Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

313 Pages·1999·10.24 MB·English

by  Alan Sokal

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New Yot\ Times
A N o t a b l e B o o k o f t h e Y ear
Boston Globe San Francisco Chronicle
A a n d B e s t s e l l e r
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“A thoroughly hilarious romp through the postmodernist academy.
Fashionable Nonsense delivers the perfect coup de grace.”
Blood Rites The Snarling Citizen
— Barbara Ehrenreich, author of and
F A S H I O N A B L E N O N S E N S E
P O S T M O D E R N I N T E L L E C T U A L S ’
A B U S E o f S C I E N C E
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 of 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.
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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 of 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 of moral or aesthetic relativism.
xi
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
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.
Similarly, to view this book as a generalized criticism of the
humanities or the social sciences—as some French reviewers
did—not only misunderstands our intentions, but is a curious
assimilation, revealing a contemptuous attitude toward those
6This overlap is, however, not perfect. The French authors analyzed in this book are
most fashionable, in the English-speaking world, in departments of literature, cultural
studies and women’s studies. Epistemic relativism is distributed rather more broadly,
and is widespread also in domains of anthropology, education and sociology of
science that exhibit little interest in Lacan or Deleuze.
7The politicians caught in flagrante delicto will also encourage this interpretation of
the journalist’s intentions, for different (but obvious) reasons.