[Marxism] 1996 Rethinking Marxism conference

[Louis Proyect]

This article was written for Socializmus, a German magazine. I have a 
completely different take on Alan Sokal today:

Rethinking Marxism conference

The journal "Rethinking Marxism" hosted a conference from 12/5 through 12/8 
on "Politics and Languages of Contemporary Marxism." Held at the University 
of Amherst in Massachusetts, it revealed divisions in the left 
intelligentsia that were brewing beneath the surface for a number of years. 
This division, roughly speaking, is one between classical Marxism and a 
"post-Marxism." What brought it to a head was the "Sokal Affair"

Alan Sokal is a radical physicist at NYU who had grown tired of the 
tendency of some postmodernists and post-Marxists to question the notion 
that science has universal validity. They claimed that the sciences act in 
a dominating and patriarchal manner to obliterate the "local knowledge" of 
traditional societies. While abuses do take place, according to Sokal, the 
problem is not in science but in the tendency for prejudice to creep into 
the application of science. Hence, Nazi experiments in eugenics. The answer 
to these abuses is a more scientific approach, not postmodernism.

Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, a post-Marxist journal, on 
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of 
Quantum Gravity." This eventually appeared in a special issue titled the 
"Science Wars." The article is a send-up of postmodernist ideas and style 
and includes a large amount of fawning references to all the fashionable 
thinkers in post-Marxist circles, including Stanley Aronowitz, a founder of 
"Social Text." The opening paragraph states:

"There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue 
to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and 
cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps 
peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea 
that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in 
the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the 
long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, 
which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external 
world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and 
indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in 
'eternal' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit 
imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the 
'objective' procedures and epistemological strictures proscribed by the 
(so-called) scientific method."

Shortly after the article appeared, Sokal revealed to Lingua Franca, a 
"review of academic life" that the article was a hoax. Notions that quantum 
gravity could have anything to do with a "postmodern and liberatory" 
science were strictly tongue-in-cheek. The revelation had an enormous 
impact internationally, including front-page coverage in the NY Times. The 
editors of Social Text became defensive and made statements linking Sokal 
with right-wing attacks on "tenured radicals." Why should one leftist 
attack another, they cried out in pain? Weren't there enough targets on the 
right that Sokal could attack?

full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/amherst.htm

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