Frankly, it isn’t a topic that interests me a whole lot — I rarely read Social Text, I have no commitment to “post-modernism,” and while some of my work draws upon concepts developed in the context of “science studies,” I don’t study science myself. All the same, that didn’t stop me from making comments on the subject here, which developed out of posts here and here. And a reply to all this here. (For what it is worth, I tend towards epistemological and ontological realism of objects, but I study the discursive mobilization of these objects as opposed to the objects themselves; e.g., I don’t study animals, I study how people make sense of their relations to animals). The gist of my comments was that “Sokal Hoax” does not exist because Sokal failed to perform a hoax. In his eagerness to expose his enemies as frauds, he left the idea of the hoax behind. He could not contain himself and revealed the “hoax” before anyone had a chance to even notice that he had published a terrible article in a meagre journal. Put another way, the only person who fell for the hoax was Sokal himself — Sokal successfully hoaxed himself. Others were duped, but Sokal was the only one who was hoaxed. This is significant. Sokal framed his “hoax” in terms of an “experiment” — an experiment that he himself destroyed by announcing he was conducting an experiment. That is, he could not adequately control all the relevant variables. Put another way, given that he claimed he was performing an experiment — i.e., operating on the terrain of the sciences — he should have actually treated his hoax as such. Afterall, he is quoted as saying the following: “But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless or even counterproductive.” This is true: he performed sloppy science and, consequently, was counterproductive. (We should note in passing that Sokal does not seem to understand the sort of truth claims sociology makes, especially in his attack of social construction and Bloor’s “strong programme.” Neither maintain that “truth” or “reality” does not exist, but that its existence is beside the point. For instance, the “strong programme” holds that the sociology of science should be able to explain why both Creationism and evolution are taken seriously despite one being obviously false and the other being obviously true.) Had he actually wanted to perform an experiment, he should be publishing his initial findings right about now. Unfortunately, his desire for press got in the way, likely because on some level he knew that no one would read his article and those who read his article would likely have thought it was ridiculous (which he fully admits). What Sokal did was bad science and poor scholarship. The real hoax is that some take Sokal to be an intellectual hero!
But, if my analysis is correct, it might suggest another rather interesting — and damning – conclusion: “postmodern science studies” circa 1996 were unhoaxable.
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Not to pick an ontological fight or anything, but I honestly find it strange to hear philosophies such as the one you put forward above. It usually ends with people laughing at me in public, suggesting that I am denying that anything like ‘the world’ exists… so be it…
However, when you claim that the real world exists as a realist principle or set of principles, and then state that you simply choose to study ‘discursive mobilization of these [real] objects’ I am always a bit confused and even disappointed. Either you choose to chase the tail of the dog instead of studying the dog itself (either literally or metaphorically, in this case (he he)), or you are straight forwardly not concerned with the real world that you state exists (perhaps since it is so obvious, it is just not interesting). But, in the latter case, it is disengenuous to acknowledge that something important exists as an ontological fact but that you could care or less to study it. Rather, you would prefer to study what people say about something and how they work in relation to it rather than study that something itself. So, obviously, this is a set up for disappointment, always leaving the reader or critic to wonder what your study would look like if you actually studied the thing that you insists simply exists but which you disregard.
I’d say it is much more convincing to acknowledge that you do not have access to these so-called real objects without processes of mediation, predicates, presuppositions and the like, and that is why you study their discursive production. To not acknowledge this is to have Sokal have his cake and eat it too – he wins! Postmodernism becomes a pejorative and we walk around pretending that the world we have access to is too boring to study in a serious way.
I’m not convinced by your interpretation. Discourses are not “un-real” or “ir-real” or false. They have a real existence. By “real” I mean something to the effect of “has a consequence” or “makes a difference.” Unicorns do not make a difference; race does. Both are discursive objects. It is a reasonable question as to whether race is also a material object — for instance, if it exists at the genetic or biological level. But such a question is of a different order of magnitude as to whether or not race as a discursive object has real consequences: it clearly does. But that I mean it matters whether a particular individual is coded as “black” or “white” or whatever. Whether “black” or “white” exists at the genetic level is a different question. Hence, race can exist discursively but not exist genetically. This is but a variation upon Durkheim’s maxims; viz., to treat facts as things and that different orders of facts are relatively autonomous from one another. As a sociologist, I can only legitimately study particular sorts of facts (e.g., social facts); I cannot study other sorts of facts (e.g., biological facts). I can certainly study how people develop methods of social regulation that are based upon biological facts, but those methods of social regulation are no longer biological; they’ve been reinscribed at the level of the social.
I’m not sure if I’ve adequately addressed your objection.
I am reminded of an, alas, apparently only apocryphal story that is told regarding the great talmudist Saul Lieberman’s introduction of the great historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem before a lecture at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1973. It has been variously formulated but my favorite version goes thusly, “Now everybody knows that Kabbalah is narishkayt (childishness), but the history of narishkayt — now that’s scholarship!”
hey, whoa, marcegoodman:
childishness is a really bad translation for narrischkeit. in german, narrheit is folly and the narr is a fool, not a child.
Thanks, Jannon. I realized that after I posted. I cut and pasted quickly and left everything as is including the less common transliteration for narrishkeit.
A variant version of the introduction goes, “You know that I believe that mysticism is nonsense, total and complete nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship. And the man who is about to speak knows more about the history of nonsense than anyone has ever known.”
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[...] August 16, 2009 Just to tie up some loose ends from the discussion a couple of weeks ago about Sokal, here is CRAIG OF THEORIA WITH HIS THOUGHTS. [...]
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