by Alan Sokal
(Chomsky 1993, p. 286)
Finally, let us briefly discuss the subjective motivations of those who are opposed to postmodernism. These are complicated to analyse, and the reactions that followed the publication of Sokal’s parody suggest a prudent reflection. Many people are simply irritated by the arrogance and empty verbiage of postmodernist discourse and by the spectacle of an intellectual community where everyone repeats sentences that no one understands. It goes without saying that we share, with some nuances, this attitude.
But other reactions are much less pleasant, and they are good illustrations of the confusion between sociological and logical links. For example, the New York Times presented the ‘Sokal affair’ as a debate between conservatives who believe in objectivity, at least as a goal, and leftists who deny it. Obviously, the situation is more complex. Not all those on the political left reject the goal (however imperfectly realized) of objectivity;272 and there is not, in any case, a simple logical relation between political and epistemological views.273 Other commentators link this story to attacks against ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘political correctness’. It would take us much too far afield to discuss these questions in detail, but let us emphasize that we in no way reject the openness to other cultures or the respect for minorities that are often ridiculed in these kinds of attacks.
Why does it matter?
The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness – the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.
(Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1961a, p. 782)
Why spend so much time exposing these abuses? Do the postmodernists represent a real danger? Certainly not for the natural sciences, at least not at present. The problems faced today by the natural sciences concern primarily the financing of research, and in particular the threat posed to scientific objectivity when public funding is increasingly replaced by private sponsorship. But postmodernism has nothing to do with this.274 It is, rather, the social sciences that suffer when fashionable nonsense and word games displace the critical and rigorous analysis of social realities.
Postmodernism has three principal negative effects: a waste of time in the human sciences, a cultural confusion that favors obscurantism, and a weakening of the political left.
First of all, postmodern discourse, exemplified by the texts we quote, functions in part as a dead end in which some sectors of the humanities and social sciences have got lost. No research, whether on the natural or the social world, can progress on a basis that is both conceptually confused and radically detached from empirical evidence.
It could be argued that the authors of the texts quoted here have no real impact on research because their lack of professionalism is well-known in academic circles. This is only partly true: it depends on the authors, the countries, the fields of study, and the eras. For example, the works of Barnes–Bloor and Latour have had a undeniable influence in the sociology of science, even if they have never been hegemonic. The same holds true for Lacan and Deleuze–Guattari in certain areas of literary theory and cultural studies, and for Irigaray in women’s studies.
What is worse, in our opinion, is the adverse effect that abandoning clear thinking and clear writing has on teaching and culture. Students learn to repeat and to embellish discourses that they only barely understand. They can even, if they are lucky, make an academic career out of it by becoming expert in the manipulation of an erudite jargon.275 After all, one of us managed, after only three months of study, to master the postmodern lingo well enough to publish an article in a prestigious journal. As commentator Katha Pollitt astutely noted, ‘the comedy of the Sokal incident is that it suggests that even the postmodernists don’t really understand one another’s writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads.’276 The deliberately obscure discourses of postmodernism, and the intellectual dishonesty they engender, poison a part of intellectual life and strengthen the facile anti-intellectualism that is already all too widespread in the general public.
The lackadaisical attitude toward scientific rigour that one finds in Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard and Deleuze had an undeniable success in France during the 1970s and is still remarkably influential there.277 This way of thinking spread outside France, notably in the English-speaking world, during the 1980s and 1990s. Conversely, cognitive relativism developed during the 1970s mostly in the English-speaking world (for example, with the beginning of the ‘strong programme’) and spread later to France.
These two attitudes are, of course, conceptually distinct; one can be adopted with or without the other. However, they are indirectly linked: if anything, or almost anything, can be read into the content of scientific discourse, then why should anyone take science seriously as an objective account of the world? Conversely, if one adopts a relativist philosophy, then arbitrary comments on scientific theories become legitimate. Relativism and sloppiness are therefore mutually reinforcing.
But the most serious cultural consequences of relativism come from its application to the social sciences. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm has eloquently decried
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 clear difference between fact and fiction. But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly antipositivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental.
(Hobsbawm 1993, p. 63)
Hobsbawm goes on to show how rigourous historical work can refute the fictions propounded by reactionary nationalists in India, Israel, the Balkans and elsewhere, and how the postmodernist attitude disarms us in the face of these threats.
At a time when superstitions, obscurantism and nationalist and religious fanaticism are spreading in many parts of the world – including the ‘developed’ West – it is irresponsible, to say the least, to treat with such casualness what has historically been the principal defense against these follies, namely a rational vision of the world. It is doubtless not the intention of postmodernist authors to favour obscurantism, but it is an inevitable consequence of their approach.
Finally, for all those of us who identify with the political left, postmodernism has specific negative consequences. First of all, the extreme focus on language and the elitism linked to the use of a pretentious jargon contribute to enclosing intellectuals in sterile debates and to isolating them from social movements taking place outside their ivory tower. When progressive students arriving on American campuses learn that the most radical idea (even politically) is to adopt a thoroughly sceptical attitude and to immerse oneself completely in textual analysis, their energy – which could be fruitfully employed in research and organizing – is squandered. Second, the persistence of confused ideas and obscure discourses in some parts of the left tends to discredit the entire left; and the right does not pass up the opportunity to exploit this connection demagogically.278
But the most important problem is that any possibility of a social critique that could reach those who are not already convinced – a necessity, given the present infinitesimal size of the American left – becomes logically impossible, due to the subjectivist presuppositions.279 If all discourses are merely ‘stories’ or ‘narrations’, and none is more objective or truthful than another, then one must concede that the wors
t sexist or racist prejudices and the most reactionary socioeconomic theories are ‘equally valid’, at least as descriptions or analyses of the real world (assuming that one admits the existence of a real world). Clearly, relativism is an extremely weak foundation on which to build a criticism of the existing social order.
If intellectuals, particularly those on the left, wish to make a positive contribution to the evolution of society, they can do so above all by clarifying the prevailing ideas and by demystifying the dominant discourses, not by adding their own mystifications. A mode of thought does not become ‘critical’ simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.
To be sure, intellectuals tend to exaggerate their impact on the larger culture, and we want to avoid falling into this trap. We think, nevertheless, that the ideas – even the most abstruse ones – taught and debated within universities have, over time, cultural effects beyond academia. Bertrand Russell undoubtedly exaggerated when he denounced the perverse social consequences of confusion and subjectivism, but his fears were not entirely unfounded.
What next?
‘A spectre is haunting U.S. intellectual life: the spectre of Left Conservatism.’ So proclaimed the announcement for a recent conference at the University of California–Santa Cruz, where we and others280 were criticized for our opposition to ‘anti-foundationalist [i.e. postmodernist] theoretical work’ and – horror of horrors – for ‘an attempt at consensus-building ... founded on notions of the real’. We were portrayed as socially conservative Marxists trying to marginalize feminist, gay and racial-justice politics, and as sharing the values of American right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh.281 Might these lurid accusations symbolize, albeit in an extreme way, what has gone wrong with postmodernism?
Throughout this book, we have defended the idea that there is such a thing as evidence and that facts matter. However, many questions of vital interest – notably those concerning the future – cannot be answered conclusively on the basis of evidence and reason, and they lead human beings to indulge in (more-or-less-informed) speculation. We would like to end this book with a bit of speculation of our own, concerning the future of postmodernism. As we have repeatedly stressed, postmodernism is such a complicated network of ideas – with only weak logical links between them – that it is difficult to characterize it more precisely than as a vague Zeitgeist. Nevertheless, the roots of this Zeitgeist are not hard to identify, and go back to the early 1960s: challenges to empiricist philosophies of science with Kuhn, critiques of humanist philosophies of history with Foucault, disillusionment with grand schemes for political change. Like all new intellectual currents, postmodernism, in its inchoate phase, met with resistance from the old guard. But new ideas have the privilege of youth playing for them, and the resistance turned out to be vain.
Almost forty years later, revolutionaries have aged and marginality has become institutionalized. Ideas that contained some truth, if properly understood, have degenerated into a vulgate that mixes bizarre confusions with overblown banalities. It seems to us that postmodernism, whatever usefulness it originally had as a corrective to hardened orthodoxies, has lived this out and is now running its natural course. Although the name was not ideally chosen to invite a succession (what can come after post-?), we are under the inescapable impression that times are changing. One sign is that the challenge comes nowadays not only from the rearguard, but also from people who are neither die-hard positivists nor old-fashioned Marxists, and who understand the problems encountered by science, rationality and traditional leftist politics – but who believe that criticism of the past should enlighten the future, not lead to contemplation of the ashes.282
What will come after postmodernism? Since the principal lesson to be learned from the past is that predicting the future is hazardous, we can only list our fears and our hopes. One possibility is a backlash leading to some form of dogmatism, mysticism (e.g. New Age) or religious fundamentalism. This may appear unlikely, at least in academic circles, but the demise of reason has been radical enough to pave the way for a more extreme irrationalism. In this case intellectual life would go from bad to worse. A second possibility is that intellectuals will become reluctant (at least for a decade or two) to attempt any thoroughgoing critique of the existing social order, and will either become its servile advocates – as some formerly leftist French intellectuals did after 1968 – or retreat from political engagement entirely. Our hopes, however, go in a different direction: the emergence of an intellectual culture that would be rationalist but not dogmatic, scientifically minded but not scientistic, open-minded but not frivolous, and politically progressive but not sectarian. But this, of course, is only a hope, and perhaps only a dream.
APPENDIX A
TRANSGRESSING THE BOUNDARIES: TOWARD A TRANSFORMATIVE HERMENEUTICS OF QUANTUM GRAVITY*
Transgressing disciplinary boundaries ... [is] a subversive undertaking since it is likely to violate the sanctuaries of accepted ways of perceiving. Among the most fortified boundaries have been those between the natural sciences and the humanities.
(Valerie Greenberg, Transgressive Readings, 1990, p. 1)
The struggle for the transformation of ideology into critical science ... proceeds on the foundation that the critique of all presuppositions of science and ideology must be the only absolute principle of science.
(Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power, 1988b, p. 339)
There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.
But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian–Newtonian metaphysics;1 revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility;2 and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”.3 It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz’s analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics;4 in Ross’ discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science;5 in Irigaray’s and Hayles’ exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics;6 and in Harding’s comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.7
Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceas
es to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science – among them, existence itself – become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.
My approach will be as follows: First I will review very briefly some of the philosophical and ideological issues raised by quantum mechanics and by classical general relativity. Next I will sketch the outlines of the emerging theory of quantum gravity, and discuss some of the conceptual issues it raises. Finally, I will comment on the cultural and political implications of these scientific developments. It should be emphasized that this article is of necessity tentative and preliminary; I do not pretend to answer all of the questions that I raise. My aim is, rather, to draw the attention of readers to these important developments in physical science, and to sketch as best I can their philosophical and political implications. I have endeavored here to keep mathematics to a bare minimum; but I have taken care to provide references where interested readers can find all requisite details.
Quantum Mechanics: Uncertainty, Complementarity, Discontinuity and Interconnectedness
It is not my intention to enter here into the extensive debate on the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics.8 Suffice it to say that anyone who has seriously studied the equations of quantum mechanics will assent to Heisenberg’s measured (pardon the pun) summary of his celebrated uncertainty principle: