Alan Sokal Sucks (A.S.S)

[This post is a response to primarily Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, through the review of their book by Richard Dawkins. I use only Sokal's name for simplicity. This may make this a poor academic response, but it is a rant not a response anyhow.


PISSED:

[jungesam][campbel2] [although this rant is really not directedly at either of you]: Sokal is alot of bullshit. So he fooled some editors. This doesn't prove anything (although as Charlie mentioned, perhaps the fact that they still have jobs does). The fact is that Sokal is guilty of precisely the same thing that he is accusing philosophers; that is, using elements of others' actual work in paraphrased form merely to further a meaningless discourse AND one's own career.

Let's take a look at some of Sokal's work before he began his much more well-known career as a professional debunker (from which I'm guessing he sold a shit more books). Let's choose, say, his april 2002 piece, entitled "Transfer Matrices and Partition-Function Zeros for Antiferromagnetic Potts Models III. Triangular-Lattice Chromatic Polynomial". I quoth from the "abstract":

"We study the chromatic polynomial P_G(q) for m \times n triangular-lattice strips of widths m <= 12_P, 9_F (with periodic or free transverse boundary conditions, respectively) and arbitrary lengths n (with free longitudinal boundary conditions). The chromatic polynomial gives the zero-temperature limit of the partition function for the q-state Potts antiferromagnet. We compute the transfer matrix for such strips in the Fortuin--Kasteleyn representation and obtain the corresponding accumulation sets of chromatic zeros in the complex q-plane in the limit n\to\infty. We recompute the limiting curve obtained by Baxter in the thermodynamic limit m,n\to\infty and find new interesting features with possible physical consequences. Finally, we analyze the isolated limiting points and their relation with the Beraha numbers."


Whoa! And they get paid for that bullshit?!?!? Tell me THAT isn't the most pretensious thing you've ever read!!! I can't even understand a word! "m,n\to\infty" isn't in any dictionary I've ever seen! Who are Fortuin and Kasteleyn? Some of Sokal's cronies in the "cult of physics" no doubt, who probably have cushy jobs because of their supposed "ability" to write in this "theoretical" (theoretical means "made-up" in case you didn't know!) literary style. Somebody kick these guys out on their asses, and get to work trading bonds or some other job involving REAL things, fer crissakes!!

So I can't understand high-level math that describes physical environments measured on some "invented" scale. I can accept that there is a history of research that people have been working together very hard to build. So then, why should the theorists who trying to describe the workings of your subjectivity on a unconscious and pre-language level have to write for a 5th grade reading level? Because, for the simple fact that these sorts of physicists who would take time off from their VERY important research to critique a field that they know nothing about are pretenious pricks who have to further their ego by "defending" their field against the "threat" of philosophy. Read how happy that Dawkins shithead is about Sokal's book. You'd think someone proved String Theory isn't a gigantic... "theory"! I bet he had alot of sticky late-night pleasure when he got to talk about "erectile organs" and square roots in the same sentence. I for one have never taken any stock in Lacan's logic squares simply because I knew right off the bat that seeing as how I knew nothing about logic, I couldn't decide whether Lacan's lectures were worthwhile or not. But it seems like Dawkins couldn't even have gotten that far, because anyone who has opened the first five pages of "Lacan for Dummies" could have understood that the Phallus as a structure has nothing to do with the penis. If you think you can understand a psychoanalyst (Guattari, Lacan, or the one you might visit four times a week), or even a psychiatrist, conducting a theoretical discussion just because you walked into a room or opened a book to a random page, then you should try landing a plane, because that looks really easy on TV.

This is the trouble with people. They think they understand things. "Sure, I know how a cell phone works. They make it out of plastic, intergrated circuits, and other complicated electronics in Malaysia, I sign up for a bill for which I pay once a month, and then they beam calls to my phone from the national network through those towers I see by the interstate. But my phone is broken for no reason! It just broke! I didn't even drop it!" This is why people kick machines when they are broken, why they talk louder to people who don't speak their language, and why hundreds of people "who know how to drive" are stranded at the side of the road every year because they didn't change their oil or ran out of gas. It is the assholic nature of humanity to assume that if they can't understand something, FATE must be fucking with them, because god knows there SIMPLY COULD NOT be something outside of the understandable-realm of their own little mal-adjusted world. This is also why we have religion, by the way.

And while Sokal's has a prepubescent emerging-stump of a argument going with the whole "science out of context" thing, he totally loses it in his knee-jerk quotations. Sure, Irigaray gets a little happy with her fluids. But THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT!!!! If he had took a look at any serious literature on Irigaray, he would find other key elements about the nature of literature, the necessary departure from form, from substance, from science, from the world, etc etc etc etc. It is not supposed to be about science, as in what you learn in the lab. It is supposed to be about science as naturalism, as in the way that we think. She's not talking about the science you do at a lab bench, she's talking about the science of our thought. If you had done the work, and read Irigaray, Heidegger, and Husserl, or even had some concept of what post-modern means, you would already know this. Otherwise, you just assumed that you knew, even though you didn't. Did you know what I meant when I said "naturalism"? Maybe you thought you did. Maybe you thought you did, and then misinterpreted what I said, or thought my sentence didn't make sense, because you didn't know. Then again, maybe I made it up, or I got it wrong. What do I know anyway, I only have a half a master's degree in this sort of thing. However, that's more than you have, so I'm going to take my word for it. After all, this is not Reading Rainbow.

I don't really need to go back into the whole literary value of printed-word thing again, where I try and simplify really complicated big-kid ideas in to recognizable "small-words" to argue the fairly basic fact that literature and poetry are more important to human life than any hard science since building fires. I really don't care in the end if anyone gets it, least of all some asshole that has already made up his mind, and moreover made money off a book he published demonstrating his own idiocy. Because if he ever faltered in that idiocy, he'd probably have to give that money back, or at least stop getting more of it.

Yeah, I'm pissed off. But I really get tired of this sort of thing. I don't know why it is such a scandal that it might be harder than voting to be political, it might require more work to be right than publishing a book or being on TV, and why it might take language that you wouldn't find in a sportscast vocab to describe the feelings, emotions, and patterns of behavior in something as simply as, oh, say sex. And the other end of things is no better, when some prick with a piece of paper on his wall thinks that because he is good at describing some things, goddammit, he must be good at describing everything! And therefore, he should! Especially when he can influence other pricks who are like him into agreeing, and then finally, we can really save the world by getting some academics fired! With the exception of the last, most people I have met in academia certainly qualify. And not just the men, despite my use of the masculine pronoun. And this is why "inter-disciplinary" is only considered if their are strict "disciplines" to begin with. And as long as it mean MORE academic contracts. That goodness disciplines can intermingle within a constitutionally protected marriage of the general education requirements for the classically-republican education!

If you need anymore evidence to Sokal's shittiness, you can take his April-Fools-Day-Senior-Year-Prank-Publicity-Stunt-Entrapment scheme itself. Maybe we should have academia vice squad who prowl the academic docks looking for journals with a loose editorial board! If Sokal had only worn a wire, he could have gotten the editor joking with him on tape, saying how "post-modern" his essay was, with a nod and a wink! Incriminated! It's too bad that the journal takes open submissions and doesn't pay anything to its authors, otherwise maybe Sokal could have traded the editors a golf vacation with hookers for a three-part series, and there could be criminal preceedings! Just like that guy- oh, what was his name? You know, they guy who bribed a bunch of elected officials who run this country, oh whats-his-name? Oh well. I guess I was too busy circling typos in every collegiate academic journal and high school newspaper in the country instead of reading the actual news.

And yeah, it might seem that my ego is invested somewhere in this little rant. Well, it is. This is not what someone who is pretenious sounds like. This is what I sound like when I've invested a year of my life and $35,000 (so far) of my own money in something that I think is more important than any other thing I have going in my life, and therefore am spending all of that and most of my sanity trying to become better trained in it and having to deal with all the other asshole pricks that think just like Sokal and contributing to nothing but a waste of paper because this is the "best place in my shitty TV-watching flag-waving fast-food-eating blood-sucking murderous chauvanistic fatherland" to learn what I want to learn, or so I've been told by many of those same asshole pricks. Then, some jerk who can do math with tenure reads me three sentences of a 300 page text and then tells me that in addition to my job prospects either being non-existent or surrounded by many of the jerks who I loath, my job itself is bullshit. Yeah, you might say that my ego is a little bit invested. You might say that my life and mind is a little invested. And hey, philosophy is a bit of bullshit sometimes. So is everything. That's life. I think if Bill Clinton can cite a little semiotics in his legal testimony on his blowjobs, if physicists can shoot billions of dollars of electronics into space, and if Queer Eye can be a positive step for gay culture than Felix Guattari can coin a few choice phrases.
Does this mean that I, as a philosopher, could not be wrong? No, I could definitely be wrong, and I have been many times. Philosophy is not easy, its hard. I got a grade-inflated equivalent of a C in my Kant class, ok! I admit it! I don't know it all! I don't want to, I don't ever want to take a class on the First Critique again! If I died not knowing Kant's Critique of Pure Reason well enough to get an A from Jay Berstein, I would be perfectly happy. But I tell you what I do know: I do know that if I handed Jay a paper saying that "philosophy is bullshit", he wouldn't have given me a grade at all, because THAT is not any work at all.