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Khora: Being Serious with Plato

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Khora: Being Serious with Plato 3 Khora: Being Serious with Plato "[ am on the threshold of reading Plato and Aristotle. [ love them and [ feel [ have to start again and again and again. It is a task which is in front of me, before me. " "Roundtable," 9 "We have gotten more than we think we know from 'tradi tion ,' but the scene of the gifta lso obligates us to a kind of filial lack of piety, at once serious and not so serious, as regards the thinking to which we have the greatest debt. " PdS I 39fPoints 130 A HOAx On May IS, 1996, The New Yo rk Times reported on its front page a story of a hoax that was played on Social Tex t, the chief outlet of the "cultural studies" movement; the headline of the story ran "Postmod­ ern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly. " The Times reported a story that had just appeared in Lingua Franca and subsequently created quite a controversy, in which a physicist named Alan Sokal revealed that he had submitted a satire entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutic of Quantum Gravity " aimed at making what postmodernist sociologists of science say about " gravity" look silly, wh ich is what the Times meant by "deconstructed. " The ed itors of Social Text took it quite seriously and had just published it, which led to Sokal's "gotch'ya." Taking on a look of perfect gravity, Sokal took on what he took to be the relativism of the cultural studies movement, particularly as regards " hard science" -the gravely serious issue of the 72 DECONSTRUCTION IN A NUTS HELL principle of gravity in mathematical physics. I Sokal, fo r whom "grav­ ity" is not a suggestion, but the law, said that he defended the truth of "the silliest quotes about mathematics and physics from the most prominent academics .... I invented an argument praising them and linking them together. All this was very easy to carry offb ecause my argument wasn't obliged to respect any standards of evidence or logic. " Sokal feels obliged to rise to the defense of "science" against its "bashers," which is obviously what he thinks "deconstruction" means. Sokal's rakish claim was that in a postmodern perspective "the space­ time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality;geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the fo undational conceptual categories of prior science-among them, existence itself-become problematized and relativized . " Defending himself to the Times re­ porter, Stanley Aronowitz, co-founder of the journal and CityUn iver­ sity of New York professor, said Sokal is " ill - read and half-educated" and "got it wrong." That does not seem like much of a defense, as it leaves the reader to wonder what "standards of evidence or logic" editor Aronowitz uses when he accepts articles for publication in his journal. Stanley Fish, among other things Executive Director of Duke U niver­ sity Press, which publishes Social Tex t, was incensed that anyone should disturb, disrupt, transgress, mime, satirize, or subvert postmod­ emists (who spend their time, of course, doing just that to everybody else). Fish said he was not amused, that this was a bad joke, not funny at all , and then, like an aging Shakespeare scholar, invoked the most classical and straight standards of academic propriety against Sokal. Questioning the very ethics of Alan Sokal, Fish took all this very seri­ ously and indignantly argued that the sociology of science is in the serious business of delimiting science, not of bashing it, of showing the extent to which scientificclaims are embedded in social, political, and even sexual systems possessed of serious political implications. Z I See Alan D. Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Her meneutics of Quantum Gravity, " Social lext (Spring/Summer 1996), 217 252; and "A Physicist Experiments with Social Studies," Lingua Franca (May/JUlie 1996), 62 64. Science Wa rs, cd. Andrew Ross (Dnrham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1996) is a separate printing of this issue of Social Tex t, whose contributors are respondillg to a wave of criticism headed by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), which presellts the cultural studies critique of "value free science" as "science bashing. " 2 Stanley Fish, "Professor Sokal's Bad Joke," The New York Times, )I.·lay 21, 1996, p. 23, "Op ed" page. The disanalogy, if I may weigh in on this dispute, between the KI/()I<A REING SERIOUS WITH PI.ATO In a letter sent out over the Internet which he had withdrawn from publication because the Times would not publish it in full, Soka) says that he knows all that and that he is interested only in exposing the excesses of the sociology of science! Sokal's satire, the Times reporter comments, is an "impenetrable hodgepodge" bolstered with lengthy footnotes and citations of the work of Aronowitz and "the likes of Jacques Derrida." The likes of Jacques Derrida! Alas, that Derrida should live to hear his name used as a sign of non-sense and resistance to gravity! Alas, that something as serious as "deconstruction" would come to do service fo r sllchsill iness! Restor­ ing the gravity of deconstruction, showing that deconstruction is seri­ ous business, clearing the name of a very responsible man, seeing the serious side of what Derrida and others call "transgression," which tickles Sakal's fu nny bone -that is serious business. The last thing Derrida is interested in doing is undermining the natural sciences or scientificknowl edge generally. A "deconstruction" of natural science, were it undertaken seriously and with a sufficient sense of gravity, would be good news. Its effect would be to keep the laws of science in a self-revising, self-questioning mode of openness to the "other," which here would mean the scientific "anomaly, " the thing that defies or transgresses the law (nomos). A deconstructive ap­ proach to science would keep the scientific community open to the upstarts, the new ideas, the audacious young graduate students who come up with unexpected hypotheses that at first look a little fu nny and then a little brilliant. A deconstructive approach to natural science would maintain that the "laws" of science are always deconstructible (revisable) just in virtue of an science to come, one that is presently unforeseeable. A de constructive approach to science would be good news and hard science. The sneaking suspicions that something may be wrong with what we currently believe, while keeping a watchful eye that current paradigms not be taken dogmatically, that something else, something other, still to come, is being missed -that deeply decon- rules of baseball and the law of gravity seems to me to outweigh the analogy. For a twit of Fish's indignation, see also Torn Frank, "Textual Reckoning," in These Times (May 27, 1996), 22 24. The New York Review of Books used this opportunity to take a shot at Derrida in Steven \Veinberg, "Sokal's Hoax," The New York Review of Boks (August 8, 1996), 11 15; Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, says we need "to protect ourselves from the irrational tendencies that still beset humanity, " implying that if Derrida and deconstruction get hold of our children's minds, it will not be long until "burning witches" makes a come back (p. 15). 74 DECON STRUCTION IN i\ NUTSI-WLI. structive frame of mind goes to the heart of hardball science, if it has a heart! So, if deconstruction would have interesting and constructive th ings to say about science, very much in the spirit of the most responsible and serious Kuhnian and post-Kuhnian philosophers of science, Anglo-Americans philosophers all, I might add;3 if deconstruction is gravity itself; if, more generally, a "deconstruction" of science or theol­ ogy, of literature or law, of whatever, is always an attempt to open it up, not bash it or knock it senseless, then how did Derrida's good name get dragged into this hoax? How, to put it in a nutshell, do "Derrida" or "deconstruction" eventually come to mean the devil himself? In the "Roundtable," the case in point is not physics but Greek philosophy. But the serious study of Greek philosophy, of Plato and Aristotle, fo r example, will serve very well to stake out Derrida's views about doing serious work, about standards and criteria in any academic discipline-from investigating the laws of gravity to the study of Origi­ nal Sin-and, hence, to dissociate him from the silliness, the stupid­ ity, the stupefyingno nsense, that he thinks that anything goes. DECONSTRUC'TION Is SERIOUS BUSINESS "Doing deconstruction," if deconstruction is something to do, is not a matter of the very latest, up-to-date, ahead-of-itself, avant-garde, postmodern ,one-upmanship. Deconstruction has to do with the oldest of the old as well as with what is coming. If there is anything at all to deconstruction, then what it describes, namely, a certain auto-decon­ structing tendency built right into things, is as old as the hills, as an­ cient as Plato, as medieval as Thomas Aquinas, as modern and enlightened as Descartes, Kant, and Hegel -and Newton. In the "Roundtable," Derrida reaffirmshi s love of the great tradition of Greek philosophy and of Plato and Aristotle in particular. He tells us that as regards the Greeks he is a perpetual beginner, that they are always ahead of him, that reading them is an infinite task that is always "be- I I have made a halting, imperfect beginning fo r myself in this direction in my Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition , Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), chap.
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