Did the Sokal affair "destroy postmodernism"?
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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2024
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The specific Sokal quotations come from:
Page 4 of emilkirkegaard.... and
www.physics.nyu...
Derrida’s response to the Sokal affair:
www.critical-th...
On the Star Wars hoax paper:
gizmodo.com/sc...
shout-out to Bruno Latour for having his picture inexplicably thrown up with all the videos about the Sokal Affair and the "destruction of postmodernism"
Damn! I thought I was going crazy
@@dmichael2097 I still see it to this day when people speak of the Sokal Affair, this is so just weird to me.
Why is Bruno Latour in the thumbnail? Can u explain? Did they get it wrong? Confused between Bruno Latour and Sokal?
@@giuseppe5686 someone please answer this I need to know
@@patricktan7120 i think it’s because Latour was (and is) gaining fame in the „political ecology“ discussions and the „new green“ movement, afaik he also claimed that law of physics etc are socially constructed therefore not necessarily universal truth. And I think he was a pretty hard defender of shitting on sciences that claim such universal truths, thus getting hate from conservative believers of the god called ‚true science‘. He opened a totally new ontological discussion and asked critical questions about the role of science(s).
He was great, may he rest in peace.
I wonder how many of sokals recent fans know he considers himself ''an old fashioned socialist''.
Yes, exactly. Was kinda my point. Post modernism was itself a reaction against socialism and Marxist philosophy. The best contemporary critics of post modernism are Marxist: Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Calinicos to name a few.
In our lifetime, we’re probably going to find out that postmodernist philosophy and ‘theory’ more generally are a CIA psy op designed to cripple and discredit the left.
@300bpm youre wrong.
@300bpm CIA is on the public record talking how the postmodernist philosophers in France (which they refer to as Anti-Marxist) were instrumental in dismantling the Marxist movement and removing the influence of Marxism from academia and how that furthered American interests.
www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.PDF
“According to the spy agency itself,” Rockhill observed, “post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism…” Here the professor was making particular reference to a recently declassified CIA report, authored in 1985, that focuses on the intellectual milieu around Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan.
That's a cool vid, but how about 'Shrek 2 - Marxist Analysis'?
How about Cars 2.
Cars 1 will obviously be required reading.
Hnas: I don't know if you are joking or not, but one of the videos in my suggestion bar is "Shrek: a Marxist analysis."
@Agora1, that's my favorite movie!
"Socialists are like onions"
- Leonid Sherksky
jorney: Socialism is like onions. Some of it makes everything better. However, you can't have a meal with nothing but onions.
I've been a long-term critic of postmodernism because I've seen it produce a great deal of impenetrable prose, while remaining frustratingly vague on its own essentials. Your videos are the best defense of it I've come across. What I'd love to see from you is a video that defines postmodern philosophy, and then explains its value to us as both individuals and as a society. Thanks!
Postmodernism is a rejection of the central tenet of modernism, which is that human beings through sensory perception and rationality can access capital-t Truths about the universe.
The value is that you don't ever get to a point where beliefs become dogmatic orthodoxies.
One difficulty is that postmodern philosophy is not unitary. The philosophers often had different interests and ideas. "Postmodern" is more an umbrella term. The same goes for modern philosophy, which includes Marx, Hume, Freud, and many others. It's better to look at the benefits of one particular think or tradition within the postmodern.
Aaand that's where it goes wrong. In fact, the whole postmodern project is a mistake.
That is like saying Language was a mistake. Or Hunting.
@@pietzsche i.e., knowing the impossibility of ever really knowing.
This, and Dr. Fatima's video on the same topic, should be required listening for everyone
My subjective impression is that a lot of postmodernist writing is less obscure than obscurantist. Once you fight your way through the impenetrable prose to the thoughts beneath, it's often disappointingly banal.
i dont give a hoot!
Pointlessly banal as it posits nothing useful, nothing testable and nothing worthy of consideration
Pretentious academia? I’ve never heard of such a thing!
@@tonefilter9480"testable"? it's philosophy not science. This is like failing a painting because it's a bad song.
@@LilFeralGangrel I referred to 3 criteria - and philosophy can be testable in numerous ways, including logically - you seem a little ignorant
People who've never bothered to read Sokal's book often like to cite his name and claim he "debunked postmodernism". Sokal set out to do no such thing.
By his own admission, he was only concerned with what he felt to be the misuse of scientific terms and concepts in postmodern philosophy. Which yes, postmodern thinkers tend to do.
Though being familiar with Deleuze, Sokal misunderstood what he was doing. Deleuze wrote much of his work in a sort of modernist James Joyce style. He even writes in the intro to _A Thousand Plateaus_ that you don't need to read the book chronologically. This means that he often entertained different concepts not because he felt they were true, but because they enabled one to explore knowledge from different angles. Concepts for him were sort of like Instagram filters which highlighted different aspects of the world, and that no one concept should be held up as the One Truth.
However, Sokal was absolutely correct in saying Deleuze is needlessly difficult to read. Reading his prose is as unpleasant as chewing tinfoil.
Exactly. A good analogy I've heard to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is that it's like a jazz record - you don't have to listen to it chronologically, and you can skip the "tracks" as you wish. Each concept is introduced as a general "theme" that is then unfolded like a jazz improvisation. And this style of writing reflects Deleuze's ontological views. I agree that he's needlessly difficult to read too. Manuel Delanda is able to introduce Deleuzian thought way more clearly and without trivializing it either.
Voltairine Kropotkin
look you can do a response to Saad in this video in 2:24:28 he is talking about french postmodernist ua-cam.com/video/NAalq9lrjQA/v-deo.html
But chewing tinfoil is actually alot of fun..?
@300bpm
Which means you're probably an idiot who can't comprehend nuance.
@@voltairinekropotkin5581 He's been all over this thread today, and yeah, that's it.
I think even more interesting than Sokal is the Schön Scandal. This guy Jan Schön published fraudulent papers on semi-conductor physics for ~6 years while working at Bell Labs (very prestigious, birthplace of the transistor and many other technological advancements). These papers *were* peer reviewed, and yet he continued to get published until a couple of grad students noticed he literally copy/pasted a graph from a previous paper and falsified data.
It's really disturbing bc you want to have faith in the peer review process, but at a certain point, academic work becomes so complex that it is very difficult to verify, even by experts in your field.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
I'd say there is a difference in quality between these incidents. Jan Schön and other scientific fraudsters are actual scientists who use their knowledge and status to commit fraud. They succeed to varying extents because peer review is not actually very good at detecting fraud, nor is it intended to be. The purpose of peer review is mostly to point out honest mistakes and sloppyness. To detect actual, competent fraud would often require trying to replicate the findings of the fraudster. This would be a lot of work and not always possible because most labs use specialized, or even custom-made equipment. That said, journals should at least require the raw data to be submitted.
Hoax articles in the social sciences try to expose something else. If editors and reviewers are incapable of telling the difference between actual research and complete gibberish, this does point at one out of three things:
- Said editors and reviewers are incompetent.
- They are lazy.
- The field as a whole is utter nonsense.
The latter option would be a sound conclusion if such hoaxes succeeded in a variety of peer reviewed journals in a given field.
Completely different from the Sokal affair, because a) those papers were not nonsensical, they made perfect sense, but were simply and flat out extrapolating the data, and more importantly, b) it was, as opposed to the Sokal affair, exposed by the scientific community itself. And therein lies the gigantic chasm between postmodernism when it starts talking about philosophy of science and science: BS science can only last so long until facts of nature uncover the BS.
Man, this channel deserves way more attention than it gets. Riveting work, sir.
Postmodernists and critical theorists always say : It's more complicated than that, it's more nuanced than that. Maybe the Emperor's clothes are translucent rather than absent.
Good one :)
critical theory is not that complicated, maybe the reason people always say "is not that simple" to you is becouse you're a simpleton
@@mine1231939 Nice - every time a postmodernist (or CT-er) has no more arguments (which happens quite quickly and often), they start insulting and attacking people.
And they always move the goalpost, denying what they've said before.
They do indeed claim that it's complicated and "complex".
Ironic that you would use this example: because the post-modenists and critical theorists exemplify the child in the story who exclaimed “But he hasn't got anything on!" The nuance comes in explaining why everyone else appealed to the kings vanity and why, even after the child’s exclamation, the emperor continued the procession, pretending nothing was wrong.
@@tomspaghetti The child sees that truth exists. It's not a product of culture. We'll not agree, but I do think you're wrong about the strength of my anomaly/joke.
I defended my Bachelor's thesis in the field philosophy, it mostly covered science & technology studies issues. That thumbnail with Latour's photograph was the most personalised clickbait I've ever come across
I know the thumbnail is a reference to the other video 'Postmodernism Destroyed Forever'. But that's not even Sokal, that's Bruno Latour.
What are people smoking?
I.N.F. L.X. I was looking for this comment. And if there is a connection between Sokal and Latour. Latour did call the affair a “tempest in a teacup” according the Wikipedia page on the Sokal Affair.
Did they get confused between Latour and Sokal?
Maybe it's a meta-joke. Associating one face with another's work, a slight of hand to test you in the way Sokal tested the editors.
You have a very great point how the publishers contribute to the problem, however in the latest hoax "grievance studies" there were many peer reviews for a plethora of so called studies, which gave a very solid indication that even with peer review (some were returned for correction but then accepted) are completely bogus.
One thing to take in mind, that one of my first professor mentioned, is that you don’t need to have a good, or even knowledgeable paper, to get published.
In most fields, including the sciences, unfortunately
I have some questions, as someone old enough to remember the Sokal Hoax.
1. Why do you take the SOCIAL TEXT editors' face-saving ex-post-fact statements of how they felt about Sokal's paper (e.g., that it was poorly written and hokey) at face value? And while the journal (they say) was not refereed at the time, it was clearly read by numerous editors -- including many big names in the field. Why not talk about _why_ they we either fooled, or so foolish?
2. Why focus, instead, on the putative bashing of Derrida? As far as I can tell and recall, the press coverage at the time (The NYT, the Globe, Newsweek, TLS, NPR, etc.) did not attack or even joke about Derrida's work? (And isn't Derrida's "they've got nothing on me!" reaction a little sad too?) Why not focus, instead, on the real role Derrida, et al., played in the Sokal paper: they were signals of postmodern seriousness to the SOCIAL TEXT crew, which the editors gobbled up because they thought they had found a political ally (their term)?
3. Why, when you quote Sokal's 1997 reflections, do you only focus on the short paragraph where he acknowledges the limits of his hoax, but ignore the rest of the essay -- where he talks about the sociology of science (and "Theory" at large) had fallen prey to *"meaningless statements, name-dropping, displays of false erudition, ... sloppy thinking, poor philosophy [conflating ethics and epistemology], and glib relativism."* Agree or disagree, this is decidedly NOT just a claim about how some Humanities people occasionally misuse physics and math. It's a broad statement about intellectual hubris, academic silliness, and/or political blindness.
I know that your video had smaller and slimier fish to fry: grandiose UA-cam claims that Sokal had "destroyed postmodernism." And you honestly did a good job stomping that bug (and, in the age of Peterson, it does need continual stomping).
But in the process, you ignored the real content and, in my opinion, the real import of the Sokal hoax -- occasionally falling into the same "Science Wars" thinking that took down SOCIAL TEXT.
1. It's true that the statements made by Social Text after the fact aren't necessarily accurate, but it IS true that they asked Sokal to excise most of the philosophical speculation and footnotes in his paper. It's also true that the journal had big names, but they were big names in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, etc. not in physics. So although they did show a lack of rigour, the lack of rigour was in physics, not in their own field of expertise.
2. I mention Derrida because I have seen the Sokal affair being mentioned to "debunk" a wide range of philosophers, including Derrida. I speak here of not just the intentions and actions of Sokal, but the affair as an event, which includes also how it was reported, and how it is viewed to this day. I don't think Derrida's reaction is sad, his reaction is correct as far as I can see. He himself has never abused scientific terminology.
3. I focus on Sokal's acknowledgment of the limits of his hoax, because that's what most pertains to the affair. It's definitely true that he has great suspicions of the field as a whole, and sees postmodernism as a fraud, but that's not what he proves, or even tries to prove, neither with his hoax nor his more extensive work in Fashionable Nonsense, and demonstrating that sociology or cultural studies has fallen prey to "meaningless statements, name-dropping, displays of false erudition, ... sloppy thinking, poor philosophy [conflating ethics and epistemology], and glib relativism." would require a lot more than the Sokal affair did.
Of course, the Sokal affair could be covered a lot more extensively, and with different angles too, but as you say, I had smaller fish to fry. This video was meant to be less a defence of the theory under attack, but just pointing out that the hoax never closed the debate. I don't see how this makes me fall into "Science Wars" thinking, I just merely tried to break down an obstacle to considering postmodern theory, which is the mis-use of Sokal's hoax.
Thank you for the well thought out comment, I appreciate it
And thank you for your thoughtful response. Not sure if "I just subscribed" means a lot, but... "I just subscribed!"
I'm not going to take up a bunch of your time with a continued bite-by-bite rejoinder, but I do want to wonder aloud about your claim that the SOCIAL TEXT editors' lack of rigor was in physics, but not in their own field.
Here's why I don't think that works. The article was accepted _within_ their own field, according to their own rules and standards (even if those standards were relaxed to let in this apparently fannish physicist). To be sure, they didn't understand the physics, but they _did_ understand the references to and the application of Arnowitz, Latour, Irigaray, Lyotard, and (of course) Derrida. And the editors were, apparently, just fine enough with this part of the argument that the physics hardly mattered. (And those parts of the essay were just as bad, just as "silly" a mishmash of names and Theories, weren't they?)
I am a longtime fan of many of these authors, including the ST editors, but I think that the "Hoax" exposed a lack of rigor on both sides of the equation. And it did change the way I thought about critical theory and the academy for a long time.
Take care, and thanks for the conversation
Thanks for the comment; It really helpful me now
nice video!
I want to express my feeling of postmodernism. I'm not an expert of postmodernism, but in terms of my limited reading experience, I really hate postmodernism literature and various social science literature quoting them without showing accessible context. When I for the first time tried to read Deleuze's work several years ago, most of the time I can't understand his argument. I thought it's because I was inexperienced, impatient and stupid. However, after more reading, although I don't believe I have enough knowledge and wisdom to specifically accuse certain writer's work as nonsense, I think the generally low accessibility of postmodernism literature makes them *SERIOUSLY SUSPICIOUS* . I often wonder: how could anyone be sure about the meaning and argument of these literature? There seems no way to know for sure what do those words mean, not to mention they are often filled with fancy metaphor borrowed from other fields.
In university, I saw many peers and professors using or quoting postmodernism literature without explicitly explaining them. Usually, nearly all students in the class don't understand or fully understand what they just heard, but no one asks a dang question about it. It seems that "having a vague grasp of postmodernism quote is enough for building arguments" is extensively believed and practiced. And I really really hate this phenomenon. I know its likely that I'm too biased or intellectually incompetent to change my view, but I still believe postmodernism's style of discussion and argument-buliding is harmful. It makes people believe or pretend they know something while they don't, and makes people prone to use vague phrase to justify their argument or ideology.
I'm not saying I'm right and postmodernism is wrong (I'm definitely not qualified to say that). All I want to say is I understand why some people hate postmodernism and blame it for various things. Because I'm one of them.
Postmodernism is a catch-all term. It encompasses so much that it is practically nonsensical to talk about one's feelings *of* it. No doubt you can be generally sceptical: I agree, for instance, that Deleuze is a bit of maverick; stylistically provocative and experimental, he is very difficult to understand at the best of times. But making claims for postmodernism *as a whole* based on arguments such as this is a bit like dismissing all avant-gard art on the basis of disliking the works of a select few painters from the tradition. Take Foucault, for instance. He writes in a far more lucid style, and (to me at least) offers insights which are manifestly true and pertinent. In their application to neoliberal governmentality, human capital and the entrepreneur(ship) of the self -- for starters.
As a humanities student who has had to dabble in nearly all these postmodern theorists I can say I also share your frustration. People can accuse them of writing so obscurely out of pretentiousness. But really I think it’s also the fact that these are such linguistically skilled academics (Baudrillard for example) who spent their entire lives retreating into academia, that when putting their thoughts into writing and specifically translating them from other languages into English, it becomes very hard for a moderately educated english speaker to read and understand their words. Maybe Baudrillard was covering up his a fraudulence with complicated writing. but looking at this work now and at least guessing what he might have meant by all his jargon he still seems to have been right in his predictions about the mass media.
@@superstar082100 agreed. his ideas on hyperreality seem especially prescient in these isolated times
@@superstar082100 as a Frenchman I can assure you that many of these authors are extraordinarily difficult to make sense of even in French. Some authors, like the Freud-inspired Kristeva and Lacan are largely regarded as complete charlatans, when others are taken very seriously, even though you still need interpreters to tell you what the texts really are about...
You can't be an expert on something, that doesn't exist 😅
Hey, your thumbnail is not a picture of Sokal, but is one of Latour.
This is a good video. As a scientist, I lament the way in which academic writing is often lacking in rigor not just in cultural or post-modern studies but across the board in academia, even in hard sciences. People often use journal publications as ways to justify their political or social beliefs, and ultimately I think that's what Sokal was trying to prevent. I like and admire Sokal for what he did, also for addressing the misuse of mathematical or scientific language to add some sense of rigor to otherwise vacuous arguments.
really great video, I've had a few people bring this up with me but its really cool to hear more about what Sokal thought about it. Most people who bring this up really seem to think it's some kind of checkmate but he himself didn't see it that way at all and that is good to know.
"The journal "social text" was not peer-reviewed at the time"
I had to stop the video and laugh out loud.
Well, of course it wasn't. To have things peer reviewed would be hierarchical, and Postmodernists hate hierarchy.
@@infinitum8558 I can't tell which you misunderstand the most between peer review, hierarchy, and postmodernism.
@@kyyowa129 now now, let's not get persnickety.
Great video. You are a serious creator of content and can only respect that. I am sad I can’t not give you more than one thumbs up.
On a different note, I have tried to watch PhilosophyInsights videos and they are painful to watch due to his naked bias for whatever Peterson is spewing. The positive consequence of Peterson being popular in certain UA-cam circles and now in the media is that I have to go back and reread Foucault and Derrida and Habermas and refresh my 20th century History studies and I hope that other people do the same.
lol the truth in the last sentence... i was just thinking that i gotta brush up cos vultures are hollowing out every thing
Lol, good luck making sense of them. I think Deleuze and Baudrillard are probably more important in todays cultural context. At least I find them more interesting.
oaxacachaka
Your comment just makes me realize that Peterson might just be a Francophobe. I hope somebody could explore that especially considering the context of Canadian political culture and how you can make a division between the Quebecois left and Anglo-Saxon Ontario.
Daniel Alveo I’m not really sure but maybe. I think it probably has to do with the fact that he works in the liberal arts and that’s where political correctness seems to have its stronghold.
You think that Peterson's opposition to compelled speech is just cover for anti-French bigotry? Really?
Great video...once again. This is what I have been thinking and communicating to most of these antiPoMo outrage community --- that they are themselves the children of the post modern condition --- where the surface, the appearance, the superficial do not only matter more than the substance or authorised core, but rather emphasising their importance problematises the notion of a core or substance itself.
These people do not take Sokal's critique as a moment of critical insight into the workings of academic institutions, but rather as an occasion to ridicule and entire academic tradition (ironically used wrt post modernism) because they see it primarily as part of a grand conspiracy, as a partisan force trying to destroy western civilisation. Their distaste for post modernism stems from fear mongering and not from an actual engagement with the texts. If they read the texts they'd realise how close they actually are to such scholars.
Great breakdown of the controversy. Just found your channel and love your content :)
Mad Blender yall been missing out
Are you pre-op?
I think Jordan Peterson’s generalizations about postmodernism are already getting old and are beginning instead to bring a huge amount of positive and critical attention to postmodernism and will both bring out real critiques and reveal missed insights.
What if that was his plan all along?!🤔
Dorian sapiens then he's running one hell of a psychology experiment that will be talked about for a long time.
I actually think Peterson has some interesting things to say about myth and religion but when it comes to postmodernism and cultural Marxism he’s basically a conspiracy theorist.
Nathan Dyck if he was in literature he'd be following in the acclaimed footsteps of people like Northrop Frye and be pretty well regarded, I'm sure. I like archetypal theory in literature, it's fun but that's about the extent of it for me.
Dorian sapiens : "What if that was his plan all along?!" Are you serious? In other words everything about him is a lie and he is an actor with pure intentions to bring out serious discussion? Come on man. How could anyone pull that off? And in what way does he seriously engage with any serious thinker? UA-cam celebrities are not serious thinkers! They are the Kardashians of the intellect!
Far more plausible is that he is frustrated with not understanding the world and wants black and white explanations which simply cannot be offered.
And so he comes out like this angry white male and countless others feeling equally frustrated "find" themselves in him and a glorious sense of bonding is experienced.
But when you look for what he offers its scarcely anything.
"Clean your room first," he says.
Oh come on man. What next?
Climb the corporate ladder?
"a media scandal" "an imposture" parody is quiet avant garde and post modern actually.
Also "Badiou studies", a post modern peer reviewed journal was fooled by one such parody recently.
Badiou Studies is not Post Modern. Alain Badiou, the philosopher the review is based on, is actually one of the biggest and more sophisticated critics of post-structuralism and the great intellectual rival of Gilles Deleuze btw (although both liked each other personally). He's actually known for trying to rethink an objective conception of truth and give an new account of the Hegelian philosophy, also being inspired by Althusser and Lacan
I think a lot of the gleeful public reaction to the Sokal affair is to do with scientism. Many see this affair as proof that philosophy is useless wank and only the hard sciences constitute 'real' knowledge. All par for the course for an intellectually philistine culture, obsessed with easy to quantify facts and suspicious of qualitative knowledge. I'm starting to sound like the Frankfurt School now.
I completely agree
haha, very true. Lots of atheists are like this too. Their devotion to pragmatism is pretty impressive though.
I would rather say that people who put their faith in hard sciences are suspicious of people who claim to have qualitative knowledge, especially when they start telling you how to live your life, or that you are evil, an infidel, or philistine.
You're talking about a different topic. I'm referring to the STEM circlejerk and the common dismissal of the humanities that is so prevalent today.
No - same topic. Humanities are dismissed by many because they have contained so much utter dross responsible for vast amounts of human misery, even as they claim to be guides to living the good life, individually or collectively: just like religions. By contrast, people see that their TV works, so they know that scientists are good for something, even if they do not get it right all the time.
If you tell people that they are intellectually philistine because they mistrust your particular brand of qualitative "knowledge", you should expect to be dismissed, since the term "Philistine" has no real determinate content: it is just being used as an insult meaning something like "not as cool as me".
Anyway, a post-modernist (which you may or may not be) has no "real" basis to say what constitutes "real knowledge" if knowledge is no more than an extension of power. The rejoinder "He would say that wouldn't he" apples to post-modernists just as well as to anyone else.
Sokol is an actual scientist, Peterson is the lobster King of the incels.
Shubham Bhushan Peterson is a clinical psychologist. Sounds pretty science-y to me
Finn Reisner oh, fancy words.
INSTALL GENTOO well afaik you have to study medicine with psychology, to understand medical and biological aspects of "the mind", like how a braincell works etc.
So yes fancy words, only they genuinely mean something in academia.
Unlike postmodernism I think, which sort of relativises alot of meanings.
Basically only a pleb, or postmodernists, would consider "clinical psychology" to be just "fancy words".
Who is Sokol?
CountFenrir
Appeal to authority.
Thank you for the indepth look at this. Really important for those of us just beginning to hear of the controversy.
I see postmodernism as a dialectical swing of the pendulum, that was once liberating when it began, in that it was a clear critic of the modern era. It took the observation serious that the initial liberating aspects of enlightment and modernity have led to hell on earth in the brutal World Wars and coldness of the industrial age.
And now, we are beginning to see the downfalls of postmodernism itself. The biggest one being arbritary relativism, which has been abused even by criminals and Wallstreet CEO's to excuse their psychopathy.
This new critic is leading to the era of so-called _New Realism,_ that while preserving the pluralistic aspects of postmodernism, uses a negative ontology as a foolproof against _anything-goes-ism._
I believe you may be missing the point. Kind of a lot of them. It's true that critics who don't understand postmodernism in general exaggerate the significance of what Sokal did (a thing known as White Hat Hoaxing which is fairly common - the open access journals that you listed there are widely understood to be a problem and are frequently the target of such activities), but it's also essential that you not underplay the behavior that Sokal's action addressed. Postmodern theorists have a terrible habit of appropriating scientific terms with a specific meaning, using them to "speak metaphorically" (which I put in quotes there because I don't believe they understand the initial concepts well enough to use them effectively as icons in a metaphor), and scrambling the understanding of critical disciplines within the physical sciences of anybody who happens to encounter their work. That's bad.
Deleuze and Guattari are not vague and difficult to understand because they have to be and they're not vague and difficult to understand because most of their readers are picking up translations and they're not vague and difficult to understand because the concepts they're dealing with are just that hard. They're vague and difficult to understand because it makes their balls feel big. They misappropriate icons of scientific discourse to lend to themselves an unearned legitimacy, not unlike Deepak Chopra's constant, flagrant, and patently idiotic misuse of the word "quantum." It's naive to think that this is harmless, because Baudrillard and D/G (probably my two greatest enemies in the "big six") fuel a truly disgusting amount of modern science denial. That's their fault. That's on them.
Derrida's response seems particularly telling to me here. His reaction isn't to admit that he picked up a concept he almost certainly did not understand and used it as a discursive tool - it is to attempt to establish his own intellectual superiority through purely rhetorical means (such a GREAT SHAME that we couldn't have a real, substantive discussion about these subjects, and how sad that this man's academic achievements will now forever be linked to such a silly hoax instead of real and useful work) and evade blame (I mean, I wasn't even doing it - I was just responding to somebody else who WAS doing it so I kept doing what they were doing, so, I mean, in context I was only ignorantly misusing an idea because of this other person context context excuse). Many of the targets of this criticism absolutely cannot abide being told that there is something that they fundamentally misunderstand which renders their words utterly nonsensical, and it's that kind of pretension to intelligence that makes it so very, VERY difficult to sell what good ideas there are in their work.
That's a real problem. That's a criticism that contemporary postmodern theorists need to take to heart and incorporate into their work, but I see woefully few of them actually bothering to do it. To provide what feels to me like a much better quote from Sokal:
"My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of literary criticism (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself... There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless, or even counterproductive."
I don't see any of the points i supposedly missed. I said that it's true that philosophers should be more careful in their use of scientific terminology, but Sokal did not attack any of the frameworks, concepts or theoretical premises the theorists he criticized used, which is the core of their work.
Even so, I'm doubtful about your claim that D&G only used scientific terminology because it made their balls feel big (although I agree that their works are needlessly dense and hard to read), or that they only did it metaphorically (Deleuze is not a fan of metaphors). Their work has been applied in recent works to dynamic systems theory, even biology and geography (Mark Bonta, who's s a professor in Earth sciences has combined Deleuze's work with his own scientific work in spatial complexity for example, so I don't know what science denial you're referring to).
About Derrida, "a concept he almost certainly did not understand", how are you so sure that he did not understand it? He did not use it as a discursive tool, he was answering a question from an audience. Scientists themselves may often accidentally use a term inappropriately when answering an unscripted audience question. This on its own says nothing about his larger philosophical work, which Sokal himself admitted and therefore did not include any criticisms of Derrida in Fashionable Nonsense.
As a response to that Sokal quote, I can in the same way say "we (the left) will survive just fine, thank you, even without mathematicians publishing hoax articles in social studies journals", postmodern theory hasn't stopped the propounders and teachers of these theories from being politically active. It's funny to me that Sokal said "But why did I do it? I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class." I could say right back at him that I don't understand how his work on the chromatic polynomial and the Tutte polynomial is supposed to help the working class
Great thing about Sokal and his book is that he emphasised the fact humanities are not sciences. Great thing about postmodernism actually proved that even science is not science sometimes.
how postmodernism prooved that science is not science???? plz plz explain
It's funny how people often name "science" in singular as if it were only one discipline with a defined set of knowledge and principles, but then name the "Humanities" in plural as some odd category of several dozens of disciplines that are supposed to have nothing in common except for a concern with what is "human".
JP has no actual idea what postmodernism actually is, from what I've seen of him. Also he talks about it like it was all the rage and the latest fad, when it's a thing from the 70s lol.
*early 60s*
It's almost as if people are deliberately missing the point when they criticize Jordan Peterson. Postmodernism evolved into applied postmodernism in the fields of Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Gender Studies, Queer Theory etc. While not postmodernists in the purist sense, the founders of those fields explicitly draw from postmodern theory and place it in the foundations of their ideology. What Jordan Peterson is criticizing is the use of postmodernist tools by activists scholars that have reasoned their way into believing that free speech is bad that that all white people are racists. And all of those fields are alive and well today.
@@thenormalyears Post-modernism began with Protagoras, who had been dead for almost 2000 years by the 1960s.
"Destroyed!" -this is the aftermath of US being plagued by WWF imagery
i was wondering what felt off about the ending of your videos, and i realized it's that you don't ask us to "like and subscribe" or check out any of your other videos. i like the abrupt endings, though, they feel more genuine, less alienated. great work.
You can call it "scientific metaphor", but the Postmodernists were really trying to misappropriate scientific authority through nonsensical scientific claims. Sokal showed that fairly effectively.
I think a big part in why the controversy has persisted for so long is that describing it is much easier than refuting it, esp for someone who isn't well versed in the subject. It takes seconds to say "Sokal got a nonsense paper on post-modernism published by a journal" and most people just aren't interested enough to listen to anything beyond that.
A criticism of postmodernism is not the same as rejecting everything it brings up. Philosophy , in my plebian view, (I'm not as well read in philosophy as I feel I want to be) is a reassessment of previous modes of thought as new ideas come to the forefront. Sometimes this is done through rejection, but often times it is building off of what came before.
Also plenty of people who would be labeled as 'postmodernist neo-marxist' actually criticize postmodernism, which I keep trying to tell everyone, haha . The best example is postmodern feminism , and the criticism of that. Yes, even people on the left criticze the idea that gender is nothing but a social construct, but people who are conservative don't want you to believe that. TERFS tend to take this to the extreme, though.
Some marxists criticize postmodernism too , saying that it doesn't take into account that human lives are very much shaped by pre-determined factors. That and it is steeped in late capitalism. Frederic Jameson is a really good source, and I'm not sure if you have talked about him, but I think it's a great idea to. There is a reason that postmodernism came out after mass media. He talks all about it :) in " Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". It's also funny became the same thing conservatives say about moral relativism being a danger is there in his writing. I think we can make the argument that moral relativism is actually kind of inevitable in a system that packages up ideas like you can purchase them. The idea that you are 'buying ideas' and 'the best ideas = the best product' is really weird. Mainly because products are usually made to produce comfort...Anyway....
My opinion is the move away from postmodernism is just as much there in leftist circles..It's even in the art(which is where I come at everything from ). I think the proliferation of identity politics,....maybe is actually a sign that postmodernism is waning. I'm interested in what you think about that.
Sorry for rambling so long.
Yeah. Terms like "the marketplace of ideas" kind of give away the game. I think a lot of conservative criticism of what they understand to be postmodernism is really projection of their own modes of thought. Certainly true with the moral panics over things like moral relativism or "cancel culture."
As for gender, what precisely it "is" is kind of undecidable from this point. I mean, how exactly would you even go about extricating the social and cultural from the biological in something as diffuse and ubiquitous as gender? It seems very likely that a whole lot of it is cultural. We know that gender has varied tremendously between cultures, and subcultures and individuals. That may not be all that gender is, but it's certainly a huge chunk of what it is.
Since you brought up TERFs, I think it's important to be clear that someone else's right to live in a way that feels right to them shouldn't hinge on my (or anyone's) ability to fully understand their inner life or history, or fit them neatly in some framework, scientific or not. Conservatives and TERFs often appropriate scientific terminology to attack the rights of trans people to live their lives, in the same way they've attacked gays, blacks, etc. That's a much more worrying, and much more influential sort of illogic than anything Sokal gestured at.
@@DavidLessemRight the earth is flat and Jesus created the earth
"Some marxists criticize postmodernism" ??
All Marxists (people who actually study Marxism, not declarative Marxists) have huge problems with postmodernism.
How can a hoax to destroy postmodernism? Are we now in Sokalian post-postmodernism? I think Sokal has not understood postmodernism and attacking a windmill.
I know that you don't talk about it in the video, and I agree with what you said in it, but as the thumbnail suggests, it makes no sense to link Latour to postmodern theory, as he has always viciously critiqued it, specially in "we have never been modern".
1. Peer reviews can be fooled to, the problems sokal points out kinda persistet through scientific degrees of freedom and other bs. A "truth bias" of popular publications who are not producable nor hold any scientific value but can lead to drastic consequences remains in social sciences and social psychology and is probably going to brake the fragile neck of those subjects someday.
2. To claim one would be open for discussion a posteriori is an easy thing to do. Possible outcomes are . The question remains wether it is at all practical to discuss something with a deconstructionist since his views will lead you into philosophical questions unable to be answered without axioms. You can twist that discussion in the way you want it to end at any time and theres never gonna be an result, if ure capable.
3. Social Texts got absolutely pwnd with their own weapons. I hate how philosophers always have to speak so that nobody figures out what their actual positions are and give this aura of superior intellect and understanding to their words. Makes me very aggressive, they could just present it as simple as possible. I defo think that would be an option for a lot of philosophical theories.
As I see your repeated disdain for Peterson's critique, and since this is the 2nd video of yours in which you defend postmodernism, I would be interested to see you respond or refute the argument against Postmodernism made by Dr. Stephen Hicks, especially since that seems to be where Peterson is deriving his conclusions from (although far more short-handedly than Hicks is).
That has been suggested several times so I might do it. I'm just a bit conflicted right now between the viewers who want to see more content about postmodernism, and those who think I should focus more on other fields of philosophy
Wonderful narration! Glad I found your video first while searching for the Sokal affair.
1:55 exactly, this is what I was getting at in the comments at my video last week: his act was postmodernist itself.
You could say he was giving them a taste of their own medicine.
Well, I think his effective use of postmodernist performance validates postmodernism to a certain extent, and undermines his attack of it. It's also important to note that this was an attack on postmodernism coming from a hard scientist, and not an attack on hard science coming from a postmodernist. That is to say, the hostilities have been generated more on the side of science here than on the side of postmodernist theory.
I don't think the two are equivalent. Scientists have successfully posed as humanities scholars on several occasions just by dialing down on clarity and saying what they correctly assumed their audience wanted to hear. Now try to imagine the reverse, a humanities scholar trying to publish a fake paper in a physics journal. The idea makes me giggle.
As to who started hostilities, I disagree. Humanities scholars, especially the activist types, have been accusing people who prefer their statements backed by evidence of "scientism", "reductionism" etc. since long before the Sokal hoax.
I'm not saying the two are equivalent, but I would not put the humanities below the hard sciences on a hierarchy. Didn't the publishers of the Sokal paper admit they couldn't understand what he'd written? That seems significant. What is wrong with criticizing the hard sciences for trying to subsume the humanities?
The hard sciences aren't trying to subsume the humanities. However, it may happen that, through new methods and technological progress, questions that were once the domain of speculative deliberation in the humanities become accessible to evidence-based research. Famous historical examples include the shape of the universe and the origin of species, while the current battleground appears to be certain key aspects of the human condition.
In each case, claims that humanities scholars have been making (motivated by religion, political ideology, or some other type of Weltanschauung) eventually became testable and were found to be false. In each case, the response was an attack on the sciences by the humanities - ultimately futile, but quite destructive nonetheless.
Has the society of the spectacle ever ceased to be so? "Bread and circuses", fellow Romans!
You're great dude! Despite listening to a lecture of Sokal and reading a little about the debacle on Wikipedia, I had no idea about the details.
All these cultural reactionaries seem to have caused a surge of informed leftist responses and thought. Hopefully it keeps building up.
Ixian Technocrat Hopefully not in the wrong way.
We need more content like this. Keep up the good work mah boi
I did not exactly understand this video, but it made me realize that I had to admit not understanding this video. So, great?
I did not understand how the Sokal affair (which I've just now learned about) was in any way discrediting to postmodernism. Isn't it confirming it, rather? Isn't postmodernism all about "relative this, relative that"? That a bogus paper gets published seems to confirm this.
...Or is there an aspect of postmodernism I don't know?
My conclusion from this saga is that much damage to all intellectual disciplines has been done though the pursuit of publication in open access journals. This well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided pursuit, has resulted in predatory journals, who thrive on the authors' money rather than the quality of content. Surprisingly, even the previously high-quality journals have been affected. In order to maintain their eminence, with the belief that they need to remain competitive, some have become more hype-journals with their published results being either non-reproducible by others or plainly wrong.
3:42 "It's critique of Baudrillard amounts to 7 pages, the first 2 of which simply show examples of him using scientific terms metaphorically."
And then he states the problem. For some reason you neglect to mention that, and the pages where he explains that go by conveniently fast.
In Sokal's own words: "But what could this metaphor mean? Indeed what could [it's opposite,] a _Euclidean_ space of war look like?"
Short answer no. Post modernism continues and both humors and alarms . Social media has given it a new phoenix
Sokal didn't destroy postmodern theory, but it did ruin the respective careers of Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz (my dissertation advisor at UC Irvine) both of "Social Text." Ross was getting a lot of mainstream press attention at the time and was made head of the American Studies Dept. at NYU and I suspect others there (Sokal?) resented this. Beyond the "Sokal Affair," about 80 percent of academic articles are worthless except for merits/promotions and 20 percent have some value to the given field. Most academics publish a polished up version of their doctoral dissertation and never do anything else for the next thirty or forty years of schmoozing and plotting to advance themselves without doing any scholarly work or else striving to get into administration where the big bucks are. While May 1968 was an abject failure as revolutions go, postmodern theory and its unfortunate offshoots like "queer theory" have done quite well at the university. Its corporatist masters prefer that otherwise intelligent academic specialists be mired in arcane arguments instead of resisting the systematic debasement of humanity and the world it inhabits.
Professor Hamamoto - That's an important last sentence. MSM does the same - "Oh, look, Rosie O'Donnell's tweets!", "Oh, look, whom XYZ had sex with!", "Oh, look, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein are very naughty boys!"... while millions of innocents are being killed, millions more made homeless, millions of children are scarred for life with PTSD in the Middle East so that we may make the world safe for privately-held central banks who conjure money out of thin air and lend it to governments at interest, for the powers-that-be to change democratically-elected governments at will in order to control pipelines, oil fields, and through MSM control people's mind... More wars = more debt = more profits = more control = more passive zombie workers...
It's trickle-down ideology: either teach and internalise our values or we turn off the money faucet to institutions, professors and students... It's the same people left and right, neo-conservatives and neo-liberals, it's a biological survival strategy and a means to extract revenge... Just argue about irrelevancies and you'll be fine... Discuss getting off the Petrodollar or expelling privately-held central banks are you and your country will be bombed to smithereens... And fuck the innocent children. Who cares?
We are living in a far from optimal world - equal opportunity for all, a safe and encouraging environment to raise a family, free thinking and speaking without fear or favour - as vested interests create false flags around the world - including 9/11 - to divide and to keep us distracted and frightened and hating each other in order to continuously take away freedoms and tighten control. Population numbers in the West are falling due to the financial stress of providing for children and due to a materialistic, rat-race ideology, and the population that is left over is progressively being dumbed down, distracted by baubles, frightened by taboos.
There's huge difference between mass-produced articles without much content, and articles that are a clear sham.
Or maybe there isn't in postmodernist academia, and that's why you go off on this tangent about polished versions of doctoral dissertations? Surely that's not what you're saying?
The content on this channel is a lot more nuanced and genuinely educational than most of what you see on UA-cam. I don't always agree with it, but it's clearly far above the type of propaganda and clickbait flooding this website.
I've really enjoyed your videos. See I am (un) fortunate enough to be a certain age where I got to read, for example, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble in uncorrected proofs in an academic seminar in the 1980s, and this video reminds me of that era. I also appreciate your defense of sincere and important intellectuals from Continental Europe, and America, from mischaracterizations by certain conservative (and at times even philistine) commentators. Deleuze and Baudrillard are still valid and valuable, (Even if they are not right about everything ). I also appreciated Sokal, so it is complicated.
Philosophy is so broad that I think events like this serve as a non- requested excuse for those who want to discard before reading, which is often a symptom usually called out by the authors of the books that are often target of this reductionist accusations.
Paradoxical indeed.
I think you do a good job, but most academics I've talked to have a very strained relationship with publishers. The fact that public research is not open to the public for free, the professors often pier review these papers for free, the policy that the only way to get tenure is to get published atleast 3 times, there's no system in place that would allow for more autonomy for working professor in the realm of research ( not that research is the only thing an intelligence Institution can do for it communities) anyway it's pretty easy to see what needs to be fixed, Private Universities tend to have enough pride in their work that they have a dedicated publishing house, why not public universities?
I do keep trying to understand ideas originating in postmodernist thought. I even have Lyotard on my bookshelf. I know I'd have to read it many times to understand even a little. One conclusion I make is that the aim is not to "cut to the chase". If I do eventually understand, will I be able to, je ne sais quoit, "bend a spoon", you know, the way the engineers do? This comment does have to do with whatever I took away from reading Lyotard. Yes, to repeat, I get it that the aim is not to bend anything. "What should understanding achieve?" is the wrong question to ask a post-modernist. More discourse is the answer.
glad i just subscribed. this i good stuff. :)
How can defined scientific terms used in metaphrocial context? Would that be either bad literature and bad science? In video was said that Sokal didnt try to abolish postmodernism but to expose that those people have no idea what they are talking about. It might be an postmodern act itself but it does not devalue Skola's point that postmodernists use scientific terms whithout knowledge and understanding. Ranting on bad writtings is only a tongue in cheek.
It seems to me that you are too easy on the postmodernists. Something that many or possibly all of the postmodern scholars dealt with in the book have in common is a habit of explaining their theories, which are usually most immediately concerned with psychology and literature, by way of metaphors drawn from arcane and incredibly far-flung fields such as topology and quantum physics. I guarantee that none among their audiences, none of their hapless students, were caused to understand the ideas more clearly by their being presented in such a way. I think they do it to impress, and to obscure. As you point out, Sokal and Bricmont scrupulously refrain from calling this behaviour contemptible, but I'm quite happy to do so. (I agree that Derrida is not one of the worst of the mis-users of scientific terminology, he is one hell of an obscurantist though.)
This is great! Finally some actual precise thinking, nuance (w/ reference to the source material!). This channel is an antidote -a φάρμακον in the best possible way ;)
Hi, really like your work, do you think you could do a video about the "Grievance Studies affair" since it differs from this one in spite of being sometimes called Sokal squarred ? Thank you !
Yes please!!!!! Especially since it forms a large part of the recent anti-science & wokeism campaign of conflicts & is conflated with capture of Academia etc…
Probably said more about *the state of academic publishing* than it said about science or postmodernism.
Why would you present a picture of Bruno Latour for a video about Sokal?
You saves me or losing my time reading a book from Sokal. Thank you
I was a bit reluctant to say this since i haven't read any Foucault, but isn't that point that he makes about institutions not being driven by the search of knowledge just a symptom of the profit motive? Truth is generally useful: true science gives way to good engineering that improves our lives and true statements in society in general removes the need of people to waste their precious time discerning the truth from the lies. So for an institution to not pursue truth, it needs to be surpassed in utility by something else, and in our society that is profit.
This is a hypothesis but I'd wager that if multiple institutions were researched to see how many lies each perpetuated, the result would be that for profit companies were the most dishonest, non-profit who relied on donations or a variable budget less dishonest, and state institutions that had a fixed budget the least of them all. So it basically comes down to Marx and the removal of the profit motive to fix this problem.
What is true isn't necessarily "useful" for generating a profit. If profit were the only concern for academic researchers, do you think we'd have telescopes taking extremely high quality images of galaxies that we couldn't get to even in millions of years of travelling just below the speed of light?
Or do you think we would be seeing people doing research on when and why dinosaurs evolved winged feathers?
A lot of research doesn't usually start becoming applicable in areas of economic importance until literally decades, or even centuries after it first becomes formulated and incorporated into a theory.
Perhaps post-modern philosophy will not have much of a strong positive impact on society any time soon, but I don't think it should be totally excluded from academic environments, since many post-modern philosophers and social scientists' ideas may be of interest to academics, if only in a "negative" way (that is to say, for reminding them that all institutions and systems can and should become subject to criticism).
Are you under the impressions Sokals goal was to demonstrate that one obscure journals editors were lax, or was he attempting to demonstrate there is probably a major flaw in the entire field?
All individuals examples only prove that an event occured in that one specific instance, but we use induction to extrapolate to more general conclusions about the field.
He definitely had suspicions about the entire field, he doesn't hide that, but by his own admission, neither his hoax nor his book proved that the entire field is corrupt
No scientific experiment ever proves a conclusion, all they ever prove is that there was occurrence X under these specific conditions in this one instance in time.... however we use a collection of such instances to infer broader conclusions about reality as a whole.
His paper has the same effect.
Sure, but discrediting postmodern theorists would have to involve discrediting their theoretical premises, concepts, frameworks, etc. Not just attacking their use of scientific terminology, which is a small aspect of any of these thinkers' thought
True, but in order to discredit their theoretical frameworks you first have to be able to understand it, and the point Sokal was making was that a great deal of post modern publication is complete gibberish making in unfalsifiable and therefore useless... this is the primary argument made against post modernists such as Derrida, Foucault etc.
That same criticism could be put against a huge number of influential philosophers, rather than just postmodern theorists. If I had read Kant without having any help from secondary literature, I wouldn't have understood it, maybe even thought it's gibberish, yet he's one of the most influential philosophers of all time. It seems to me like people are just upset about difficult texts that take patience to understand
You make a comparison to the starwars paper. The scientific community viewed the journals as fraudulent and predatory, existing purely as a way to make money. Did the philosophical community view the paper that published Sokal the same way? Did the scientific community attack the star wars hoaxers like Derrida attacked Sokal? If not then your comparison is quite dishonest.
I couldn't have said it better myself, Sokal's hoax doesn't really demonstrate anything beyond the fact that some journals do not filter their articles as thoroughly as they should. Peer review is very important for evaluating any technical work. Even then it is better to give exposure to some dubious ideas than to set the bar for publication too high - so much so that it stops younger and less established researchers from publishing. The current publishing environment is already detrimental to science as it is.
What's also particularly egregious about such theatrics as that hoax is how it furthers the most appalling strand of anti-intellectualism inherent in such reactionary acts.
Grievance studies, 7 out of 20 papers peer reviewed and accepted.
I like the way you, dare I say, deconstruct the topics you choose on your videos! Cheers and to my fellow members of the audience, I wish you gain insight and new perspectives! :)
A masterpiece of a video.
Most postmodernist disiples would discount any cogent factual evidence that affirms Sokal's argument by simply envoking the circuitous formulation of Critical Theory and Intersectionality, to claim that Sokal's White European heritage automatically disqualifies him from any such discourse anyway. Which just continues to prove Sokal's contention that Post modernism is nothing but philosophical sophistry.
Who did this?
Hey, really enjoyed the video my dude
"Nothing goes over my head! my reflexes are too fast and I would catch it!"
THIS VIDEO IS RIDICULOUS: What Sokal and Bricmont prove is that, despite in a Postmodern World there are no criteria to judge any aspect of the reality - let alone reality itself -, Postmodernists nevertheless engaged in a critique of science which they were not capable of engaging with, and that it would have been wiser not even start. All the rest in this video is nonsense .
Love your videos but to be honest that excerpt of Baudrillard is not only using a vague metaphor, it's using a completely meaningless metaphor and the whole paragraph, if not meaningless I guess, is completely unreadable. That's not good.
In some ways this affair is reminiscent of Stanisław Andrzejewski (or Stanislav Andreski) who published a book, Social Sciences as Sorcery. As far as I know, no hoaxes were involved, but there are the same complaints about impenetrable academic jargon that indict nearly all the social sciences.
In any event, since reproducibility is essential in the sciences, I think more hoaxes are called for.
Interesting, I never knew the context and detail around Sokal's writing.
I avoid videos and articles that claim to "destroy" like a plagueis x3
It would also be helpful to make a video on right leaning "post-modernists" such as Sloterdijk, Fukuyama, Dugin or De Benoist in order to show that postmodernism isn't just "left identity politics" or some shit like that.
I've seen this label applied to Dugin and De Benoist before, but what about their theory is post-modern specifically? I know they borrowed from a number of different schools of thought and adopted a lot of the language of the post-1968 left, but I'm curious what you mean.
@@yep9462 I wrote this comment a year ago and my positions have changed since. However I do think that you could vaguely consider both Dugin and De Benoist as "postmodernists" since both of them elaborate a critique of modernity and base their works in Heidegger.
Not very reasonable to compare Sokal to Peterson. Peterson is from a newer generation of critics... and the new generations have a tendency to know a lot less about what they criticize. He, and others like him, keep blaming "cultural marxism" for problems created by Capital, like the abolition of sexual difference, death of religion, moral degeneration in general, and so on. He is similar to the new generations of girls criticizing male behavior with absolutely no knowledge of how things work, and no intention of acquiring that knowledge. Sokal, on the other hand, is from the generation when girls actually studied to criticize males, socialists actually read marx, conservatives knew Chesterton and so on. Good old days
Oh there's definitely huge differences between Sokal and Peterson, both in terms of their politics, the context of their popularity and their knowledge. I compared them only because they are both popular critics of postmodernism that are often praised by the same people.
I don't think it's necessarily that the critics of the new generation are simply less knowledgable as a whole, but that with the advent of the internet, it is easier for people to become popular and find a large following without being knowledgable in the topics they choose to talk about, while also carefully selecting which of their critics they will respond to
I don't think he compared Peterson to Sokal in equal terms, he even mentioned respecting him for his more honest and rigorous approach, than that of the paranoid Peterson.
You’re using ad hominem fallacies to separate Peterson and Sokal and then go on to say it was capitalism and not Marxism that caused problems by mentioning a bunch of them as if that validates your statement. Apparently that’s all it takes to be right in this world.
Yup. I mean Sokal is as far left as it can get. As he said. The main reason that he criticized postmodernism was because it was useless in the fight for the working class. It was even detrimental, as he and other leftwing scientists would try to educate workers, and viewed scientific literacy as another means of empowerment against the ruling classes that keep that knowoedge out of their reach, only for a bunch of "intellectuals" to come along and spread the view that knowledge is just another "contruct" and abuse terms from the sciences and disregard truth.
Atreus Lione Do you read Jacobin? It's not meant as a barb - I'm just curious because I can't tell you how many people I see say that it is Capital that keeps hegemonic ideals of the masculine and the feminine alive, the unfair influence of religious institutions in politics a recurring theme, and the working class enslaved to the faux morality of 'family values.'
Adorno did deestroy it with "The Jargon of Authenticity" & "Negative Dialectics"
So, after bringing up Foucault, are you against his questioning what we perceive as knowledge? He wouldn't label himself a post modernist, and I think a lot of people who knock post modernism just want to label the lunatics in today's universities post modern, when really they know nothing of the philosophy. Derrida is something altogether different.
@ippos_khloros i want you to think about.the multifaceted concept of literacy for a second. The first of literacy as an individual capacity to read and write, two literacy as a census measurement (literacy rates), three literacy as a form of human capital. Would the concept of literacy exist if we did not have written language? Would we measure it at an individual level if it werent a socially necessary requirement for an individual to be literate to partake in economic activity? Would states measure literacy rates if they had no impact on public goals and economic outcomes? What economic and social transformations made governments go from being indifferent to, and even suppressing, general literacy, to pursuing it as an end goal?
Literacy is the perfect illustration of a social and psychological construct deeply rooted in the exercise of power of the state through educational institutions in the service of economic goals, the individual psychological tests and braoder census instruments reflect the circulation of knowledge through power. Literacy, not the act of being literate, but literacy as a measurement and qualifier and category, is a social construct, a good one, a desirable one, but one that only exists in the realm of power and economic activity.
It just sounds like one of the many examples of "academic" journals not having academic standards
Isn't the preview picture on this video Bruno Latour and not Alan Sokal?
You make some good points but I think you underestimate Sokal's overall weakening of the various modes of heuristic intersectionality essential to Postmodernism.
Those scientific journals were hardly peer reviewed, they are "predatory journals" most open access journals are predatory so that's not a fair comparison. "Social Text" IS a academic published journal and the whole journal is tarnished now because of this event.
I'd argue that Molecular biology is not a fraud because the technology discovered in the field are partly the reason we are alive right now. Academic standards are generally higher for STEM and business/law fields than the humanities at most institutions. This is not the case with bullshit cultural fields. Do I sound like a deep philosopher now? I said a whole bunch of empirical observations and unverifiable subjective opinion followed by mic drop this is not the case. Philosophers literally sit on their ass and do nothing, i'm not saying they're useless to intellectual thought but i'd rather not die from MRSA than be lectured about post modern shit.
Social Text was not peer reviewed either, so the comparison still holds.
I'm not criticizing STEM of course, but you could also argue that certain STEM academics "literally sit on their ass and do nothing" (which I don't think is true, as it's also not true for philosophers). Not every STEM academic is engaged in inventing things that improve your life. There are loads of theoretical physicists, for example, whose works have no immediate practical application.
STEM fields don't need to have practical application though to prove useful. Many theoretic fields have given technologies incidentally out of pure chance which are invaluable to industry. PCR is a good example of this in molecular cloning, vaccinations, medications. Physics is the worst example of a theoretical field that has no "practical" usage since we base all modern technology around laws of physics, the idea of economic consumerism was invented from the invention of appliances. Refrigeration wouldn't have been possible without theoretical studies of magnetism, mechanics and thermodynamics.
I think theoretic fields of science are undoubtedly useful. STEM academics have to complete PhDs in research projects which help the creation of new technologies. This mutual dichotomy just doesn't exist in social sciences there's too many distinct fields with difficult to repeat tests, for whatever reason their put on the same level when with the exception of economic theory or fields like jurisprudence they don't really have a practical usage to advancing or implementing technologies.
"There are loads of theoretical physicists, for example, whose works have no immediate practical application."
Did you seriously write this?
Theoretical physicists are trying to figure out the very fabric of the universe. What could be more important than that, irrespective of any possible practical applications.
Are you seriously going to compare what they do to what gets published in the "Fat Studies" journals, for example?
"Theoretical physicists are trying to figure out the very fabric of the universe. What could be more important than that, irrespective of any possible practical applications."
I don't see the problem. Nothing you said in that paragraph contradicts what I said in your quote, that there are theoretical physicists who work on things without immediate practical application. My point is precisely that things can be very important even "irrespective of any possible practical applications", which is why I don't think that the only standard of valuing any academic field should be immediate practical applications. For people who DO only value academic fields by that standard, it could seem that SOME theoretical physicists "literally sit on their ass and do nothing", but I would disagree with that characterization
In the same way, some might think philosophers "sit on their ass and do nothing", but they are important, even outside of practical application, although that is not to say they NEVER have practical applications. One of my professor in ethics, for example, has worked in the government advising matters on euthanasia laws. You also only need to look at neuroscience, which is inseparable from philosophy of mind. Introduction classes to neuroscience (which I have taken) usually involve theories in philosophy of mind, and neuroscience conferences usually include philosophers. It's no accident that some of the most important physicists in western history have been philosophers too
If "knowledge is not detached from the circulation of power", then knowledge is stained with long the filthy fingers of corrupted power. If we accept this as true, then we must excise the malignant powers and replace them with benevolent power. But, if all of our knowledge is tainted, how can we practically accomplish this. There is no jumping off point. And there is high risk of going from bad to worse, as history has shown us.
Power is not corrupt. Is Dangerous.
I think your quote reflecting Sokal's motivations and conclusions around 6:40 is too generous with his character. It seems to me that by contrasting the tone of his Lingua Franca article with that of his books, it looks like Sokal was determined to prove that cultural studies were rotten to the core, and it only morphed into some kind of appeal to rigor as he dug deeper into what he had done. The whole thing was pretty infantile, and he should be given more crap about how irresponsible it was.
The video side steps the effect of a post modernism analysis, as I understand it. By acting as solvent to existing theories of culture, art, social relations, ethics, etc., without proposing a workable alternative, post modernism assists in remove the balast and frame of western civilization and political discourse.
With that common civilization framework dissolved by postmodern analysis, and so, in effect, out of the way, the political world picks up the nearest and most obvious tools to differentiate left from right; skin pigment, ethnicity, gender, income envy. So me go from a critique of western culture, to tribal clubs and worship of power, in the same generation and by the same persons.
....Now do the grievance study affairs.
I am not epert on postmodern theory. But postmodern architecture goes back to Robert Venturi's "Complexity and COntradicton in architecture" and "Learning from Las Vegas" where he says that modernist architcts are bad fr trying to raise the cultural leval of hte masses and for such sins as designing housing for the aged where plastic flowers do not look good in the windows. He himself designed a home for the aged (Guild House) which he says is topped with a nonfunctioning gold plated antenna "ss a symbol for the elderly who watch so much television". Venturi's work is a manifesto against modernism. His house is not The Bahhaus.
Oh sure, bring in all that nuance and facts and context and RUIN the fun of smarty-pants bloodsport! People don't want truth, they want those lilly-livered -liberals- erm... intellectuals get REKT!
Oh shiet!!!11111!!1!!
More on peer review.
1. Most of the important ideas in modern science were not peer reviewed prior to publication. Of Enstein's 100, or so, published papers, only 1 was peer-reviewed.
2. Peer-review does not prevent the publication of garbage in the academic literature. But once a bad idea has been laundered in academia, peer-review gives that bad idea a false legitimacy. For example, Robin DiAngelo's PhD thesis was presumably peer-reviewed. It must've been "examined" - because she, eh, "passed". Yet whoever authorized it did not check for plagiarism. Which only goes to show how easy it is to beat the peer-review system. Consider how DiAngelo constructed her white fragility argument in her PhD thesis. She implied that certain authorities (previously academically laudered work) made certain arguments. But it's unclear whether DiAngelo ever read some of the primary sources she implies her arguments rest on. Because she takes words of a secondary source writing about the conclusions made by a primary source; but alters key words of the secondary source - to change the meaning of what they say - so implying the primary source made ideas they never did. Her PhD is social contructivist sophism enabled by her PhD examiners - who themselves enabled rampant plagiarism.
Academica = Scamdemica
They tried to do it again, and it's just as rubbish as last time haha
Another person going down in history who tried to make a point one way, and went down in history for almost a completely opposite one because haters' reading comprehension has always been piss poor? Well, I am shocked!
Agree that Peterson could do better to be more specific, but then I'm not sure what good it would do. People could endlessly accuse him of misunderstanding anyway, as they do now. Those with a background in 20th century philosophy have a habit of accusing any critics of the field of 'failing to engage with the ideas' or 'missing a thorough reading' unless they see a very specific response to the texts that they're looking for. Of course, the language of these texts - Derrida especially - could be recast in multiple ways so interrogators like Peterson would never be able to pin it down in the eyes of the experts. To make matters worse, the most bombastic people on college campuses who have been using Foucault's language or Fanon's arguments likely have never read the texts either, and probably have equally shallow knowledge of the nuances of the concepts the French Poststructuralists were trying to present. It would be these individuals that Peterson is concerned about, so perhaps his own ignorance isn't as tantamount as it might seem; of course I can't blame students of the French school for feeling that their toes are being stepped on.
It is interesting that Peterson's fans usually accuse his critics of not understanding what he says. It is also true that his statements are often so vague that one can "recast" them in multiple ways so nobody can form an effective critique without listening to hours of his ramblings. At the most extreme (albeit not rare), Peterson straight up makes new definitions for commonly known terms, almost priming most of his arguments to be plagued with equivocation fallacies.
It is almost as if Peterson is a kind of reactionary neo-postmodernist. At the very least he appears to be using the same tools he accuses the post-modernists of using.
Ahmed Ashour I don't disagree. I think Peterson could improve a lot simply by recognizing that whatever ideology is fueling more aggressive activist mentalities today diverged from Foucault and Derrida some time ago. As Dyson noted in the recent Munk debate, Foucault's own ideas about power are markedly different from the "differential" notion that is more commonly held among Intersectionalists today. It was actually surprising to hear Dyson point that out, because I get the impression that he subscribes to Weber-esque conception of power, himself.
Jonathantheweirdo Maybe it's just because I'm an autist but I can't tell if that was supposed to be a passive aggressive remark about me, lol. I have a lot of issues with Peterson; my remark wasn't a defense of him so much as a lament about the current situation.
+Open4991
Not so much a passive-aggressive remark about you, but about the ironic (almost hypocritical) stance that Peterson has engaged in. Due to this fact, I see little use on bringing up Peterson in any topic. He is just a blank validation canvas that anyone can use, proven to be demonstrably wrong in almost anything concrete he's said. You can see the videos about him from RationalityRules (Religion), ContraPoints (Postmodernism), ThreeArrows (Nazism) and Peter Coffin (Self-help) for a taste of what he misunderstands.
This is to say, I get tired that he keeps getting attention for no real merit of his own.
I really do not have objections about your broad remark. I do agree that the fluidity in interpretation of some philosophical ideas makes it more difficult to construct valid criticism about them, specially when people do not take their due diligence to study those examples. Your remark (outside of the Peterson bit) is a tad too general for me to either ask you for evidence or agree with more of what you are saying.
What is vague about Peterson's ideas? Give me something you don't understand and I will put it in simple terms for you...
Good points in the video but to be fair it doesn't address the elephant in the room, the artificial difficult of texts that most of the time have little to say, which sokal and bricmint addressed convincingly in the book. I have read post modernists and the true is generally the effort is not worth the reward.
Well, if I read scientific publications, one can experience the exact same thing.
And here we see how dishonest are people when they want to discredit something.
True that.
I'm learning a lot from your stuff. Thanks for all this and keep it up!
could you write in a sentence what have you learned about postmodernistic theory based on this video and why it has not been destroyed?