SCIENTISTS 鈥渃ling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment
hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook . . . that there exists an
external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human鈥�. So
physicist Alan Sokal introduced his famous spoof essay published in Social
Text, despite the fact that it was an acerbic parody of postmodernists鈥�
abuse of the imagery of scientific discourse and full of deliberate
errors鈥攐r so many observers report, anyway.
New Yorker Sokal鈥檚 playful exposure of the intellectual carelessness of
postmodern editors provoked a frisson among fellow physicists, largely
expressed in e-mail. In Impostures Intellectuelles (Editions Odile
Jacob, $39.95/140 francs, ISBN 2738105033), he set out with Jean
Bricmont, physics professor at the University of Louvain, to show that the
emperors of French philosophy have no clothes. L鈥橝ffaire Sokal provoked
editorials in Le Monde. More ironically inclined readers can find
pleasure in the text鈥檚 demonstrations of Lacan, Baudrillard,
Deleuze-and-Guattari, and a dozen eminent others talking utter cobblers
about science.
Bricmont and Sokal do miss one tiny but probably crucial point. Mark Seem, in
his introduction to the English edition of Deleuze and Guattari鈥檚
Anti-Oedipus, claims them as successors to the 鈥渟toned thinking鈥� of Miller,
Nietzsche or Artaud.
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There is a serious problem with this witty deconstruction: the question of
Realism, an external, independent reality, is a long-standing one posed by the
very sober as much as by the would-be sciences of, say, consciousness. To insist
with the authors that reality can be taken for granted as a working hypothesis
and then ignored may be to miss the bus of post-postmodernism.