without a philosophical background, as you can see if you look at the book I just linked to. If Sokal had put his attention onto science studies rather than the academic philosophers they (mis)use, I would have no beef with him, but he tremendously overreached, and did so in a particuarly arrogant — and politically unacceptable — way.
The Irigaray quote is Sokal’s translation: I want to see it in context before making any claims what it’s about. I’m not claiming it is or isn’t a misstep — just that Sokal is a lousy source for any understanding of these philosophers he claims to be debunking. The fact remains that he can’t even successfully parse them although he never fails to present himself as expert enough to debunk them entirely.
Sokal deserves contempt not for showing up people like the editors of Social Text, who deserve it, but for trivializing the complexity not only of the projects he’s mocking, but of the project he claims to be undertaking. Irigaray and Derrida are Marxists too, and I’m sure they would have been more than happy to engage him in a discussion of the politics of science in post-Marxism.
But the idea that he can simply assert science’s truth claims as some sort of salvation for the Left is simplistic and naive in the extreme — and he doesn’t argue it, he posits it. If you want to hear well-put-together arguments against Foucault, read Chomsky, not Sokal.
Sokal doesn’t meaningfully engage the specific conversations the Left, including but not limited to these philosophers, were having any more than he engages the specific philosophical conversations he claims to be debunking. He’s smoke and mirrors, no different from any other pop political writer with some pseudo-philosophical cause. Like Derrida said: he’s not serious. But decade plus years later we’re still talking about him and his hoax and his treatment of these fundamental philosophical issues as if they were resolvable by common sense — because all he did was equate the scientific position with the anti-intellectual one. How exactly has that particular flavor of Left-Populism helped the Left?
I don’t know that it’s especially helped the left, and I don’t necessarily find him especially illuminating, at least in the bits I’ve read — he seems to be arguing at one point that the only reason to use metaphors is to simplify things, for example, which doesn’t seem like a very thoughtful way of looking at it.
But we’re talking about him mostly because he had literary talent (which is what a parody is). And because people feel that a scientist does have something to bring to this conversation.
And what I’m arguing is that Sokol does not bring the perspective of a scientist here. I completely agree with the points about the failure of academic peer review and the silliness of science studies, and there’s the point about the real straw men which will probably boil down to semantics, but both of those are about the hoax as an event, not about the subsequent books.
The supposedly “scientific” arguments against postructuralism are made in his follow-up books, which came up in comments with regards to repeating a bunch of his sloppy claims about Irigaray (et al.). The arguments made in those books are not rigorous. In many cases they are, in fact, outright wrong. Philosophical books don’t exist to be analyzed independently of the conversation they’re having. You can’t pull quotes from a non-fiction book written for a highly specialized audience out of context (historical or textual) and claim to analyze those quotes objectively as if they were stand-alone axioms. There’s not enough information in them to do that. At the absolute best you will end up with an argument that it’s poor writing or a bad example, which is not Sokal’s point. Claiming that he can perform this kind of textual debunking is not “the perspective of a scientist:” it’s a perspective of someone who doesn’t understand. A scientist would say “I don’t have enough information to evaluate this.” A good scientist, at least.
The Sokal books are by people with a serious axe to grind and no meaningful depth of knowledge on the subject they’re claiming to analyze. They’re completely unreliable sources that distort the truth, in very ugly, arrogant language intended to rile up sentiments, specifically to score political points. That’s also not representative of what a scientist should have to bring to this conversation. (Sokal learned his lessons from the Sandinistas well, and if you think I prefer Foucault’s pointy head to the Sandinistas’ pointy bayonet, you’d be right.)
It’s like quoting Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann — except because Sokal has a PhD and a respectable academic job, people often think he’s more neutral and legitimately informed. But he’s not. Those books do not represent “science’s arguments against postructuralism.” If you want this vein of argument against the poststructuralists, you want Chomsky, not Sokal. I don’t particularly agree with Chomsky, but he’s the real thing.
Also, to be clear, I’m not sneering at Sokal for wanting to engage these writers. I’m sneering at him specifically because I don’t accept that he wanted to engage them: I believe he wrote about them specifically to use the authority of his scientific training against them, to discredit them and prevent engagement with them, for political purposes, without any attentiveness at all to what they actually said or actually were doing.
Alex, I’m happy to refer to Lacan, the Cahiers crowd, and Ginsberg as rebel intellectuals. The term is quite apt!
Haven’t seen Caro get quite so hot under the collar before.
I would say that Sokal does engage these philosophers, but he refuses to do so on their ground; he engages them on his. That’s perfectly legitimate, especially when they venture in realms they understand poorly. It’s engaging them in the most primary Hegelian sense: the dialectic.
In the book he takes on, one by one, various scientific metaphors employed by them and demonstrates how they don’t work.
We have a clash of worldviews going on here, and I have much sympathy for Sokal’s because there is an alarming tendency in modern humanities to treat the very idea of truth as an anachronism. I’m not saying ambiguity and differing opinions have no place; of course they do. And it’s plain that such movements as feminism have informed theory in salutary ways, challenging the established consensus that was the dead-hand legacy of the existing power structure.
But what I see more and more is a radical skepticism that facilitates subjectivity to the point of solipsism. We tailor our readings to whatever discourse we’re most comfortable with. That’s fine in art or literary criticism; it’s dangerous in history; it’s catastrophic to the point of lunacy in the hard sciences.
Sokal has fired a warning shot,and done so with wit.
When the child says the Emperor has no clothes on, it’s not enough for him to retort that the child just can’t see them. It should be the beginning of a dialogue.
Calling Sokal an idiot or comparing him to Glenn Beck is merely choking off that dialogue.
Sokal has no interest whatsoever in dialogue, dialectical or otherwise. His purpose is specifically to shut down the dialogue you claim should begin from his work. The dialogue’s great — but if it happens it’ll be because people like you give him more credit than he deserves and are more even handed than he himself is. His work is not intended to be a warning shot. It’s intended to be a firing squad.
He’s the worst sort of Leftist, playing anti-intellectual power games with scientific authority in order to deceive less-informed people into believing something is simpler than it is. That’s exactly like our propagandistic TV pundits. Sokal’s kind of insulting, jocular, arrogant one-sided polemic is bad for ideas, it’s bad for politics, and it’s bad for science, as well as being a thorn in the side of humanities academics trying to get their work done. (He won’t slow the good ones down a bit.)
If he bothered to talk about Bourbaki, he might convince me that there were problems with Lacan’s set theory. But he doesn’t.
If he bothered to talk about Frege, he might convince me there were problems with Irigaray’s math, but he doesn’t.
And so on, and so forth.
Sokal doesn’t explain how the “scientific metaphors” in their writing “don’t work.” He explains how they don’t work “as science.” And that — unless you count psychoanalysis as a science, which I don’t — is entirely and completely irrelevant. He specifically states that you can’t use a math metaphor unless you use it in its most rigorous mathematical sense, which is patently absurd. It wouldn’t be a metaphor if you used it that way. The man is incapable of understanding the concept of an illustrative heuristic.
Reading Lacan Sokal’s way is like pulling an article out of PNAS from the 1960s and pointing out that it doesn’t take advantage of insights we learned from PCR. It’s ludicrous.
If Sokal had even made the slightest attempt at explaining why Irigaray was wrong to use Frege rather than elementary school arithemetic, I might believe he wanted to start a dialogue. Instead he pretends that she’s the idiot: “As we all learned in elementary school, the symbol plus denotes the addition of two numbers. We are at a loss to explain how Irigarary got the idea…” He then goes on to continue “correcting her” as if he is the Subject-Supposed-to-Know, adding all this clarity to her obscurantism — when if you’ve read Frege he’s just making the whole situation three times as muddy by raising the problem of how to incorporate differences between mathematical logic and math proper into Irigaray’s argument. But is that his point? No: his point is that she should be dismissed out of hand as ignorant and bad at math.
Explain to me how, if his interest was dialogue, Sokal thought that it was appropriate and productive to a) imply that Irigaray is more naive about math than an elementary school student and b) claim he was “at a loss” about the postulates of the father of analytic philosophy.
The explanation that he’s trying to protect science from people like her doesn’t make sense. The explanation that he’s trying to make the humanities more scientifically rigorous also doesn’t make sense. You may be right that he’s trying to protect history from the “wrong sort of Leftist”, but that’s highly political. It matters that he targeted the European intellectuals — the ones who were actually rigorous on their ground — rather than directly hitting the sloppy science studies people, whom he could have easily, and justifiably, eviscerated and who as teachers and far more accessible writers are more likely to be doing the kind of damage you claim he was trying to fight. My explanation is that he has a political project against these thinkers because they’re antithetical to his preferred, revolutionary, flavor of Leftism.
This isn’t a “clash of worldviews” between objective reason and subjective nihilism. It’s not “refusing to engage them on their ground.” It’s a political attack. It’s distorting what people who disagree with him are saying in order to discredit them, and to refuse them the right to reject science’s starting assumptions as the necessary ground of philosophical inquiry.
That’s hegemony.
It’s dangerous. It’s immoral. And you’re damn right it gets me hot under the collar. I greatly prefer Gramsci to Daniel Ortega, and I’d be more than happy to defend that to Mr. Sokal.
The version of Leftism that Sokal takes on in these arguments is, very specifically, a philosophical response by a deeply disillusioned European left to the excesses and abuses of Marxist ideology by the Soviets (and other petty Leftists like Mr Sokal’s friends in Nicaragua). Sokal does not care about those excesses and abuses. He rejects the project of post-war European Marxism as too indirect. He is, in these books, behaving like the kind of Marxist he admires: this is how you should believe, and if you don’t believe this way, you are an “imposter” spouting “nonsense,” and it is my responsibility to get rid of you.
Defend that if you want, but don’t try to do it on the grounds that it provokes dialogue. If you buy that, I’d like to tell you about this nice Gulag I have in Siberia for sale.
For the record, the idea of “subjective truth” is not some corrupt brainchild of the “modern humanities.” It’s Kirkegaard, from the Afsluttende Uvidenskabelig Efterskrift of 1846. Just because people like to think that this line of inquiry and thought is “fashionable” and contemporary doesn’t make it so.
“but don’t try to do it on the grounds that it provokes dialogue.”
But he’s not rounding them up and putting them in a gulag. He’s writing books and responding at length to critics. And he has provoked dialogue; as you say, we’re still talking about it and him. And there’s been a ton of discussion with and about him obviously.
He’s inflammatory, aggressive and unfair — the fact that he’s going after Irigary rather than Feyerabend in the first place seems to fairly clearly indicate he’s being slippery. And his understanding of how metaphors work is as you say deeply confused. But I think people in the humanities, like people in the sciences, could probably stand to have thorns placed in their sides on a semi-regular basis.
I think he also raises some justifiable questions about why these folks talk this way, what they think they’re doing with science, and who they think their audience is. You’ve pointed out on occasion that the utter obscurity of a lot of contemporary philosophy is a problem. Sokal shows fairly clearly that even leading journals don’t necessarily understand what they’re publishing or why. In that metasscience response he seems to do a pretty good job of suggesting that at least some of Lacan’s advocates don’t really understand the math he’s using (whether or not Lacan does.)
I think there are reasonable answers to these questions, and some of Sokol’s interlocutors talk about them. But i think raising them, even in a hostile, politically charged way isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And I think comparing him to Fox pundits doesn’t make sense to me. He’s way more willing than those folks are to debate and respond to critics in arena’s that aren’t his own show.
And, you know, Derrida et all are in general are of the opinion that intellectual debates are about ideology and propaganda. If Sokol’s wrong and an idiot, don’t chuckle at him with your friends (which is what Derrida’s “not serious” remark sounds like). Write a polemic and take him out. (Maybe Derrida did this; I didn’t see a translation of his response to Sokol.)
Again, this is part of what’s so lovable about Feyerabend; his philosophy basically says for counter-intuitive and somewhat abstruse reasons that philosophers need to be popularizers, and so he’s a really effective popularizer. It’s a shame he died a couple years before the Sokol Affair. Maybe Sokol was waiting for him to kick off….
I haven’t read everything here, but Caro says:
“If you can show me something that indicates even slightly that Sokal knows even a fraction as much about mathematical logic and the history of philosophy as even Irigaray — let alone Derrida, who I feel pretty certain could wipe the floor with Irigaray’s most flawless work — then I’ll accept that maybe there’s something to his criticism of them.”
Bricmont and Sokal address your Irigaray point here (which was brought up in a review by Mermin for _Physics Today_). Quote function doesn’t work, but it’s on pages 2 and 3.
I just want to point out that this is all Anja’s fault. In case anyone had forgotten.
Caro, if you’re going to call Sokal an evil Stalinist for supporting the Sandinistas, I think you have to say the same thing about Chomsky and most of the American left.
Caro the Contra. Who’d’ve thunk it?
Caro, think carefully about your answer to this:
Who do you think is the more competent mathematician — Sokal or Irigary?
I want to thank you for the link to Frege on the plus and equal signs; I needed a good laugh today. Yep, he sure demonstrates that 1+1+1 does not equal 3. He merrily confuses equality with identity. Any real mathematician would laugh him out of the room.
He succumbs to one of the most widespread and foolish fallacies extant: that logic and mathematics map.
The simplest peasant knows how false this is. If I drip three drops of water into a bowl, do I have 1+1+1 = 3 drops? No, I have 1 drop 3 times larger.
Caro, I can’t conceive of a single context where anybody, let alone Irigaray, can seriously contend that E=MC2 is a sexed concept.
I think you’ve invested so much intellectual and human capital into this particular intellectual bubble that you fly into a rage when you perceive your ox is being gored.
If that sounds too ad hominem…well, Caro, you gave me the example.
Okay…so I’m leaving in like 5 minutes. Please let’s not have this get too rancorous while I’m driving to the relatives?
Alex, Caro didn’t say anything about you personally, unless you are Sokal. You’re escalating…which is why you sometimes have these really unpleasant troll battles, in case you’re wondering. (And yes, pot, kettle, all that, I know.) Not that you’re points aren’t worth making but…if you could de-escalate just slightly, that might be nice.
To your point; it would be possible for a mathematician to not know very much if anything about various regions of mathematics. As I said, mathematicians often know little about even related subfields. Math is incredibly balkanized. That doesn’t say anything about who knows which, Irigary or Sokol, but it’s not impossible that the answer in certain situations could be Irigary.
And Anja, I will get you for this.
Alex, if logic and mathematics do not map, and Irigaray is doing logic, then why does it matter (to either you or Sokal) whether she is a good mathematician?
And just to be clear, you’re also relying on the appeal to “the simplest peasant,” argument, yes? Is this peasant related to Sokal’s elementary school child?
I don’t want to defend Irigaray’s statement about
E=mc2 until I READ it, and I still can’t FIND it except out of context in Sokal’s translation. It very well might be complete rubbish. I’m sure in the however-many-gazillion pages Sokal and his cabal have published they’ve managed to score some hits, and Irigaray’s poetic style and systematic counterintuitiveness makes her a likely target. I’m not trying to avoid the question — I can’t find the source. Somebody send me a scan or a link.
Also, if anybody has a copy of Fashionable Nonsense, can you confirm that the Irigaray 1993 source is “A Chance for Life” in Sexes and Genealogies? They quote at length from this source on page 107 of FN, but I searched for those quotes on Google books and there isn’t a single reference to either Neitzsche or Einstein in that book. There isn’t a reference to a violin. Etc. I can’t find those quotes either to see what’s going on there. If somebody can point me to them in their original context, I’d really appreciate it.
WRT the article Charles sent, I don’t see them responding there to the charge that they are un-engaged with Frege. They just keep asserting their understanding of logic as if it automatically discredits hers. They focus primarily on confusion stemming from her use of the term “quantifier”, which they claim is muddled, but it’s in fact also Frege. Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Irigaray’s point is that when you divide things into those two absolute truth terms, you take something that should be “qualitative” (that’s why she inserts the parenthetical term there, that they question), and you make it “quantitative”: she concludes “there is therefore no sign for difference other than quantitative difference.” There is only quantitative difference and identity.
They could have asked Irigaray to defend her use of Frege. They could have disavowed the influence of Frege on contemporary mathematics, and explained specifically how actual mathematics resists this type of analysis and does allow for what Irigaray says it does not allow for. Either would have been a brilliant stroke. But it’s not what they did – they called her an idiot and said they didn’t understand what she was saying, and that this made her writing nonsense.
But her analysis is not meaningless — it’s a loosely Derridean analysis of the political implications of a mathematical worldview, by means of a critique of the Frege/Russell project which forms the kernel of analytic philosophy of logic. You have to be a little familiar with Frege and a lot familiar with Derrida to follow it, but it’s a big bite into analytic philosophy. She may very well be wrong, I have no idea! But I do know that Sokal and his wimpy little argument from “common sense” understandings of mathematical language don’t even begin to show how.
It’s also worth noting that Irigaray also doesn’t like Frege: Sokal et al conveniently leave out her conclusion, which is
So not only are her claims perfectly consistent with a reading of Frege via Derrida, they’re ultimately just as critical of Frege as Sokal (and Alex), but from a different vantage point.
Sokal et al. are pretending that the philosophy of math should be immediately transparent to mathematicians, which really is “nonsense” since mathematical logic is a completely different symbol system with a very detailed tradition.
Noah, I do believe that there’s value in non-obscurantist language, and I specifically believe that the difficulty, because of the counterintuitive logic, of ever translating poststructuralist thinking to non-obscurantist language is a problem for poststructuralism, and for academia. That doesn’t mean I think that poststructuralist jargon has no place, and if books by Irigaray and Derrida aren’t the place for it, then I don’t know what is. Not all conversations can happen in ordinary speech, and not all systems for understanding the world can be reconciled with each other into one happy totality. Sometimes there will be incommensurate differences of perspective. I believe that is to the good, and that the project to reconcile everything is a fool’s errand and bad politics.
Experts need to be able to use the discourses of their fields to present and debate ideas with each other, without being subject to people who don’t understand what the conversations about about playing the kind of power game that Sokal does. That’s why he’s anti-intellectual: he devalues expert discourse. But it’s also why he’s hegemonic: he does not devalue the expert discourse of the sciences, only the expert discourse of perspectives that reject the premises of the sciences.
That’s not the foundation for a productive conversation. It’s not scholarship — it’s an assertion of authority. It doesn’t help readers figure out what’s going on — it asks readers to accept Sokal’s version of the facts without providing those readers the ability to reproduce the experiment that leads him to his conclusions. And the reason you can’t reproduce it is because the experiment was sloppy: all he’s done is say “this doesn’t fit what I know.” He hasn’t said first “what does it fit, instead?” and then “why is what I know more useful and valuable than the other model?”
For them to say, in that response to the review that you forwarded, Charles, that they “looked” for an explanation in the text — well, that may be true. But obviously it didn’t occur to them that the explanation might be outside of the text, in the source texts that were being discussed. Sometimes the “external object” that philosophical writing references isn’t the world or perfect mathematical knowledge, it’s other writings by other thinkers. The fact that Sokal et al. did not consider this is why I’m so adamant that they’re hegemons rather than conversation starters. You can’t have a conversation with a hegemon, because hegemony by definition is about asserting itself over the other participant.
And I’m perfectly happy to admit, Alex, that I’ve invested a lot of intellectual and human capital into the idea that the written-down thought of humankind, present and past, is not so unimportant that someone like Sokal can come in and claim that His Science, His Knowledge is big enough to fuck it out of existence without even taking it to dinner first. If his attitude toward other modalities of expert discourse doesn’t prove Irigaray’s point, I don’t know what does.
The methodologies of argument and analysis in the humanities — even when they are examining related phenomena to the sciences, and even when they are examining science itself — should not be the same as those of the sciences. The sciences handle the scientific way of reading and analyzing just fine without help from Derrida and Irigaray et al. The humanities are supposed to do and be something else, and Sokal’s inability or unwillingness to accept that is not acceptable. It’s propaganda in the service of scientific hegemony, not scholarship.
Alex, if you want to argue the merits of Frege’s contribution to philosophy and the relationship between mathematics and logic, take it up with Bertrand Russell, because that’s not my field. I tend to agree with Irigaray that we could throw the lot out and be better off. Here’s the paragraph about him in the Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The only thing I said about Chomsky, Jack, is that he’s a better source for this kind of argument than Sokal. I think that implies their (relatively) shared political vantage point.
Noah, I wanted to respond to what you said earlier and didn’t have time while I was writing that last.
The fact that dialogue has resulted from Sokal’s provocation has nothing to do with whether Sokal cared about whether it did or not. The power of dialogue in an open society is stronger than the power of Sokal’s totalizing hegemony. Just because people did speak back to him and there was a back and forth doesn’t mean he’s not hegemonic, either logically or in his motives.
There are several different pieces of Sokal’s argument and its presentation that I’m objecting to here. I think his arguments are bad, naive and uninformed, and up to a point I’ll argue against them, although he is SO uninformed that it takes a tremendous amount of energy. I agree with you that academia has a responsibility to rebut his arguments, even though it’s hard and tiring, and that to the extent they have not done that in ways people can understand that’s a failure in the response. There’s also his complicity with the general deterioration in the terms of public debate over contentious ideological issues: there’s nothing about Sokal’s purpose or qualifications or argument that makes it more ok for him to be arrogant and reductive and hostile than it is for Glenn Beck (et al.) to do so. There are his minor political motivations: to score hits against people he doesn’t like and shut them down. I’m sure Sokal would have been happy for English departments and even Irigaray and Derrida themselves to say “Oh my goodness, Alan! Thank you so much for sharing your expertise! We stand corrected!” He meant the arguments to discredit them, not promote a conversation where their positions became clearer and more well-articulated vis-a-vis mainstream science. That’s clear, because his more large-scale political motivation is to oppose their politics.
Sokal is claiming that the Left has abandoned reason. That’s his big political bugabear. What it misses is that the European Left, Irigaray and Derrida and all his bete noires, have not abandoned a commitment to reason. They’ve abandoned hegemony, and concluded that it’s not an easy business to separate reason from hegemonic forces.
Sokal’s political analysis, which is as unsophisticated as his analysis of Irigaray et al., ignores the assertion from the European left that the drive to hegemony is the force that propeled actually existing Leftist governments — from Stalin to the Sandinistas — toward totalitarianism. Hegemony also propels actually existing RIGHTIST governments toward totalitarianism. (If you watch the debate between Chomsky and Foucault on YouTube, when Foucault talks about “justice” being subsumed back into the system of inequality, this is what he means.)
Anybody who calls himself a old-fashioned Leftist and doesn’t take seriously the problem of how to avoid totalitarianism in Leftist government is a bad guy. Full stop. He can’t heap collective guilt on Rightist politics for the crimes of Right governments, which any old-fashioned leftist would do, and not also come to terms with the ones that resulted from his own politics. And the drive to hegemony is a big part of those totalitarian outcomes.
Sokal has a committment to hegemony — even though he mixes it into his notion of “truth” and can’t see that. He quotes Alan Ryan: “the minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth.” He accuses the European Left of making this path to liberation impossible. But he’s mixing up cause and effect. The fact remains, from history, that the ability of truth to undermine power is contingent, limited by real politic, and most importantly that the truth itself can be manipulated, because people can be manipulated into believing things are true that aren’t. The truth is easily held hostage to all sorts of things, from the media to money — to political ideologies and to the influence and authority of scientific ideas. Science can be used and abused in the service of non-truth just like philosophy can.
European Left Intellectuals didn’t INVENT that aspect of human experience. They aren’t responsible for it, as Sokal tries to claim. Their work is intended to explain it, and more to imagine possibilities for how to combat it. That’s the shift in European leftism from “revolutionary ideology” to “ideological interpellation.” It’s not an abandonment of reason. It’s horror in the face of the end of any truth that can speak back to power, and it’s a panicked attempt to explain it. The frequency with which that dire viewpoint is borne out in contemporary global politics is legitimately disheartening, and it is worth the attention of academics. Sokal, for his his vaunted objectivity and commitment to the truth, is so secure in his own safe little scientific ideology that he can’t even admit it’s a problem, let alone a problem that empirical science can’t solve.
Science may be able to explain some aspects of the human propensity to believe in weird crap — but science is almost uniquely ill-equipped to advise us how to mediate, mitigate and manipulate that propensity for political purposes. Fox News is much much better at such manipulation. And that’s much, much more dangerous to the Left than Irigaray is.
Ah, well, we can agree to disagree to some extent. I don’t think experts should be immune from common-sense challenges. Experts fuck up. A lot. Reifying expertise, in the humanities or elsewhere, actually seems antithetical to anti-hegemony to me.
It’s also worth noting I think that objectivity isn’t necessarily hegemonic. I was talking to a friend who lives under a repressive regime, and he mentioned that the authorities use the argument that there is no objectivity as an excuse to punish journalists who write things the regime doesn’t like. Eagleton makes the same points more or less (that is, that a belief in reality can be important in forming a foundation/starting point for certain kinds of political resistance.)
“The fact remains, from history, that the ability of truth to undermine power is contingent, limited by real politic, and most importantly that the truth itself can be manipulated, because people can be manipulated into believing things are true that aren’t. ”
Which is certainly right…but the ability of philosophical assaults on truth to undermine power is also extremely contingent. And the hegemonic impulse — which might more clearly be expressed as the drive to power, or (more theologically) as Moloch, is extremely strong throughout academia. Again, Feyerabend is great about this, talking about how he wanted to found a school of philosophy to show the hubris of science and reason — and then realizing he was heading for the same totalizing vision he hated. He talks about planning to dump it all and be an artist…which I think is sweet, though obviously missing the way Moloch functions in the arts as well.
Sokal’s not exactly presenting himself as the arbiter of common sense, Noah. (That was Alex.) He’s presenting himself as the more authoritative expert, the one with more access to truth and the Right Answers. He’s just saying those Right Answers are closer to common sense than anything else. Pretending he represents the little scientist standing up against the big philosophers is absurd.
It’s not his favoring objectivity that’s hegemonic. It’s his favoring an absolute standard, which in his case is objectivity, but could be something else. Hegemony isn’t epistemological like “objectivity.” The opposite of hegemony is pluralism, not relativism. You can, in some absurdly logical sense, be hegemonic about pluralism, but then your hegemony undermines your hegemony. (How’s that for deconstructive?)
There’s absolutely no idea that a totalitarian system can’t manipulate as an excuse to perpetuate crimes against its people. That’s precisely the point: there’s no possible way to speak “the truth of objectivity” back to that regime in a way that will miraculously make them do something differently, because they’d just adapt and respond, find a different way to manipulate that information. What they say doesn’t matter. At all. Hannah Arendt’s phrasing is “in the body politic of totalitarian government, the place of positive law is taken by total terror… [Terror’s] chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.”
Nature or history. Either Sokal or Irigaray, Darwin or Marx, objectivity or subjectivity. There will always be an instrument of terror, and what that instrument of terror specifically is, is besides the point. That’s why the response to mid-century totalitarianism in Europe was deconstruction — a hegemony that undermined itself from within.
I’ve said it before but apparently I have to say it again: the idea that poststructuralism is incompatible with “a belief in reality” is just bullshit. Saying that reality is mediated and slippery, and that attempts to pin it down are always partial and also mediated, isn’t saying it doesn’t exist.
It seems that all it took to reignite the Science Wars was to make a joke about reigniting the Science Wars (how meta!).
Yep, it’s all my fault.
Also, I’d like to put my lot (as a leftist, although not a radical one) in with the idea that power corrupts – the more hegemonic, the more corrupting – regardless of whether the body holding that power is a government espousing leftist, rightist or centrist ideas, a corporation, or some other body. Powerful bodies are holders of power before they are anything else; state powers are state powers before they are left- or right-leaning.
Logical-positivist Marxist philosophy strikes me as dangerous because it seems to take a very hegemonic, non-discursive position. Remember, Marx’s whole project was to produce a “scientific socialism” – when you think your political philosophy has reached the level of
“science,” you’re going to be a lot more willing to take (possibly extreme and destructive) action, and a lot less willing to talk things out with your opponents and detractors. This is why rightists often deride communism as a “religion” – it’s so heavily hegemonic and doctrinal – and why my radical friends are all anarchists or more moderate socialists, not communists. It’s also why I respect anarchism, however suspicious I may be of its workability: it recognizes the primal position of power over everything else.
Oh, and before people who know more than I do about philosophy jump on me for getting things all wrong, let me preempt by saying that I don’t know as much about this stuff as y’all do.
No jumping here! I agree with you completely, Anja.
Hurrah! I am un-jumped.
Why is Sokal a “hegemonist”? Because he thinks he’s right and his opponents are wrong? That makes hegemonists of us all. The word is imported from Maoism, by the way, as hegemonical a system as ever was.
Here’s another blog discussing the same passage:
http://www.philosophicalmisadventures.com/?p=11
By the way, why does no-one mention Bricmont? Here’s an interview with him (in French):
http://www.zetetique.ldh.org/bricmont.html
Saying that reality is mediated and slippery, and that attempts to pin it down are always partial and also mediated, isn’t saying it doesn’t exist.
I’ve stayed out of this, because I don’t really care that much about the French dudes. But, jeez.
That above sentence encapsulates one of the most dangerous ideas from the humanities, as applied to science, EVER. It’s the reason that people joke about belonging to the ‘reality based community’, because Bush’s staffers believed that reality was what you make it. The global warming debate should not even be a debate, but it is, because of this idea that pinning down reality is slippery and pesky and that you can’t pin down the truth. Gravity works, say the scientists. Gravity is an idea, say the humanities folks. And you know, leap off a small building with a cape around your shoulders and see how it works for you, I guess.
I’m very much for humanities, but I’m classically trained (read the Politics in Greek, read De Rerum Natura in Latin, read some Goethe in German and Levi Strauss in French) and it gave me a good grounding in cynicism as well as word play. I know, deep in my heart of hearts, that academics on both sides just make shit up. It’s human nature. They also, both sides, use complicated words to cover up the fact that they are making minor arguments that don’t amount to much. But in the sciences, since proof is easier to come by, there’s more ‘yeah nice try’ going on. I mean, does anyone seriously believe humanities journals do not contain tenure fodder horseshit that’s mostly designed to cover up the fact that there’s not a single original thought contained therein? That they’re not using their great big words to mostly hold onto the cushy chairs they’ve got for themselves?
There’s been so much, ‘reality is complicated and difficult to determine’ that many people now believe, including, apparently (?), you Caro, that it cannot be pinned down. Which is a problem. Because for practical purposes, yes, it sure as hell can. And it must be. Not pinning it down, believing that it is somehow this mythical place between two points, leads to people making shit up and launching a bunch of bombs at innocent people. That is not a joke and it’s a big deal, and it’s kind of getting people killed. And you know, I think that’s kind of more important than the egos of the French dudes, who can probably stand more than a little ribbing. I don’t care, one or another, what the philosophers do in their spare time. But I do care about the trickle down theories that they’re passing around like some kind of nasty mental herpes and the ‘reality is shifty’ one is a huge problem.
Well, Vom, how do you pin down an aesthetic preference? Or more importantly, the factors that make not just an individual, but a group of individuals transform that aesthetic preference into a political conviction?
Or do you think culture isn’t part of “reality”?
The application of ideas in the humanities to science is indeed a lot more problematic than the application of ideas in the sciences to the humanities. I believe I’ve said many times that science studies has a lot of problems. I think I used the word “silly.” But the latter, the application of ideas in the sciences to the humanities, is what my objections were about.
The point of science is pinning things down, but people in the sciences often want the humanities to be about pinning things down too.
And that’s where the problem comes in. Because the reality that the humanities deals with is a great deal harder to pin down — and a great deal more dangerous to TRY and pin down — than the reality the sciences deal with.
There are an awful lot of people who eschew the humanities in favor of the social sciences and think the social sciences will be able to pin down everything we are — why we think the way we think, how we think the way we think, even what we should think, what is good to think. The idea that scientific understanding will be able to capture, describe and explain, culture via its material and biological components is compelling for a lot of people. There is nothing inherently about culture that makes the scientific explanations of it more valuable, useful, or even correct than the ones from the humanities — although you, I hope, can see the complexity and even peril in the very idea that there are “scientifically correct” forms of culture. The humanities deal with heuristics, which by definition are descriptive rather than proscriptive, interested in imagining human society rather than “pinning it down.” But how often do we take social scientific insights and attempt to make the proscriptions for a “good” or improved society? How often do we, with the best of intentions, look to scientific insights for answers to problems that come from intolerance or immaturity, thinking that if we can just “pin it down” we’ll be able to avoid the hard work of dealing with things that don’t suit us? I find the utopian idea of a scientific teleology for culture utterly terrifying, incredibly dehumanizing, and yes, hegemonic.
Trying to make that discussion about whether or not physical scientists can explain gravity is missing the point.
The point is not that there is no aspect of reality that can’t be pinned down. The point is that the totality of reality can’t be pinned down, both because some aspects of reality are legitimately slippery and because some of those aspects of reality are supposed to be slippery.
And get real — the global warming debate doesn’t exist because French intellectuals wrote books about postmodernism in the ’80s. What a ridiculous scapegoat. Global warming is contentious because entrenched interests will lose money if we fix the problem, and entrenched interests have access to communications networks that they use to sow confusion among people who either have interests of their own in believing bullshit or who are just susceptible to whatever ideology they hear on TV.
The rationale for why people drop bombs falls under the same logic as the rationale for other forms of terror. Do you really think that efforts to silence and/or demonize humanities academics interested in post-Marxism and poststructuralism is going to stop governments and lunatics from shooting and bombing people they don’t like? I’d like you, please, to pin down for me exactly how silencing them is going to make any difference at all.
For Alex.
Of course culture is part of reality, but the idea that you can’t pin down big parts of it is absurd. The humanities like to say that we do is somehow different, bigger, messier, more complicated than the things the sciences do. And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case at all.
I’m currently editing a humanities journal and one of the articles is by a scientist. He uses mathematics to pin down the likelihood of where John Henry fought his battle with the machine and on what day. Up until that point, and even now, people in the humanities argue about aspects of this–it’s folklore. They’ve used all kinds of arguments–culture, mores, artistic preferences, the way that oral history works, how and why people write songs and tell stories, race relations, various theories of history, the usual things. But he used math and makes a convincing argument about where and when.
I can’t help but find that helpful and yes, humanizing, because it does nail down a kind of truth. All of the truth? No, of course not. But the more that is pinned down, the more that *is* factual, the more possible it is to move forward with various subtleties and to check and recheck theories against facts to see if they hold up.
I don’t find that idea dangerous whatsoever. Up until this point, the arguments about the date and place were made in large part on aesthetic and cultural grounds–but the author uses a different approach and pins it down. Why would I shy back from that?
If you find the application of science to the humanities scary, that’s fine. But that’s a feeling, which is very different from whether or not it can be done. And no, I don’t think I’m missing the point. There is a lot of harm done by the insistence of the humanities that fuzziness is inherently there, and I do think there are strong alternate forces at work for humanities people to declare fuzziness whether it exists or doesn’t.
I don’t find where and when something happened to be a “big part” of what the humanities has to say about a thing.
Of course you can marshal historical evidence for a date and place. But marshaling historical evidence — even making historical arguments based on that evidence — is not all the humanities do. Sometimes the humanities even study things — gasp! — that aren’t historical.
If all you’re saying is that bits and pieces of things about culture can be pinned down, ok. I can’t think of a single French intellectual who would disagree with you. Many of them lived through the Holocaust. They don’t deny history.
But they do deny that it follows the same mechanisms as physical matter. They deny that its effects are simple and easy to detect and describe. And they deny that the political effects of doing so are always transparent and always unquestionably good.
That is what post-structuralism and post-Marxism are about.
There is also such a thing as textual evidence, and it matters that people have taken textual evidence from run-of-the-mill humanities journals and used it to make claims about ideas from a completely different historical and geographical context. The primary sources, read in context, give a significantly different picture of what these people think than do the secondary sources.
When you mix up under the rubric “the humanities” second-tier academic journals AND magazines like Tel Quel and the books of philosophers like Derrida and Irigaray, and try to make claims about the ideas of the latter based on the former, that’s a gross misuse of textual and historical evidence.
The extreme — and extremely unsophisticated — definition of the assertion “reality is slippery” that most science-oriented people use is probably right for US academia, which, as you and others here, including me, is a profession laden with tenure politics and personal interests.
But is not correct about the mid-century French Marxist intellectuals. Their point is more complicated, more based in evidence, and more valuable. And most of the time, the claims people make about them are true about “the humanities academic establishment” and not true in the least about the original thinkers.
Demonizing poststructuralism and post-Marxism because a lot of people wrote about it without understanding it is equivalent to demonizing anthropology departments because of Social Darwinism.
My general take on this debate is that there’s something quite obviously wrong with thinking Sokal’s an idiot, Frege’s an idiot or even, despite her awful prose, that Irigaray’s an idiot. However, after websurfing on some of this stuff, I was left with the thought that I need to read more Frege, don’t need to read more Sokal and have no desire to ever read Irigaray.
At least, I’ll read Dummett on Frege. Dummett is something of an anti-realist, situated around the linguistic turn, one of the foremost interpreters of Frege, and, yet, I’m pretty sure that he would come closer to siding with Sokal instead of Irigaray on her supposedly Fregean problematic. I’m certainly no expert, but I see nothing in Frege that suggests + denotes “the definition of a new term.” Rather, he was anti-psychologism, and was attempting to show the grounding of addition in what he called a concept, that could also apply to linguistic objects being added together. Logic underlies both language and mathematic arguments, instead of 1+1+1=3 being a matter of enumeration of mental or physical objects that were supposed to be identical to their grouping. Likewise, Sokal and Bricmont score a point by pointing out that Irigaray is just playing around with colloquial meanings for quantification (existential vs. universal — some vs. all) to make some feminist point about logical language. Saying P applies to all instances isn’t in itself held to be more true or valuable than saying it applies to some instances. Assuming that the former is inherently masculine might be metaphorical, but doesn’t mean much if one tries to draw any literal consequences from it. I mean, I agree the masculine view of things has been taken as universal for a good long time, but that’s not the same thing as saying logical quantification has helped reify the patriarchy. Feminists need to use quantification, too, to make their counter-arguments.
But I also agree with Sokal’s critics that he’s too hasty in dismissing all the subjects of his book. He doesn’t have much a need for philosophy (though he pays some lip service to it). On the other hand, he’s been willing to debate the points made against him and Bricmont. If his discourse is hegemonic, it’s a good deal less so than the miserable treatment Derrida gave his interlocutors regarding de Man and Heidegger or critics of deconstruction. He was remarkably petty in those debates. You were either with him or against him, period.
That sounded a little like I was backtracking, I think, and I don’t mean to. Vom said this:
Vom, your point is about historical facts, dates and places. And granted.
But the humanities deal with more than historical “facts.” They deal with textual and cultural “facts” — which involve different kinds of evidence, and can mean multiple things at the same time, and which aren’t factual in the same way.
Can you really not see the complexity — let alone the dangers — in trying to make cultural and textual facts behave like historical facts, let alone scientific ones?
Charles, I agree with you on this: “Yet, I’m pretty sure that he would come closer to siding with Sokal instead of Irigaray on her supposedly Fregean problematic.”
I see where Irigaray got her reading, it’s a very classically post-structuralist reading (and somewhat unusual for Irigaray, actually) but it’s definitely anti-Frege. I don’t know exactly what Dummett would make of it, but I’m guessing Frege himself would react in basically the same way Derrida did about the de Man mess — snobby and defensive.
Ha, Frege looks so cuddly.
To his credit, I think Frege was very much a grown up. You should check out the story of Russell’s paradox in the Stanford Encyclopedia:
That’s of course, what I WISH Sokal had gotten into in his “rebuttal” of Irigaray, instead of the wimpy “you don’t know elementary school math” drivel we got.
Caro: “Can you really not see the complexity — let alone the dangers — in trying to make cultural and textual facts behave like historical facts, let alone scientific ones?”
I’ve lost the link, but Sokal (or it might’ve been Bricmont) made this point, that he was attempting to delimit science by criticizing the misappropriation of it. Even if there is some snobby defensiveness to his approach, that’s a positive spin, which has some merit.
Look, people, this is really a lot simpler at an abstract level than you’re trying to make it.
People who dealt professionally in precise, linear ideas and phenomena that can be precisely tested, falsified and pinned down – mathematicians, logicians, scientists – came up with precise, neat, logical philosophy to explain and undergird what they were doing.
People who dealt professionally in messy, gooey and slippery phenomena that can’t be easily tested and mapped – art critics, literary critics, cultural theorists – came up with slippery, difficult-to-map philosophy to explain and undergird what THEY were doing.
They’ve been clawing each other’s eyes out ever since.
They’re obviously both right.
Science, logic and math really are quite neat and tightly argued, and they SHOULD be – that’s their job. We rely on these disciplines to find things that can be mapped precisely, and map them as precisely as humanly possible.
They can also give us important clues to the questions of the humanities by mapping those areas that they CAN map with the tools they’ve got, and handing the evidence and ideas they’ve got over to the humanities to work with.
Aesthetics and culture really are quite messy, slippery, emotional and subjective, and they SHOULD be – that’s their job. We rely on these disciplines to deal with subjective matters of human emotion.
They can also give us important clues to questions in science by thinking over the objective, emotion-driven side of human-related scientific questions, and handing that thinking over to scientists to take into account.
This should, theoretically, be perfectly possible with a well-built and well-understood interdisciplinary system and accompanying philosophy. Every time someone even mentions the words “science” and “deconstruction”” in the same paragraph, though, Bertrand Russell and Jacques Derrida are exhumed from their graves and their corpses used as battering weapons to beat those Bad Folks over at the science/humanities department with.
CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?
Seriously.
Hmm, Caro, when you speak of “demonising” — what do you call what you’ve done with Sokal? I mean, you started out comparing him to Glenn Beck, and then to Stalin! What next– Pol Pot? All he ever said was that he was of the left. What authority do you have for declaring him to be a dogmatic, totalitarian Marxist?
Bricmont is interesting, because he comes from a different angle than Sokal does. Sokal was largely inspired by disgust at academic politics.
Bricmont, however, seems to regard the academic controversy as a sideshow to his primary concern: the spread of irrationalism– belief in astrology, faith healing, creationism.
In this extract from the interview I linked to some posts ago, he explains some of his motivation:
(original French, alternating with my translation)
Pour ce qui est des enseignants, les débats que j’ai eu suite à l’affaire Sokal et à la parution du livre m’ont plutôt surpris. Je veux éviter de généraliser, mais j’ai rencontré chez certains philosophes ou chercheurs en sciences humaines une hostilité ou une incompréhension face à l’attitude scientifique qui m’a vraiment impressionné (j’ai d’ailleurs écrit un petit texte ironique là-dessus, que j’ai intitulé: «Un physicien au pays des merveilles»).
As for teachers, the debates I’ve had after the Sokal affair and the book’s publication have rather surprised me. I want to avoid generalising, but I’ve encountered in certain philosophers or researchers in human sciences ahostility or an incomprehension towards the scientific attitude that really left an impression on me(I’ve, by the way,written an ironic little text on this: “A Physicist in Wonderland”).
Dans certains cas, on tombe dans un relativisme ou un scepticisme intégral : par exemple, on m’a expliqué que certes les sorcières n’existaient pas dans notre culture mais bien dans celle de l’Angleterre du XVIème siècle (et pas seulement pour dire, ce qui serait banal, que des femmes étaient socialement définies et brûlées comme sorcières à l’époque) ; on ajoute l’expression «dans notre culture» pour relativiser n’importe quelle affirmation «de fait»; par exemple : l’assertion «les croisades ont eu lieu» est vraie, mais «dans notre culture».
In some cases, one falls into a total relativism or skepticism: for example, it was explained to me that certainly witches didn’t exist in our culture but they did in XVIth century England ( and not just to state what would be banal, that some women were socially defined and burny as witches at the time); one adds the expression “in our culture” to relativise any “factual” affirmation; for example: the assertion that “the Crusades happened” is true, but “in our culture”.
L’autre travers est un dogmatisme qui est en fait lié au relativisme et qui consiste à soutenir certaines assertions de fait sans donner aucun argument empirique pour les justifier. On rencontre cette attitude chez certains psychanalystes : leurs assertions relèvent d’une «autre rationalité» ou s’occupe d’un «autre niveau de réalité». C’est d’ailleurs une démarche qu’on trouve également chez les théologiens.
The other fault is a dogmatism that is in fact linked to relativism and which consists in supporting certain factual assertions without any empirical argument to justify them. One meets this attitude among certain psychoanalysts: their assertions belong to “another rationality” or concern “another level of reality”. It’s also a way of thinking one finds among theologians.
Caro,
Yeah, that’s the barber cutting his own hair stuff, which undermined Russell and Whitehead’s own project. Regarding gentleman discourse, though, Russell would only take that approach within his community. He was critical of his own views and open to criticism from others within his circle. (Not sure about Frege.) He could be just as much of a dick as Sokal when it came to those on the outside, you know? But it seems like many of Sokal’s targets, including Irigaray, in the way they gloss over the scientific and mathematic ideas they use are being dismissive, too. That’s why I won’t simply dismiss Sokal’s approach of targeting only their borrowings and not their overall views (the context). There’s some merit to it, even if it’s problematic and far from conclusive. Am I sounding like Noah? Jesus, forgive me.
My internet is shaky and this probably won’t post…but Anja and Vom, there’s good reason to think that science can be a lot shakier than you’re giving it credit for being. As just maybe a case in point…my strong impression is that scientists don’t know all that clearly exactly how gravity works. That is, they can describe it’s effects fairly clearly, but the actual theoretical explanation of why it works the way it does is fairly iffy. I’ve heard explanations involving the curvature of space, and explanations involving gravitons, but the whole thing is pretty unclear. And, indeed, one thing scientists do know is that gravity is relative, not absolute; you could in fact jump out of a window and be fine depending on the acceleration of your frame of reference.
Yet “falling out of a window” is almost always the metaphor of choice for showing how science must be bedrock true. When, in fact, you don’t jump out of windows for ad hoc reasons involving trial and error, not because of any theoretical explanation involving gravity. Which doesn’t mean that science isn’t a powerful tool which can produce both amazing results and certain kinds of truths. But it does mean that whenever you discuss science in language, you’re in language, which is a slippery place to be.
Noah, people don’t fall up when they step out of windows. They fall down, and science is far and away the best mechanism we’ve got to explain why that’s the case. If you think that the bedrock theories of science are “iffy,” you have ridiculously high expectations. Romantic-type philosophy is great for explaining art, but you cannot expect scientists (or me) to take you seriously if you’re willing to dismiss the solidity of the most basic scientific theories based solely on the limitations of language. Forgive me for being a bit sharp, but I’m tired of analytic and continental types fighting, and it’s precisely this attitude of refusing to own the limits of your ideological framework that gets us into this mess in the first place. It’s petty and stupid, and enough of it makes me want to lock the offending parties in a room with Richard Dawkins and some creationist idiot from the Discovery Institute.
Can’t we find some sort of analytic-continental compatibilism, make that the new philosophical norm, and get over with it? These fights aren’t good for anything aside from getting a bunch of intellectuals all huffy at each other, which is only cute for so long.
Can’t we, you know, INVEST SOME ENERGY in unifying analytic and continental approaches?
I like what you have to say, Noah; you’re an interesting person to read. Please don’t feel that I’m attacking you here. It just bugs me that you didn’t even acknowledge the need to reconcile science and the humanities before moving on the bash science.
I just can’t believe that people don’t -want- a solution to this problem.
Anja, you must not have read comments here much, or maybe just missed the good ones. You’ll have to be a lot, lot meaner before you offend me.
I don’t think I was bashing science. I was bashing the simplistic misuse of science; bad analogies using bad science to make philosophical points was exactly what Sokol was arguing against. (Though he uses the falling out of windows analogy too, for which I think he should be mocked.)
Science is a very good system for explaining how gravity works in order to allow you to, for examplee, fire a rocket and hit something with it. Other systems may be better for other purposes (telling a story, admiring God’s handiwork, whatever.) In any event, science remains dicey on why gravity works (at least at the moment.)
All of which has little if anything to do with why people don’t jump out of windows. People weren’t regularly throwing themselves from a height before Newton. They weren’t doing it after Newton either, even though Einstein eventually showed that Newton was wrong…and now most people use Newton’s wrong science for everyday matters.
I actually had a conversation witha friend about this some years ago where I made the same point; i.e. scientists don’t know how gravity works. She said, “yes they do! It involves the spinning of the earth, right?” Nonetheless, she had not, before our discusssion, thrown herself from a window.
Feyerabend argues that science that isn’t slippery is science that would be crippled. Mendeleev seems to have deliberately fudged his data; Galileo pushed forward though there wasn’t really any theoretical basis for claiming his telescope worked; Boyle was the only one who could get his air pump to work; etc. etc. If scientists actually agreed to follow Popperian ideas of reproducibility, falsifiability, etc., many of the most important advances wouldn’t have happened. That’s certainly bashing one kind of philosophy of science, I suppose — but it’s not against science’s interest.
So I guess I feel like there are ways to reconcile science and continental philosophy; Feyerabend does a good job for me. I can’t reconcile your vision of science (as solid and objective within its sphere) to continental philosophy because I don’t actually believe your version is correct. A And…I’m sufficiently on board with Caro’s vision of non-hegemony that it doesn’t really both me that there are competing visions of how science works and of how it can or cannot be linked up to continental philosophy. Science is probably the most important truth-system we’ve got at the moment; I think it’s good that it’s philosophical bases are contested.
Is any significant proportion of scientists interested in listening to Feyerabend, though? I was under the impression that Feyerabend’s work is widely perceived (rightly or wrongly) as an “attack on science’s foundations” or even an “attack on science,” and it’s not hard to see why: no scientist I’ve met wants the words “epistemological” and “anarchism” sitting next to each other. It goes against everything they stand for.
Remember, a lot of people at the time thought that Popper was going a step too far – and Popper provides far more solid ground for science than Feyerabend.
I sometimes have trouble telling if Feyerabend and the various people who share his general viewpoint consider science a valid and interesting truth-uncovering mechanism at all; clearly -you- do, but does Feyerabend? I suppose I’d have to read his work, but I’m not sure I want to. I think I’d find Kuhn a lot more palatable.
Feyerabend’s great! He’s a ton of fun to read. And I think he’s fine with science in its place, though it’s a somewhat restricted one.
I don’t see why scientists necessarily shouldn’t like Feyerabend. As I said above, I was introduced to him by a mathematician (who publishes like a fiend, for what that’s worth.) I think the truth is that most scientists, like most people, aren’t interested in epistemology in general. They do their job without thinking a ton about the philosophical underpinnings, because why would they?
That’s a good point, of course. Most people are generally interested in practicing their discipline more than they are in philosophizing about it.
I might give Feyerabend a try, but I’ll have to ease into him by way of Kuhn (or is that a bad idea?).
Now then, off to actually, um, draw comics for a change.
I haven’t read Kuhn, embarrassingly enough. He sounds entertaining by all accounts, though….
Kuhn coined the term ‘paradigm shift’, which has definitely entered the general language…
(sorry, I’m obsessing about etymology these days.. you’ll all see why in about a week…)
Sorry to pick this up again, but maybe somebody other than me cares.
Sean: “Irigary is the same person who claimed that men studied the dynamics of solids before fluid dynamics because of the rigidity of the penis versus vaginal secretions. That particular argument doesn’t seem very metaphoric to me.”
I’m actually reading that Irigary essay now. I think this is the smoking gun:
“So we shall have to turn back to science in order to ask it some questions. Ask, for example, about its historical lag in elaborating a “theory” of fluids, and about the ensuing aporia even in mathematical formalization. A postponed reckoning that was eventually to be imputed to the real.”
I don’t know that the gun is as smoking as all that, though. For one thing, I’m pretty sure Irigary sees the rigidity of the penis as itself a metaphor rather than a fact. Unless I missed it, she doesn’t talk about vaginal secretions…? (She talks about the privileging of solid feces over liquid cum in psychoanalytic theory, but that’s not exactly the same thing….) And she’s always far more concerned with the metaphorical implications than with “proving” any particular statement. She doesn’t even really come back to the idea that solid mechanics was first in the rest of the essay — I mean, she does talk about fluids and solids, but she doesn’t try to prove her point about the historical sequence. She talks about Frege in a footnote, and there is a little bit of discussion of math/science stuff (which is what Sokal dings her for) but the whole thing takes up maybe a couple of pages in a 12 page essay, and is all phrased very rhetorically and often elliptically.
The essay is really criticizing language and science, and perhaps the language of science — she’s arguing that science, like Lacan, refers thought/life/knowledge back to unitary explanations (rigorous explanations?), and arguing that that’s gendered and (intentionally) stifling. So Sokal comes along and says, “no, according to science, you mean this, and the real meaning is this, and you are wrong.” I mean, he may prove his point, but he isn’t not proving hers as well. He’s insisting that her discourse is his discourse and then negating her discourse; she’s him and/or she’s nothing. That’s exactly how Irigary says (male) discourse works.
The last line of the essay is this:
“And if, by chance, you were to have the impression of not having yet understood everything, then perhaps you would do well to leave your ears half-open for what is in such close touch with itself that it confounds your discretion.”
All right. Sorry about that. This thread can return to death now….
“Leave your ears half-open for what is in such close touch with itself that it confounds your discretion.”
I just think that’s lovely.
I also agree with your analysis of what happens with Sokal’s “rebuke.” He proves his point — and he proves hers, and most of all he proves how completely he failed to understood hers…
I don’t think he’s completely wrong…. She is trying to score points by showing she knows her science, and I suspect he’s right that she doesn’t. The point isn’t that she’s a fool and nothing she says makes sense, though. Rather, it seems like it shows maybe even more clearly how seductive and treacherous the appeal to scientific authority can be.
Again, to me it’s like Freud; the thing she’s wrong about is claiming to be doing science (though her claim to that is much more ambivalent/elliptical than Freud’s was.)
I don’t remember thinking at all that she was claiming to do science…but I haven’t read it recently…maybe it was just so obviously wrong that it didn’t register…or perhaps I was just seduced by the ambivalent ellipses.
Some old-fashioned chauvinist might say that women don’t have a head for science or rationality. Irigaray is arguing that such things are inherently masculine. I don’t see why a feminist would be comfortable with either.
A lot of feminists weren’t — she was very aggressively despised by a lot Anglo-American feminists — but Irigaray is a Lacanian, and her best known work is “This Sex which is Not One,” following (in a gorgeous double entendre that Lacan himself should have thought of!) Lacan’s parallel dicta that “Woman Does Not Exist”/”Woman is not Whole”, so she’s starting from the position that the lack of a map between biology and gender is so acute that gender is itself a metaphor, mapped onto the bodies of biological men and women in ways that are at best arbitrary and at worst violent (with the most common terrain in between). It’s both a much more radical feminism and a feminism that is one step removed from women — it’s a anti-dualistic feminism, in the interest of humanity writ large, rather than in the interest of a disadvantaged group. All human beings are disadvantaged by these patriarchial structures in her formulation — although women certainly more so than men.
That’s interesting…I was definitely reading it as more of a gender essentialism, though the essence of woman is not one, or an essence that can’t be spoken in discourse (maybe.) She definitely tries to use the female body as a metaphor for a non-unity, outside discourse, yes? Though you’re reading makes sense of her refusal to identify as a woman, or to define what a woman is when asked….
Charles, as Caro says, I think a lot of Anglo-American feminists would criticize her for exactly the reasons you state. And I think her response would be that your (and their) effort to put her in a box is an effort to put her in a box, and that women have had enough of boxes.
It’s the radical vs. assimilationist argument, but worked out in terms of language/rationality such that it’s really difficult for the two sides to even understand each other, much less find common ground.
You can certainly argue that what she’s arguing for isn’t a good idea; that rationality is important and vital in particular for revolutionary politics (which is where Sokal’s coming from.) I think it’s duplicitous, though, to say that she’s irrelevant *because she doesn’t understand rationality on rationality’s terms*, which is what Sokal says, if I understand him right. She’s vehemently rejecting rationality on rationality’s terms; she’s arguing that it’s about power, not knowledge, and about reinscribing itself and saying its own name for its own ears. And so Sokal uses it for power and to reinscribe himself and to say his own name for his own ears. Her last sentence takes on an extra bite, actually — because, of course, the scientist reading it will never take the step to say he doesn’t understand.
I think you could criticize her validly on the grounds that her arguments are too abstract; that rational liberal humanism has historically been the best path to liberation; that losing links to gendered relationships and stability leads not to happiness but to chaos — making a mixed conservative/pragmatist argument basically. But to say she’s damaging/misusing science, or misappropriating scientific authority — it just seems really silly when you read the whole book (or the half of it I’ve gotten through.) She doesn’t care a poop about science. I mean, the book starts off with a short story that’s sort of/kind of a misreading of a movie sort of about Alice in Wonderland. It just never pretends to be rigorous.
here’s the Lacan she’s starting from:
http://books.google.com/books?id=cmBRNyM4XoYC&lpg=PA7&ots=2SOb_EStSi&dq=Lacan%20woman%20does%20not%20exist&pg=PA6#v=onepage&q&f=false
This thread, again. Oy.
But I thought it needed a link to this, on the recent “science war” kerfuffle in anthropology.