Content area
Full Text
book reviews
Postmodernism disrobed
Intellectual Impostures
by Alan Sokal and Jean BricmontProfile: 1998. Pp. 274. 9.99To be published in the USA by Picador as Fashionable Nonsense in November 1998 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, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic nondiscursive 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 Flix 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 mlange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered. Guattaris 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 Medawars earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawars own elegant and clear prose):
Style has become an object of first importance, and...