Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 320 pages
• Published by: Picador; First Edition edition October 29, 1999
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0312204078
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0312204075
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 10.4 ounces

Product Review
In 1996, an article entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was published in the cultural studies journal Social Text. Packed with recherché quotations from "postmodern" literary theorists and sociologists of science, and bristling with imposing theorems of mathematical physics, the article addressed the cultural and political implications of the theory of quantum gravity. Later, to the embarrassment of the editors, the author revealed that the essay was a hoax, interweaving ridiculous pronouncements from eminent intellectuals about mathematics and physics with laudatory--but fatuous--prose.

In Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal, the author of the hoax, and Jean Bricmont contend that abuse of science is rampant in postmodernist circles, both in the form of inaccurate and pretentious invocation of scientific and mathematical terminology and in the more insidious form of epistemic relativism. When Sokal and Bricmont expose Jacques Lacan's ignorant misuse of topology, or Julia Kristeva's of set theory, or Luce Irigaray's of fluid mechanics, or Jean Baudrillard's of non-Euclidean geometry, they are on safe ground; it is all too clear that these virtuosi are babbling.

Their discussion of epistemic relativism--roughly, the idea that scientific and mathematical theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions--is less convincing, however, in part because epistemic relativism is not as intrinsically silly as, say, Regis Debray's maunderings about Gödel, and in part because the authors' own grasp of the philosophy of science frequently verges on the naive. Nevertheless, Sokal and Bricmont are to be commended for their spirited resistance to postmodernity's failure to appreciate science for what it is. --Glenn Branch --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
The authors of this audacious debunking apparently want nothing less than to embarrass some of the foremost academic stars of the postwar period?including Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray and Paul Virilio, among other luminaries in the humanities?for their "abuse of science." Sokal, a professor of physics at NYU, and Bricmont, a theoretical physicist with the Universite de Louvain in Belgium, offer an argument that's an offshoot of Sokal's notorious 1996 prank in which he submitted an article, high in jargon and low in logic, to a cultural studies journal, which accepted it immediately. After Sokal revealed the hoax, bitter debates raged within academia. Here, he and Bricmont continue where the hoax left off, waging a war of wits with thinkers who, they say, adopt science as a metaphor for their own more literary purposes. The authors also attack critics who fabricate pseudoscientific theories of their own, and much of their book is dedicated to building methodical cases against the academics' principles and logical flaws. The authors fervor and the precision of their writing makes this a most engaging read.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
Who does not secretly (or not so secretly) enjoy watching a pompous windbag (or several) be put in his (or her) place by the utter destruction of their ridiculous arguments? I do. So too, I suspect, would a great many people who read Fashionable Nonsense, an accounting of the hoax that hammered another nail in the coffin of Postmodernism. In 1996, NYU physics professor Alan Sokal (a co-author of this book, along with Jean Bricmont) published Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in the journal Social Text. It is a long, detailed, heavily footnoted account of the connections between modern physics and social patterns. It is also, by design, total nonsense. It was page after page of semi readable junk, some of it quite hilarious, whose only redeeming value was that it agreed with the editorial staff of Social Text that science is a social construct, no more or less valid than any other, while apparently also claiming that scientific theories from very advanced physics had useful things to say about societal interactions. Why did Sokal do this? The answers are to be found, in part, within these pages. Roughly half of the book directly concerns the writings of specific postmodernist intellectuals, mostly French, and their blatantly inappropriate use of advanced mathematical concepts in realms where the terms have no meaning. We start out with Jacques Lacan's claim that mental disease is a torus (a doughnut shape). Not metaphorically, but actually. And this is just the first example. As I read through the chapters, I came to the realization that Sokal and Bricmont were listing their authors in increasing strangeness. If anything, this actually became a bit tedious after a while. If a passage is wrong in many ways, we can dissect the writings and find the errors. If an entire passage is one long non sequitur or worse, the comedic value eventually wanes. Even so, I just can't finish this paragraph without giving special mention of a quote by Guattari, of which I only give two sentences: "We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously." Sokal and Bricmont believe that only a genius could have written this, but they don't intend this as a compliment. I agree. The other half of the book contains more general writings on science and philosophy by Sokal and Bricmont as they pertain to the postmodernist abuse of science. There are, overall, two main ideas. One is that the postmodernists are wrong to claim that science is just a social construct. This is what I expected when I bought the book, but it is probably less than half of the subject (see Roger Newton's The Truth of Science for an excellent longer work more focused on this subject). The other main idea is that many postmodernists have appropriated many mathematical and scientific terms and mangled them. They use words from math to discuss psychoanalysis without explaining them. If they redefine the word (which they have every right to do), they don't explain the re-definition. They quote abstract theories from topology and set theory that have nothing at all to do with sociology. We're not talking about sloppy statistical analysis here. We're talking about a systematic misuse of terminology and theories, a likely deliberate use of equivocation to confuse the reader and make themselves look smart. Some structural and literary points should be made here. Obviously I enjoyed this book tremendously, but it is not perfect. Sokal and Bricmont write like physicists, something I know about. I don't think I've ever seen as many qualifications, caveats, and gentle reminders as I found in chapter one as the authors explain in intricate detail precisely what they are going to say. It seems likely that this is done to try to pre-empt much of the likely criticism that surely will be (or was, this came out in 1998) directed at them by the postmodernist community. Certainly there are a great many sociologists that have a vested interest in suppressing the ideas Sokal and Bricmont present here. One would think the postmodernist abusers of science were embarrassed enough to try to fight against some of these assertions, although my understanding is that some of them refuse to accept that the original article was even a hoax. This is certainly laughable. I mean, when Sokal claimed that the new theory of complex numbers is quite speculative compared to the older and better established theories of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and hadron bootstrap theory, it was all I could do not to fall off my couch laughing. It's like he wanted to get caught. Finally, I have to finish with some speculations of my own about the hoax and this book. In a strict epistemological manner, one cannot say for certain whether the postmodernist writers so liberally quoted are honestly in error or whether they are deliberate charlatans. Certainly Sokal and Bricmont make it explicitly clear, perhaps for legal reasons, that they aren't going to say one way or the other what they think on this question. Fine. But we, the readers, are perfectly free to do so. If you're like me, you will probably come away thinking something like `Thank god someone finally exposed those charlatans.' Even if you've never heard their names before (except Bruno Latour, they were all brand new to me), one cannot read the lengthy examples of gibberish and believe that any of it is serious. It can't be. These emperors have no clothes on at all, but they weren't fooled into doing it the way Hans Christian Anderson's hapless dupe was. Three cheers for Alan Sokal. Comment (1) | | (Report this)