I was studying at the University of Toronto in 1992 when Julia Kristeva, the famous French thinker, took up a one-year appointment as visiting professor. You'd think Elvis had appeared on campus. Star-struck disciples, mainly literature majors, were ready to exchange a kidney for a seat in Ms. Kristeva's exclusive seminar. Rumour held she'd accepted the invitation on condition the university fly her to and from Paris every week.A celebrity, she was the subject of adoring gossip. I didn't attend the lectures, but heard of intense jostling as students competed for Ms. Kristeva's favour, hoping, apparently in vain, for a sign of affirmation, no matter how small.
Julia Kristeva belongs to the elite cadre of academics who developed postmodern theory. Broadly speaking, a postmodernist argues that objective reality is an illusion, that there is no such thing as universal truth.Postmodernists have argued that it makes no sense to discuss, for example, the artistic merit of this or that literary text. Because truth doesn't exist, one has no business claiming a Shakespeare sonnet is more meaningful than the lyrics of rap singer Snoop Doggy Dogg (like this an' like that 'n' like this an' a). In a postmodern world everything is relative. My reality is as valid as yours because both are nothing but social constructions.
I skipped Ms. Kristeva's lectures because musings of postmodernists are so dense with jargon that it takes considerable effort just to untangle the nouns from the verbs, and even then there's only a 50% chance the sentence will be intelligible. Beats me what Ms. Kristeva is saying here in a typical excerpt:
"The compatibility of the axiom of choice and the generalized continuum hypothesis with the axioms of set theory places us at the level of reasoning about the theory, thus in a metatheory (and such is the staus of semiotic reasoning) whose metatheorems have been perfected by Godel."
It was not only the ridiculously obscure writing style; I also resented the bullying that postmodernists brought into the classroom. For postmodernism is as much a political as an intellectual movement. Suddenly, renegade professors can teach that ancient Africa was an egalitarian advanced civilization while Athenian democracy was flawed and barbaric. Having rejected empirical truth, history is reduced to competing narratives, or, they-say, we-say. Rules of logic and evidence are dismissed as coercive and Eurocentic. Suggesting sonnets are superior to rap lyrics invites charges of discrimination.
Because reality is nothing but the sum of one's cultural experiences, it becomes necesary to preface every opinion with: "As a middle-class white woman, I believe..." or "As an Asian-Canadian homosexual, it seems to me..." The university seminar room today sounds more like a confessional as students, some willingly and others under duress, are pressured to play identity politics. I hated being told my admiration for William Faulkner had nothing to do with Faulkner's genius, genius just being an arbitrary construct, but was just a manifestation of my bias as a white heterosexual male.
It is, then, somewhat gratifying to see the silliness of Julia Kristeva and her circle finally exposed.The dragon slayer is an American academic named Alan Sokal whose new book Fashionable Nonsense is the most devasting expose of fakery since the Amazing Randy proved would-be psychics don't actually bend spoons with their minds. Mr Sokal and his co-author Jean Briemont are neither philosophers nor literary critics, they are, instead, physicists, ones who felt the anti-rationalist cant of postmodernism was destroying higher education.
Mr. Sokal began his crusade after discovering that postmodernists use the vocabulary of science even though they have no training in the field. He recognized that these famous thinkers invoke terms they don't understand, and he concluded that their aim is to impress and intimidate non-scientist readers. Now, happily, students who are stumped when trendy English professors speak of "stochastic analysis" or "topological space" can rest assured that the professors themselves likely have no idea what they are talking about.
Skinny and bespectacled, Alan Sokal looks like he was brought in from central casting to play the part of a nerdy physicist. This is the wrong impression, however. During lunch two weeks ago, at a small restaurant near his New York University office, I learned that Mr. Sokal, 44, speaks fluent French, has travelled extensively, and is well read in a variety of topics unrelated to physics. "I've gotten a lot of support from people in the humanities," he says. "They tell me, 'Lucky for you,' you're a physicist, you don't have to deal with this sort of garbage every day.' Some of them have been trying to point out for years the obscurity and sloppy reasoning which had infected their disciplines, but they weren't listened to. It took an outsider to come in and show that the local emperor is naked."
The idea for a new book came three years ago when Mr. Sokal submitted an article to a prestigious academic journal called Social Text. Mr Sokal wrote the article as a spoof, cramming it, at random, with every possible postmodern buzzword he could think of. He drafted and redrafted whole paragraphs until they reached a desired level of incoherence. He finally title the parody "Trangressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". The article suggested, among other things, that pi and gravity, formally thought to be universal, are in fact, culture-bound. One hundred footnotes later, the article calls for the overthrow of 'static ontological' categories (whatever those are) and for a profound revision of the canons of mathematics.
The editors of Social Text, all prominent professors, took the bait and published the piece in May of 1996. Mr Sokal, who promptly revealed the hoax, landed on the front page of the New York Times. People snickered that the article should have been titled: 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Total Bullshit'.
Deception is a grave sin in the scholarly community, and Mr. Sokal was denounced. Stanley Aronowitz, the celebrated English professor and co-founder of Social Text called Mr. Sokal ill-read and half-educated. Others called for Mr. Sokal's dismissal, arguing that such a breach of ethics disqualified him from holding a university post. "I did play a kind of cruel trick on Social Text," he admits now. "They made fools of themselves, though I gave them the opportunity to do it. But I felt it was necessary to drop a little bomb in order to wake people up. I had a feeling that if I were to write just another scholarly article criticizing postmodern texts and authors, it would disappear into a blck hole just like so many articles before. I thought something a little more spectacular was needed to open up a debate."
Critics assumed Mr. Sokal was a conservative, an authoritarian scientist wistful for byegone days when universities offered no programs in women's studies and black literature, and that the hoax was designed to discredit the academic Left, whose leaders comprised the Social Text's editorial board. Turns out Mr. Sokal is an unabashed Leftist, who spent time teaching in Nicaragua during the Sandinista period. Yes the hoax, and the just-released book, are politically motivated, but in the sense that Mr. Sokal wants to save the Left from itself. "I never quite understood how to deconstruction was supposed to help the working class," he says. "It seems the Right wing can have the mass media, the Pentagon and the CIA, and the Left gets the English departments."
It is true that for all their subversive talk, the academic or postmodern Left make for a powerless bunch of activists. If, as they say, there are no universal standards, only intellectual constructions, then on what grounds can one claim that racial segregation is wrong? Or that freedom is better than tyranny? On the one hand, it is clear why feminists, multiculturalists and other minority interests have been so receptive to the postmodern world view. Some conventional 'truths' have been shaped by culture and ought to be challenged, or subverted as the postmodernists say. It was once deemed self-evident that women were intellectually inferior to men. But, like chemotherapy, postmodernism destroys the good cells as well. Economic justice cannot be exposed if one disavows empirical reality. Female circumcision abroad cannot be condemned becuase, having drunk from the cup of relativism, we are pressured always to respect, even celebrate, 'differences'.
Paralysed by their own thinking, postmodernists are reduced to the impotent, faux radicalism that Mr. Sokal satirized in his spoof and now dissects more thoroughly in Fashionable Nonsense. A particularily pathetic example, cited in the book, is the claim of philosopher Luce Irigaray the e=mc 2 is a sexist equation because it privileges the speed of light , the fastest speed, over other speeds. It is hardly necessary for Mr. Sokal to comment here, although he does anyway in his book stating that the relationship has been experimentaly verified and simply would not be valid if the speed of light (c) were replaced with another speed.
Then there is the late, eccentric, Jacques Lacan, another postmodern cult hero, whose work is required reading in course on literary theory. Lacan has an interest in mathematics, he speaks of 'compactness' and 'topologies' and once declared (no joke) that the male erectile organ is equivalent to the square root of minus one. Unlike humanities professors, who worship Lacan, Mr. Sokal knows advanced mathematics and has carefully analyzed Mr. Lavan's writings. Alas, Lacan is a charlatan. "Although Lacan uses quite a few keywords from the mathematical theory of compactness," writes Mr. Sokal, "he mixes them up arbitrarily and without slightest regard for their meaning. His definition of compactness is not just false, it is gibberish."
Although in many quarters Mr. Sokal is reviled, in one or two others he is cheered. Before his joke on Social Text, it was dangerous to say publically that something was wrong in the academy. Many of the most powerful players at the most prestigious universities are adherents to the ideology Mr. Sokal sought to ridicule. "They sit on appointment committees," writes Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins, "wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or anthropology." Thanks to Mr. Sokal, however, the postmodernists no longer seem so intimidating and at last dissenters are talking openly.
"There are serious problems within the postmodernist subculture," recently wrote historian Barbara Epstein, of the University of California at Santa Cruz. "There is an intense ingroupyness, a concern with who is in and who is out, and an obscure vocabulary whose main function often seems to be to mark those on the inside and allow them to feel they are part of an intellectual elite.There is an inflation of language and the habit of self congratulation. It has become common practice in this arena to advertise one's own work as radical, subversive, trangressive. There is a worship of celebrities. This is a culture that celebrates and rewards self-aggrandizement and grandiosity and the use of humiliation, ridicule and implicit threats of ostracism, to silence dissent. All this stands in direct contrast to the endless talk of difference in this arena."
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