> Can someone name the main achievement of one author who has been
> dubbed "post-structuralist"?
the lads at http://www.adequacy.org had a go at claiming that Luce Irigaray
anticipated Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science": (I have added a couple
of question marks to words which do not get through my firewall)
----------------------------------------
We don't pretend here at adequacy to understand the French feminist
philosopher and critical theorist Luce Irigaray in any great depth. Since
male life expectancy is only 74.5 years in the USA, and what with
maintaining this website, keeping up with the newspapers and trying to read
some of the classics of Western literature, we frankly doubt that we're ever
going to have the spare time to get into her work. Maybe perdida, with the
extra five years' life expectancy her gender brings, will give it a crack
some time.
Because of our ignorance about what Irigaray actually wrote, we're reduced
to getting our information third hand, via people like Alan Sokal and Jean
Bricmont. They wrote a book called " Intellectual Impostures " in order to
tell us, at mind-numbing length, that Irigaray and other French critical
theorists were Very Bad People and Not Worth Reading. Indeed, so many people
are of this opinion, and so many of them are folks (like Richard Dawkins and
William Safire) who have turned out to be utter a??eholes on every other
subject, that I at least among the Adequacy staff had come to the conclusion
that if literally the entire
inflated-self-esteem-hard-science-equals-hard-d?ck-know-it-all community
hated Irigaray enough to write a whole big book about how stupid she was,
there was almost certainly something to be said for her.
What I didn't expect was that one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of
the last twenty years would prove this view to be crashingly and
resoundingly right.
For those of you with better things to do with your time than keep up with
the Science vs Sociology wars, the rap sheet against Irigaray boils down to
one specific charge; that she did recklessly or with malice aforethought
suggest that there might be some connection between
1) the way in which classical mechanics concentrates for the most part on
the motions of medium-sized rigid objects, and
2) the fact that most scientists in history have been men, and therefore for
the most part obsessed with the motions of a particular kind of object, an
object which is often decidedly less rigid and decidedly more medium-sized
than its owner would like, but which could charitably be assumed to tend
asymptotically toward the Newtonian ideal.
Specifically, the great sin which got Irigaray into the Black Book of
Postmodernism was to suggest that mathematics was not as value-independent
and Platonic a field of inquiry as one might think. In an attractively
adventurous quote, she speculated that things would have been different
(specifically, our view of which classes of applied maths problem are easy
and which difficult) if women had been in charge of the whole enterprise
"The Newtonian break has ushered scientific enterprise into a world where
sense perception is worth little, a world which can lead to the annihilation
of the very stakes of physics' object: the matter (whatever the predicates)
of the universe and of the bodies that constitute it. In this very science,
moreover [ d'ailleurs ], cleavages exist: quantum theory/field theory,
mechanics of solids/dynamics of fluids, for example. "
Or as American writer Katherine Hayles puts it...
" 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 s?x 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.
Hard questions
So, to sum it up, male maths is obsessed with h?rd-ons, while women's maths,
if it existed, would be able to solve problems of turbulent flow because
women are more interested in it. Not, one might have thought, all that
outrageous a piece of speculation about the sociology of mathematicians. But
apparently this small mention of our old pal the pen?s was enough to bring
out a long parade of male academics absolutely eager to spell out exactly
where Luce Irigaray had gone wrong. So we have...
Irigaray, in sum, does not understand the nature of the physical and
mathematical problems posed in fluid mechanics, " -- Sokal & Bricmont,
Fashionable Nonsense
" 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.
" -- Richard Dawkins, Nature."
Irigaray's invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse than dodgy "
-- John Sturrock, LRB
And so on.
What we are obviously meant to conclude is that there is no sociological
reason whatsoever why turbulent flow is generally considered to be an
intractable calculation; it has to be intractable, because the only way to
model turbulent flow is via the Navier-Stokes partial differential
equations, and these have no closed-form solution, so they are intrinsically
difficult. Case closed. Irigaray didn't know sh?t, so let's burn the witch
for lying about science. Or is that the end of the story?
OK, we're going to be a bit rude about some scientists here, so sensitive
souls should look away.......
There is a much easier way to model turbulent flow than trying to solve the
Navier-Stokes equations by brute force, and if Sokal, Bricmont, Dawkins and
the gang had held themselves to their own intellectual standards and
bothered to look up the science before shooting their fckng mouths off,
they'd have known about it.
In 1986, Uriel Frisch, Brosl Hasslacher and Yves Pomeau published the paper
" Lattice-gas automata for the Navier-Stokes equation " in Physical Review
Letters. In this paper, they demonstrated that by modelling a turbulent
fluid using the theory of cellular automata as invented by John von Neumann
and developed by Stephen Wolfram, one could achieve a step jump in the
mathematical tractability of the modelling of turbulent flow. Interestingly,
this paper appear some ten years before Sokal and Bricmont published "
Impostures Intellectuels ", presumably some time after Sokal's knowledge of
the field had ossified, but one year after Luce Irigaray set out her views
on fluid mechanics in " This S?x Which Is Not One " in 1985.
So what's the big deal? Well, as Stephen Wolfram, the mathematical genius
and author of computer program Mathematica, argues in his recent book, " A
New Kind Of Science ", the theory of cellular automata (the eponymous " new
kind of science") is a massively important development in mathematics. By
stepping back from the differential equations way of thinking which
described classical mechanics so well and allowed us to calculate the
trajectories of cannonballs so accurately for so many years, it is possible
to use this new method to dissolve all sorts of problems which had
previously appeared to be utterly intractable. It gets better. The theory of
cellular automata is best illustrated by reference to the famous " Game of
Life ", in which tiny little cells, which look a lot like ova, propagate
themselves by growing, dividing, gestating and increasing in complexity in a
way which only someone who was utterly blind or trying to be annoying on
purpose could avoid seeing as inordinately analogous to the workings of the
female reproductive system.
Cellular automata theory doesn't deal with rigid things which fly around in
continuously differentiable trajectories; it deals with things which diffuse
outward gradually, then experience sudden unpredictable changes in
complexity. The parallels with Irigaray's writings on the feminine as fluid
are unarguable:
" continuous, compressible, dilatable, viscous, conductible, diffusable...
it enjoys and suffers from a greater sensitivity to pressures... it changes
- in volume or in force... it allows itself to be easily traversed by flow
by virtue of its conductivity to currents... it mixes with bodies of a like
state, sometimes dilutes itself in them in analmost homogenous manner, which
makes the distinction between the one and the other problematical: and
furthermore that it is already diffuse " in itself ", which disconcerts any
attempt at static identification. "
So in other words, Sokal and Bricmont (and later on, their crowd of
wannabes), were heaping fun on Irigaray for predicting, one year before the
FHP paper, that the problem of fluid mechanics would only be soluble by
turning to an area of mathematics which is vastly more suited to the
description of female sexuality than male, and being right. We at adequacy
think that an apology is probably in order. .
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