to my mind, it wasn't Sokal's prank that was important as much as the fact that ST (Aronowitz) fell for it. It didn't make Sokal look good as much as make ST look bad.
On 2/5/06, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ken hanly wrote: > > >Sokal's spoof was not meaningless. The point was not to be humurous > >by making fun of post modernist language. After all postmodernist > >readers did not even take it as poking fun at them. To use PM > >language Sokal's text deconstructed postmodernism by showing that > >those who use it do not even understand it since they could not > >distinguish a spoof from a serious discourse. This may be funny but > >it also makes a serious po int and there is nothing low about it. > >Surely people who promote a language should understand it. > > I'd be the last to defend Stanley Aronowitz, the ST editor most > responsible for publishing the Sokal piece. And I'll leave aside the > fact that what Sokal did had nothing to do with deconstruction. But I > do want to say that I had several long chats with Sokal in the weeks > after the prank and it quickly became clear to me that he has a very > conventional idea of scientific knowledge - and the problem with the > ST crowd, from his point of view, was not that they weren't doing > science studies very well (i.e., informed by a knowledge of both > science and politics), but that they were doing it at all. I asked > him how he'd feel about a Frankfurt-style critique of instrumental > reason, and he had no idea what I was talking about. I don't think > his prank did very much to improve the quality of science studies; it > just confirmed a lot of pre-existing prejudices about the authority > of science. > > Doug > -- Jim Devine "The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin
