Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Picador USA, $23, 300 pages.




The News & Observer


December 27, 1998

Serious gobbledygook

A war is happening under our noses. Because it's a bloodless war, taking place in academia over seemingly abstruse ideas, few people are paying attention. But the issues are significant to all of us because they have the power to change the society in which we live.

On one side are the postmodernists, people who reject the widely held traditions of the Enlightenment, in which facts are obtained by observation and tested experimentally. They argue that there is no "truth," only assertions of truth; no "reality," only versions of reality. On the other side are the rationalists, scientists and humanists who believe in objective facts and in the power of reason to convert those facts into testable hypotheses.

The most famous shot in this war was fired by Alan Sokal, a New York University theoretical physicist. In 1996, he wrote a paper packed with pompous language and scientific gobbledygook in which he claimed that pi isn't really a constant and that postmodern science can "liberate human beings from the tyranny of 'absolute truth' and 'objective reality.' " The paper was accepted as a serious contribution and published in the trendy postmodern journal Social Text. When Sokal revealed the hoax,Aronowitz

Sokal fired back; he followed his paper with a book, "Impostures Intellectuelles," written with Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont, which has now been translated into English as "Fashionable Nonsense." In this important and well-documented book, they take on eight French intellectuals whose writings are linked to the postmodern movement ranging from the psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan and the philosopher of science Luce Irigaray to the critic Julia Kristiva. Sokal and Bricmont focus their critiques on the abuse of science by these authors, whose theoretical writings have strongly influenced the study of history, literature and the social sciences. But Sokal and Bricmont's larger aim is to "denounce intellectual posturing and dishonesty." And in the

Lacan, for example, uses nonsensical mathematics to compare the "erectile organ" to the imaginary number, the square root of minus one. Irigaray suspects that Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, is a "sexed equation." Kristiva compares the theory of poetic language to set theory and psychoanalysis to topology. The authors dissect the mathematics to show her many mistakes, but it is chilling to consider how many readers have uncritically accepted the ideas in this error-packed prose.

But then, how does one decipher the tortured sentences favored by most postmodernists? Here is a sample from Luce Irigaray: "Considerations of pure mathematics have precluded the analysis of fluids except in terms of laminated planes, solenoid movements (of a current privileging the relation to an axis), spring-points, well-points, whirlwindpoints, which have only an approximation to reality ... What consequences does this have for 'science' and psychoanalytic practice?"

What consequences, indeed. Unfortunately, Irigaray makes no effort to identify the links between fluid mechanics and psychoanalysis so that her words provide neither a useful approximation of or metaphor for reality.

But even Irigaray doesn't really expect readers to follow her logic, so she concludes her essay with the following: "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." Even Sokal and Bricmont, who manage to untangle some pretty dense prose, don't know what to say about this paragraph.

And so it goes throughout the book. Every passage is followed by the authors' often humorous debunking of the writers' garbled science and obscure language. It's good reading, but one might ask, Does any of this matter? Can fashionable nonsense affect our lives? You bet it can, say the authors.

First, consider what the abandonment of clear thinking and good writing does to readers. "The deliberately obscure discourses of postmodernism and the intellectual dishonesty they engender," the authors say, "poison a part of intellectual life and strengthen the facile anti-intellectualism that is already too widespread in the general public."

This anti-intellectualism (or, as some have called it, the dumbing down of Western society) has given rise to fundamentalist movements that either ignore science or are antithetical to it. Books on astrology outsell books on astronomy; polls show that half of all Americans don't believe in evolution; and DNA evidence is routinely challenged in court by pseudoscientists and lawyers. And why not? If all knowledge has the same claims on truth, the difference between astronomy and astrology boils down to personal preference.

Despite postmodernists' use (and misuse) of science to add verisimilitude to their work, their overall message is anti-science. If objective reality is unknowable, as they claim, what's the point of science? This denigration of rationality has had little effect on the scientific community. No scientists are postmodernists, and most are too busy with their own work to pay much attention to the movement. The postmodernists' impact on the humanities, however, is considerably greater - and more worrisome.

To make this point, Sokal and Bricmont quote the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who laments "the rise of 'postmodernist' intellectual fashions in Western universities, particularly in departments of literature and anthropology, which imply that all 'facts' claiming objective existence are simply intellectual constructions. In short, that there is no difference between fact and fiction. But there is, and for historians ... the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental." Postmodernists' refusal to recognize the existence of objective, knowable facts reduces this defense to rubble, which makes the world less secure for all of us.

###