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I think this is relevant. I just read a section of Alain Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense, and it was extraordinarily reactionary in it's contents. It was clear to

I think this is relevant. I just read a section of Alain Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense, and it was extraordinarily reactionary in it's contents. It was clear to me that Sokal had made no attempt to understand the underlying systems of thought that the so-called "postmodernists" employed in their writings, or immerse himself in the intellectual history that would give him the context to understand it. He just read the mathematical formulae or scientific claims, decided if they were "true" or not, and did not engage in serious attempts at interpretation or bring up secondary literature or any critiques of the work (because I guarantee that every single "postmodernist" listed in that book has received dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of critical articles on their work, by people who very well understand their systems of thought.) In Sokal's world, things are true or they're not true, they're rigorous or they're unrigorous. Writings that might question normative political institutions, ways of thinking about the world and ways of organizing social reality (all of "postmodern" writing), are simply cast as unintelligible and any need for serious intellectual engagement is wiped away.

voidhorse 3y ago
This x1000. I am truly amazed, also, that so many people that are quite intelligent could fall in for such a paper-thin, sloppy "they don't believe what we believe! let's completely talk past each other" bad faith argument and think they somehow "owned" the targets. Hyperspecialization has done massive damage to the overall intellectual health of society. What Sokal did is roughly equivalent to a humanities scholar creating a spoof hit piece to show how some mathematician did not employ a literary metaphor correctly in an article about geometry. The only reason it was even remotely successful is because the western (particularly American) perspective is so heavily biased toward STEM at the expense of basically producing individuals who can adequately solve practical problems but who (on average, there are exceptions) have the humanities knowledge of a stick and revere their favorite Netflix show or animated superhero blockbuster as though it were high art on par with anything hanging in the Guggenheim.
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  Well, I like the Guggenheim but I still feel there is a place for critiques of popular media and literary merit/appreciation of certain Netflix shows (though I am pretty tired of capeshit, aside from The Boys and shows of that ilk). But I by and large agree, even if I'm biased because I chose to study literature and learn all about "postmodernism." But look there is something about logical positivist styles of thinking that was very attractive to many of the people Sokal attacks (which is why he is even able to attack them in the first place!), and also to me. I can't tell if that's because I have some deeply repressed control and power fantasies (probably), or because there is something to the analysis of the structure and order of logic and language in a rigorous fashion that reveals something about the order of social and psychological life, even if unintentionally. If these more radical authors used the mathematic and logical formulae in this manner, I don't see how a criticism of "it's poorly defined" works, because anything would be poorly defined in an algebra of society, psychology, history--if you only defined it in terms of contemporary mathematics and logic which seeks to divorce itself from those things. And modern literary education isn't much better. My inner-authoritarian wants every humanities major to get a rigorous classical education and required courses in logic. Trying to break history is very hard when you have no consciousness of it whatsoever, and the humanities disciplines today are almost designed to keep students away from contributing their work to a "rigorous" STEM field, as they are deemed too reactionary to be worth critiquing or engaging with. It is for the very reason I listed above that its imperative humanities students receive the same basis of education as the STEM majors, and vica versa!
constantcrying 3y ago
>things are true or they're not true, they're rigorous or they're unrigorous Mathematics (more specifically, meta mathematics) has the ability to talk about these issues. "What is truth" quickly becomes an asinine question, if you don't at least accept some meta framework in which the question becomes actually meaningful and so far the only field which I which actually has the ability to coherently question itself is mathematics. The problem with post modernism I have aren't the ideas specifically, but the fact that if you see the world as filled with mutually incohrent narratives talking about anything becomes very hard. But post modernist throry gives insane people the thought that they can write anything and it becomes justified, because narrative coherence can not exist anyways. Nothing could be further from the "truth".
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  >But post modernist throry gives insane people the thought that they can write anything and it becomes justified, because narrative coherence can not exist anyways. That's not really the argument (and there is no coherent "unity" of postmodernism anyway, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, even if they all occupied the same intellectual spheres, had different projects). If there is an argument, its that by dint of its "place in discourse," any statement adds and also modifies every other statement in the great network of social life, so the moment you begin to talk about anything or interpret anything you begin to move away from the thing. But the idea of an original, pure object of critique is seen as suspect to begin with as well, since such a notion is always composed with further discourse, which, in a sense, replaces the object of discourse and negates it. The fact that there are these "definite negations" in language, every time we speak, is not taken as some great horror but instead is meant to be affirmed as an act of human creativity: there is no bottom to our logic, but we nevertheless always discover more and add to it! To try and enforce normative constraints on what is deemed logical also in the end constrains the limits of discourse and intelligibility: it limits the very possibilities of how we could order our society, and claims that the one we live in, which is currently grinding young men into meat in eastern Europe for the profits of large arms manufacturers, which arbitrarily targets and imprisons the most impoverished and downtrodden of its citizens and forces them into slave labor, which participates in the regular everyday exploitation of labor and suppresses and controls any resistance to its hegemony with constant propaganda and moralism for the weak, and direct violence towards the strong and well-organized--it claims THAT society is always somehow "logical," "rationally organized," and "the best system that exists." If we accept that this totalitarian nightmare society as the best that we can have, then we are effectively nihilists and we have abandoned any idea that we have the power to make a better, stronger, more creative, more free, more fulfilling life for ourselves.

voidhorse 3y ago

This x1000. I am truly amazed, also, that so many people that are quite intelligent could fall in for such a paper-thin, sloppy "they don't believe what we believe! let's completely talk past each other" bad faith argument and think they somehow "owned" the targets. Hyperspecialization has done massive damage to the overall intellectual health of society. What Sokal did is roughly equivalent to a humanities scholar creating a spoof hit piece to show how some mathematician did not employ a literary metaphor correctly in an article about geometry. The only reason it was even remotely successful is because the western (particularly American) perspective is so heavily biased toward STEM at the expense of basically producing individuals who can adequately solve practical problems but who (on average, there are exceptions) have the humanities knowledge of a stick and revere their favorite Netflix show or animated superhero blockbuster as though it were high art on par with anything hanging in the Guggenheim.

DiscourseFan 3y ago
Well, I like the Guggenheim but I still feel there is a place for critiques of popular media and literary merit/appreciation of certain Netflix shows (though I am pretty tired of capeshit, aside from The Boys and shows of that ilk). But I by and large agree, even if I'm biased because I chose to study literature and learn all about "postmodernism." But look there is something about logical positivist styles of thinking that was very attractive to many of the people Sokal attacks (which is why he is even able to attack them in the first place!), and also to me. I can't tell if that's because I have some deeply repressed control and power fantasies (probably), or because there is something to the analysis of the structure and order of logic and language in a rigorous fashion that reveals something about the order of social and psychological life, even if unintentionally. If these more radical authors used the mathematic and logical formulae in this manner, I don't see how a criticism of "it's poorly defined" works, because anything would be poorly defined in an algebra of society, psychology, history--if you only defined it in terms of contemporary mathematics and logic which seeks to divorce itself from those things. And modern literary education isn't much better. My inner-authoritarian wants every humanities major to get a rigorous classical education and required courses in logic. Trying to break history is very hard when you have no consciousness of it whatsoever, and the humanities disciplines today are almost designed to keep students away from contributing their work to a "rigorous" STEM field, as they are deemed too reactionary to be worth critiquing or engaging with. It is for the very reason I listed above that its imperative humanities students receive the same basis of education as the STEM majors, and vica versa!

constantcrying 3y ago

>things are true or they're not true, they're rigorous or they're unrigorous Mathematics (more specifically, meta mathematics) has the ability to talk about these issues. "What is truth" quickly becomes an asinine question, if you don't at least accept some meta framework in which the question becomes actually meaningful and so far the only field which I which actually has the ability to coherently question itself is mathematics. The problem with post modernism I have aren't the ideas specifically, but the fact that if you see the world as filled with mutually incohrent narratives talking about anything becomes very hard. But post modernist throry gives insane people the thought that they can write anything and it becomes justified, because narrative coherence can not exist anyways. Nothing could be further from the "truth".

DiscourseFan 3y ago
>But post modernist throry gives insane people the thought that they can write anything and it becomes justified, because narrative coherence can not exist anyways. That's not really the argument (and there is no coherent "unity" of postmodernism anyway, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, even if they all occupied the same intellectual spheres, had different projects). If there is an argument, its that by dint of its "place in discourse," any statement adds and also modifies every other statement in the great network of social life, so the moment you begin to talk about anything or interpret anything you begin to move away from the thing. But the idea of an original, pure object of critique is seen as suspect to begin with as well, since such a notion is always composed with further discourse, which, in a sense, replaces the object of discourse and negates it. The fact that there are these "definite negations" in language, every time we speak, is not taken as some great horror but instead is meant to be affirmed as an act of human creativity: there is no bottom to our logic, but we nevertheless always discover more and add to it! To try and enforce normative constraints on what is deemed logical also in the end constrains the limits of discourse and intelligibility: it limits the very possibilities of how we could order our society, and claims that the one we live in, which is currently grinding young men into meat in eastern Europe for the profits of large arms manufacturers, which arbitrarily targets and imprisons the most impoverished and downtrodden of its citizens and forces them into slave labor, which participates in the regular everyday exploitation of labor and suppresses and controls any resistance to its hegemony with constant propaganda and moralism for the weak, and direct violence towards the strong and well-organized--it claims THAT society is always somehow "logical," "rationally organized," and "the best system that exists." If we accept that this totalitarian nightmare society as the best that we can have, then we are effectively nihilists and we have abandoned any idea that we have the power to make a better, stronger, more creative, more free, more fulfilling life for ourselves.