Re: the arrogance of postmodern mumbo jumbo
Bruce Scott TOK (bds@ipp-garching.mpg.de)
16 Sep 1996 18:45:48 GMT
Stephen Barnard (steve@megafauna.com) wrote:
: Bryant wrote:
: > Stephen Barnard <steve@megafauna.com> wrote:
: > >>In May, 1996 Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, published a paper in
: > >>_Social_Text_, a leading journal of cultural studies. The title of this
: > >>paper was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
: > >>Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."
: > I've wondered if the collapse of socialism played a role in the
: > development of nihilistic postmodern deconstructionism in the academic
: > left. Is the timing of this school's emergence right for that explanation?
: I don't really think so, Bryant. Postmodernism predates the collapse of
: socialism. My own take on its popularity in academia is that it
: provides a virtually inexhaustible source of publishable (though largely
: unread) papers. That's the absurd thing about academia these days:
: Everyone is writing papers and no one is reading them.
Or, some of them are taking the piss. I sometimes think both Foucault
and Derrida were having a lot of fun with the people who tried to read
them.
: Another irresistable feature of the postmodern view of science is that
: every math-disabled humanities professor who can't even balance his
: checkbook can be skeptical and comtemptuous of the most abstruse
: technical subjects, because, after all, they are just arbitrary social
: constructs.
Not just science. You can hold onto all of your favorite myths and
ignore any contrary argument once you can look to dialectical contexts
and deconstruct anything inconvenient. The PM-ists are by far not the
only ones to do this. Just ask Brother Rush, or the Xian Coalition.
They just use different language.
--
Mach's gut!
Bruce Scott Congratulations to
bds@ipp-garching.mpg.de Ghada Shouaa,
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Plasmaphysik Olympic heptathlon champion!
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