Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (Paperback)

This book is not, centrally, an attack on deconstruction, post-modernism, social constructionism and so on. It is instead a tightly focussed attack on some French writers who are often associated with those ideas, Lacan, Deleuze, Kristeva, Baudrillard and others.

Without confronting those writers' central ideas, "Fashionable nonsense" devastates their reputations. It shows them claiming authority in various scientific fields, using scientific "expertise" to enhance their authority and credibility, to bolster arguments on non-scientific propositions by analogy with scientific propositions, and to scare away dissenters. For example Lacan makes claims about topology for both his analogy and his argument on some matter concerning phallic psychology. Most readers, like me, would not know whether Lacan's topology was reasonable or absurd, but Sokal and Bricmont show that Lacan wasn't merely "inaccurate"; he was "meaningless".

It's reasonable to ask if Sokal and Bricmont are right about topology (and the other branches of science cited by the book's targets), while Lacan and the others were wrong. In a symposium in the November 2000 edition of "Meta Science", hostile critics of "Fashionable Nonsense" confronted Sokal and Bricmont. But only one critic even attempted to dispute that the book's targets wrote ignorant nonsense about science. This was Lacanian, who attempted to defend Lacan's topology: and that sole attempted defence was clearly and crushingly rebutted. It seems clear that in its science the book's credibility is unshaken.

So Lacan's grasp of topology was so vague that he must have known that he couldn't make accurate and meaningful statements about it. But he went ahead, knowing that he didn't understand what he was writing. It follows that he was lazily and arrogantly relying on the likelihood that his readers wouldn't understand topology either. Therefore Lacan is guilty of intellectual fraud, or imposture, as in the original French title.

So what? First, if Lacan is prepared to use intellectual fraud to make and support arguments, then some of the intellectual indulgences that academics allow each other, for example too seldom checking references, should not apply. His credibility logically diminishes, to the extent that the only statements by him that should be given credence are those that are backed by specific and checkable references to matters of fact, or based on sound argument from cited evidence.

Second, this highlights the reality that Lacan (like the others skewered in this book) is peculiarly vulnerable to the withdrawal of intellectual indulgence. Once you decide to give credence only to those things in Lacan that are based on reasoning from evidence, as those terms are usually understood, what remains is little more than the residue of soap scum after the bursting of a glistening bubble. If I were to use Lacan's method I would write that soap bubble metaphor in more abstruse terms, stretch it for endless pages of waffle, and pretend that it was an argument or proof rather than merely a figure of speech. Also if I were Lacan, I would not look up the physics concerning soap bubbles and iridescence, but make something up and hope to get away with it.

This is why the narrowness of Sokal and Bricmont's approach is well chosen. Other writers could not be so damaged by the withdrawal of intellectual indulgence. Nietzsche, for example, can be shown to be wrong on matters of fact, and that where he bothers to reason at all his reasoning is faulty, and that his real attitudes (pro-war, anti-compassion, misogynist, antidemocratic, antisemitic, and so on) are not the fashionable doctrines often attributed to him. But he will survive unscathed because unlike these French philosophists, who write like bureaucrats even when making "jokes", Nietzsche was a great writer. People like his wit, energy and poetic fire, and adolescent readers like the way he makes them feel superior to the "herd". In a different way Frege or Hume (say) are also impervious to this sort of demolition. They could be shown to be wrong or even dishonest about some particular point, but this would not hurt the remainder of their work because in general their work does not depend on their reputations but on their reasoning.

But Sokal and Bricmont's targets are ripe for the "Emperor's New Clothes" effect. Scepticism, once thought uncool and a product of stupidity and the failure to understand these deep writers, is suddenly permissible. Instead of being impressed by thickets of words and assuming that something profound must be in there somewhere, we do the hard work of close reading, discarding the phrases that mean nothing, working out precisely what is being claimed and whether those claims are backed by evidence or reasoning. Sokal and Bricmont (and Sokal alone with his splendid if mildly unfair hoax, also documented here), can reasonably claim to have had more to do with that process than any other writers. Apoplectic attacks on deconstruction by conservatives only strengthened the false appearance that here was something radical, interesting, and probably hip.

But when Sokal and Bricmont's French wankers and their American acolytes return to an obscurity as deep as the obscurity of their texts, some of the ideas they espoused will remain. Post-structuralism and social constructionism pose respectable challenges to scientific positivism, that can be expressed clearly, that do not assume that the world is "only text", but that argue that much of our understanding is socially constructed. Sokal and Bricmont did not attack those ideas. They cleared away some writing that is unhelpful to the discussion of social constructionist and related ideas, demonstrating that some Big Names who were until recently considered central to the discussion were in fact merely passengers, and irrelevant to it.

Finally, why five stars? It's a narrower book than is sometimes claimed, but the tight focus was well chosen. It is solid and much needed work. It must have been difficult to research and write, but it is easy to read. The exact opposite of the texts they skewer.

Cheers!

Laon

Having just finished it, I think Fashionable Nonsense is well worth reading, but it's not quite the triumph I had pictured. The chapters vary greatly in quality and in general Sokal and Bricmont should have spent less time quoting and more time explaining and analyzing. The sections on specific intellectuals are more sucessful when they follow this approach. I thought the demolitions of Bruno Latour and Luce Irigay were quite convincing. However, as a couple of readers have already pointed out, the chapter on Deleuze & Guattari is a decided letdown: interminable quotations followed by almost no substantive commentary. I know Sokal and Bricmont aren't professional writers, but it doesn't appear that they had much editorial help, either.

In a way, the more general chapters are the most impressive ones here: the first "Intermezzo" has a useful analysis of the shortcomings of Karl Popper's work and the overreaction it produced (by Feyerabend and others). The "Epilogue" is in many ways the strongest and most convincing statement Sokal has yet made about the damage and mistrust created by the aggressive mindlessness of postmodernism. After all, Sokal and Bricmont are really doing two different things in this book: exposing those who appropriate scientific ideas without knowing what they are discussing (i.e., Lacan, Kristeva, et al), and arguing against those advocating the "strong program" in the Sociology of Science (i.e., Latour). It's in the "Epilogue" where I think they make a plausible case that these things are not only related but harmful intellectual practices.

In sum, then, Fashionable Nonsense is enjoyable enough, but should have been more smoothly developed. Sokal and Bricmont are in a position of great strength, but didn't take full advantage of it.