Fashionable Nonsense Delivers the Perfect Coup De Grace.” — B a R B a R a E H R E N R E I C H , a U T H O R of Blood Rites a N D the Snarling Citizen
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— 7------ 1------ 7------ 7------ 1------- A New Yot\ Times Notable Book of the Year A Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller _j_____1_____1_____ I_____I_____I_____L_____/____ /____ L____ L____ L_L _/ “A thoroughly hilarious romp through the postmodernist academy. Fashionable Nonsense delivers the perfect coup de grace.” — B a r b a r a E h r e n r e i c h , a u t h o r of Blood Rites a n d The Snarling Citizen FASHIONABLE NONSENSE POSTMODERN INTELLECTUALS’ ABUSE of SCIENCE Additional praise for Fashionable Nonsense “Sokal is trying to stake out a territory free from the political claims of cul ture.” — Edward Rothstein, The New York Times “The modem sciences are among the most remarkable of human achieve ments and cultural treasures. Like others, they merit— and reward— respect ful and scrupulous engagement. Sokal and Bricmont show how easily such truisms can recede from view, and how harmful the consequences can be for intellectual life and human affairs. They also provide a thoughtful and con structive critical analysis of fundamental issues of empirical inquiry. It is a timely and substantial contribution." — Noam Chomsky “A brilliant and entertaining book...Fashionable Nonsense exposes the fraud.” — The Advocate “A debut that promises to be [the debate’s] most explosive incarnation yet.” — Kristina Zarlengo, Salon Magazine “Sheer chutzpah and cleverness .. .The book is a sobering catalog o f idiocies by some of those claimed to be the best thinkers of our times.. .1 recommend this book.” — Russell Jacoby, Los Angeles Weekly “[An] important and well-documented book...Every passage is followed by the authors’ often humorous debunking of the writers’ garbled science and obscure language. It’s good reading.” —Raleigh News-Observer “Their book has come like a breath of fresh air.” —John Weightman, The Hudson Review “An in-depth examination." —Rolling Stone “Hilarious.. .What can be more irresistible than the opportunity to take some pompous, widely respected intellectual and knock him flat on his ass by exposing him as an idiot?” — Fred Moody, Seattle Weekly “[An] audacious debunking...The authors’ fervor and the precision of their writing makes this a most engaging read.” —Publishers Weekly “What they reveal is scandalous.. .true hilarity.. .The physicists aren’t staging some sort of anti-theoretical pogrom; they’re just standing up for rationali ty." — Glenn Dixon, Washington City Paper “This is a valuable and well-argued document in one of the key philosophi cal debates of our time.” —Kirkus Reviews Also by Alan Sokal Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory (with Roberto Fernandez and Jiirg Frolich) Fashionable Nonsense Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont Picador New York FASHIONABLE NONSENSE: POSTMODERN INTELLECTUALS' ABUSE OF SCIENCE. Copyright © 1998 by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.picadorusa.com Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited. For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin’s Press. Phone: 1-800-221-7945 extension 763 Fax: 212-677-7456 E-mail: [email protected] Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sokal, Alan. Fashionable nonsense : postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science / Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 0-312-19445-1 (he) ISBN 0-312-20407-8 (pbk) 1. Science—Philosophy. I. Bricmont, J. (Jean) II. Title. Q175.S3659 1998 501—dc21 98-35336 CIP First published in France under the title Impostures Intellectuelles by Editions Odile Jacob, 1997 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 For Marina For Claire,Thomas, and Antoine Contents Preface to the English Edition ix 1. Introduction 1 2. Jacques Lacan 18 3. Julia Kristeva 38 4. Intermezzo: Epistemic Relativism in the Philosophy of Science 50 5. Luce Irigaray 106 6. Bruno Latour 124 7. Intermezzo: Chaos Theory and “Postmodern Science” 134 8. Jean Baudrillard 147 9. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 154 10. Paul Virilio 169 11. Godel’s Theorem and Set Theory: Some Examples of Abuse 176 12. Epilogue 182 A. Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity 212 B. Some Comments on the Parody 259 C. Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword 268 Bibliography 281 Index 297 Preface to the English Edition The publication in France of our book Impostures Intel- lectuelles1 appears to have created a small storm in certain in tellectual circles. According to Jon Henley in The Guardian, we have shown that “modem French philosophy is a load of old tosh.”2 According to Robert Maggiori in Liberation, we are humorless scientistic pedants who correct grammatical errors in love letters.3 We would like to explain briefly why neither is the case, and to answer both our critics and our over- enthusiastic supporters. In particular, we want to dispel a num ber of misunderstandings. The book grew out of the now-famous hoax in which one of us published, in the American cultural-studies journal Social Text, a parody article crammed with nonsensical, but unfortu nately authentic, quotations about physics and mathematics by prominent French and American intellectuals.4 However, only a small fraction of the “dossier” discovered during Sokal’s library research could be included in the parody. After showing this larger dossier to scientist and non-scientist friends, we became (slowly) convinced that it might be worth making it available to a wider audience. We wanted to explain, in non-technical terms, why the quotes are absurd or, in many cases, simply meaning less; and we wanted also to discuss the cultural circumstances 'Editions Odile Jacob, Paris, October 1997. 2Henley (1997). 3Maggiori (1997). 4Sokal (1996a), reprinted here in Appendix A. The story o f the hoax is described in more detail in Chapter 1 below. X PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION that enabled these discourses to achieve such renown and to re main, thus far, unexposed. But what exactly do we claim? Neither too much nor too lit tle. We show that famous intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard, and Deleuze have repeatedly abused sci entific concepts and terminology: either using scientific ideas totally out of context, without giving the slightest justification— note that we are not against extrapolating concepts from one field to another, but only against extrapolations made without argument— or throwing around scientific jargon in front of their non-scientist readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning. We make no claim that this invalidates the rest of their work, on which we suspend judgment. We are sometimes accused of being arrogant scientists, but our view of the hard sciences’ role is in fact rather modest. Wouldn’t it be nice (for us mathematicians and physicists, that is) if Godel’s theorem or relativity theory did have immediate and deep implications for the study of society? Or if the axiom of choice could be used to study poetry? Or if topology had something to do with the human psyche? But alas, it is not the case. A second target of our book is epistemic relativism, namely the idea— which, at least when expressed explicitly, is much more widespread in the English-speaking world than in France— that modem science is nothing more than a “myth”, a “narration” or a “social construction” among many others.5 Be sides some gross abuses (e.g. Irigaray), we dissect a number of confusions that are rather frequent in postmodernist and cultural-studies circles: for example, misappropriating ideas from the philosophy of science, such as the underdetermina tion of theory by evidence or the theory-ladenness of observa tion, in order to support radical relativism. This book is therefore made up of two distinct— but related— works under one cover. First, there is the collection of 5Let us emphasize that our discussion is limited to epistemic/cognitive relativism; we do not address the more delicate issues o f moral or aesthetic relativism. PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xi extreme abuses discovered, rather haphazardly, by Sokal; this is the “fashionable nonsense” of our title. Second, there is our cri tique of epistemic relativism arid of misconceptions about “post modern science”; these analyses are considerably more subtle. The connection between these two critiques is primarily socio logical: the French authors of the “nonsense” are fashionable in many of the same English-speaking academic circles where epistemic relativism is the coin of the realm.6 There is also a weak logical link: if one accepts epistemic relativism, there is less reason to be upset by the misrepresentation of scientific ideas, which anyway are just another “discourse”. Obviously, we did not write this book just to point out some isolated abuses. We have larger targets in mind, but not neces sarily those that are attributed to us. This book deals with mys tification, deliberately obscure language, confused thinking, and the misuse of scientific concepts. The texts we quote may be the tip of an iceberg, but the iceberg should be defined as a set of in tellectual practices, not a social group. Suppose, for example, that a journalist discovers documents showing that several highly respected politicians are corrupt, and publishes them. (We emphasize that this is an analogy and that we do not consider the abuses described here to be of com parable gravity.) Some people will, no doubt, leap to the con clusion that most politicians are corrupt, and demagogues who stand to gain politically from this notion will encourage it.7 But this extrapolation would be erroneous.