"Where everything becomes language...."
Alan Sokol and the Social Text Hoax
The spring 1996 edition of the academic journal Social Text included an essay written by a physicist from New York University entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." The essay suggests that the axioms of science are, like all social knowledge, culturally constructed and open to multiple viewpoints. Upon publication of this article, the editors of Social Text learned that, much to their surprise, Sokol's essay was in fact a hoax, a parody of the rhetoric used by contemporary cultural theorists. This, Sokol felt, was just what they deserved for extending their critique of literature and society into the world of science. As he said, "I didn't know people were using deconstructive literary criticism not only to study Jane Austen but to study quantum mechanics." By 'transgressing the boundary' of liberal humanist studies and by offering a critique of the methodology of science, Sokol sought to put social and cultural studies back in their place, that is, behind science.
Professor Stanley Aronowitz, co-founder of the journal, believes that Sokol does not understand postmodernism and has called him "ill read and half-educated." Why, then, was Sokol's essay accepted for publication ? According to Andrew Ross, a co-editor of Social Text, Sokol's essay was reviewed by six editors who, failing to perceive Sokol's intentions, decided to publish the piece in a special issue devoted to "Science Wars." The fact that Sokol's essay was accepted for publication throws a stark light onto postmodern cultural studies. If the editors cannot tell when someone is using the language of critical theory in a deliberate nonsensical way, then is the discourse of postmodernism one step removed from gibberish ? As Sokol himself has written, in an article published shortly after his hoax, his essay was a melange of "citations, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions." This hoax, he continues, was necessary to combat the academic elitism that contends, with intellectual arrogance, "that knowledge of the real world is superfluous."
Sokol explains his method of composition, revealing that he took the most absurd quotes about the natural sciences and mathematics from several well-known academics, including Derrida and Lyotard, and composed a piece that celebrated the connections between them. The central claim of his article is that the theory of quantum gravity possessed significant political ramifications. Aligning quantum gravity with postmodern epistemology, Sokol asserts that postmodern science has abolished the concept of objective reality. In the next portion of his article he suggests that the "liberatory" sciences of the future must rework and redefine the concepts of mathematics, as dictated by political struggles within the late-capitalist system of production. Sokol derisively says that these statements were made without regard to the logic argument, as should be expected from any piece of rhetoric. The absence of this requirement, implies Sokol, indicates that postmodern studies are poorly written and empty of meaning.
Rather than making a detailed analysis of Sokol's argument and the jargon of authenticity he employed in order to deceive the editors of the journal (although such an essay could very well be written), I intend to find out if the concept of postmodernism can be rehabilitated, standing it back on its feet after Sokol's crushing parody. Over the course of the semester we have read several critics who, like Sokol, criticize the postmodern use of language as a superficial linkage of metaphors and word-games; however, we have also read many thinkers who suggest that the relationship between language and reality is a debateable issue. Specifically, the status of language as a privileged articulator of reality is a key issue of postmodernism. This, too, is a debate that Sokol attempts to close by showing how postmodern cultural critics, in their attempt to describe the sphere of empirical reality more properly inhabited by science, are revealed as unscholarly and even irrational.
"I don't want to claim that it proves that all social scientists or all English professors are complete idiots," Sokol says, "but it does betray a certain out-of-touchness on the part of a certain clique inside academic life." Responding to the statements, Stanley Fish, professor of English at Duke University, says that Sokol incorrectly perceives postmodern studies as being "in competition with mainstream science." Postmodern studies of the sociology of science are not to be seen as wrestling with natural sciences for the possession of the truth; rather, postmodern studies ought to be seen as distinct from scientific inquiries. Fish believes this distinction can be made in terms of viewpoint. The natural scientist, whose aim is to perform scientific research, occupies a viewpoint distinct from the postmodern critic of science, whose objective is to develop a philosophical explanation of what the scientist does. According to Fish, while Sokol is correct in saying that "theorizing about the social construction of reality won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS," he incorrectly accused postmodernism of failing to do something it never claimed to do. Quoting the 1989 report from the National Academy of Science, Fish condemns Sokol's hoax as a fraud that could potentially "erode the foundation of trust on which science is built."
Was Sokol justified in perpetuating the hoax ? Is science to be seen as an unquestionable epistemological starting-point ? Or is he wrong is viewing the postmodern evaluation of scientific knowledge as an exercise in relativism ? Certainly, one might say, the editors of Social Text should have sent out his essay to a physicist if they did not have the competence required to evaluate the piece properly. Aronowitz responds to this rejoinder when he says that Sokol has confused the issues at hand: "The issue is not whether reality exists, but whether knowledge of it is transparent, or unproblematic." My final essay for this course will take up these questions and, by evaluating several of the readings from this semester, I will attempt to determine whether the viewpoint of postmodern science is a legitimate one.
Nearly twenty years before Sokol published his hoax, the French philosopher Jean-Francoise Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition (1979), in which he announced that contemporary society had reached a crisis-point in the history of science. In my second paper for this course, I analyzed Lyotard's report on the scientific methodology of contemporary society and the cultural imperatives that, he believes, will cause it to change. I feel it is necessary to re-visit this argument, as I feel it is integral to understanding the motivations behind Sokol's essay.
Lyotard's desire to present the unpresentable, a strategy held by postmodernists in general, has led to the intellectual debate that Sokol satirizes when he calls it an epistemic relativism that substitutes textuality in place of physical reality. Sokol criticizes writers like Lyotard, who appear on first reading to call for new ways of thinking. As noted above, Sokol sees the postmodern critique of science as dressed up in an inflamed rhetoric that substitutes metaphor and word-play for logical argument. In addition, he is skeptical of postmodernism's call to re-affirm the importance of thinking which, some have argued, is in danger of being lost, erased by the elisions and forgetfulness that occurs with the advancement of the modern era. If Sokol's fears are unjustified, as I believe they are, what, then, is the theoretical basis for Lyotard's critique of science ? The postmodern individual, Lyotard says, is one who no longer believes in the grand narratives that have legitimized both the social basis of cultural knowledge and the epistemological basis of scientific truth. While this claim might appear to be implausible in that Lyotard does not fully justify his statement, I believe that this proposition is commensurate with the views held by many other writers we have read this semester. If postmodernism is 'about' anything, it is about questioning the taken-for-granted truths that are at the base of society and allowing for a more fully reflective society to develop. By converging postmodern philosophy with the history of science, Lyotard indicated that shift begun in the work of Nietzsche calls us to abandon conceptual systems founded on grand narratives.
In her essay on the Sokol controversy, Babette Babich illustrates how one of these grand narratives came into being, demonstrating how it is unjustifiable to equate postmodernism and anti-science ideology. If people have come to reject grand narratives, as Lyotard claims, then this may be because people are disappointed that the age of modernism did not materialize as they expected and, consequently, people have become frustrated by the rate of scientific progress. Using the example of the fight against disease and death, Babich says that modern scientific thought promoted the belief that the progress of science was unlimited and that, in time, all diseases would be eradicated. Duped by the rhetoric of high modernism, Babich says, "the public subscribed both to the promise and the ideal." Learning of science's advancements in the war against viruses and other pathogens, the public began to imaging that this battle was being won and, when the enemies were overcome, perhaps the aging process and even death itself could be fended off. Such a belief, obviously, was a misguided one, and Babich says that the progressive realization that such an era had not yet arrived and, furthermore, would not arrive at any time in the foreseeable future, paved the way for what has been commonly called postmodernism.
Prior to our reading of Lyotard, we discovered several other individuals who, like Lyotard, suggested an underlying complicity between truth and narrative. For instance, Hans Blumenberg says that the history of scientific thought illustrates the curious way in which trends in thinking develop. In the history of science it is not uncommon for a single scientific proposition to emerge and, over the course of time, come to assume a status of force and truthfulness. As more and more scientific results adhere to an originally anomalous result, propositions that initially seemed strange and counterintuitive eventually become the unquestioned and axiomatic truths of new fields of thought. Considering the the French word histoire signifies both history and story, it is not surprising the Lyotard thinks of the history of science as a narrative. In this way Lyotard's work way be seen as developing from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1955), which conceives of the history of science as being a succession of paradigm shifts, of revolutions in seeing the world. Lyotard's viewpoint is shared by thinkers such as Paul Feyerabend, who views the further development of scientific thought as being dependent on dissenting viewpoints and even outright anarchistic forms of methodology.
Moreover, Blumenberg points out that, for many of these scientists, the spirit of scientific inquiry is a limited one: Modern scientific practice has become a kind of institution in which "it can be more rational to accept something on insufficient grounds than to insist on a procedure modeled on that of science." Painting a picture of the bureaucracy of modern science, Blumenberg insists that modern science has fallen into a trap where the claims of rationality are not being used correctly. Rather than proceeding from a liberal model of scientific progress, scientific researchers use the rhetoric of rationality to "disguise decisions that have already been made." In this way, scientific institutions become self-legitimizing, free from the ethical laws that govern scientific inquiry. Large-scale scientific inquiry has led to this state of affairs because, Blumenberg says, should the scientists find that they do not have sufficient evidence to support their conclusions, they often are not permitted to cancel or alter their research methodology. Instead, they must continue research in the direction authorized by the institution, even when the results run counter to the state objectives of their research.
In it conclusions such as these concerning the pernicious relationship between the modern institution and the practice of scientific research that led Sokol to make the following statement: "The pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are not perceived in their ineluctable historicity, and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point." Raising Blumenberg's objections to modern scientific research to the level of absurdity, Sokol disingenuously appeals to Blumenberg's viewpoint. With this statement Sokol scoffs at the idea that scientists can become overly invested in their research and therefore unwilling to concede the possibility of alternative modes of thought. Mimicking the histrionics of postmodern writers such as Jacques Derrida, Sokol argues that Euclid's mathematics and Newton's theory of gravity, too, are scientific constructs that once enjoyed that status of indisputable physical realities but now can be removed from this status. Here Sokol parodies the academic debate of whether there is a single objective truth or a set of multiple viewpoints.
While both Lyotard and Babich see economic imperatives as the driving force behind modern scientific research, there are others who see the driving force behind postmodernism to be equally pernicious. In particular, John M. Ellis sees postmodern literary studies as dressing up thought in inflated rhetorical gestures for no other purpose other than to revel in the experience of language. Ellis takes Derrida's reading of Saussure to symbolize the error of postmodern thinking. Saussure redefined the concept of the sign by suggesting that the foundation of meaning was not located in concepts existing outside language but within contextual circumstances where subject and object, or speaker and listener, were differentiated from each other. Derrida adds to Saussure's picture of the exchange of language by characterizing speech-act communication to be a region of unlimited play. Essentially, it is the play of differences that causes meaning to be ceaselessly deferred and never absolutely present outside this system. As a result of this circular system of meaning, the endless process of signification allows postmodernists to extend their critique of the human sciences to other forms of textuality, including the social sciences and, much to the dismay of Alan Sokol, the natural sciences as well. At this point, says Ellis, "everything becomes discourse [and] since we are cut off from ultimate referents, there is only language."
There are additional critics who advocate this viewpoint as well. Benjamin Woolley seems to favor this view, especially when he argues that, due to the influence of modern viewpoints, the events that occur in physical reality have become dissociated from the phenomenon associated with them. He related this to a recent even in international warfare, the Gulf War between the United States and Iraq. According to Woolley, this war was so dominated by media coverage and critical analysis that the events of the war itself became, to use Jean Baudrillard's phrase, merely a simulacrum of the real. Baudrillard's condemnation of postmodernism, Woolley says, is a reaction to the conclusion that reality no longer exists, that life itself has become an image without reference to anything other than itself. The postmodern world is a world where the real has been abolished, suffocated out of existence by the advancement of manipulative images than can be altered by the free commerce of truth and illusion. It is a world dominated by hyperreality, where the play of reality has become an aesthetic hallucination without origin or reference. I find Woolley's writing to be provocative, but unconvincing. Perhaps his argument would attain more significance if he were to present an analysis of contemporary Western culture that is pervaded with absent images, presences without reality, such as those portrayed in television and film. These, I believe, are the true operators behind the phenomenon Woolley observes. It is this inundation with presences without reality that promotes a belief in reality without presence, causing things to become, to use Charles Taylor's term, "flattened."
Frederick Jameson, too, believes a basic feature of postmodernism is the progressive transformation of life into textuality, wherein the experience of the temporality of life is akin to the experience of language. By this Jameson means that human existence and the experience of the passage of time are being re-conceptualized into, essentially, effects of language. To clarify his meaning, Jameson related this statement to a reading to the poem "China" by Bob Perelman. In this poem the experience of the real is not only mediated through signs, as in a modernist text, but is an example of a postmodern literary artwork, where the only references in the work are to other images. A postmodern discourse is developed where images refer to other images only and the intrusion of the real is not only prohibited, it is de-legitimized, removed from the realm of the plausible and moved to the realm of the mythic. Unlike the modernist appreciation of the literary work, in which unity is to be found within the text, in postmodern discourse this unity re-located into the province of myth and insubstantial being, or what Jameson calls, "The bound unity of the absent book." Like Woolley's argument, Jameson's description of postmodernity seems to rest on what Ellis sees as Derrida's misreading of Saussure, where a cultural deconstruction of reality insists both that language ix the only sure phenomenal manifestation of reality and that there is nothing outside the language of the text.
Similar to the way Jameson view the literary text, Lyotard sees science as a narrative founded on myth. Lyotard targets those myths that legitimized the methodology promoted by research institutions that insist on the continual drive for the new and the modern. While Lyotard is all in favor of scientific progress, he wants us to recognize that our notions of progress are founded on myths and the false consciousness of outmoded ideologies. Specifically, these myths are the liberation of humanity from the oppressors, which originates in the French enlightenment, and the unity of all speculative knowledge, which derives from the Germanic and Hegelian traditions.
Lyotard's text came as a reaction to the explosion of information which necessitated the creation of a new medium for the dissemination of rhetorical discourse, one which could better accommodate the workings of the postmodern mind. Electronic hypertext, the internet and the World Wide Web makes available a field of interconnections that were hitherto unbreached. A component of Lyotard's report on the epistemological uncertainty of the postmodern subject is a critique of the work of Jurgen Habermas. In particular, Lyotard distrusts Habermas' faith in an immanent social evolution within an intersubjective communication community. Such a belief, Lyotard says, is no more than a reconceptualization of those modernist belief-systems that expectantly awaited the development of a social, political and philosophical consensus. Rejecting such expectations, postmodernism repudiates Hegel"s idea of a consensual culture in a world of absolute spirit, substituting in its place Marx's belief that the only true consensus will take place when we make ourselves at home in our alienated being. Lyotard observes a transformation in the status of knowledge that, he says, began at the end of the 1950s, occurring simultaneously with the end of post-war European rebuilding and with the emergence of multi-national capitalism, which Marx called the third and final stage of capitalism. In this stage, says Lyotard, a twentieth-century Marxist, the outcome of history has been problematized to such an extent that predictions of future developments are always highly uncertain.
Lyotard recognizes that the leading sciences and technologies are based on language theory and are, for the most part, driven by language processing instruments. "In a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day," he says, "language assumes a new importance." This includes, of course, the computer, a machine whose data storage and information retrieval capabilities make it the foundation of contemporary techne. While the future impact of this transformation of societal knowledge cannot be determined from the standpoint of the present, Lyotard suggests that these changes in the accessibility of knowledge will have social effects comparable to the increased access to knowledge at the time of the Renaissance. These changes entail the dissolution of the directive which, inherited from the Greeks, commanded the student to 'know thyself' in order to acquire learning. Lyotard sees these old principles as swiftly becoming obsolete in the face of the new educational imperatives which see the education of students as being distinct from the development of character and individuality. The reason for this change is due to the fact that the educational arena, once the province of a humanist liberalism that regarded free inquiry as the highest good, becomes a marketplace of information as the logic of the commodity is carried over to the relationship between teacher and student, who adopt roles of producer and consumer. With this restructuring of the values behind the economy of learning, knowledge comes to be manufactures according to its market value. The preeminent goal when knowledge is stripped of its use-value, says Lyotard, is exchange.
Lyotard believes that the technocratic nations of the future will continue to place a major emphasis on science and, for this reason, the margin of difference between wealthy countries and impoverished countries will continue to widen, until an overwhelming abyss divides the postmodern and premodern worlds. He believes that the value of information will continue to grow until, like a precious resource, nation-states will battle one another for rights of possession. This new stage in territorial warfare is the inevitable result of what Lyotard calls "the mercantilization of knowledge." Revealing his Marxist roots, Lyotard predicts the withering away of the State due to the ceaseless generation of viewpoints that contest the system of power installed in traditional notions of ideological or epistemic reference. Who can know the truth in this world of multi-national corporations and proletarian culture ? This is one of Lyotard's most resounding questions.
As mentioned previously, Lyotard frequently engages in sloganeering without giving a sufficient basis for his reasoning, often posturing himself as a poet. His severe criticism of the Western scientific establishment leads him to make statements that neither he nor his sympathizers can adequately defend. Lyotard says that since the earlier advancements in Western civilization, scientific knowledge has found itself bound by narrative, that is, stories that serve to regulate and determine the projected course of history. These stories, one the grand recits of a highly productive and transformative worldview, have since faded into the cultural memory, living on as the etiolating ghosts of a future history that has failed to come to pass. Lyotard notes that starting in the 1960s, scientific research began to exhibit a "demoralized" affect that corresponds to a "slackening" of revolutionary ambitions in both the human and natural sciences. Lyotard sees no place for revolution in this non-ideological postmodern age; the order of post-industrial society, while in a demoralized state, is nevertheless impervious to the sudden outbreak of revolutionary spirit. One area where support is lacking is that of cultural legitimation, for in its demoralized state, the world finds self-legitimation to be a daunting and overwhelming task. In particular, postmodern society finds it difficult to authorize and promulgate the normative laws set in place by the founders of modern society. This becomes a particular difficult quandary when it comes to matters of science. Such are the claims of Lyotard which, as stated above, are unusual in that do not conform to the typical order of thought. All of these hypotheses are contingent on the acceptance of the statement that lacks a convincing argument, that science has been in a demoralized state since the 1960s. This us a statement that Lyotard expects the reader to accept as an article of faith, and it is easy to believe that statements like these provoked Professor Sokol's hostility towards postmodernism.
Traditionally, the results of scientific research were scrutinized by a legislative group who, working within the carefully codified worlds of authorized discourse, determined whether or not a scientific statement was significant for the community at large. However, asks Lyotard, what happens when a statement can no longer be legitimized in the traditional manner ? If the right to determine the truth is, like the right to determine what is just, a subject open to multiple viewpoints, then we can forsee how Lyotard's vision of a future world burdened by a heteroglossic miasma of competing bodies is, in fact, a possibility. It is important to note that Lyotard speaks of 'competition' in the scientific world and not 'elimination', for it is clear that postmodernism does not wish to extirpate modernist truths at all. In Lyotard's scenario, the scientific world of the future is like today's political world, where an unyielding set of cultural prejudices leaves much of the globe in turmoil. Moreover, if knowledge and power are two sides of the same question, then the ruling classes have simply retreated to the next highest level, stacking the cards against the marginalized social groups that postmodernism seeks to liberate. Lyotard imagines the ruling classes to be working to reify and re-legitimize the status quo in the face of political and legal advancements made by marginal social groups. Ironically, in this new age of computers and information superhighways, the questions that stand before us are the same ones we thought had been resolved. In this respect, the condition of the working class in both the modern and postmodern ages are identical. Lyotard admits as much, saying, "The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers."
Marxism is directed by a different conception of knowledge; it does not privilege the same regime of values that the ideology of capitalism does. On the contrary, Marxism conceived of the world as fundamentally non-totalizable and dis-unified. As Jameson writes in "Postmodernism and Consumer Culture", the less radical forms of postmodernism believe that modernist constructs are no longer applicable in the age of late-capitalism, while the moder radical versions of postmodernism believe that these constructs, such as the individual bourgeois subject, never really existed at all. Such constructs, Jameson says, are seen as being cultural and philosophical propaganda designed to produce a sense of confusion over those who could radicalize the social world against the status quo. Like Jameson's view of the postmodern literary object, Lyotard says that the postmodern individual exhibits the same qualities. The individual is not referred to any larger chain of reference, but only to himself. Lyotard uses the metaphor of the Brownian particle to characterize this model of the self that moves about haphazardly and incessantly. The self does not exist as an independent subject anymore, but is bound by a concatenation of complex references and mobile identities that provide it with an intrinsic bond in relation to the other.
Although it may appear to the uncareful reader that Lyotard seeks to de-legitimize the paradigm of contemporary science, in no way does he believe that those concepts which the scientific tradition was founded on are now deprived of meaning. Rather, Lyotard makes the case that in order to reinstitute the re-vitalization of scientific inquiry, all deficient and empty words and texts must be cleared away. "This war is not without rules," he states, "but the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterance." It is also important to be aware of Lyotard's conception of postmodern knowledge which, he says, is not a simple set of denotative facts. For Lyotard, postmodern knowledge is more than a simple fulfillment of criteria either true or false. By extinguishing all trace of narrative from scientific discourse, Lyotard conceives of a future where knowledge is reconfigured. Made up of two sub-groups, postmodern episteme is composed from prescriptive knowledge or payment knowledge, which serves to increase technical skills, and evaluative knowledge or investment knowledge, which serves to increase productivity. Where will we find the true knowledge of existence, the knowledge acquired through training in the liberal arts ? This type of knowledge, Lyotard says, has been abandoned, for it has been judged as lacking adequate use-value. In the early scientific era, education was deemed an important factor in the establishment of social boundaries and for this reason it viewed itself as rational, narrative knowledge. In the postmodern age education no longer has this exclusive function and for this reason only denotative statements are valid; all others, says Lyotard, are excluded. The replacement of universities with schools seems to be a necessary corollary of Lyotard's philosophy. After all, schools are functional while universities are merely speculative. Lyotard predicts that we may see an early manifestation of the reorganization of the educational institution in the United States, as this country was among the first to implement the organization system of the German universities as its educational model.
The figure of the scientific method is converted into a myth which lingers on in ignorance, unaware that its two main pillars of support, dialectics and metaphysics, rely on a belief in original reference and transcendental presence, both of which have been called into question. Lyotard attempts to re-historicize the concept of science by re-situating scientific knowledge in the concept of the learning self. Postmodernism, which has developed as the result of the proletariatization of society, has gained discursive power from the synthesis of the twin philosophies of existentialism and Marxism. By conflating these two systems into a single text, it allows them to manifest a more significant presence in our lives.
While postmodernism appears to announce the death of the God of scientific inquiry, I believe Lyotard calls us to re-accept science on newly articulated terms. In this context, scientific knowledge can best be seen as a network, simultaneously extirpating and re-installing the ethical values of a demoralized society that despaired because it could not provide a stable and transparent future. Although similar in structure to that scientific tradition that led to the catholic precepts of Copernicus and Galileo and to the splintering that took place at the time of Locke and Bacon, the foundation of the methodology of postmodern science contains neither dogmatism nor an easily recognizable code of morality. The advancement of scientific knowledge is impossible because postmodernism sees science as being dead. This is because contemporary society has obfuscated the natural world, with its logic of the commodity and its staunch emphasis on the culture of the individual. Consequently, only those views of the world which legitimize the present scientific understanding of the world are considered legitimate.
It should be remembered that postmodernism is about recovering those voices that were previously lost or marginalized. Deriving inspiration from the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, postmodern theorists such as Lyotard are operating in the scientific tradition, working to re-legitimize the scientific paradigm. It has been shown that Lyotard's work is an attempt to re-invigorate the scientific methodology that he feels has been subverted by a demoralized ethical training. Like Feyerabend's call for an anarchist ethics, Lyotard speaks of the near for a radical super-moral ethics for the seeker of postmodern scientific fact, smashing all of the idols of Western civilization in the attempt to rationalize a non-totalizable universe. Postmodern theory represents an attempt at re-discovering the primal sense of scientific thinking which has been debased or forgotten. Yet there is another acute sense of the meaning of scientific reasoning, in that postmodernists believe that tradition is unable to preserve the truth perpetually. Rather than promoting scientific truth on the basis of an authentic rationality, postmodernism willfully conceals the accepted standards of scientific truth, causing that real and original component of meaning to be lost in history, in the shift from futurology to the nostalgia of a future anterior.
While I have argued that postmodern thinkers feel capable of analyzing science because in the postmodern age the critic is free to address any subject organized by and made real through language, it remains to be seen why these writers believe reality to be subordinate to language. Eugene Goodheart supplies us with the example of Roland Barthes, a critic who was among those who inaugurated the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. Goodheart says that Barthes' semiology entails "the absorption of reality into writing." According to Barthes, even if language and reality are set apart from one another and regardless of whether reality is simply absorbed or distorted by language, the fact remains that reality is unable to restrict language, for the signifier transgresses the limits of the signified. This creates a space for postmodern science to emerge as postmodern thinkers, unrestrained by the traditional fields of thinking, extend their discourse beyond the area demarcated by literary studies; their grasp extends not only into philosophy and literature, but to cultural studies and social sciences and even--to the horror of individuals like Professor Sokol--into the study of the natural sciences.
Writers of contemporary fiction, Barthes says, are often at fault because they commit a similar error in that their texts posit a reality prior to and exterior to both meaning and language. "The body of the world enters the writing process," Barthes says, "and writing becomes a physical presence equivalent to reality." Barthes historicizes this process, calling it "the myth of ecriture." With this dissolution of the text following the disintegration of the individual subject, reality itself becomes an indeterminate linguistic construct. The free play of the word leads to the free play of language over the world. Goodheart also mentions Stanley Fish who said, as early as 1980, that it would be a caricature of the postmodern viewpoint to see the denial of objectivity as necessarily leading one to "a universe of free play in which everything is indeterminate and undecidable." The significant change, according to Fish, is that determinacy and decidability are always available, for postmodernity evaluates its subjects not by comparison with some universal normalizing standard, as in the modernist universe, but according to the specific context of our lives.
Another figure who provides a theoretical ground for postmodern views of science of Michael Polyani. He is someone who has seeks to discredit "the tacit assumptions by which scientists circumscribe the ground of which scientific progress occurs." In a similar vein, Fish believes that "the truth of an interpretation is ultimately a matter of its persuasiveness," which he says is often a matter of politics. This leads one to ask whether or not there is a political program at the base of postmodern science ? While such a belief is laughable to Sokol, Michel Foucault says that the importance of a revolution is located, not in the revolutionary agents themselves, but in the changes of the minds of those who do not participate. This remark provides a basis from Aronowitz's statement on the need to "bring science down to earth" where it can be studied as a form of lived experience. Like a political revolution, the significance of a scientific revolution is not to be judged from the lives of those who enact the changes, but in the minds and lives of those that are affected by these changes.
In the final section of my essay I will make a comparison between a final pair of thinkers, the rhetorician James Boyd White and the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, each of whom take decidedly different viewpoints from what might be expected. White says that mainstream science considers itself a self-legitimizing enterprise because it has at its foundation two forms of thought whose logical authenticity cannot be refuted. Deductive reasoning and empirical reasoning comprise the two forms of logical argument and science derives its privileged standing because these are the only forms of thought that can call themselves a proof. However, White says, the kinds of reasoning denoted by these two forms of thought make up only a small portion of human life. The greater portion of the human world cannot be negotiated simply by showing, demonstrating and proving facts. These facets of life must be reasoned out through debate and justification by parties who proceed without the comfort of empirical and logical certainty. White also expresses the view that the despairing anxiety of the postmodern age is the result of the failure of the structuralist project that sought to bring the diverse complexity and heterogeneity of the modern world into a scientific framework. After witnessing the inability of the structuralists to articulate the existence of an objective truth, the world progressively accepted the postmodern viewpoint that "we live in an incoherent and elemental flux in which no meaning and reasoning is possible." To recover from this postmodern affliction, White says that it is important that we reclaim the meaning that establishes our being within language. This can be accomplished if we enlarge our definitions of reading and writing through a close examination of the relationships between writer and language, writer and culture and writer and reader. Under this program, individuals can establish their identities within a textual community that not only questions the ideologies of the world but may even posit and give rise to a new world.
Although Fish claims that some scientists feel that the argument made in Sokol's hoax is, in fact, a plausible argument, he does not identity any specific figures. Lest we interpret Fish's claim as an empty boast, it should be known that Marvin Minsky, one of the leading American theorists on artificial intelligence technology, may be sympathetic to postmodern science. According to Minsky, although the human brain is subject to the "same all-inclusive physical laws that govern all forms of matter," human beings cannot explain how our brains function simply on the basis of these principles. Knowing how each part of our brain performs its individual functions is not the same as knowing how the brain functions as a total agency. This is because, Minsky says, "Their functions are not established by the general laws of physics, but by the particular arrangements of the millions of bits of information in our inherited genes." In his opinion, postmodernism is not a form of epistemic relativism that rejects the existence of an external world, but is a justifiable call for "additional theories and principles that operate at a higher level of organization." These statements lead me to believe that Minsky would approve of the postmodern cultural studies offered by Social Text, not as a replacement for scientific knowledge, but as an addition to it.
While some example from contemporary philosophy might suggest that nothing exists outside language, postmodern science does not adopt such a view. Why, then, are those who champion postmodern view of science find themselves labelled as epistemic relativists ? It seems to be that the reason why has a line of reasoning similar to the one used by those who deplore deconstruction as a morally nihilistic institution, libeling its affiliated as advocates of a relativistic hermeneutics. Perhaps it is viewed as being linked with recent movements in literary criticism such as deconstruction, whose true nature became confused in the minds of many who incorrectly saw it as a method literary criticism where the very nature of meaning was abolished. Jacques Derrida may have inadvertently promoted such a view when he said that deconstruction considers the idea of meaning to be a terrorist act. Foucault furthered the association of postmodernism and terrorism when he suggested that Derrida's work was "an exercise in the terrorism of obscurity." Such a characterization fails to understand the ethical component of postmodern studies and it should be noted that Derrida sought to establish a postmodern form of literary criticism that was "not an enclosure in nothingness but an openness towards the Other." Any evaluation of deconstruction that fails to note this aspect is a misinterpretation of Derrida's intentions and a misunderstanding of the deeply ethical nature of postmodernity.
In regards to postmodern science, the ethical component of this change in the re-organization of knowledge is the shift from the legitimation of denotative statements to the legitimation of prescriptive statements. Lyotard makes this clear, saying, "The important things is not to legitimate denotative utterances, but rather to legitimate presciptive utterances pertaining to justice." Although this emphasis on prescription may appear unusual coming from a postmodern thinker, it is important to note that these perscriptions are ethical in nature and, as indicated above, the realm of ethics is heavily accented in the postmodern age. Statements that pertain to justice are legitimated as the only solutions valid for society's needs. Ethics in the postmodern era is no longer a subject that is studied for its own sake, but it something that accrues value in its application, its legitimacy only arriving when it allows for the manifestation of the ethical face of reality, an essential factor in the relationship between self and other. The philosophies of Lyotard and Nietzsche explicit call on the dawning of a new age and the emergence of a new type of individual subject, one who knows the secret complementarity of scientific truth and narrational fiction. By speaking for their unification, the postmodern individual becomes a revolutionary in the deepest sense possible; this person has moved beyond these grand narratives and has forged a new epistemological code through the strength of their moral will.
Many critics, it should be said, are not entirely comfortable with this viewpoint. Charles Taylor is a critic who suggests that Lyotard's description of increasing laxity and demoralization is not a historically specific characterization of the 1960s: "What we need to explain," Taylor says, "is what is specific to our time." What is specific to our time, he adds, is that people are able to respond to the call of conscience and that this call seeks the recognition and the acknowledgment of the Other. In addition to misunderstanding its ethical character, what Sokol misunderstands about postmodernism is its commitment to the ideal of authenticity. This is an ideal whose moral force has been endangered, says Taylor, and it is an ideal that endangers those who advocate for it. Indeed, the promotion of this ideal by Aronowitz, Fish and other causes Sokol to label them as "soft relativists," just as Taylor predicts. If this is so, then how is this 'openness towards the other' reflected in postmodern science ? According to Taylor, the best way to embody this openness is to create a text that could function as a work of retrieval in order to unify the past and present. The postmodern scientific text must concern itself with the other, it must be open to and must search out and retrieve the other of history. Scientific writing should not be seen as the absolute locus of truth but, like a postmodern literary text, as a form of textuality whose ethos consists in being structurally open to the other. Postmodern science sees scientific work as ethical because it is always already structurally open to the moral authenticity of the other. If we are not aware of this essential feature of postmodern science then we cannot but misunderstand it, as Professor Sokol does.
The spring 1996 edition of the academic journal Social Text included an essay written by a physicist from New York University entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." The essay suggests that the axioms of science are, like all social knowledge, culturally constructed and open to multiple viewpoints. Upon publication of this article, the editors of Social Text learned that, much to their surprise, Sokol's essay was in fact a hoax, a parody of the rhetoric used by contemporary cultural theorists. This, Sokol felt, was just what they deserved for extending their critique of literature and society into the world of science. As he said, "I didn't know people were using deconstructive literary criticism not only to study Jane Austen but to study quantum mechanics." By 'transgressing the boundary' of liberal humanist studies and by offering a critique of the methodology of science, Sokol sought to put social and cultural studies back in their place, that is, behind science.
Professor Stanley Aronowitz, co-founder of the journal, believes that Sokol does not understand postmodernism and has called him "ill read and half-educated." Why, then, was Sokol's essay accepted for publication ? According to Andrew Ross, a co-editor of Social Text, Sokol's essay was reviewed by six editors who, failing to perceive Sokol's intentions, decided to publish the piece in a special issue devoted to "Science Wars." The fact that Sokol's essay was accepted for publication throws a stark light onto postmodern cultural studies. If the editors cannot tell when someone is using the language of critical theory in a deliberate nonsensical way, then is the discourse of postmodernism one step removed from gibberish ? As Sokol himself has written, in an article published shortly after his hoax, his essay was a melange of "citations, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions." This hoax, he continues, was necessary to combat the academic elitism that contends, with intellectual arrogance, "that knowledge of the real world is superfluous."
Sokol explains his method of composition, revealing that he took the most absurd quotes about the natural sciences and mathematics from several well-known academics, including Derrida and Lyotard, and composed a piece that celebrated the connections between them. The central claim of his article is that the theory of quantum gravity possessed significant political ramifications. Aligning quantum gravity with postmodern epistemology, Sokol asserts that postmodern science has abolished the concept of objective reality. In the next portion of his article he suggests that the "liberatory" sciences of the future must rework and redefine the concepts of mathematics, as dictated by political struggles within the late-capitalist system of production. Sokol derisively says that these statements were made without regard to the logic argument, as should be expected from any piece of rhetoric. The absence of this requirement, implies Sokol, indicates that postmodern studies are poorly written and empty of meaning.
Rather than making a detailed analysis of Sokol's argument and the jargon of authenticity he employed in order to deceive the editors of the journal (although such an essay could very well be written), I intend to find out if the concept of postmodernism can be rehabilitated, standing it back on its feet after Sokol's crushing parody. Over the course of the semester we have read several critics who, like Sokol, criticize the postmodern use of language as a superficial linkage of metaphors and word-games; however, we have also read many thinkers who suggest that the relationship between language and reality is a debateable issue. Specifically, the status of language as a privileged articulator of reality is a key issue of postmodernism. This, too, is a debate that Sokol attempts to close by showing how postmodern cultural critics, in their attempt to describe the sphere of empirical reality more properly inhabited by science, are revealed as unscholarly and even irrational.
"I don't want to claim that it proves that all social scientists or all English professors are complete idiots," Sokol says, "but it does betray a certain out-of-touchness on the part of a certain clique inside academic life." Responding to the statements, Stanley Fish, professor of English at Duke University, says that Sokol incorrectly perceives postmodern studies as being "in competition with mainstream science." Postmodern studies of the sociology of science are not to be seen as wrestling with natural sciences for the possession of the truth; rather, postmodern studies ought to be seen as distinct from scientific inquiries. Fish believes this distinction can be made in terms of viewpoint. The natural scientist, whose aim is to perform scientific research, occupies a viewpoint distinct from the postmodern critic of science, whose objective is to develop a philosophical explanation of what the scientist does. According to Fish, while Sokol is correct in saying that "theorizing about the social construction of reality won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS," he incorrectly accused postmodernism of failing to do something it never claimed to do. Quoting the 1989 report from the National Academy of Science, Fish condemns Sokol's hoax as a fraud that could potentially "erode the foundation of trust on which science is built."
Was Sokol justified in perpetuating the hoax ? Is science to be seen as an unquestionable epistemological starting-point ? Or is he wrong is viewing the postmodern evaluation of scientific knowledge as an exercise in relativism ? Certainly, one might say, the editors of Social Text should have sent out his essay to a physicist if they did not have the competence required to evaluate the piece properly. Aronowitz responds to this rejoinder when he says that Sokol has confused the issues at hand: "The issue is not whether reality exists, but whether knowledge of it is transparent, or unproblematic." My final essay for this course will take up these questions and, by evaluating several of the readings from this semester, I will attempt to determine whether the viewpoint of postmodern science is a legitimate one.
Nearly twenty years before Sokol published his hoax, the French philosopher Jean-Francoise Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition (1979), in which he announced that contemporary society had reached a crisis-point in the history of science. In my second paper for this course, I analyzed Lyotard's report on the scientific methodology of contemporary society and the cultural imperatives that, he believes, will cause it to change. I feel it is necessary to re-visit this argument, as I feel it is integral to understanding the motivations behind Sokol's essay.
Lyotard's desire to present the unpresentable, a strategy held by postmodernists in general, has led to the intellectual debate that Sokol satirizes when he calls it an epistemic relativism that substitutes textuality in place of physical reality. Sokol criticizes writers like Lyotard, who appear on first reading to call for new ways of thinking. As noted above, Sokol sees the postmodern critique of science as dressed up in an inflamed rhetoric that substitutes metaphor and word-play for logical argument. In addition, he is skeptical of postmodernism's call to re-affirm the importance of thinking which, some have argued, is in danger of being lost, erased by the elisions and forgetfulness that occurs with the advancement of the modern era. If Sokol's fears are unjustified, as I believe they are, what, then, is the theoretical basis for Lyotard's critique of science ? The postmodern individual, Lyotard says, is one who no longer believes in the grand narratives that have legitimized both the social basis of cultural knowledge and the epistemological basis of scientific truth. While this claim might appear to be implausible in that Lyotard does not fully justify his statement, I believe that this proposition is commensurate with the views held by many other writers we have read this semester. If postmodernism is 'about' anything, it is about questioning the taken-for-granted truths that are at the base of society and allowing for a more fully reflective society to develop. By converging postmodern philosophy with the history of science, Lyotard indicated that shift begun in the work of Nietzsche calls us to abandon conceptual systems founded on grand narratives.
In her essay on the Sokol controversy, Babette Babich illustrates how one of these grand narratives came into being, demonstrating how it is unjustifiable to equate postmodernism and anti-science ideology. If people have come to reject grand narratives, as Lyotard claims, then this may be because people are disappointed that the age of modernism did not materialize as they expected and, consequently, people have become frustrated by the rate of scientific progress. Using the example of the fight against disease and death, Babich says that modern scientific thought promoted the belief that the progress of science was unlimited and that, in time, all diseases would be eradicated. Duped by the rhetoric of high modernism, Babich says, "the public subscribed both to the promise and the ideal." Learning of science's advancements in the war against viruses and other pathogens, the public began to imaging that this battle was being won and, when the enemies were overcome, perhaps the aging process and even death itself could be fended off. Such a belief, obviously, was a misguided one, and Babich says that the progressive realization that such an era had not yet arrived and, furthermore, would not arrive at any time in the foreseeable future, paved the way for what has been commonly called postmodernism.
Prior to our reading of Lyotard, we discovered several other individuals who, like Lyotard, suggested an underlying complicity between truth and narrative. For instance, Hans Blumenberg says that the history of scientific thought illustrates the curious way in which trends in thinking develop. In the history of science it is not uncommon for a single scientific proposition to emerge and, over the course of time, come to assume a status of force and truthfulness. As more and more scientific results adhere to an originally anomalous result, propositions that initially seemed strange and counterintuitive eventually become the unquestioned and axiomatic truths of new fields of thought. Considering the the French word histoire signifies both history and story, it is not surprising the Lyotard thinks of the history of science as a narrative. In this way Lyotard's work way be seen as developing from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1955), which conceives of the history of science as being a succession of paradigm shifts, of revolutions in seeing the world. Lyotard's viewpoint is shared by thinkers such as Paul Feyerabend, who views the further development of scientific thought as being dependent on dissenting viewpoints and even outright anarchistic forms of methodology.
Moreover, Blumenberg points out that, for many of these scientists, the spirit of scientific inquiry is a limited one: Modern scientific practice has become a kind of institution in which "it can be more rational to accept something on insufficient grounds than to insist on a procedure modeled on that of science." Painting a picture of the bureaucracy of modern science, Blumenberg insists that modern science has fallen into a trap where the claims of rationality are not being used correctly. Rather than proceeding from a liberal model of scientific progress, scientific researchers use the rhetoric of rationality to "disguise decisions that have already been made." In this way, scientific institutions become self-legitimizing, free from the ethical laws that govern scientific inquiry. Large-scale scientific inquiry has led to this state of affairs because, Blumenberg says, should the scientists find that they do not have sufficient evidence to support their conclusions, they often are not permitted to cancel or alter their research methodology. Instead, they must continue research in the direction authorized by the institution, even when the results run counter to the state objectives of their research.
In it conclusions such as these concerning the pernicious relationship between the modern institution and the practice of scientific research that led Sokol to make the following statement: "The pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are not perceived in their ineluctable historicity, and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point." Raising Blumenberg's objections to modern scientific research to the level of absurdity, Sokol disingenuously appeals to Blumenberg's viewpoint. With this statement Sokol scoffs at the idea that scientists can become overly invested in their research and therefore unwilling to concede the possibility of alternative modes of thought. Mimicking the histrionics of postmodern writers such as Jacques Derrida, Sokol argues that Euclid's mathematics and Newton's theory of gravity, too, are scientific constructs that once enjoyed that status of indisputable physical realities but now can be removed from this status. Here Sokol parodies the academic debate of whether there is a single objective truth or a set of multiple viewpoints.
While both Lyotard and Babich see economic imperatives as the driving force behind modern scientific research, there are others who see the driving force behind postmodernism to be equally pernicious. In particular, John M. Ellis sees postmodern literary studies as dressing up thought in inflated rhetorical gestures for no other purpose other than to revel in the experience of language. Ellis takes Derrida's reading of Saussure to symbolize the error of postmodern thinking. Saussure redefined the concept of the sign by suggesting that the foundation of meaning was not located in concepts existing outside language but within contextual circumstances where subject and object, or speaker and listener, were differentiated from each other. Derrida adds to Saussure's picture of the exchange of language by characterizing speech-act communication to be a region of unlimited play. Essentially, it is the play of differences that causes meaning to be ceaselessly deferred and never absolutely present outside this system. As a result of this circular system of meaning, the endless process of signification allows postmodernists to extend their critique of the human sciences to other forms of textuality, including the social sciences and, much to the dismay of Alan Sokol, the natural sciences as well. At this point, says Ellis, "everything becomes discourse [and] since we are cut off from ultimate referents, there is only language."
There are additional critics who advocate this viewpoint as well. Benjamin Woolley seems to favor this view, especially when he argues that, due to the influence of modern viewpoints, the events that occur in physical reality have become dissociated from the phenomenon associated with them. He related this to a recent even in international warfare, the Gulf War between the United States and Iraq. According to Woolley, this war was so dominated by media coverage and critical analysis that the events of the war itself became, to use Jean Baudrillard's phrase, merely a simulacrum of the real. Baudrillard's condemnation of postmodernism, Woolley says, is a reaction to the conclusion that reality no longer exists, that life itself has become an image without reference to anything other than itself. The postmodern world is a world where the real has been abolished, suffocated out of existence by the advancement of manipulative images than can be altered by the free commerce of truth and illusion. It is a world dominated by hyperreality, where the play of reality has become an aesthetic hallucination without origin or reference. I find Woolley's writing to be provocative, but unconvincing. Perhaps his argument would attain more significance if he were to present an analysis of contemporary Western culture that is pervaded with absent images, presences without reality, such as those portrayed in television and film. These, I believe, are the true operators behind the phenomenon Woolley observes. It is this inundation with presences without reality that promotes a belief in reality without presence, causing things to become, to use Charles Taylor's term, "flattened."
Frederick Jameson, too, believes a basic feature of postmodernism is the progressive transformation of life into textuality, wherein the experience of the temporality of life is akin to the experience of language. By this Jameson means that human existence and the experience of the passage of time are being re-conceptualized into, essentially, effects of language. To clarify his meaning, Jameson related this statement to a reading to the poem "China" by Bob Perelman. In this poem the experience of the real is not only mediated through signs, as in a modernist text, but is an example of a postmodern literary artwork, where the only references in the work are to other images. A postmodern discourse is developed where images refer to other images only and the intrusion of the real is not only prohibited, it is de-legitimized, removed from the realm of the plausible and moved to the realm of the mythic. Unlike the modernist appreciation of the literary work, in which unity is to be found within the text, in postmodern discourse this unity re-located into the province of myth and insubstantial being, or what Jameson calls, "The bound unity of the absent book." Like Woolley's argument, Jameson's description of postmodernity seems to rest on what Ellis sees as Derrida's misreading of Saussure, where a cultural deconstruction of reality insists both that language ix the only sure phenomenal manifestation of reality and that there is nothing outside the language of the text.
Similar to the way Jameson view the literary text, Lyotard sees science as a narrative founded on myth. Lyotard targets those myths that legitimized the methodology promoted by research institutions that insist on the continual drive for the new and the modern. While Lyotard is all in favor of scientific progress, he wants us to recognize that our notions of progress are founded on myths and the false consciousness of outmoded ideologies. Specifically, these myths are the liberation of humanity from the oppressors, which originates in the French enlightenment, and the unity of all speculative knowledge, which derives from the Germanic and Hegelian traditions.
Lyotard's text came as a reaction to the explosion of information which necessitated the creation of a new medium for the dissemination of rhetorical discourse, one which could better accommodate the workings of the postmodern mind. Electronic hypertext, the internet and the World Wide Web makes available a field of interconnections that were hitherto unbreached. A component of Lyotard's report on the epistemological uncertainty of the postmodern subject is a critique of the work of Jurgen Habermas. In particular, Lyotard distrusts Habermas' faith in an immanent social evolution within an intersubjective communication community. Such a belief, Lyotard says, is no more than a reconceptualization of those modernist belief-systems that expectantly awaited the development of a social, political and philosophical consensus. Rejecting such expectations, postmodernism repudiates Hegel"s idea of a consensual culture in a world of absolute spirit, substituting in its place Marx's belief that the only true consensus will take place when we make ourselves at home in our alienated being. Lyotard observes a transformation in the status of knowledge that, he says, began at the end of the 1950s, occurring simultaneously with the end of post-war European rebuilding and with the emergence of multi-national capitalism, which Marx called the third and final stage of capitalism. In this stage, says Lyotard, a twentieth-century Marxist, the outcome of history has been problematized to such an extent that predictions of future developments are always highly uncertain.
Lyotard recognizes that the leading sciences and technologies are based on language theory and are, for the most part, driven by language processing instruments. "In a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day," he says, "language assumes a new importance." This includes, of course, the computer, a machine whose data storage and information retrieval capabilities make it the foundation of contemporary techne. While the future impact of this transformation of societal knowledge cannot be determined from the standpoint of the present, Lyotard suggests that these changes in the accessibility of knowledge will have social effects comparable to the increased access to knowledge at the time of the Renaissance. These changes entail the dissolution of the directive which, inherited from the Greeks, commanded the student to 'know thyself' in order to acquire learning. Lyotard sees these old principles as swiftly becoming obsolete in the face of the new educational imperatives which see the education of students as being distinct from the development of character and individuality. The reason for this change is due to the fact that the educational arena, once the province of a humanist liberalism that regarded free inquiry as the highest good, becomes a marketplace of information as the logic of the commodity is carried over to the relationship between teacher and student, who adopt roles of producer and consumer. With this restructuring of the values behind the economy of learning, knowledge comes to be manufactures according to its market value. The preeminent goal when knowledge is stripped of its use-value, says Lyotard, is exchange.
Lyotard believes that the technocratic nations of the future will continue to place a major emphasis on science and, for this reason, the margin of difference between wealthy countries and impoverished countries will continue to widen, until an overwhelming abyss divides the postmodern and premodern worlds. He believes that the value of information will continue to grow until, like a precious resource, nation-states will battle one another for rights of possession. This new stage in territorial warfare is the inevitable result of what Lyotard calls "the mercantilization of knowledge." Revealing his Marxist roots, Lyotard predicts the withering away of the State due to the ceaseless generation of viewpoints that contest the system of power installed in traditional notions of ideological or epistemic reference. Who can know the truth in this world of multi-national corporations and proletarian culture ? This is one of Lyotard's most resounding questions.
As mentioned previously, Lyotard frequently engages in sloganeering without giving a sufficient basis for his reasoning, often posturing himself as a poet. His severe criticism of the Western scientific establishment leads him to make statements that neither he nor his sympathizers can adequately defend. Lyotard says that since the earlier advancements in Western civilization, scientific knowledge has found itself bound by narrative, that is, stories that serve to regulate and determine the projected course of history. These stories, one the grand recits of a highly productive and transformative worldview, have since faded into the cultural memory, living on as the etiolating ghosts of a future history that has failed to come to pass. Lyotard notes that starting in the 1960s, scientific research began to exhibit a "demoralized" affect that corresponds to a "slackening" of revolutionary ambitions in both the human and natural sciences. Lyotard sees no place for revolution in this non-ideological postmodern age; the order of post-industrial society, while in a demoralized state, is nevertheless impervious to the sudden outbreak of revolutionary spirit. One area where support is lacking is that of cultural legitimation, for in its demoralized state, the world finds self-legitimation to be a daunting and overwhelming task. In particular, postmodern society finds it difficult to authorize and promulgate the normative laws set in place by the founders of modern society. This becomes a particular difficult quandary when it comes to matters of science. Such are the claims of Lyotard which, as stated above, are unusual in that do not conform to the typical order of thought. All of these hypotheses are contingent on the acceptance of the statement that lacks a convincing argument, that science has been in a demoralized state since the 1960s. This us a statement that Lyotard expects the reader to accept as an article of faith, and it is easy to believe that statements like these provoked Professor Sokol's hostility towards postmodernism.
Traditionally, the results of scientific research were scrutinized by a legislative group who, working within the carefully codified worlds of authorized discourse, determined whether or not a scientific statement was significant for the community at large. However, asks Lyotard, what happens when a statement can no longer be legitimized in the traditional manner ? If the right to determine the truth is, like the right to determine what is just, a subject open to multiple viewpoints, then we can forsee how Lyotard's vision of a future world burdened by a heteroglossic miasma of competing bodies is, in fact, a possibility. It is important to note that Lyotard speaks of 'competition' in the scientific world and not 'elimination', for it is clear that postmodernism does not wish to extirpate modernist truths at all. In Lyotard's scenario, the scientific world of the future is like today's political world, where an unyielding set of cultural prejudices leaves much of the globe in turmoil. Moreover, if knowledge and power are two sides of the same question, then the ruling classes have simply retreated to the next highest level, stacking the cards against the marginalized social groups that postmodernism seeks to liberate. Lyotard imagines the ruling classes to be working to reify and re-legitimize the status quo in the face of political and legal advancements made by marginal social groups. Ironically, in this new age of computers and information superhighways, the questions that stand before us are the same ones we thought had been resolved. In this respect, the condition of the working class in both the modern and postmodern ages are identical. Lyotard admits as much, saying, "The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers."
Marxism is directed by a different conception of knowledge; it does not privilege the same regime of values that the ideology of capitalism does. On the contrary, Marxism conceived of the world as fundamentally non-totalizable and dis-unified. As Jameson writes in "Postmodernism and Consumer Culture", the less radical forms of postmodernism believe that modernist constructs are no longer applicable in the age of late-capitalism, while the moder radical versions of postmodernism believe that these constructs, such as the individual bourgeois subject, never really existed at all. Such constructs, Jameson says, are seen as being cultural and philosophical propaganda designed to produce a sense of confusion over those who could radicalize the social world against the status quo. Like Jameson's view of the postmodern literary object, Lyotard says that the postmodern individual exhibits the same qualities. The individual is not referred to any larger chain of reference, but only to himself. Lyotard uses the metaphor of the Brownian particle to characterize this model of the self that moves about haphazardly and incessantly. The self does not exist as an independent subject anymore, but is bound by a concatenation of complex references and mobile identities that provide it with an intrinsic bond in relation to the other.
Although it may appear to the uncareful reader that Lyotard seeks to de-legitimize the paradigm of contemporary science, in no way does he believe that those concepts which the scientific tradition was founded on are now deprived of meaning. Rather, Lyotard makes the case that in order to reinstitute the re-vitalization of scientific inquiry, all deficient and empty words and texts must be cleared away. "This war is not without rules," he states, "but the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterance." It is also important to be aware of Lyotard's conception of postmodern knowledge which, he says, is not a simple set of denotative facts. For Lyotard, postmodern knowledge is more than a simple fulfillment of criteria either true or false. By extinguishing all trace of narrative from scientific discourse, Lyotard conceives of a future where knowledge is reconfigured. Made up of two sub-groups, postmodern episteme is composed from prescriptive knowledge or payment knowledge, which serves to increase technical skills, and evaluative knowledge or investment knowledge, which serves to increase productivity. Where will we find the true knowledge of existence, the knowledge acquired through training in the liberal arts ? This type of knowledge, Lyotard says, has been abandoned, for it has been judged as lacking adequate use-value. In the early scientific era, education was deemed an important factor in the establishment of social boundaries and for this reason it viewed itself as rational, narrative knowledge. In the postmodern age education no longer has this exclusive function and for this reason only denotative statements are valid; all others, says Lyotard, are excluded. The replacement of universities with schools seems to be a necessary corollary of Lyotard's philosophy. After all, schools are functional while universities are merely speculative. Lyotard predicts that we may see an early manifestation of the reorganization of the educational institution in the United States, as this country was among the first to implement the organization system of the German universities as its educational model.
The figure of the scientific method is converted into a myth which lingers on in ignorance, unaware that its two main pillars of support, dialectics and metaphysics, rely on a belief in original reference and transcendental presence, both of which have been called into question. Lyotard attempts to re-historicize the concept of science by re-situating scientific knowledge in the concept of the learning self. Postmodernism, which has developed as the result of the proletariatization of society, has gained discursive power from the synthesis of the twin philosophies of existentialism and Marxism. By conflating these two systems into a single text, it allows them to manifest a more significant presence in our lives.
While postmodernism appears to announce the death of the God of scientific inquiry, I believe Lyotard calls us to re-accept science on newly articulated terms. In this context, scientific knowledge can best be seen as a network, simultaneously extirpating and re-installing the ethical values of a demoralized society that despaired because it could not provide a stable and transparent future. Although similar in structure to that scientific tradition that led to the catholic precepts of Copernicus and Galileo and to the splintering that took place at the time of Locke and Bacon, the foundation of the methodology of postmodern science contains neither dogmatism nor an easily recognizable code of morality. The advancement of scientific knowledge is impossible because postmodernism sees science as being dead. This is because contemporary society has obfuscated the natural world, with its logic of the commodity and its staunch emphasis on the culture of the individual. Consequently, only those views of the world which legitimize the present scientific understanding of the world are considered legitimate.
It should be remembered that postmodernism is about recovering those voices that were previously lost or marginalized. Deriving inspiration from the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, postmodern theorists such as Lyotard are operating in the scientific tradition, working to re-legitimize the scientific paradigm. It has been shown that Lyotard's work is an attempt to re-invigorate the scientific methodology that he feels has been subverted by a demoralized ethical training. Like Feyerabend's call for an anarchist ethics, Lyotard speaks of the near for a radical super-moral ethics for the seeker of postmodern scientific fact, smashing all of the idols of Western civilization in the attempt to rationalize a non-totalizable universe. Postmodern theory represents an attempt at re-discovering the primal sense of scientific thinking which has been debased or forgotten. Yet there is another acute sense of the meaning of scientific reasoning, in that postmodernists believe that tradition is unable to preserve the truth perpetually. Rather than promoting scientific truth on the basis of an authentic rationality, postmodernism willfully conceals the accepted standards of scientific truth, causing that real and original component of meaning to be lost in history, in the shift from futurology to the nostalgia of a future anterior.
While I have argued that postmodern thinkers feel capable of analyzing science because in the postmodern age the critic is free to address any subject organized by and made real through language, it remains to be seen why these writers believe reality to be subordinate to language. Eugene Goodheart supplies us with the example of Roland Barthes, a critic who was among those who inaugurated the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. Goodheart says that Barthes' semiology entails "the absorption of reality into writing." According to Barthes, even if language and reality are set apart from one another and regardless of whether reality is simply absorbed or distorted by language, the fact remains that reality is unable to restrict language, for the signifier transgresses the limits of the signified. This creates a space for postmodern science to emerge as postmodern thinkers, unrestrained by the traditional fields of thinking, extend their discourse beyond the area demarcated by literary studies; their grasp extends not only into philosophy and literature, but to cultural studies and social sciences and even--to the horror of individuals like Professor Sokol--into the study of the natural sciences.
Writers of contemporary fiction, Barthes says, are often at fault because they commit a similar error in that their texts posit a reality prior to and exterior to both meaning and language. "The body of the world enters the writing process," Barthes says, "and writing becomes a physical presence equivalent to reality." Barthes historicizes this process, calling it "the myth of ecriture." With this dissolution of the text following the disintegration of the individual subject, reality itself becomes an indeterminate linguistic construct. The free play of the word leads to the free play of language over the world. Goodheart also mentions Stanley Fish who said, as early as 1980, that it would be a caricature of the postmodern viewpoint to see the denial of objectivity as necessarily leading one to "a universe of free play in which everything is indeterminate and undecidable." The significant change, according to Fish, is that determinacy and decidability are always available, for postmodernity evaluates its subjects not by comparison with some universal normalizing standard, as in the modernist universe, but according to the specific context of our lives.
Another figure who provides a theoretical ground for postmodern views of science of Michael Polyani. He is someone who has seeks to discredit "the tacit assumptions by which scientists circumscribe the ground of which scientific progress occurs." In a similar vein, Fish believes that "the truth of an interpretation is ultimately a matter of its persuasiveness," which he says is often a matter of politics. This leads one to ask whether or not there is a political program at the base of postmodern science ? While such a belief is laughable to Sokol, Michel Foucault says that the importance of a revolution is located, not in the revolutionary agents themselves, but in the changes of the minds of those who do not participate. This remark provides a basis from Aronowitz's statement on the need to "bring science down to earth" where it can be studied as a form of lived experience. Like a political revolution, the significance of a scientific revolution is not to be judged from the lives of those who enact the changes, but in the minds and lives of those that are affected by these changes.
In the final section of my essay I will make a comparison between a final pair of thinkers, the rhetorician James Boyd White and the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, each of whom take decidedly different viewpoints from what might be expected. White says that mainstream science considers itself a self-legitimizing enterprise because it has at its foundation two forms of thought whose logical authenticity cannot be refuted. Deductive reasoning and empirical reasoning comprise the two forms of logical argument and science derives its privileged standing because these are the only forms of thought that can call themselves a proof. However, White says, the kinds of reasoning denoted by these two forms of thought make up only a small portion of human life. The greater portion of the human world cannot be negotiated simply by showing, demonstrating and proving facts. These facets of life must be reasoned out through debate and justification by parties who proceed without the comfort of empirical and logical certainty. White also expresses the view that the despairing anxiety of the postmodern age is the result of the failure of the structuralist project that sought to bring the diverse complexity and heterogeneity of the modern world into a scientific framework. After witnessing the inability of the structuralists to articulate the existence of an objective truth, the world progressively accepted the postmodern viewpoint that "we live in an incoherent and elemental flux in which no meaning and reasoning is possible." To recover from this postmodern affliction, White says that it is important that we reclaim the meaning that establishes our being within language. This can be accomplished if we enlarge our definitions of reading and writing through a close examination of the relationships between writer and language, writer and culture and writer and reader. Under this program, individuals can establish their identities within a textual community that not only questions the ideologies of the world but may even posit and give rise to a new world.
Although Fish claims that some scientists feel that the argument made in Sokol's hoax is, in fact, a plausible argument, he does not identity any specific figures. Lest we interpret Fish's claim as an empty boast, it should be known that Marvin Minsky, one of the leading American theorists on artificial intelligence technology, may be sympathetic to postmodern science. According to Minsky, although the human brain is subject to the "same all-inclusive physical laws that govern all forms of matter," human beings cannot explain how our brains function simply on the basis of these principles. Knowing how each part of our brain performs its individual functions is not the same as knowing how the brain functions as a total agency. This is because, Minsky says, "Their functions are not established by the general laws of physics, but by the particular arrangements of the millions of bits of information in our inherited genes." In his opinion, postmodernism is not a form of epistemic relativism that rejects the existence of an external world, but is a justifiable call for "additional theories and principles that operate at a higher level of organization." These statements lead me to believe that Minsky would approve of the postmodern cultural studies offered by Social Text, not as a replacement for scientific knowledge, but as an addition to it.
While some example from contemporary philosophy might suggest that nothing exists outside language, postmodern science does not adopt such a view. Why, then, are those who champion postmodern view of science find themselves labelled as epistemic relativists ? It seems to be that the reason why has a line of reasoning similar to the one used by those who deplore deconstruction as a morally nihilistic institution, libeling its affiliated as advocates of a relativistic hermeneutics. Perhaps it is viewed as being linked with recent movements in literary criticism such as deconstruction, whose true nature became confused in the minds of many who incorrectly saw it as a method literary criticism where the very nature of meaning was abolished. Jacques Derrida may have inadvertently promoted such a view when he said that deconstruction considers the idea of meaning to be a terrorist act. Foucault furthered the association of postmodernism and terrorism when he suggested that Derrida's work was "an exercise in the terrorism of obscurity." Such a characterization fails to understand the ethical component of postmodern studies and it should be noted that Derrida sought to establish a postmodern form of literary criticism that was "not an enclosure in nothingness but an openness towards the Other." Any evaluation of deconstruction that fails to note this aspect is a misinterpretation of Derrida's intentions and a misunderstanding of the deeply ethical nature of postmodernity.
In regards to postmodern science, the ethical component of this change in the re-organization of knowledge is the shift from the legitimation of denotative statements to the legitimation of prescriptive statements. Lyotard makes this clear, saying, "The important things is not to legitimate denotative utterances, but rather to legitimate presciptive utterances pertaining to justice." Although this emphasis on prescription may appear unusual coming from a postmodern thinker, it is important to note that these perscriptions are ethical in nature and, as indicated above, the realm of ethics is heavily accented in the postmodern age. Statements that pertain to justice are legitimated as the only solutions valid for society's needs. Ethics in the postmodern era is no longer a subject that is studied for its own sake, but it something that accrues value in its application, its legitimacy only arriving when it allows for the manifestation of the ethical face of reality, an essential factor in the relationship between self and other. The philosophies of Lyotard and Nietzsche explicit call on the dawning of a new age and the emergence of a new type of individual subject, one who knows the secret complementarity of scientific truth and narrational fiction. By speaking for their unification, the postmodern individual becomes a revolutionary in the deepest sense possible; this person has moved beyond these grand narratives and has forged a new epistemological code through the strength of their moral will.
Many critics, it should be said, are not entirely comfortable with this viewpoint. Charles Taylor is a critic who suggests that Lyotard's description of increasing laxity and demoralization is not a historically specific characterization of the 1960s: "What we need to explain," Taylor says, "is what is specific to our time." What is specific to our time, he adds, is that people are able to respond to the call of conscience and that this call seeks the recognition and the acknowledgment of the Other. In addition to misunderstanding its ethical character, what Sokol misunderstands about postmodernism is its commitment to the ideal of authenticity. This is an ideal whose moral force has been endangered, says Taylor, and it is an ideal that endangers those who advocate for it. Indeed, the promotion of this ideal by Aronowitz, Fish and other causes Sokol to label them as "soft relativists," just as Taylor predicts. If this is so, then how is this 'openness towards the other' reflected in postmodern science ? According to Taylor, the best way to embody this openness is to create a text that could function as a work of retrieval in order to unify the past and present. The postmodern scientific text must concern itself with the other, it must be open to and must search out and retrieve the other of history. Scientific writing should not be seen as the absolute locus of truth but, like a postmodern literary text, as a form of textuality whose ethos consists in being structurally open to the other. Postmodern science sees scientific work as ethical because it is always already structurally open to the moral authenticity of the other. If we are not aware of this essential feature of postmodern science then we cannot but misunderstand it, as Professor Sokol does.
posted by Andrew B. Noselli at 8:41 AM
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