Received: from mx05.globecomm.net (mx05.globecomm.net [206.253.129.28]) by email.mcmail.com (9.9.9/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA06159 for ; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 00:58:16 +0100 (BST) Received: from maelstrom.stjohns.edu (maelstrom.stjohns.edu [149.68.1.24]) by mx05.globecomm.net (8.8.8/8.8.0) with ESMTP id TAA29398 for ; Wed, 5 Aug 1998 19:58:23 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199808052358.TAA29398@mx05.globecomm.net> Received: from maelstrom.stjohns.edu by maelstrom.stjohns.edu (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <0.3389B889@maelstrom.stjohns.edu>; Wed, 5 Aug 1998 17:30:28 -1300 Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 17:30:27 -0400 From: "L-Soft list server at St. John's University (1.8c)" Subject: File: "SCI-CULT LOG9807" To: Ian Pitchford X-UIDL: 2ebe63ac3d597826bf709f7b148a51b9 X-PMFLAGS: 33554560 0 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 00:33:28 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Review of "Impostures Intellectuelles" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE =20 BOOK REVIEW =20 _________________________________________________________________ =20 IMPOSTURES INTELLECTUELLES by Alain Sokal and Jean Bricmont Available to purchase from Amazon.com Jacob, Paris, 1998, 276 pages, 140fr., ISBN 2 7381 0503 3 _________________________________________________________________ =20 Reviewed by Kevin Mulligan, Geneva, Switzerland _________________________________________________________________ =20 Encouraged by the success of Sokal's masterly and now notorious experiment, the publication in Social Text of a parody of postmodern thought (see Paul Boghossian's description and discussion in TLS 13/12/96), Sokal and Bricmont have undertaken a much more thorough exercise in intellectual and moral hygiene. Dismayed by postmodernism's popularity, especially in North America, they concentrate on two aspects of the phenomenon: first, the extraordinary level of misuse of science and scientific terminology in recent Parisian thought; second, relativistic currents in analytic philosophy. Their nosology of Parisian thought addresses a bewildering variety of symptoms: Lacan's claim that elementary topological structures explain the structure of mental illness; Irigaray's suggestion that the equation E =3D mc2 might be sexed ("sexu=E9e"); Baudrillard's assertion that In the Euclidean space of history, the quickest path from one point to another is a straight line, that of Progress and Democracy. But this holds only of the linear space of the Enlightenment. In ours, the non-Euclidean space of the end of the century, an evil curvature invincibly diverts all trajectories. =20 Then there is Deleuze and Guattari on the nature of philosophy. They write that the first difference between philosophy and science is to be found in their respective attitudes towards chaos. Chaos ...is defined less by its disorder than by the infinite speed with which every form which opens up in it is dissipated. It is an emptiness which is not a nothingness but something virtual, containing all possible particles and extracting all possible forms which arise and immediately disappear, without consistency, without reference, without repercussions. It is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance. Philosophy asks how to maintain infinite speeds whilst gaining in consistency by giving a knowledge which is peculiar to the virtual. =20 R=E9gis Debray on the nature of society: The statement of the "secret" of collective misfortunes, that is to say, of the a priori condition of all political history, past, present and to come, is to be found in a few words, simple and childish...This secret has the form of a logical law, a generalization of G=F6del's theorem: there is no organized system without closure, and no system can be closed with the help only of the elements belonging to the system... =20 And then, in his discussion of what he generously calls the "principle of G=F6del-Debray," there is Michel Serres' claim that R=E9gis Debray applies to social groups or finds in them the theorem of incompleteness, which holds for formal systems, and shows that societies only organize themselves on the express condition that they are founded on something other than themselves, external to their definition or boundary. They cannot be self-sufficient. He calls this foundation religious. By way of G=F6del he completes Bergson. =20 Sokal and Bricmont quote a large number of claims in this vein--by Kristeva, Latour and Virilio in addition to Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Irigaray and many others who are discussed in a more cursory fashion. They describe their contexts, document their view that the passages they quote are not atypical and show how the different claims fit into their wide-ranging taxonomy of cavalier approaches to science. This involves giving rapid and lucid explanations of what a number of different expressions in physics and mathematics actually mean, thus enabling the reader to make up his own mind about where the texts dealt with belong on the continuum between honest attempts to further knowledge and culpable conceptual insouciance. When Lacan confuses irrational and imaginary numbers, when Kristeva misunderstands the axiom of choice, we are not, the argument goes, to think that the confusions are isolated; nor that there are an awful lot of them. Rather, the claim is that the confusions and parade of ill-understood scientific terminology or superficial erudition are designed to impress, and are part and parcel of an enterprise which is indifferent to the real content of the concepts employed. To use a phrase due to Debray, in a text subsequent to that quoted above, "G=F6delity is an illness that has become widespread." And, one might add, the family of illnesses to which G=F6delity or G=F6del-mania belong= s has also grown. To many a topic in physics, logic and mathematics there now corresponds a distinct Parisian illness which is parasitic on the terminology peculiar to the topic. Its main symptom is the tendency to regurgitate portions of the relevant jargon in more or less random ways. =20 Well aware that postmodernism in the US also often draws on what are felt to be congenial developments within analytic philosophy of science, Sokal and Bricmont interrupt their sottisier to provide a long critique of the cognitive relativisms encouraged by Kuhn and Feyerabend, of their roots in Popper's (non-relativistic) philosophy of science and of the relativisms they detect in recent sociology of science. Their own epistemology is refreshingly old-fashioned, although by no means popular today with most of their philosophical allies. We are, they hold, directly aware only of our own sensations and infer from these to the existence of an external world which explains better than anything else the regularities of our experience. Similarly, the main reason for believing in the truth of science is that it explains the coherence of our experience. Rationality in science and in everyday life are of the same general type; the scientist functions like a detective and there is as little reason to be a relativist about the results in one case as in the other. They note that philosophical relativism about factual propositions--the view that the validity of such propositions is relative to an individual or group--contradicts the conception scientists have of their activities. One philosophical response to this is to question the relevance of this or any other philosophical conviction to scientific activity. But Sokal and Bricmont provide a number of telling anecdotes about the extent to which relativistic platitudes have now seeped into the culture at large which suggest that the stock philosophical views about the relations between science, common sense and philosophy, in particular about the continuities and discontinuities between these, need rethinking. =20 What is the relation between Parisian abuses of science and the relativisms defended by analytic philosophers? As far as I can tell, they merely coexist in the "discourses" of contemporary postmodernism. Indeed Sokal and Bricmont stress that their criticisms of the abuses are independent of their critique of relativism. They also mention a fundamental difference between these two components of postmodernism. Relativism has been defended within analytic philosophy, but a recurring feature of the pseudo-scientific verbiage they quote is that it occurs in contexts (and, it is worth adding, in traditions) in which no attempt is made to defend what seems to be said. They note, too, some intermediate cases between these two extremes, such as "subtle" misunderstandings of chaos theory. =20 Sokal and Bricmont do not investigate in any systematic way the relations between the two components of postmodernism on which they concentrate. But they provide a French translation of Sokal's original parody and a commentary thereon which together go some way towards documenting their view of how postmodernism's parts hang together in contemporary thought in the US. In an epilogue they provide some conjectures about how these aspects of postmodernism came about: the failure to distinguish between empiricism and the empirical attitude and between scientism and science; the role of traditional philosophico-literary education; the assumption that only postmodernism can provide a philosophical basis for "the politics of difference;" the possibility that philosophical consumerism and hostility to science have come to be seen in some milieux as easy alternatives to politics. =20 Are their Parisian targets intellectual impostors? Sokal and Bricmont tend to assume that this is at least in part always the case. They attribute to their targets a number of intellectual vices. When they mention the choice between the two hypotheses of conscious fraud and self-deception they claim to be not particularly interested in settling the question. They assume, too, that in one way or another the texts they discuss are supposed to belong to some sort of identifiable theoretical enterprise. Although I think they are right about this, it is by no means obvious that this is so. In their most explicit discussion of this question, their account of Lacan, they point out that admirers of Lacan and of other Parisian thinkers often claim that their texts are contributions neither to science, nor to philosophy nor to literature. In the case of Lacan, Sokal and Bricmont conclude that the genre in question is that of a "secular mysticism" designed to evoke a religious response and, of course, reverent exegesis. =20 The philosophical background to the Parisian texts is what is often called, except on the Continent, Continental Philosophy. If one thing stands out in this large and varied tradition, from its German beginnings in the writings of Dilthey, the later Husserl and Heidegger to its later Gallic transmogrifications, it is the turn away from the conception of philosophy as a theoretical enterprise. The most obvious symptom of this is the relative absence in Continental Philosophy of the traditional theoretical apparatus of elucidations, distinctions, justifications and objections, an absence that also characterizes anglophone "Theory." Furthermore, Continental Philosophy is marked not so much by relativism as by one or another form of hostility to realism. Relativism, after all, is a view about the truth of propositions or theories. But, for those who take Heidegger seriously, whether pure or jumbled together with Freud, semiology or mathematics, the primary locus of truth is not propositions and their ilk at all. I say "hostility" to realism since "antirealism" and idealisms of different stripes, like any philosophical position, can be and have been defended in a properly theoretical fashion. But in Continental Philosophy atheoretical or anti-theoretical modes of writing--in all their unsurveyable variety, writing which is, through and through, expressive, declamatory, allusive, hagiographic, programmatic, metaphorical etc.--are the norm. =20 The institutional background of Continental Philosophy throws some light on the way it is done. The philosophers and thinkers dealt with by Sokal and Bricmont form--together with the small embattled band of French analytic philosophers--almost the whole of contemporary philosophy in France. For by far the greater part of what is called philosophy there is in fact not philosophy at all but rather the history of philosophy. This is in turn connected with the close links in French universities between philosophy and the humanities and thus with the fact that there is so little philosophy of hard science in these and other French institutions. (Of all the French thinkers criticized by Sokal and Bricmont perhaps only Michel Serres and Alan Badiou, who are discussed only in passing, would claim to be philosophers of mathematics.) Even in 1944, Julien Benda noted the widespread French preference for a philosophical method, which is that of literature where it is not that of music. =20 Sokal and Bricmont wisely do not attempt to delve into the background of the abuses they bring into such sharp focus, with one exception. They trace the sad story of Bergson's persistence in misunderstanding the theory of relativity and the continued failure of French and Belgian philosophers to appreciate just how sad a story this is. Bergson was not, they note, a postmodern philosopher. But if Benda is right, Bergson played an important role in teaching French philosophers to do philosophy as if it were literature. =20 Sokal and Bricmont have some predecessors--Julien Benda, Louis Rougier, Jean-Fran=E7ois Revel and Jacques Bouveresse. But their detailed focus on just one aspect of recent French thought is new and has, I suspect, provoked more and more violent reactions than other contributions to the genre. Unsurprisingly, one feature of French responses to their book has been to suggest that they are francophobes. This is particularly cruel since, in spite of their pronounced political correctness, Sokal and Bricmont persist in writing "anglo-saxon" instead of, say, "anglophone," like good francophiles. =20 A more distant predecessor is the Austrian novelist-philosopher Robert Musil who, in 1921, carefully dissected Spengler's casual approach to mathematics and physics in order to lay bare some of the key features of the irrationalisms prominent in German thought at that time. Musil reflected at length on the relations between philosophy as a theoretical enterprise and as a nontheoretical enterprise and often argued that, although the latter is as necessary as the former, it should not fall theoretically short of the former. Where Sokal and Bricmont betray their exasperation with writers who simply could not be bothered even to consult scientific popularizations, Musil suggests that the important thing is to "go to the end of the trampoline of science before jumping off." =20 Sokal and Bricmont are distressed by the popularity of postmodernism on the left in the US. They might take comfort from the fact that when Musil noted the connections before the Second World War between irrationalist philosophies and their attitude towards science, on the one hand, and politics and styles of life, on the other hand, the irrationalisms he attacked, such as that of Spengler, were more often to be found on the right than on the left. =20 Sokal and Bricmont are, by and large, content to accuse most of their Parisian targets of impostures and deliberate obscurantism. They do not consider the more severe verdict envisaged by Russell in a passage they quote in which Russell predicted that to give up the conception of truth as something which depends on facts largely beyond our control would be to take a step down the road which leads to a sort of madness. Nor the only slightly less severe diagnosis that Musil might well have envisaged. Of the "higher, pretentious form of stupidity," Musil said in 1937 that it ...is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right... This higher stupidity is the real disease of culture... and to describe it is an almost infinite task. It reaches into the highest intellectual sphere [Geistigkeit]... Years ago I wrote about this form of stupidity that "there is absolutely no significant idea that stupidity would not know how to apply; stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage." The stupidity this addresses is... a dangerous disease of the mind. _________________________________________________________________ =20 Copyright =A9 1998, Kevin Mulligan Kevin Mulligan is Professor of Analytic Philosophy in the University of Geneva. =20 This review was first published in the Times Literary Supplement on May 1, 1998. It was reproduced in naturalSCIENCE on May 23, 1998. =20 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 00:35:28 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: "Left Conservatism" conference (part 1) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Left Conservatism: A Conference Report =20 Matt Wray =20 Bad Subjects, Issue #37 March 1998 =20 Copyright (c) 1998 by Matt Wray. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of Bad Subjects. ___________________________________ =20 Left Conservatism: A Workshop Saturday, January 31, 1998 Panelists: Jonathan Arac, Paul Bov=E9, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Joseph Buttigieg. Moderator & Convenor: Chris Connery =20 Stepping into the Ring =20 "'Left Conservatism' or Left Factionalism? Who invented this strange and wondrous new term, 'Left Conservatism'? And why have they done so?" So the flyer began. Black ink on glowing neon red paper, it had been thrust into my path by a bespectacled graduate student just as I crossed into the lecture hall where the Left Conservatism conference was getting underway. "Counterprogram?" he offered, although his hushed voice carried none of the usual rising intonations which signal a question--it was more of a flat statement of fact, a noncommittal if slightly conspiratorial declaration. (Suddenly, I felt like I was being offered drugs by some suspicious looking dude in the park. I hesitated, but only for a split second. This shit looked too good to pass up!) =20 Despite the bloody hue of the paper and the shrill tenor of alarm carried by its headline, the flyer began innocently and calmly enough. I was happy to see the questions stated plainly and pointedly, for they seemed to cut directly to the issues at hand. The "counterprogram," the two-page, single-spaced document I now held in my hand, was written, produced and signed by sixteen graduate students drawn from UC Santa Cruz's (UCSC) History of Consciousness, Sociology and Anthropology departments. It seemed well thought out, if somewhat hastily written. But it did ask the important questions: Where had this term come from and why was it circulating now? In large part, these were the very questions which impelled me to make the short drive from San Francisco down to UCSC that morning. The email and snail mail flyers which had advertised the conference had also been, it seemed to me, somewhat alarmist and openly aggressive: =20 "A specter is haunting U.S. intellectual life: the specter of Left Conservatism. Within academia and without, in events such as the Sokal affair, in the anti-theory polemics in The Nation and the Socialist Review, in work by authors such as Katha Pollit, Alan Sokal, and Barbara Ehrenreich, there is evidence of a phenomenon that might properly be labeled Left Conservativism: that is, an attack by "real" leftists on those portrayed as theory-mongering, hyper-professional, obscurantist pseudo-leftists. Left Conservatism's hostility to the anti-foundationalist theoretical work of the 1980s and 1990s shares features with left opposition to the radical anti-rationalist politics of the 1960s. The current polemics bring to the fore long unresolved questions about how the left conceives the nature and stakes of critical work, over the past fifty years and into the future." =20 This really did seem a bit over the top--hyperbolic to the point of parody. But maybe it was just good advertising copy, designed to spark interest in the event. Maybe Chris Connery, the moderator and convenor who, through his tenure as director of the Center for Cultural Studies at UCSC (arguably the most internationally famous and widely known and respected center for Cultural Studies in the US) had invited the panelists, wrote the flyer that way because he wanted to fill the hall. Maybe he felt he needed to provoke his readers a bit, since most of us are by now are quite bored with the tedious aftermath of the Science Wars, the Sokal affair, and the evolutionary biology vs. cultural studies debacle. How else to breath life into a tired, jejune and sterile debate, except by raising the specter of "haunting specters"? =20 But of course the point of the conference and of both the program and the counterprogram was that the debate was far from tired and worn out--it has, it seems, only just begun. Or better, it has just rekindled itself. It is impossible to say definitively when this latest battle began--does it date back to the raging debates of British Marxist historiographers of the old New Left, when, in the pages of The History Workshop Journal, historian E.P. Thompson slammed the new cultural theorists for "overtheoreticism?" Or did Alan Sokal fire the first shot? Or was it the Critics of Science and Empiricism like Donna Haraway and some of the editors of Social Text? Regardless, there seems to be agreement on both sides that this is turning out to be another episode in the periodic internecine war that the Left has always had with itself. =20 So where exactly did this latest specter of 'Left Conservatism' come from? In his opening remarks, Chris Connery credited Paul Bov=E9 with inventing the term a few years ago. Bov=E9, a professor of English from University of Pittsburgh, had apparently dropped the phrase in reference to liberal philosopher Richard Rorty, cultural studies assassin Alan Sokal, and the poetry editor of The Nation. Connery, overhearing the remark, went on to use the phrase and expand and extend the reference to include other writers at The Nation, including left feminist critics Katha Pollit and Barbara Ehrenreich (a usage of the term both Butler and Wendy Brown took exception to in their remarks) and even to Michael Moore. Left Conservatism, in Connery's formulation, is supposedly marked by a belief (always unspoken) in unmediated access to reality (empiricism); a pragmatic belief in the transparency of language, and a desire for some kind of foundational truth(s) upon which to build political identities, broad-based social movements, and to reinvigorate public, democratic discourse. Opposed to Left Conservatism, Connery argues, is the anti-foundationalism of poststructuralist intellectuals, who, like Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, reject all claims to philosophical essences and who are primarily concerned to interrogate the linguistic and epistemological preconditions under which certain political ideas and political identities come to be regarded as "true," "necessary, " or even as "useful." =20 In some ways, this seems like a fair characterization of the debate, since it is equally unfair to both sides. The Left Conservatist types are not as anti-theoretical as Connery would have us believe, nor are the forces of poststructuralism unconcerned or ignorant of immediate political contexts and issues. =20 In what follows I want to offer a brief summary of the remarks offered by each of the panelists (excepting for the moment the brief but interesting remarks of Joseph Buttigieg, a Gramsci scholar who seemed oddly out of place and out of step with the rest of the panelists). It is tempting to try to imagine how to incorporate all their remarks into a larger, more coherent anti-Left Conservatist position, but that would, I suppose, be a somewhat too obvious foundationalist move, so I won't make it! Rather than attempt any grand synthesis of their thoughts, I want to move on to a discussion of what wasn't discussed at the conference and what might have been, and why I think that the real casualties of this particular battle in the academic Left will be the younger generation of scholar/activists (myself included) who will be left to reconstruct a notion of Left politics long after the warriors of poststructuralism and Left Conservatism retire to their respective Valhallas of tenured deadwood. =20 Paul Bov=E9 -- Enter the conversation or change the subject? =20 Bov=E9's talk focused on North American philosophers Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor. Both present interesting case studies for the present debate because they are known to be both anti-foundationalist and prominent figures on the liberal Left. And both at times have criticized poststructuralists for their obscure theories and difficult if not impenetrable prose. That is, both Rorty and Taylor would seem to be simultaneously poststructuralist and Left Conservatist. =20 Bov=E9 tackles Rorty and Taylor by arguing that they are not as thoroughly anti-foundationalist as they claim to be. Embedded in their philosophical pragmatism is a narrative of movement towards the types of philosophical language which can create and sustain communities of scientific knowers. This movement, Bov=E9 argues, can only really be understood as a kind of evolutionary development of language, as a kind of progress towards a state where secular knowledges freely compete for truth status in the arena of rationality. Of course, this notion of progress is, in Bov=E9's eyes, a foundationalist myth, a modernist metanarrative that we have believed for far too long. And it undercuts Rorty and Taylor's claims to be anti-foundationalist--their foundation is tied to the disciplinary concerns of an Anglophone philosophical tradition, one which Foucault was implicitly and, at times, explicitly critical of. In Bov=E9's punning phrase, Foucault was interested not so much in entering that particular philosophical conversation--instead, he wanted to change the subject (both the subject of the conversation and the notion of subjectivity). =20 With his talk, Bov=E9 tried to open up the fight on the philosophical front, dragging Rorty and Taylor into the ring and subjecting their texts to poststructuralist rigor in the same fashion that they have subjected Foucault to their rigorous analytic pragmatism. Their claims to anti-foundationalism are found wanting and this, Bov=E9 states, undercuts their arguments against poststructuralist theory. Of course, one could argue that Bov=E9's fantasy of a text purged of all foundationalisms is as unattainable as the pragmatist's dream of a philosophical statement purified of all non-analytical categories. Where does this leave us? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 00:36:27 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: "Left Conservatism" conference II MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE =20 Judith Butler -- Remarx on Engels and Sex =20 Judith Butler, who is a professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and is perhaps best known for her book, Gender Trouble, began her comments by pointing out that anti-foundationalism can neither secure nor destroy politics (or any given political position). This is, in fact, precisely the point of anti-foundationalist critique, that nothing, including anti-foundationalism, can serve as a firm and stable foundation for building politics or political identity. She went on to say that the point of deconstruction (one of the main methodologies of anti-foundationalists) is not to eliminate categories of thought or being, but to interrogate them. When we do so, she argued, paraphrasing from Spivak, we are inquiring about categories we absolutely cannot do without, since the very language of our inquiry depends upon the categories we are attempting to interrogate. =20 Butler went on to identify what she feels are the two complaints most often leveled against postmodernism: =20 1. Marxism has been reduced to cultural politics. This is, in a nutshell, the "Cultural Studies sucks" argument. In this line of complaint, culture has replaced economics (understood here as the struggle over resources and the processes of production) and politics (understood here as the struggle over the control of State power) as the proper realm of struggle. This has led, the plaintiffs say, to excesses of discourse analysis which completely miss the material. =20 2. New social movements have been too concerned with the cultural domain. This has resulted in increased factionalism, seen chiefly in the rise of identity politics and identitarian movements and in the gradual disappearance of the common goals, ideals, and language which once gave (some) unity to the Left. This complaint is usually accompanied by a call to return to a mode of economic and materialist analysis, or as Butler dismissively termed it, "an anachronistic materialism as the basis for a reinvigorated Left orthodoxy." =20 Butler takes up these complaints as they appear in the work of feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser, (who, Butler was at pains to say, is not a Left Conservatist!). While Fraser has written that identity politics and political correctness are little more than derogatory slurs for feminism, anti-racism and anti-heterosexism, she has also located the struggle of gays and lesbians strictly in the realm of a struggle over cultural recognition. That is, Fraser identities gay and lesbian politics not as a struggle for material equality, but as a struggle for full inclusion in a pluralist, democracy. =20 Butler countered Fraser by citing Engels' classic text on the origins of the Family, the State and Private Property, a nineteenth century text which places the heterosexual family at the heart of the system which reproduces (both in the biological and social senses of the word) capitalist labor and capitalist property rights. Butler claims that, contrary to Fraser, Engel's insight places the politics of sexuality directly at the heart of any Left agenda for social change and social and material equity. =20 Butler has managed to take on the "anachronistic materialism" of Fraser et al. But despite the brilliance of her prose and her talent for terse, ironic epigrams ("the critique of cultural iconicity is the means by which cultural iconicity is achieved"), Butler's talk left one wondering how one might test her hypothesis. Will changing family structures really affect the sorts of social change that we on the left would like to see? The work of anthropologist Judith Stacey (see her book, Brave New Worlds) is perhaps an example of a recent effort to place these ideas to the test, but Butler seems reluctant to leave the realm of the purely discursive, to abandon the close textual reading for a moment of participant observation. Does merely citing the authority of Engel's lay the question to rest? =20 Wendy Brown -- Conservative Desires =20 Wendy Brown, professor of Women's Studies at UCSC, offered what was perhaps the most conciliatory approach to addressing the poststructuralist/Left Conservatist split. She positioned herself as someone who was deeply ambivalent about the terms of the debate and as someone who understood not only the intellectual stakes involved, but also the affective and libidinal (i.e. the emotional) stakes as well. She spoke of her own conservatism, explaining that her pedagogy had been described more than once as conservative and traditional. She also spoke of her belief in politics as a semi-autonomous realm, one which cannot simply be reduced to the personal--a belief which has apparently garnered her the label of conservative in some circles. In these meandering opening remarks, Brown almost seemed to be saying "Don't take offense at being called a conservative--all of us on the Left have our conservative impulses. At least have the intellectual honesty to admit these moments when you are confronted with them." =20 Brown then went on to offer a definition of Left Conservatism as essentially a reaction to and a refusal of theory. The theoretical insights of poststructuralists include, among others: the decentering of capitalism (or any single force as determinant of social life); the Foucauldian notion of power as everywhere, rather than the old formula of Who? Whom? (i.e., who wields it, whom does it effect?); the abandonment of revolutionary politics; and the emphasis on language--its priority over deeds, words, or social forces. =20 shiny happy people Left Conservatist rhetoric tends to portray poststructuralist rhetoric as "too hard, too dense, and thus insufficiently political." These complaints, Brown remarked, often take the form of nostalgic desire for something imagined to be lost: for a unified social movement instead of the fractious nature of identity politics and new social movements; for historical materialism instead of discourse analysis; for a clearer account of accountability and human agency instead of the complexities and indecipherabilities of the postmodern subject; and a desire to have real working class heroes instead of the deeply ambiguous and flawed heroes we have now. =20 Brown ended her talk by insisting that it is a mistake to conflate academic and political work. What we do in the academy, she claims, is think. To constrain thought to what has immediate political application, is to constrain our imaginations. =20 Left Out or Left Over? =20 I've offered these synopses from my (admittedly sketchy) notes in order to convey some of the tone and rhetorical strategies of the papers. Given more space and time, I would have liked to comment on the many important and insightful remarks which were made by audience members in response to the panelists. The exchanges were numerous and heated and any attempt on my part to capture them faithfully would fall far short. =20 In my judgment, what was not said at the conference is far more telling than what was. There was no real concern expressed for the effects this may be having on the younger generation of Left intellectuals and academics. Many of us were there at the conference, many of us have been following these debates with interest and with a strong sense of investment in the future of the debates. The "Counterprogram" was an expression of concern and maybe even something like a cry for help. Many of us in the younger generation have enormous respect for the intellectual and political work of combatants on both sides of the current debate. Perhaps as a child of divorce, I personalize this debate too much and project too much of my own complexes on this, but really, how is this situation any different from the child who wants the parents to stop fighting and to take some responsibility for parenting--for raising up the next generation, sharing intellectual skills and political organizing tactics in a spirit of love and affection? (Don't tell me it's different because we're all adults, because it's clear that some of the adults are acting like children). There is a pedagogical and political responsibility here to not only pass on the wisdom and learning of the elders, but to help create the kind of community where that wisdom and learning can take root and flourish. =20 In my view, what is needed if this debate is to move forward is the following: =20 1) Crash courses in the intellectual and political history of the Left that has preceded this moment of struggle within the Left and an analysis of the discourses which make up those traditions. What was distressing about the conference was that for all the poststructuralist talk about self-reflexivity, the participants did little by way of contextualizing their own intellectual claims or positioning themselves in relation to specific intellectual traditions. Bov=E9 came closest to making a contribution in this area when he said, in closing, that "post-structuralism is a technical term" that has a complex intellectual history deriving from the philosophy of Husserl and other Continental philosophers. While Bov=E9 is surely right to insist on this, it seemed that few in the audience, including myself, and even fewer in Left circles at large, really have a clue about what this intellectual history is, how it has changed over the past three decades, and how it relates to and shapes the contemporary debates about politics, identity, and culture. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure how many of my professors and graduate student colleagues are equipped with enough training and pedagogy in philosophy to help themselves or others grasp the philosophical nature of the debate). Interesting starting points for this process might be reviewing the events of May 1968, or the 1970s debates of the British New Left over Althusser and structural Marxism, or the more recent debates over Deconstruction within the North American Left in the late 1970s and 80s. =20 2) A fuller analysis of the ways these intellectual fault lines within the Left are contributing to the ascendancy of the Right and the continued rise of market forces in university life. David Noble's recent article in The Monthly Review on the commodification of education in the university is a perfect example of the kind of analysis that was largely missing from the conference (To be fair, both Chris Connery and Paul Bov=E9 touched briefly on this issue in their remarks). There is a missing institutional context here which is, in large part, going to determine the outcome of these debates over the next decade and into the next millennium. While some of this analysis has been carried out in the "Science Wars" issues of Social Text, it has generally not been centered enough in the debates, which have all too often been personalized and gossipy. Don't these debates enable the Right to succeed in further marketizing and privatizing education, while the Left sidelines itself with more factionalism? =20 I offer these two focus points for further conversation because I believe they offer opportunities for both sides to contribute to the training and development of a new generation of interdisciplinary activist/scholars on the Left. We need intellectual history and conjunctural analysis, not personal vendettas. We're all tired of the "Jerry Springer meets MLA" atmosphere that these acrimonious debates have created. Poststructuralists like Bov=E9, Butler, and Brown, are well positioned to help us understand the intellectual and political history we need to know in order to make sense of the present moment. And so-called "Left Conservatives," a great majority of whom are social scientists, are well suited to engage in the kind of empirically-minded research that we need to make sense of the current workings of capital and capitalist interests in the new educational marketplace. I'm talking about a division of labor which has as its goal the production of a new form of interdisciplinary knowledge, one which is neither rigorously poststructuralist, nor structuralist, neither modern nor postmodern, but simply oppositional. That is, by the way, what we here at Bad Subjects try to do. We often fail, but at least we can still talk to one another. ______________________ =20 Matt Wray is a graduate student in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He is co-editor of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, forthcoming from Duke University Press in 1999. Reach him at mwray@socrates.berkeley.edu. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 09:33:42 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Aronowitz and Bohm Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit In a message dated 98-06-28 00:58:23 EDT, Mart Malakoffwrites: >Actually, the 'metaphysics' of Bohm to which I referred was not his Krishnamurti >etc ideas people might know of, but his deterministic interpretation >of QM >referred to in High Super. > I think actually this is tied to the same metaphysics of S Aronowitz > mart I wonder whether Aronowitz even understands Bohm's metaphysics. In his article in the famous Social Text issue that includes Sokal's hoax, Aronowitz claims that Bohm's philosophy is based on that of Kant. this seems bass ackwards. In fact Planck, Heisenberg and especially Bohr were followers of Kant, with Heisenberg and Bohr and one point claiming that we can't think outside of the categories and models of classical physics (while the micro- world doesn't follow these), while Bohm is closer to a realistic view of physical reality as monistic (although he sometimes lapses into an extreme subjectivism, where everyone has their own "paradigm"). Clarification of this by anybody who has read Bohm's later stuff would be appreciated. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 13:22:37 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Bergson and impostures Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit In the thoughtful review by Kevin Mulligan of Sokal and Bricmont, kindly posted by Norman Levitt, it is written: <> Before dismissing Bergson as a complete jerk, one needs to separate several issues. Bergson indeed made some major mistakes (one pointed out by Einstein himself) in arguing about special relativity theory. Do these mistakes mean that Bergson's views ought to be dismissed, or that his philosophical claims about time have no value? Bergson was not, contrary to common opinion, trying to defend Newtonian absolute space, and he accepted the demise of the classical aether, unlike a number of reactionary philosophical holdouts against relativity theory. Several physicists, such as de Broglie, Watanabe and Costa de Beauregard have seen value in some of Bergson's ideas in relation to wave mechanics and thermodynamics, despite his mess-ups on relativity theory. (see Bergson and the Evolution of Physics, ed., Gunther, U of Tenn Press, 1967, for selections of praise of Bergson by these physicists, and including Bergson's exchanges with Einstein about relativity theory.) A number of continental writers including (to choose two who are Polish, and Czech-American respectively, rather than French) have noted that Bergson's tendency to deny multiple time-sequences and the objective reality of external times of other entities are inconsistent with his own earlier philosophical writings. The spirit of his earlier writings contradicts the letter of his unfortunate sally into relativity theory. Sigmund Zawirski in his Evolution de la notion du temps (1937) notes that Bergson's own earlier "Matter and Memory" (a very interesting book) contradicted Bergson's later denial of multiple temporal rhythms in his discussion of relativity theory. Milic Capek points out in Bergson's emphasis on the difference between time and space and his denial of absolutely separate material particles fits well with much of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, but that Bergson's own treatment of time in reaction to Einstein mistakenly treated Minkowski's diagram as a "spatialization of time" similar to that of classical treatments of time as a fourth dimension in d'Alembert and others. (Capek's Bergson and Modern Physics is in Boston Studies in the Philos of Sci vol. 7, and some of Zawirski is in Boston Studies, vol. 157. Also there is Capek's early 60s The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics.) Bergson's claims would have one empirical consequence. Embryological development would not be slowed by high velocity down the same way elementary particle processes are. This would seem a priori false to a reductionist and probably is empirically false, but at least its a testable claim, not a pure "expressive, ...hagiographic, " claim of the sort that Mulligan accuses recent French philosophy, nor is it purely poetic or musical as Mulligan, following Benda, accuses Bergson. Even if Bergson's claims about the twin paradox are messed up, that's not to say that the twin paradox is totally cleared up. On another list the twin paradox was brought up and a number of physicists indignantly claimed the solution was clear and simple, but gave "obvious solutions" inconsistent with one another. Marder edited a whole book ("Time and the Space Traveller") of little "obvious solutions" to the twin paradox some of which are mutually incompatible. Bergson probably suffered from writing too well and deceptively simply. This made him extraordinarily popular, which led to his soon being dismissed by "serious philosophers." Part of Bergson's loss of respect in the English speaking world is due to Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy" which portrays Bergson as a proto-Nazi, when in fact Bergson died from illness contracted while waiting on a bread line in occupied France after he refused the Nazis' offer to give him special treatment as an "honorary Aryan." One thing that has struck me is that in the 1920s general philosophers such as Whitehead, Cassirer, Bergson and George Herbert Mead all at least attempted to grapple with the general philosophical consequences of relativity theory, whatever you think of their particular conclusions. Today in Anglo-American philosophy the philosophers of science discuss such issues, but usually without attempting in any way to discuss their implications for patterns of thought in general, while most general philosophers don't even try to grapple with the consequences of contemporary science and math and often uncritically tacitly presuppose older interpretations (such as Hilbert's formalist program or conventionalism, which have shown many weaknesses and flaws). I might mention in relation to the recent exchange about Bohm, that Bergson's notions that there might be other ways to think about or make models of physical processes other than the classical ones, especially as elaborated on by Capek at the end of Phil Impact, resemble in many respects Bohm's suggestions about trying new imaginary models and rejecting Bohr and Heisenberg's claim that we are trapped conceptually in classical models -- which supposedly prevents us from thinking directly about quantum reality. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 14:30:56 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Left Conservatism Counterdocument Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit This was the student counterdocument distributed at the Left Conservatism workshop" -Val Dusek LEFT CONSERVATISM" OR LEFT FACTIONALISM? Who invented this strange and wondrous new term, "Left Conservatism"? And why have they done so? We will all have to wait to hear what the panelists actually have to say about these matters. However, as UCSC graduate students in the humanities and social sciences committed to left critical thought, we feel the need to respond directly to the publicized workshop description. We are disturbed by the tone of the description, which implicitly mobilizes the familiar language of left factionalism (Out with the Trotskyites! Smash the Petty Bourgeois Revisionists! Down with Feminist Moralists! Out with the Left Conservatives! Etc.). Whether or not this villification of imagined enemies within the left was intended to achieve some parodical effect, it in fact does nothing to serve the organizers' stated interest in furthering "discussion and debate." There is an important difference between honest, if pointed, critique, on the one hand, and attempts to stigmatize those who would dissent from the status quo in theory, on the other. The text announcing the conference turns on the claim that critique of "anti-foundationalism" = "anti-theory" = "conservatism." This equation implies that the test of true radicalism is adherence to "anti- foundationalism." Yet there are many radicals who embrace ideas which often run counter to "anti-foundationalist" claims: e.g., that radical politics does, and should, contain an ethical dimension; that there is an essential, not merely nominal, difference between oppression and liberation; that the natural world, and the beings who inhabit it, cannot be reduced to the discursive constructions and meanings that humans beings attach to them; that patriarchy, capitalism and racism are determinate historical systems which can and should be abolished rather than simply resisted, and so on. Such statements are surely open to debate and revision. Are they, however, "conservative" or "anti-theoretical"? If so, in what way? We would honestly like to know. We would also like to know whether the organizers consider "anti- foundationalism" (or any other theoretical tendency with which they identify) to be above skepticism or revision. Do they believe that they have stumbled upon the "correct" path of analysis and critique--the one that decisively answers the contradictions and mistakes of left-feminist praxis over the course of the last century? One immune, presumably, to new criticism or interrogation? Is the mere questioning of the emergent poststructuralist orthodoxy in the humanities itself a kind of class treason--de facto proof of one's reactionary politics? If the organizers had their way, would those who remain disinclined to be incorporated within the postmodernist paradigm be excommunicated from the left? (Or would they just be denied tenure?) What does it mean when scholars who claim (in their published works) to embrace "difference" and radical democracy resort to name-calling as a form of discourse? When scholars who reputedly oppose "binary" and dualistic thinking feel the need to frame their opponents as a despised "other" (conservatives)? When anti- essentialists invoke a purely essentialist and fictive category--"left conservatism"--to tar their critics? When writers who often express skepticism toward substantive notions of truth, value, agency, and ideology nevertheless arrogate for themselves the terrain of political vanguardism, replete with denunciation and ad hominem attacks? Indeed, on what possible epistemological, ethical, or political foundation do they feel entitled to do so? There is surely some irony in the spectacle of well-compensated and comfortable academic theorists in the humanities declaring, with absolute self-seriousness, that their work represents one of the last redoubts of critical thought in the entire United States. In this regard, it seems to us curious that of the three culprits named in the conference description as engaged in "attacks on critical theory"--Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollit, and Alan Sokal--two are among the nation's most prominent feminist public intellectuals, and the other is a physicist without formal credentials in the humanities. But why name these names and not, say, others who have criticized the postmodern fashion yet are in a better position to defend themselves against the organizers' slings and arrows? Terry Eagleton, Susan Bordo, Barbara Epstein, Sabina Lovibond, Fredric Jameson, Adolf Reed, Alex Callinicos, Ellen Wood, David Harvey, Arif Dirlik, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, and many others come to mind. There must be something more here than the attempt of certain academic theorists to assert their rhetorical hegemony over the entire left, or a naked appeal to academic professionalism (the idea, recently defended by Stanley Fish, that only professionals ought to comment on other professionals' ideas). Isn't there? We do not believe that being skeptical of poststructuralist claims leads to an anti-theoretical position. On the contrary, we passionately affirm the need for theory as a crucial tool for making sense of the world, and for providing us with the maps necessary for transforming it. For this reason, we find the workshop organizers' conception of theory to be narrow and impoverished, for it seems to offer a basis only for determining "correct" ideology, rather than for changing the world. This does not make the organizers themselves "conservative," however, only (we believe) wrong. Signed,Julie Beck, Soci Ernesto Bustillos, Soc, Mark Cobb, HistCons, Santosh George, HistCons Krista Harper, Anthro., Will Hull, Soc Pamela Kido, HistCons Barbara Ley, HistCons Jason Moore, History Sandra Meucci, Soc Kathy Miriam, History of Cons Justin Paulson, HistCons John Sanbonmatsu, HistCons Sina Saidi, Hist Consc Patrick Sand, Hist Cons Nancy Ziegler, Hist Cons ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 14:30:47 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Left Conservatism Leaflet Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit This is the original Left Conservatism conference announcement -Val Dusek conference bulletin LEFT CONSERVATISM: A Workshop Saturday, January 31 College 8, Room 240 1:00-5:30 PM Jonathan Arac, Paul Bové, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Joseph Buttigieg A specter is haunting U.S. intellectual life: the specter of Left Conservatism. Within academia and without, in events such as the Sokal affair, in the anti-theory polemics in The Nation and the Socialist Review, in work by authors such as Katha Pollit, Alan Sokal, and Barbara Ehrenreich, there is evidence of a phenomenon that might properly be labeled Left Conservativism: that is, an attack by "real" leftists on those portrayed as theory-mongering, hyper-professional, obscurantist pseudo-leftists. Left Conservatism's hostility to the anti-foundationalist theoretical work of the 1980s and 1990s shares features with left opposition to the radical anti- rationalist politics of the 1960s. The current polemics bring to the fore long unresolved questions about how the left conceives the nature and stakes of critical work, over the past fifty years and into the future. There seems to be at present an attempt at consensus-building among Left Conservatives that is founded on notions of the real, and of the appropriate language with which to analyze it. We can see, in the work of some of the writers listed above and in other work, claims for a certain kind of empiricism, for common sense, for linguistic transparency. Post-structuralist thought, often lumped together in all its varieties, is in the Left Conservative view guilty not only of its own intellectual failings, but of taking a wrong turn for left analysis in general. Left Conservativism challenges post-structuralists' left credentials on a variety of fronts, but a recurrent position is the claim for the incompatibility between anti-foundationalism and a political agenda predicated on real claims for social justice. If everything-class, race, gender, poverty, alienation- is "constructed," what is the real basis for political activism? This attack on anti-foundationalism and what is perceived as a disabling relativism, however, often brings Left Conservativism toward an uneasy convergence with anti-relativists on the right. What does it mean, then, when Barbara Ehrenreich and Roger Kimball (author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education) make similar critiques? What does it mean when Alan Sokal, an avowed leftist, finds inspiration in Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition : The Academic Left And Its Quarrels With Science, an openly anti-left polemic? A discussion of the stakes in this division is important and timely. U.S. university humanities depart- ments are among the few locations in this country where critical analysis of society, culture, thought, and ideology takes place, and the attacks on critical theory are not without effect. Identifying Left Conserv-atism, and discussing its historical, political, ideological, and theoretical character, is the focus of this one-day workshop at UC Santa Cruz. The workshop is structured to encourage discussion and debate. There will be considerable time for discussion following the participants' presentations. Participants: Jonathan Arac is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and writes on problems in the historical and comparative study of culture, literature and criticism. He has edited or co-edited several books, including Postmodernism and Politics, and Consequences of Theory. He is author of Critical Genealogies : Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies and the recently published Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target : The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Paul A. Bové is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and Editor of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture. The author of several books on culture, modernity, poetry, and the intellectual, including Destructive Poetics : Heidegger and Modern American Poetry; Intellectuals in Power : A Genealogy of Critical Humanism, and Mastering Discourse : The Politics of Intellectual Culture, Professor Bové is now completing a book on Henry Adams as well as a collection of essays called The End of Thinking. Wendy Brown is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Visting Professor of Political Science at the Uof C, Berkeley, and has published widely on feminist political theory, masculinity, identity politics, and power. Her publications include States Of Injury : Power And Freedom In Late Modernity and Manhood And Politics : A Fem-inist Reading In Political Theory. Judith Butler is Professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the U of Cal, Berkeley, and is a theorist of power, gender, sexuality, and identity. Her books include Bodies That Matter : On The Discursive Limits Of "Sex"; Excitable Speech : A Politics Of The Performative; Gender Trouble : Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity, and The Psychic Life Of Power : Theories In Subjection. Joseph Buttigieg is Professor of English at Notre Dame, and writes on the intersections of culture and politics in Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present time. His books include A Portrait Of The Artist In Different Perspective, on James Joyce, and Criticism Without Boundaries : Directions And Crosscurrents In Postmodern Critical Theory. A prominent Gramsci scholar, he has edited and translated the first complete critical edition of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 17:12:11 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Conference: Medicine and the Public Sphere Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Apologies for cross-postings. MEDICINE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT Places are still available for the 1998 Annual Conference of the Society for Social History of Medicine, to be held in Edinburgh University, 17-19 July 1998. Anyone wishing to attend should complete the attached booking form as soon as possible and forward it, with the requisite payment, to Steve Sturdy at the address below. PROGRAMME: Friday 17 July 2.00 - 3.30 pm Margaret Pelling (University of Oxford): The College of Physicians in early modern London: private ethics and public responsibility David Harley (University of Oxford): Early modern childbirth and the shifting boundary between private and public 4.00 - 5.30 pm Adrian Wilson (University of Leeds): The peace of the town: the Birmingham General Hospital and its public 1766-1791 Mark Jenner (University of York): Political economy, public interest and the politics of London water, c. 1790-1830 Saturday 18 July 9.00 - 10.30 am Logie Barrow (University of Bremen): `So vast and so minute': vaccination, the state and the public sphere in mid-nineteenth-century England Pamela K Gilbert (University of Florida): Producing the public: public medicine in private spaces in the 1860s 11.00 - 12.30 pm Christopher Hamlin (University of Notre Dame): Dung and the public domain, 1840-1865 Deborah Brunton (University of Huddersfield): Evil necessaries and abominable erections: dirt, disease the morality of the public privy in the Scottish city 2.00 - 3.30 pm Bill Luckin (Bolton Institute): The great London fogs of the nineteenth century: the `public', the `private' and the `indeterminate' in environmental history Elaine Thomson (University of Edinburgh): Between separate spheres: women, hospitals and public health in Edinburgh, 1880-1920 4.00 - 5.30 pm Martin Gorsky (University of Portsmouth) and Martin Powell (University of Bath): British hospitals and the public sphere, c. 1900-1947 Kim Pelis (Wellcome Institute): Coaxing life's blood into the heart of the nation: persuading citizens to donate blood for the public good in interwar Britain 5.30 - 6.30 SSHM Presidential Address: Prof Jerry Morris (London School of Hygiene) Sunday 19 July 9.00 - 10.30 am David Cantor (Manchester Metropolitan University): Constructing `the public': medicine, science and charity in twentieth-century Britain Timothy Boon (Science Museum, London): Recruiting the mass public for public health intervention: Britain in the 1940s 11.00 - 12.30 pm John Mohan (University of Portsmouth): Regionalism, regulation and rationality: hospital policy and the public sphere in the British health services Naomi Pfeffer (University of North London): From intervention to regulation: reproduction in Britain 1960-1990 To register for this conference, please print out and complete the booking form below, and return it, with the requisite payment, to Steve Sturdy, Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh, 21 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN, Scotland. Email: s.sturdy@ed.ac.uk METHODS OF PAYMENT: You can pay by cheque or money order, drawn against a UK bank, or by a bank draft payable in Pounds Sterling. Cheques must be made payable to The University of Edinburgh. You can also pay by credit card, but please note that you must then pay a 2% administration fee to cover the charge levied by the banks. BURSARIES: Please note that the SSHM makes available a number of bursaries, on a first-come-first-served basis, to help students and others on low incomes to meet the costs of attending conferences. If you would like to be considered for one of these, you should send a breakdown of your costs, plus a letter of recommendation from you supervisor or some other competent referee, to Dr David Wright, SSHM Treasurer, University of Nottingham, Department of History, Lenton Grove, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, Great Britain. The maximum amount payable is stlg100. * * * BOOKING FORM I wish to register for the SSHM conference on "Medicine and the Public Sphere", 17-19 July 1998 Name: ___________________________________________________ Address: ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ Email: ___________________ Phone: ________________________ REGISTRATION FEE (includes morning coffee and afternoon tea): SSHM members (stlg26) stlg_______ Non-members (stlg31) stlg_______ Student/unwaged (stlg17) stlg_______ ACCOMMODATION (bed and breakfast at Pollock Halls of Residence): Nights required: Friday 17 / Saturday 18 (Delete as appropriate) En suite (stlg34.50 per night) stlg_______ Shared facilities (stlg20.35 per night) stlg_______ Do you require information about hotel accommodation in Edinburgh? Yes / No MEALS (vegetarian options will be available): Buffet lunch, Saturday 18 (stlg7.50) stlg_______ Conference dinner, Sat 18 (stlg15.00) stlg_______ TOTAL PAYABLE stlg_______ (Cheques payable to University of Edinburgh) (Credit card payment form below) Do you require a receipt? Yes / No * * * CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS Name: ___________________________________________________ Address: ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ Type of card: VISA / ACCESS / MASTERCARD (Delete as appropriate) Card number: :__:__:__:__: :__:__:__:__: :__:__:__:__: :__:__:__:__: Card valid from: __/__/__ To: __/__/__ Amount to be charged: stlg___________ Administration fee (2%): stlg___________ Total to be paid: stlg___________ Cardholder's signature: __________________________ Date: __/__/__ __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 17:49:23 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Course vacancies at Shefield Centre for Psychotherapetic Studies, including research in history & philosophy of the biomedical and human sciences Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii" UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD F A C U L T Y O F M E D I C I N E CENTRE FOR PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC STUDIES A Postgraduate Centre for Training, Practice and Research The Centre is the largest and most diverse institution of its kind, offering a wide variety of academic, clinical and research programmes. It is unique in offering some of them by distance learning. Applications for Autumn 1998 are still being considered for the following academic courses. Please note that a number of them are available BY DISTANCE LEARNING. MA/DIPLOMA in PSYCHIATRY, PHILOSOPHY & SOCIETY (1 year full, 2/3 years part-time, 2 years distance learning) A programme which clarifies the problems of the mentally ill and their treatment, enabling practitioners and academics to become more adept at analysing and understanding this complex field from a number of different perspectives. This course is recognised by the ESRC with speciality status and a quota award. MA/DIPLOMA in DISABILITY STUDIES (1 year full, 2 years part-time, 2 years distance learning) An innovative course, equally concerned with the experience of disability and the improvement of practice. A wide range of disciplines and methodologies are called upon to explore disability within a social context. This course is recognised by the ESRC with speciality status and a quota award. Persons with severe disabliity and/or mobility problems may be able to obtain special consideration for their fees. MA/DIPLOMA in PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES (1 year full, 2 years part-time, 2 years distance learning) A pluralistic course exploring a range of psychoanalytic theories and practices, addressing key debates and controversies, and examining contemporary issues of psychoanalysis and cultural theory including post-structuralism, feminism, film, literary and social theory. Students are eligible to apply for British Academy funding. POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH (full-time, part-time and by distance learning) The Centre offers postgraduate research in the Faculty of Medicine, including MPhil, MD and PhD degrees. As an interdisciplinary Centre, there is a great diversity of research interests amongst the 30 academic staff. The Graduate School offers a range of scholarships and bursaries. Applications are also still being considered for Autumn 1998 for the following clinical training courses:- GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY POSTGRADUATE CERTIFICATE AND MSc IN GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY (1 and 4 years part-time) Training in Group Psychotherapy involving intensive clinical experience and academic training is available from an introductory Certificate programme up to a full accreditable MSc programme. UKCP accrediation anticipated in Spring 1998. Contact: Kathryn Murray (0114 222 2979); k.m.murray@shef.ac.uk INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOTHERAPY MA/POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA IN PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY UKCP/UPA Accredited Training (4 years part-time) This Masters course involves a rigorous academic and clinical training, supervision and personal therapy and is the first course to be jointly accredited by the UKCP and the Universities Psychotherapy Association. Contact: Trudy Coldwell (0114 222 2961); t.coldwell@shef.ac.uk ART PSYCHOTHERAPY POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA IN ART PSYCHOTHERAPY (2 years full, 3 years part-time) This course is accredited by the British Association of Art Therapists and the Department of Health for the training of art therapists. Students engage in extensive academic work and supervised clinical practice. Opportunities for further study to MA and PhD are available. Contact: Indira Samaraweera (0114 222 2964); i.samaraweera@shef.ac.uk COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL PSYCHOTHERAPY CERTIFICATE/DIPLOMA/MSc IN PSYCHOSOCIAL INTERVENTIONS (1-3 years part-time) The Centre offers multidisciplinary training from purpose-designed brief courses up to MSc level in CBT in a range of disorders, primarily focused on the treatment of the severely mentally ill. Contact: Helen Davies (0114 222 2978); h.g.davies@shef.ac.uk A range of short courses and conferences are arranged by the Centre, most of which have a clinical focus. It is intended that over the next two years the Centre will develop a doctoral programme in psychotherapy trainings that will take students to the highest level of training available in the UK. For further information contact Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, 16 Claremont Crescent, Sheffield S10 2TA (Tel: 0114 222 2961/2/3/4; Fax: 0114 270 0619; Email: d.winfield@shef.ac.uk). Extensive information about the Centre is available on the Internet at http://www.shef.ac.uk~psysc/ __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1998 10:26:22 +0200 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "DEVRIESE, Didier" Subject: TR: ICA/SUV seminar in Stockholm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable ~~~~~~~@~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~=20 Didier Devriese=20 Unit=E9 "Histoire des sciences et des id=E9es" - D=E9partement des = Archives=20 Universit=E9 libre de Bruxelles 5O, av. F.D. Roosevelt - B-1050 Bruxelles=20 t=E9l.: 32. (0)2.650.35.68 - fax: 32.(0)2.650.53.67 - email:ddevriese@admin.ulb.ac.be http://www.ulb.ac.be/ >---------- >De : Christina Jonsson[SMTP:chris@admin.kth.se] >Date : mardi 7 juillet 1998 9:50 >A : ICA-L@MAJORDOMO.SRV.UALBERTA.CA >Objet : ICA/SUV seminar in Stockholm > >International Council on Archives=20 > >Section of University and Research Institution Archives > >Stockholm-ICA 1998 Seminar > >The Impact of Information Technology on Academic Archives > >- How are we as university archivists affected by information >technology?" > > >International Council on Archives=20 > >Section of University and Research Institution Archives > >and the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm > > >Invites you to a seminar in Stockholm, Sweden.=20 > >September 3 and 4 1998. > > >You can still register to the ICA/SUV seminar in Stockholm 3- 4 = september >and if we have your registration before the 17 of july we can book = hotel >room for you > >Welcome to Stockholm, more information on the web > >http://www-personal.usyd.edu.au/~trobinso/stock_reg.html > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Christina Jonsson, IT revisor tfn +46(0)8 790 7990 >Kungl Tekniska h=F6gskolan fax +46(0)8 790 = 9822 >Royal Institute of Technology >Central adm, IT-avdelningen email = Christina.Jonsson@admin.kth.se >100 44 STOCKHOLM >SWEDEN >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Obs! email till och fr=E5n en myndighet =E4r en allm=E4n handling som >registreras enligt myndighetens rutiner >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 07:47:53 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: page of html links to 44 journals in history, philos, social studies of sci, technol, med, etc. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Page of html links to 44 journals for history of science, philosophy of science, sociology of science, history of technology, history of medicine etc etc etc. http://www.man.ac.uk/Science_Engineering/CHSTM/journals.htm Ambix Annals of Science Archaeoastronomy Archaeometry Archive for History of Exact Sciences Biology and Philosophy British Journal for the History of Science British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society Bulletin of the History of Medicine Centaurus Configurations Historia Mathematica Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences History and Technology History of Science History of the Human Sciences Hyle: an International Journal for the Philosophy of Chemistry IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Isis Journal for the History of Astronomy Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Medical History Metascience Minerva Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London Osiris Perspectives on Science Research Policy Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Science and Public Policy Science as Culture Science in Context Science, Technology and Human Values Social Epistemology Social History of Medicine Social Studies of Science Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Synthese Technology and Culture Technology Analysis & Strategic Management Technoscience Tekhnema: The Journal of Philosophy and Technology The Information Society Transactions of the Newcomen Society The CHSTM homepage is maintained by Jon Agar, email:agar@fs4.ma.man.ac.uk __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 08:09:17 -0400 Reply-To: Norman Levitt Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Dawkins on Sokal and Bricmont, I MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Thanks to Ian Pitchford for passing this on. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Intellectual Impostures=20 by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont=20 Profile: 1998. Pp. 274. =A39.99 To be published in the USA by Picador as Fashionable Nonsense in November 1998=20 Reviewed by Richard Dawkins Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following: We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst F=E9lix Guattari, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant m=E9lange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered". Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze, had a similar talent for writing: In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast. This calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose): Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought... Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says: I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose. This is from Medawar's 1968 lecture on "Science and Literature", reprinted in Pluto's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982). Since Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has raised its voice. Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described by the celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the greatest of the great... Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian." Sokal and Bricmont, however, think otherwise: "These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences -- sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous -- and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge." But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans? Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively, New York University and the University of Louvain in Belgium. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal. On Jacques Lacan, for example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments throughout US and British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound understanding of mathematics: =2E..although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish. They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan: Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely: You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous. It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a further piece of reasoning that is entirely typical of the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ =2E..is equivalent to the of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1). We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about. The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=3Dmc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes: The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders. You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem: the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve. (cont'd) ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 08:10:00 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Dawkins on Sokal and Bricmont, II MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion of relativity with relativism, Jean-Fran=E7ois Lyotard's 'post-modern science', and the widespread and predictable misuses of G=F6del's Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, "though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view": Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes. I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's text "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense". They again call attention to "the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology -- inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning". Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticized here and lionized throughout America: In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away. But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, and no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when someone punctures the established bag of wind. As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the US journal Social Text a paper called "Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity". From start to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Normal Levitt's Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), an important book that deserves to become as well known in Britain as it is in the United States. Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it. In the words of the journalist Gary Kamiya: Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for 'advanced' thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords ('hermeneutics,' 'transgressive,' 'Lacanian,' 'hegemony', to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted... Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the 'real world'), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy)... And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit -- a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city. Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear, attacking the 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool notions as the existence of the real world. They didn't know that Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly have detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for literature. Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic establishment. Ross has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like, "I am glad to be rid of English departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature"; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words: "This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them." He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are not harmless eccentrics at third-rate state colleges. Many of them have tenured professorships at some of the best universities in the United States. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees, wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say, anthropology. I know -- because many of them have told me -- that there are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but who are intimidated into silence. To them, Sokal will appear as a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant, that his own left-wing credentials are impeccable. In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal notes that, in addition to numerous half-truths, falsehoods and non sequiturs, his original article contained some "syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever". He regrets that there were not more of these: "I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack." If he were writing his parody today, he would surely be helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne, Australia: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it, at http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern, it will spontaneously generate for you, using faultless grammatical principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before seen. I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6,000-word article called "Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context" by "David I. L.Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge University" (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge that saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here is a typical passage from this impressively erudite work: If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious. Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate. As for the harder task of reclaiming US literary departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We must hope that it will be followed. Richard Dawkins is at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PW, UK. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 08:11:09 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Frederick Crews's THE MEMORY WARS MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Frederick Crews's THE MEMORY WARS: "Crews is the ultimate scholar: he knows his facts, he presents his conclusions clearly, and he answers every criticism brought forward by those who read his seminal essays on Freud. He carefully documents his argument, which is that 'Freud's scientific and ethical standards were abysmally low and...his brainchild was, and still is, a pseudoscience.' This book should be read by the public, psychotherapists and anyone who wants to get a carefully documented, clearly reasoned picture of what Freud did and what he wrote. With this book we also learn about the ends to which a cultlike following will go to defend a series of myths. Crews has made a truly monumental contribution to rational thought." -- Margaret Singer "Freud's reputation continues its rapid downward slide, and Frederick Crews has been one of its most effective pushers. Few can read his slashing attack...without realizing that for almost a century psychiatrists, thinkers, and writers have been bamboozled by a pseudoscience as devoid of empirical evidence as the fantasies of Karl Marx." -- Martin Gardner "Fred Crews's deft and literate polemic deserves serious attention. It's time to admit that the psychoanalytic scenery is crashing to the stage floor." -- Hugh Kenner "Anyone who still believes that Freud was a genius on a par with Einstein and Galileo... must read this dazzling book. Crews brilliantly marshals the damning new scholarship on Freud the man and on analytic theory, showing why the Freudian edifice is deteriorating and why its foundations were built on sand." -- Carol Tavris, Ph.D., author of The Mismeasure of Woman "In the two essays that form the core of this book, Frederick Crews convincingly dismantles the entire Freudian enterprise, from beginning to end." --JOHN F. KIHLSTROM, Department of Psychology, Yale University "Frederick Crews's voice of common sense has cut through the mass hysteria about repressed memory syndrome. Always fearless and provocative, he has fin ally exposed a fashionable fad which has ruined many innocent people." --PHYLLIS GROSSKURTH ------------------------- Frederick Crews >From the Inside Cover of " The Memory Wars" In 1993 and 1994, The New York Review of Books published two tenaciously argued essays by Frederick Crews attacking Freudian psychoanalysis and its aftermath in the so-called recovered memory movement. The first reviewed a growing body of evidence indicating that Freud doctored his data and manipulated his colleagues in an effort to consolidate a cult-like following that would neither defy nor upstage him. The second, published in two parts, challenged the scientific and therapeutic claims of the rapidly growing recovered memory movement, maintaining that its social effects have been devastating. Crews traced that movement to Freudian precedent--not just to Freud's abandoned "seduction theory" but also to the most essential assumptions of psychoanalysis itself. The response was tremendous: issues flew off the stands, and therapists, patients, scholars, philosophers, and others whose lives had been touched by Freud's ideas responded in one of the largest waves of letters the Review had ever seen. Twenty-five of these were published, with Crews's deft and forceful replies. Most are gathered here, together with Crews's original essays, a new introduction describing the genesis of his pieces, and an epilogue considering the debate and its reverberations. The result is a fierce, contentious, and startling book that rocks the foundations of one of the century's governing ideas. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 09:51:43 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Kolata and Jasanoff on implants MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII O'm forwarding the article by Gina Kolata in today's (July 11) NY Times concerning the role of biomedical science in the massive lawsuits over the supposed damage wrought by silicone breast implants. For my part, I found this article sound, accurate, and as complete as it can be given the obvious restrictions on length. I bring it up because of the recent discussions concerning H. Dowie's critique of Kolata in the "Nation". I suppose that this article is typical of the sort of thing that provokes Dowie's wrath. If so, the onus falls on Dowie. For contrast, I forward as well, recent comments by Sheial Jasanoff and a colleague on the selfsame controversy. I suppose they would please Dowie. To me, they constitute one more example of the kind of self-evident absurdity that can only be taken seriously by academics intellectually malformed by decades of postmodern babble. I note that Jasanoff represents Harvard University's latest attempt to embarass itself profoundly. N. Levitt Harvard '63. -------------------------------- July 11, 1998 ANALYSIS When Scientific Controversies Land in the Courts ______________________________________________________________ Related Articles $3.2 Billion Settlement in Silicone-Implants Dispute (July 9) --------------------------- By GINA KOLATA A fter 16 years of litigation and more than a dozen major scientific studies, the longstanding controversy over the safety of breast implants reached a milestone of sorts Wednesday, when Dow Corning Corp. agreed to pay $3.2 billion to settle the claims of tens of thousands of women who said they had become ill from their implants. The tentative agreement did not end the conflict over implants; more chapters may be written in the months ahead as panels of judicially appointed scientists review what the science inspired by the lawsuits has wrought. But the long-running battle has illuminated the issues and forces at work when scientific controversies land in the courts or legal ones wind up in the laboratory. Indeed, experts say the litigation is providing a laboratory for judges to decide how to deal with scientific controversy and questions of what evidence to admit in court. Women suing the makers of implants have charged that their implants gave them a variety of illnesses, including well-established diseases like arthritis, cancer, lupus and multiple sclerosis, as well as what their attorneys have called "atypical diseases" with symptoms including fatigue and muscle pain. The implant makers, buttressed by statements from several medical associations and the governments of Britain, Germany and Australia, insist that science has not found a link between the devices and disease, despite years of looking. The settlement, Dow Corning said, was a business decision. The company has approximately 19,000 cases pending that could go to court, said Douglas Schoettinger, a company lawyer, and each case would cost about $1 million to win. The trouble began on Aug. 1, 1982, when Maria Stern of Boise, Idaho, sued Dow Corning. Ms. Stern said that she had become seriously ill after her implants leaked silicone throughout her body. She won a seven-figure settlement. At that time, there was virtually no scientific evidence that silicone implants did -- or did not -- cause disease. A wave of lawsuits followed. In 1992, Dr. David Kessler, who was then commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, imposed a moratorium on the sale of silicone breast implants while scientific studies were conducted. A class-action suit was filed, drawing in tens of thousands of women. On May 15, 1995, faced with 177,000 breast implant claimants, Dow Corning filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By the mid-1990s, however, several large studies were failing to find a link between implants and the illnesses ascribed to them. In 1996, the American College of Rheumatology issued a statement saying the evidence was "compelling" that implants did not cause systemic disease. That same year, the Council on Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association wrote that "to date, there is no conclusive or compelling evidence that relates silicone breast implants to human autoimmune disease." In 1997, the American Academy of Neurology wrote that "existing research shows no link between silicone breast implants and neurological disorders." Dr. Marcia Angell, executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and author of a book on breast implants ("Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case," Norton, 1997), said in an interview that there are now about 15 well-designed epidemiological studies of implants and various diseases. "Not one has found diseases are more common in women with implants, which leaves us with the high likelihood that systemic diseases are coincidental," she said. Kessler, who is now dean of Yale University's medical school, said in an interview that the science shows that "there were problems with these devices -- they broke, they leaked at a higher rate than anyone reported." But, he added, although the devices cause "local complications" like scarring and hardening of tissue, "there's no evidence that they cause systemic disease." Those who say that the implants cause disease cite evidence of a different sort. Fenton Communications, a public relations company hired by lawyers for many of the plaintiffs to communicate the risks of implants, lists studies in which doctors cite their own experience seeing women who have had implants and subsequently contracted various diseases. It also lists studies concluding that silicone can provoke immune responses and that implants can rupture and spill silicone throughout the body. Frederick Ellis, a Boston lawyer who represents women with implants, said that the latest studies show that silicone can cause illnesses in animals and that silicone degrades in the body into silica, a hard, glassy mineral, which can provoke autoimmune responses. Nonetheless, he said, "the science is still developing." Ellis explained that lawyers had little choice but to jump into the litigation before a scientific consensus had time to form. The problem, he said, is the statute of limitations. The law in most states says that plaintiffs have three years to file a suit after "they reasonably should have known" that implants caused disease, Ellis explained. In California, he added, they have only one year. "Plaintiffs are in a bind," he said. "A bunch of tort-reform advocates say, 'Wait until the science is really there."' But, Ellis added, "that's not the standard that applies in law." Bert Black, a Dallas lawyer who is an expert on product liability involving scientific questions but who has no connection to the implant litigation, said there are other factors that push lawsuits forward in advance of science. One, he said, is that "if you wait until the scientific evidence comes in, some other lawyer is likely to corner the market." "Here you'll be with all this evidence," he said, "but someone else has all the clients." Then there is what Black calls the "plaintiffs' lawyers asbestos syndrome," referring to the multibillion-dollar asbestos litigation of some years ago that made some lawyers in the product liability field both rich and legendary. Those lawyers got into the litigation early -- long before the science was there to show that exposure to asbestos could cause serious lung disease. Then the science came along and proved them right, Black said, and "every young lawyer said, 'I've got to find the next asbestos."' As the implant litigation reveals, one of the thorniest questions for the courts once lawsuits are filed is what sort of scientific evidence should be admitted, and who should decide. A recent Supreme Court decision involving lawsuits charging that the morning-sickness drug Bendectin caused birth defects addressed this question. The court concluded that judges are supposed to control what sort of scientific evidence is allowed and to screen out ill-founded or speculative scientific theories. But, said Edward Sherman, the dean of Tulane University's law school, who has no connection with the implant litigation, "Cases have shown how difficult it is to determine who is a legitimate expert witness, what is within the range of acceptable range of scientific knowledge and what is outside." He added: "I'd like to think that there are some certainties that science can give us, but in a lot of product liability cases it's very elusive to tie it down." Nonetheless, several courts and scientific panels are attempting to do just that. In Oregon, implants made women ill. But he said he would defer the effective date of his decision until an expert panel appointed by Sam C. Pointer Jr., a U.S. district judge in Alabama, issued its report on the science. Pointer, who is coordinating all the breast implant cases in federal courts, including Dow Corning's, convened a panel of three disinterested scientists to advise him on the evidence tying implants to disease. Their report is expected in September. In the meantime, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences has also appointed a panel of scientists to assess the implant evidence. Their report is expected in about a year. Daniel Quinn, a spokesman for the institute, said it has asked these scientists not to comment until then. And the British government, which issued a report in 1994, is scheduled to release another one on Tuesday summarizing the most recent evidence. Dow Corning says it remains interested in what it calls a causation trial, in which a jury would decide whether scientific evidence supports the notion that implants cause disease. If the jury were to decide that the science did not support it, the company would not have to compensate women who said their implants made them ill. Schoettinger, the Dow Corning lawyer, said he cannot say whether such a request is part of the proposed new settlement, since the details of that agreement must remain secret until it is approved by the plaintiffs. But, Schoettinger said, the company is also pursuing another avenue. It has filed motions before a bankruptcy judge in Michigan and also before Pointer in Alabama asking that all the implant claims be dismissed. "This takes it a step further and says the science is so clear that a causation trial isn't necessary," he said. He added that these judges are waiting for the report by Pointer's panel before they decide what to do. _________________________________________________________________ *************************************************************** CU Logo Department of Science & Technology Studies _________________________________________________________________ Making People: The Normal and Abnormal in Constructions of Personhood Xandra Rarden and Sheila Jasanoff, Cornell University "An Atypical Complaint: Science v. Subjectivity in Breast Implant Litigation" Abstract Competing scientific accounts have emerged in the debate over whether silicone gel breast implants cause autoimmune disorders. The mainstream story, told principally by epidemiological researchers at leading medical institutions, denies any causal connection between the devices and traditional forms of the disease. The alternative story, told by plaintiffs and their treating physicians, posits the existence of an "atypical" disease, whose symptoms are fully understandable only to those willing to heed the plaintiffs' subjective experiences. In this paper, we examine the scientific contestation around the attempted construction of an "atypical" disease entity. We ask how the cultural context of litigation molded and shaped the mainstream and alternative scientific stories, influencing the production of different forms of collective knowledge. Interactions among judges, lawyers, scientists, doctors, the media, and social activists all contributed to this process. We show how mainstream science eventually ratified the safety of the implants, while discarding or setting aside the alternative hypothesis. Although a powerful social movement coalesced around the "atypical" disease claims, knowledge derived from personal and group experiences failed to make headway against the claims of objective science. Yet, allowing orthodox scientific practice systematically to dominate over other types of meaningful knowledge production may not be the best the way to bring closure to such controversies. Instead, we need to search for mechanisms that strike a better balance between scientific and subjective knowledge in toxic tort litigation. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 10:33:00 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Ross Rides Again MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Andrew Ross's piece on the OJ case, mentioned below, originally appeared in the bizarre compilation "Birth of a Nation'hood" edited by Toni Morrison and her Princeton colleague C.B. Lacour. In that piece, Ross cites Sheila Jasanoff as one of his Eminent Authorities on how science should impinge on legal proceedings. Figures. NL ---------- Forwarded message ---------- July 12, 1998 By BROOKE ALLEN ______________________________________________________________ REAL LOVE In Pursuit of Cultural Justice. By Andrew Ross. New York University, cloth, $55; paper, $17.95. ______________________________________________________________ Andrew Ross, the director of the graduate program in American studies at New York University, is the dean of the fashionable academic discipline called cultural studies, an all-inclusive field that blends literary theory with sociology and left-wing political grandstanding. ''Real Love'' brings together nine previously published essays on a variety of subjects, including reggae music and the way it reflects the Jamaican political scene, jobs in cyberspace, gangsta rap and, inevitably, the one subject every 1990's intellectual feels compelled to weigh in on, the O. J. Simpson trials. In his introduction, Ross rather mystifyingly states that the pieces are united by their passion for ''cultural justice'': ''doing justice to culture, pursuing justice through cultural means and seeking justice for cultural claims.'' The reader is never too sure just what cultural justice is supposed to be, or what kind of justice Ross advocates. He pleads, for instance, against bringing scientific evidence, particularly DNA testing, into courtrooms because ''the quantitative reasoning of science is not well suited to taking . . . values or rights into account.'' But isn't that just the point? Ross derides statistics and polls when their conclusions are not to his liking, but does not hesitate to marshal them when they suit his purpose. He is as quick to spot barbarians at the gate as his enemies on the right, but they are different barbarians -- privatization and corporate sponsorship, among others -- and while the right makes a bugbear of Big Government, Ross does precisely the same with ''the state.'' Again and again, ''Real Love'' proves that the objectivity, and hence the value, of social science is fatally compromised when it is tailored to fit a political agenda. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 17:07:36 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: review of Impostures Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit It is to be noted that Mulligan's review of Sokal and Bricmont, like Bogosian's article about Sokal's hoax adds another dimension to the divisions in the Science Wars. Besides conservatives like Roger Kimball vs. multi- culturalists and feminists; scientists vs. humanists; we have analytical philosophers using the Sokal attacks to bash continental philosophy, an agenda, like the the neo-conservatives' one, that was around long before the Sokal affair. Mulligan in his review of Sokal and Bricmont writes: <. This is partly misleading. Hermeneutics (Dilthey and Heidegger) and phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) are claimed not be be theoretical. In one sense, insofar as they claim either to be describing the direct deliverences of experience, or interpreting meanings but not making up an external theory about them, this is true. But insofar as hermeneutics and phenomenology have approaches and claims, they could be said to have a theory. Hermeneutics denies that it is a "method" in the mechanical sense that Descartes and Bacon thought they had. It is "against method." But so are many scientists skeptical of philosophical theories of the "scientific method." With respect to justifications and counterexamples Mulligan has more of a point. The claim of phenomenology to involve description of experience, not a theory about experience, and of hermeneutics to be interpretation of meanings, not theories about the theory in the text does mean that they reject some of the usual means of argument in analytic philosophy. On the other hand analytic philosophy (as some of its devotees now admit) makes use of rudimentary phenomenology or hermeneutics in that it appeals to often supposedly unquestionable descriptions of common-sense experience or situations. My own position would be that both phenomenology and argument are needed. Just as observations can be theory-laden, so phenomenological reports can be doubted as misconstrued or misdescribed. SImilarly, the purely argumentative philosophy in its often uncritical appeals to common sense or what is "obvious" or what "everyone believes" assumes phenomenological descriptions and needs to pay attention to them. It certainly is false that Husserl, for instance, lacks distinctions. He's got so many that other analytic philosophers denounce him for being too theoretical and present themselves as "just folks" common sense philosophers, but this is equally false, as the person in the street wouldn't understand their use of terms such as "reference," "ethics vs. morals" and much else where everyday terms are used in special ways. Similarly Heidegger has distinctions. His terminology is often denounced for its peculiarities but clearly distinctions, such as between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand are made. (Some claim much of Heidegger's terminology plays on German colloquialisms and sounds less obtuse in German). Mulligan continues << The philosophers and thinkers dealt with by Sokal and Bricmont form--together with the small embattled band of French analytic philosophers--almost the whole of contemporary philosophy in France. For by far the greater part of what is called philosophy there is in fact not philosophy at all but rather the history of philosophy.>> This is true. There is often too much historical recounting and not enough critical evaluation. But philosophy has a closer and more evident relation to the history of philosophy than does science to its own history (and of course the latter is becoming more recognized today). Often philosophy done as if from scratch recapitulates old positions without recognizing them or their faults, this is true of some of the work in artificial intelligence which recapitulates seventeenth and eighteenth century theories whose problems were subsequently recognized. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 14:22:38 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: from London Review of Books (16 July) I MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE From=20LRB Volume 20, Number 14 Le pauvre Sokal John Sturrock Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Profile, 274 pp., =A39.99, 2 July, 1 86197 074 9 Way back in the pre-theoretical Fifties, a journalist called Ivor Brown used to have elementary fun at the expense of a serial intruder on our insular peace of mind, a bacillus known as the LFF, or Latest Foreign Fraud. By this he meant any thinker from abroad (Paris, nine times out of ten) whose alembicated ideas were being taken up with more excitement than he thought they =96 or, I daresay, any ideas =96 were worth. Brown's catchpenny campaign in defence of our mental virginity was brought fleetingly back to memory by the title of Intellectual Impostures, a similarly prophylactic exercise which has it in for the French thinkers who have come among us since the late Sixties, bearing what Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont would like to see ostracised as fatuous, if not actually nonsensical ideas. The authors are both professors of physics, Sokal in New York, Bricmont in Belgium, and it's as hard scientists that they make their complaint against the intellectua