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IN A NEW BOOK, INTELLECTUAL GADFLY ALAN SOKAL AND CO-AUTHOR JEAN BRICMONT ASSAIL THE DEMIGODS OF FRENCH THEORY FOR THEIR FRAUDULENT USE OF HIGH SCIENCE. BUT DOES THIS MEAN ALL POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY IS BUNK?
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BY KRISTINA ZARLENGO | For the past two years Alan Sokal has been living large. Ever since he revealed that an article he published in the trendy left-wing journal Social Text was a fraud, Sokal, a professor of mathematical physics at New York University, has been lionized, condemned and seen his name splashed across the front page of the New York Times. A year ago when his new book, "Intellectual Impostures," co-authored with Belgian physics professor Jean Bricmont, hit the European market, the two men became an instant source of media controversy. After garnering a cover story in the major French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, the book went on to earn bestsellerdom in France and Belgium, where it competed favorably with Princess Diana titles. Earlier this year, Sokal and Bricmont toasted the book's British publication with a bottle of Louis Latour burgundy and saw themselves become fodder for a host of divergent editorials and reviews. Among his many moments in the limelight, Sokal debated opponents on French television and lectured in Argentina and Brazil. Now, even as the book is being translated into 12 more languages, including Dutch and Catalan, the drama has barely begun. This month, with the publication of an American edition, the repackaged and renamed book will finally debut on Sokal's home turf -- a debut that promises to be its most explosive incarnation yet.

For a man who might have written arcane computations for a few hundred other physicists for the rest of his life, Alan Sokal's sudden rise to international fame might seem like an unlikely phenomenon. But Sokal's prank touched a throbbing nerve and reopened the culture wars of the late '80's and early '90s. "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" -- as it is called in its American edition -- follows in the same contentious tradition as the hoax, but this time Sokal and Bricmont's project is far more serious and more measured. With carefully sharpened pens, the two physicists set out to catalog the scientific abuses of the most celebrated of the French theorists: Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Bruno Latour, as well as many of their cadre from England and the United States.

Of course, in America "the Sokal affair" is reprising a two-year-old controversy that has gripped humanists and social scientists, academics and journalists, leftists and conservatives. In 1995, responding to a call from the journal Social Text for papers for a special issue on science, Sokal sent in a garbled, scientifically ludicrous essay. After the issue came out, Sokal revealed the essay to be a hoax whose publication called into question the validity of current trends in literary theory and cultural studies. "Fashionable Nonsense" is the inflation of that hoax into an earnest book -- heavy with references, extended scholarly citations and footnotes. Stateside anticipatory fever has been so high that when I called for a galley four months ago, the book's publishers were already cleaned out.

So far, reactions to the book have been mixed but uniformly intense. The Guardian hailed it as welcome proof that modern French theory is "a load of old tosh," while the London Review of Books lambasted it as "unwontedly priggish." The latter critique garnered a rash of letters that praised the book and its critique of "galloping francophilia." In Nature, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins gushed that underlings in humanities and social science programs will find Sokal "a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree." Meanwhile, French theorist Kristeva -- a target of the book's vitriol -- accused Sokal and Bricmont of abetting a francophobic political and economic campaign, then suggested they undergo psychiatric treatment. Latour, however, didn't let Sokal and Bricmont's diagnosis of his work as "fatally flawed" interfere with his politesse: Sokal and Bricmont's burgundy toast in London was courtesy of Latour, who presented a bottle of his family's vintage when he debated Sokal there.

Such a gift may seem ironic, but it's also fully appropriate. After all, Sokal and Bricmont's fame is a product of the fame of their objects of ridicule. If Lacan's "Ecrits" were not to many scholars' bookshelves what the Spice Girls CD's are to the music collections of preteen girls, Sokal and Bricmont's condemnation of Lacan's "superficial erudition" would have little impact.

Sokal and Bricmont do not attempt to assess the validity of their subjects' work, stating that they lack the necessary expertise. Rather, they limit themselves to demonstrating how the French theorists they examine misuse science and math in their arguments. For example, when psychoanalytic theorist Lacan declares that the torus (a geometric figure) is "exactly the structure of the neurotic," they dismantle this assertion piece by piece -- switching between lengthy quotations of Lacanian so-called math and their own mathematically informed (but comprehensible) explanations. In one of the miserably few cases in which Lacan does define his key term, they write, the definition is "gibberish." Having convincingly demonstrated that Lacan lacks even basic understanding of what he discusses (confusing irrational and imaginary numbers, for example), they show how he moves from a number of false premises to laughable conclusions such as: "Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the [square root of] -1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient if its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1)." Since such calculations are fantasies, they conclude, the scholarship is really just psychobabble. Since the book's release, they've gone on to issue a gleeful public challenge, inviting anyone who can prove such passages meaningful to come forward.

In six more chapters of quilted text, Sokal and Bricmont similarly criticize six other renowned scholars for their fatuous scientific jargon, arguing again and again that "if the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." Kristeva confuses set and interval. The "unwittingly comic" Irigaray doesn't understand the role of approximations in science. Baudrillard misappropriates non-Euclidian spaces. Virilio "shows perfectly how to package a banal observation in sophisticated terminology."

What is the meaning, they ask, of French theorist Lyotard's famous assertion that "Postmodern science ... is changing the meaning of the word knowledge ... is producing not the known but the unknown"? The revelation sounds shocking, Sokal and Bricmont aver, but to the extent that it indicates that modern science subtracts from what we rationally understand, or changes the meaning of the word "knowledge," it is also false. (Except, they note, for cases of Metatheorems in mathematical logic such as Godel's theorem, which are "rarefied branches of the foundations of mathematics [that] have very little impact on the bulk of mathematical research and almost no impact on the natural sciences.") To the extent that Lyotard's diagnosis of postmodern science is true, it is also banal -- new scientific theories only produce the unknown in the sense that new discoveries make for new problems. Again and again the two physicists gloss two possible meanings of the theorists' highfalutin claims about science and math: one that is "true but banal"; the other, "surprising but manifestly false." Trivia, they say, masquerades in these writings as radical wisdom. Technical jargon is a smoke screen for vapidity.

Sokal and Bricmont's polemics are part of a three-year-old conflict that some have dubbed "The Science Wars," in which cultural theorists and scientists began battling it out over each other's epistemological claims. The war started in 1994, when mathematician Norman Levitt and biologist Paul R. Gross published "Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science," a condemnation of the relativism propagated by contemporary social scientists, feminists and others they deemed inimical to science. In 1995, New York University comparative literature professor Andrew Ross fought back, arguing that "Higher Superstition" had enkindled "a second front opened up by conservatives cheered by the successes of their legions in the holy Culture Wars." He also framed the conflict in political terms: "Conservatives in science have joined the backlash against the (new) usual suspects -- pinkos, feminists and multiculturalists of all stripes." In order to mount a defense of these "suspects," Ross and his colleagues planned a special issue of the cultural-theory academic journal "Social Text." Amid a number of leftist affirmations of the cultural -- rather than objective -- roles of science and technology, was the work of one actual scientist, Alan Sokal. The rest is metahistory.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Naively scientific, unimaginative dogmatists vs. enigmatic writers and irrelevant nihilists