I got my hands on a paper called "Science, Imperialism, and Love" authored by Bruce Robbins, an English professor at Rugers University, which coincides with round two of the Sokal Affair. It was occasioned by the publication of Sokal's new book in France, written in collaboration with a Belgian physicist, that I have not had occasion to read since it is in written in French. Since I have pretty good English--and a smattering of Yiddish--I will respond to selected points in Robbins' paper. Bruce Robbins: Very schematically, Alan's side wants to insist on an absolute distinction between truth itself and our representations of truth. My side wants to insist that no such distinction can be absolute. But my side also wants to say that in most cases it won't matter much, practically speaking, since there are better representations and worse ones, and the better ones will do most of the work that Alan's side wants out of "the truth" perfectly well. Louis Proyect: Odd, I thought the debate was over the appropriateness of "sciences" or "local knowledge" versus universal scientific standards. Meera Nanda's debunking of reactionary Hindu nationalist "science" seems useful. The debate also seemed to be over the sort of obscurantism and bullshit that Social Text has been responsible for and which discredits Marxism, either classical such as my own, or the Frankfurt School variety that Stanley Aronowitz claims informs the journal. Bruce Robbins: In search of further common ground, my side should admit not only that the objective world exists but also that it intrudes forcibly if complexly into the conclusions we draw about the world. (I have no trouble accepting Lee Smolin's amendment: it's not so much a construction of as a negotiation with the world.) For example, if all European knowledge about the Third World was nothing but racist stereotype and/or projections from the European unconscious, as some critics assume, then imperialism would never have worked as well as it did in dividing and conquering its subjects, keeping them down and plundering them with efficient brutality. More or less reliable information was necessary. Louis Proyect: This is a misrepresentation of history. Imperialism had utterly no use for pure science when it carved up Africa. The 3-part documentary on Cecil Rhodes shown this week on PBS included no scenes with consultating astronomers or biologists, to my knowledge. Now engineers were certainly critical in the conquest of Africa. Mining companies and arms manufacturers would be useless without them. By the same token, more recent imperialist aggressions have used the consulting services of social scientists. Anthropologists had studied the tribesmen of Laos and Cambodia with an eye toward how they may be used as pawns in the Indochina wars. This is not really what the Sokal Affair is about, however. Bruce Robbins: Another analogy the book uses over and over again is scientific methodology as a police investigation. No problem with the literal point about not needing absolute certainty, only to overcome reasonable doubt. But as always, analogies and metaphors carry extra baggage. Here the extra implication is precisely the reverse of the emperor-with-no-clothes: suddenly science is no longer a child looking up at an emperor, but on the contrary the state apparatus looking down from on high at the street, imposing a certain brand of law-and-order. This second metaphor may not reveal the truth, but it certainly reveals a truth about Alan's argument. His stone-kicking epistemology is less like a child, I would suggest--if it were a child, it would be a rather imperious, even an obnoxious child, willing to say that most every philosopher since Kant has been talking nonsense-- and more like the police: the police as represented by Mark Fuhrman and the Abner Louima case, let's say, the police that (as I heard on the radio yesterday) people in Brooklyn find less polite to them than the drug-dealers are. In short, this is an unconscious identification with a disciplinary apparatus that many ordinary citizens have good, rational reasons not to accept at its word. Louis Proyect: I don't have a clue what prompted this disgusting amalgam between Alan Sokal and police brutality. I'm sure he'll supply the context when he gets this email. Bruce Robbins: Alan has said that we need good science against bad science: against the sort of science that (these are my examples, not Alan's) reinvents Original Sin in terms of genetics and seems intent on destroying projects of social amelioration in the name of hypothetical Bell Curves and "neuroticism" genes. But I can't eliminate the theoretical possibility that even what some scientists would call good science-- genetic explanations of falling in love, say--should be fought, and fought on the grounds that no science, good or bad, deserves jurisdiction over topics like this. Louis Proyect: Let me see if I can get this straight. Alan says that eugenics is bad science and should be fought, but Robbins raises the ante. An ancillary threat is that scientists might start finding genetic explanations for falling in love. I read nonsense like this and can only shake my head in disbelief. The American ruling class has been cutting back social programs for the past 25 years and they required some sort of scientific rationale. Charles Murray stepped forward and stated that no amount of government assistance will benefit black people because they are genetically inferior. Robbins puts research into why people fall in love on the same evil footing. Ooooh, does this make me pissed. Not only is it a slap in the face of people who are facing racial and class oppression, it also might deprive me of some useful book down the road that will explain why my personal life is so screwed up. Bruce Robbins: On the other hand, the movements of thought roughly identified as cultural studies or science studies or postmodernism have been equally imperialistic; they too have staked claims to territory that science had considered its own. The only difference between the two imperialisms is perhaps that the postmodern version is ready to concede that there is no natural division between the two territories, no single truth that can adjudicate once and for all between the competing imperial claims. Louis Proyect: Yeah, all those imperialisms can be a real bummer. What drives me crazy is all the gosh-darned fascisms. My next door neighbors are a bunch of fascists who blast their fucking Garth Brooks records late at night. My boss is a fascist too. He gave me a shitty review last year and I'm thinking of going back to work on Wall Street. One last fascist that I've got to say something about is that soup-fascist on the Jerry Seinfeld show. What was the deal on that anyhow? I never watched the show, but I can't stand people telling me what I should or shouldn't eat. Last week I went out on a date with a woman who is a zen macrobiotic cook and she bawled me out for drinking water with my meal. "Adults do not drink water with meals." What a fascist, I'm telling you. I never called her back. Bruce Robbins: The postmodern project of de-naturalizing, or the making conscious of unconscious assumptions, might want to show, for example, how the "fact" that a cathedral was built in 1612 (Terry Eagleton's example) includes assumptions about the value of knowing and dating origins, as opposed to knowing something else about the cathedral. But as this example suggests, it would not necessarily mean critiquing such assumptions in the strong sense, or throwing them out: "no more dates!". In the same way, showing that science draws on "sources" from its culture, as Darwin for example drew on political economy for his theory of natural selection, does not necessarily take anything away from the power of what science does with those sources. Louis Proyect: This is incomprehensible. I wish I knew how to write like this. Then maybe I'd get published in those high-toned journals that nobody reads. Bruce Robbins: I will conclude by saying that we may not agree on a common epistemology, but I think we have a better chance at a common politics. If and when we have to argue with people who want creationism given equal time in science class, we are going to be on the same side, and we should perhaps remember that when we talk to each other. Another important thing that scientists and humanists have to say to each other is that we share an urgent short-term interest in securing support for society's long-term interests, which include proper funding both for pure or long-term scientific research and for the proper teaching and study of the humanities. Louis Proyect: I have no idea what Robbins' politics are, but I am a little leery of the call for support for society's "long-term interests." I am one of those antediluvian Marxists who regards society's interests as being defined and divided on a class basis, while I've heard through the grapevine that Robbins is a Clinton supporter.
