Sokal et al

[Monte Davis]

 > yet the "hard" sciences seem to have a privileged position from which 
 > they can dismiss the critiques coming from those of us in the humanities

I'll venture a response here, as this has been an enlivening tension for me for a 
long time. I once sweated to finish a chemistry degree at Princeton by remote 
control, after transferring to Sarah Lawrence to do comp lit with that phallocentric 
old anti-Semite Joe Campbell. (Two BAs stood in for the degeneration of graduate 
work.) Then, the Word having saved me from the Lab, I've spent my career writing 
about science and technology. 

First, there's a pronounced hierarchy of "hardness" even within the natural 
sciences, with mathematical physics at the top. Partly historical -- the immense 
success and hence prestige of the Galilean-Newtonian program over 350 years. 
Partly a sense of logical hierarchy -- the belief that in some unthinkable last 
analysis, say, ecology could be resolved into biology, which could be resolved into 
biochemistry -> chemistry -> physics. Partly a Pythagorean notion that mathematics 
itself, to which physics is "closest," is epistemologically privileged.

So even leaving the social sciences and humanities apart, it's common to hear 
scientists speak of "physics envy" when, e.g. a Robert May (mathematical biologist) 
starts applying chaotic dynamics to population booms and collapses. And there are 
a couple of centuries' worth of arguments about "emergent properties": could an 
ultimate computer really start with quantum mechanics and derive peacocks? do 
intermediate notions like chemical valence, genes, mate selection, etc. have an 
independent standing, or are they just convenient shorthand because we're too 
limited to express it all in terms of quarks?

That said (windily)... I know I've always been made uneasy by the glad cries with 
which some artistic and literary modernists and pomos have seized on fields vs. 
particles, relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, etc. There's a lot of us/them 
psychological baggage there, a subtext of "we never liked mechanics or 
determinism much, and now look! The scientists themselves have abandoned it! We 
were right all along!"

Well, what those ideas and theories have done within the natural sciences is 
profound and important, but it's a lot more complex than that. That Pynchon knows 
that -- that he's "done the research" as you say, is very important to me.

Maybe what raises scientists' hackles about *some* pomo critiques is the sense that 
absolutely *everything* is fluid, dependent on the speaker & listener, infinitely 
reinterpretable, and so on. Whether they're experimentalists or not, scientists do 
share two convictions: first, that sooner or later, ideas will stand or fall in a 
decisive test (although instead of an experiment it may be a test of observation, as 
in astrophysics, or of retrodiction, as in evolution). And second, that what they do 
can be progressive and cumulative, because such tests are repeatable independent 
of the observer: nature will give the same answer whether the inquiry is made by a 
white European male or by some higher life-form. 

I think that's the nerve that was struck in l'affaire Sokal. What the parody article 
asserts (as clearly as it says anything) is that neither is the case, that there's an 
emergent pomo science that's as supple and user-friendly as a _texte_, that the 
physical world is abandoning its nasty old habit of insisting that some things are so 
and some things aren't so.

Hence the gleeful cackling when it was revealed as parody. God knows a lot of 
really stupid and pointless stuff makes its way into science journals, but there *is* 
a _ne plus infra_. The acceptance of the Sokal article, and the editors' subsequent 
tap-dancing, hinted that such is not necessarily the case across the hall in the 
Department of Deconstruction.