ok
but the other side of that is the scientist who says _oh you don't
understand what science is_ to put themselves outside of morality
scientific outcomes are inevitably social outcomes, unless you conduct
science on a remote planet where you are only visited by Kirk and Spock
and I am not sure *why I have said ok to start with
when ever *was science _under the regime of what is good for us_
what regime is that?
it must have been while I was napping
L
----- Original Message -----
From: "domfox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 12 January 2002 17:25
Subject: Re: A Responsibility to Awe
| > It's only funny out of context and to those who,
| > knowing nothing of the event-theory work to which Baudrillard is
gesturing
| > by analogy with such terms as "multiple refractivity" and the
| > "non-Euclidean" space of war, read those terms only in their literal
| senses.
|
| Unless there's something seriously wrong with the context in which I read
| Baudrillard, I have to say that I think it's funny in context too: I don't
| mean laughable, I mean funny. There is a difference between an epigram and
a
| theorem and Baudrillard is an incisive epigrammatist.
|
| I am dismayed from time to time by the demands from all quarters - from
the
| left, from environmentalists, from the right, from fundamentalists, from
| intellectuals, from anti-intellectuals - that science should be
| resubordinated, re-humanised, brought back into the fold and back under
the
| regime of what is good for us. I don't think that the editors of Social
| Text, for instance, liked the idea of scientific autonomy very much. The
| desire to see scientific processes as social processes is cognate with the
| desire to see scientific outcomes as social outcomes, but what you get if
| that is really the case is Lamarckism as state doctrine, and committees
| deciding that the value of pi is 3.5.
|
| Says Lynette Hunter, an apparently well-regarded writer in the field:
| science is "at its centre mainly another way for human beings to
communicate
| with other human beings: science is a text through which we act on, engage
| with and affect other people". You would not imagine, reading this, that
| science could be in any way concerned with any res that were not res
| publica, that it ever troubled to notice the existence of things which did
| not care what people thought of them, things to which people were not
"other
| people" but simply other things (it is awful to be a thing to a person,
but
| there is nothing wrong with being a thing to a thing). There is an outer
| space enclosing the "sacred" space of intra-personal relations, the
negotium
| of human business, and science is (at its centre? mainly?) a way for human
| beings to notice that the space they occupy with their customs and
concerns
| is not all the space there is.
|
| Dominic
|
| ----- Original Message -----
| From: "Candice Ward" <[log in to unmask]>
| To: <[log in to unmask]>
| Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 11:50 PM
| Subject: Re: A Responsibility to Awe
|
|
| I don't want to get sidetracked from science poetry to Sokal--Jeremy's
"why
| Lucretius? Why now?" questions are more interesting and fruitful to me
(I'll
| get back to you on that, Jeremy!)--but I do want to point out that Peter's
| quoting from the later book by Sokal and his coauthor (whose name I've
| forgotten), while my own reference was to what Sokal did and said at the
| time of the original hoax, an act of bad faith if ever there was. Since
| then, Sokal has proved that bad faith can be a good career move, but he
| hasn't put a dent in science studies because the scholars and theorists
from
| both the sciences and the humanities who work in that important area are
| simply smarter and better-informed scientifically as well as
| crit-theoretically. And they are doing serious, sophisticated work
| together--in good faith.
|
| The editors of _Social Text_ (which is published by Duke, so I was there
| when all this was going down) weren't "lazy ignorant and smug" (IMHO), but
| they weren't savvy either. While Sokal acted knowingly in bad faith, they
| took a good-faith risk on him as a hopelessly confused physicist who--they
| thought--was genuinely trying to engage with the theory he so obviously
| didn't understand. I think they acted in the spirit Peter and I have been
| sensing when they bent over backwards to try to help this clown bring his
| article into something more than laughable shape. But when he refused to
| make the revisions they'd requested (in a good-faith effort to make him
look
| less idiotic), they should have rejected the article even if they still
had
| no suspicions of Sokal's bad-faith-motivated actions. It was extremely
poor
| editorial judgment to publish his goofball article, as they themselves
| realized when the balloon went up, but poor editorial judgment isn't a
moral
| issue, while bad faith certainly is. If we assume that integrity or the
lack
| thereof goes all the way down, then a scientist who would do what Sokal
did
| is a disgrace to and a menace in his own field, not a threat to anyone
| else's.
|
| If he's publishing quotes out of context like the Baudrillard one in order
| to ridicule what he still doesn't understand (the now large literature on
| event theory, for instance), then he's acting in the same scholarly bad
| faith way that he did when he perpetrated the _Social Text_ hoax. And,
with
| all due respect, Peter, I think you implicitly endorse that bad faith when
| you do the same to Baudrillard here by repeating a quote out of its
context
| of serious, fairly smart work (I'm not gung-ho Baudrillard myself) in
order
| to say that it's funny. It's only funny out of context and to those who,
| knowing nothing of the event-theory work to which Baudrillard is gesturing
| by analogy with such terms as "multiple refractivity" and the
| "non-Euclidean" space of war, read those terms only in their literal
senses.
| The same sort of shoddy number could be done on one of your poems, Peter,
if
| some critic quoted a line in isolation and in a bad-faith effort to smear
| your work.
|
| But--jumping off my soapbox now--I also want to say that I loved the
| strategy of your post, footnotes included (footnotes especially), and
| thought it both sincere and savvy!
|
| Candice
|
|
|
| on 1/11/02 5:51 PM, domfox at [log in to unmask] wrote:
|
| > Re Sokal, I am a great lover and sometime practitioner of
theory-bollocks
| of
| > all varieties, and I personally love what he did to Social Text who
bloody
| > deserved it for being lazy ignorant and smug, although I don't love him
| > because he is also lazy ignorant and smug. The Baudrillard quote *is*
| funny,
| > and Baudrillard himself is funny, and it isn't just a joke but it is
also
| a
| > joke. I don't think Kristeva was joking, but who knows? I like it that
| they
| > couldn't find anything to pin on Derrida. And the background politics is
| > sucky, because it makes your good faith as one who wills the social good
| > dependant on your metaphysics, whereas in fact you can believe in bloody
| > fairies and still be a solid pacifist and union organizer (or whatever
| your
| > version of willing the social good entails) - the irritating thing about
| > political questions is that they are quite askew from questions of
| technical
| > or intellectual competance, and even stupid and deluded individuals can
be
| > politically decent, just as some of the cleverest bastards that there
| ain't
| > half been have also been right-wing arseholes of the first order. I
| dislike
| > it that this is the case, but what can you do?
| >
| > ----- Original Message -----
| > From: "Peter Howard" <[log in to unmask]>
| > To: <[log in to unmask]>
| > Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 10:15 PM
| > Subject: Re: A Responsibility to Awe
| >
| >
| >> I'm very glad my comments were useful, Gerald.
| >>
| >> Candice, I'll be more than happy to take a look at your poem whenever
| >> it's ready to be looked at. But don't expect too much - it's a long
time
| >> since I studied physics properly, so my knowledge is somewhat rusty. I
| >> bet you know more about neutrinos than I do at the moment.
| >>
| >> As for good stuff, the book I was most recently impressed by was Neil
| >> Rollinson's "Spanish Fly", which contains several poems that use
| >> scientific imagery effectively and accurately. Mario Petrucci and Danny
| >> Abse both know what they're talking about when they use science. The
| >> grand-daddy of science poets is Miroslav Holub, of course, but you
| >> probably knew that.
| >>
| >> But I was meaning more that there seem to be fewer scientific blunders
| >> in poems that aren't principally scientific in intent, but stumble
| >> across some science along the way. I playfully have a "S.T. Coleridge
| >> Horned Moon Award" [1] that I mentally present to poems that drop a
| >> scientific clanger, and I seem to be dishing it out less frequently of
| >> late. Poets seem to be more careful and/or better informed these days.
| >>
| >> As for Sokal, I don't agree that:
| >>
| >>> his
| >>> _Social Text_ hoax began with his own inability to penetrate the
| language
| > of
| >>> critical theory and his assumption on the basis of his own limitations
| > there
| >>> that it wasn't comprehensible or substantive at all.
| >>
| >> He specifically says: "We are not attacking philosophy, the humanities
| >> or the social sciences *in general*; on the contrary, we feel that
these
| >> fields are of the utmost importance..." His main target isn't the
| >> language of critical theory per se, but those occasions when it imports
| >> the language of physics or mathematics and doesn't use it properly. You
| >> might argue that critical theory has a perfect right to appropriate
| >> physics or maths language and use it for its own purposes; after all,
| >> those two disciplines are particularly noted for pinching their
| >> vocabulary from other sources (energy, force, set, charm, flavour etc.
| >> Physics nicked "quark" from Joyce.) But when the grammar as well as the
| >> vocabulary has the same look and feel, there's a stronger expectation
| >> of a similarity in meaning. Wittgenstein [2] aside, is it very likely
| >> that a sentence that looks to have some relevance to one field of
| >> discourse, but is written in the context of another, isn't making some
| >> sort of reference to the first? At the very least, when Jean
Baudrillard
| >> (quoted by Sokal in Intellectual Impostures) says: "It is a sign that
| >> the space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple
| >> refractivity, and that the space of war has become definitively non-
| >> Euclidean." then even if this has a precise meaning within the
discourse
| >> of critical theory, can you seriously expect anyone with any knowledge
| >> of science or mathematics (and who is unaware of the meaning in the
| >> discourse of critical theory) not to snigger?
| >>
| >> Best,
| >>
| >> Peter
| >>
| >> [1] "The horned Moon, with one bright star/Within the nether tip." -
| >> Within the moon's crescent is the rest of the moon, in shadow. It would
| >> therefore block out the light from any star behind it. This is the most
| >> notorious scientific blunder in poetry.
| >>
| >> [2] I included this because a reference to Wittgenstein always gives a
| >> post a bit of intellectual élan, don't you think? I was thinking of the
| >> references to Wittgenstein in Tom Stoppard's [3] "Dogg's Hamlet,
| >> Cahoot's MacBeth."
| >>
| >> [3] And if you're going to mention a playwright in a post, you can't do
| >> better than Tom Stoppard, especially if the reference is to one of his
| >> more recondite works.[4]
| >>
| >> [4] That's enough footnotes, ed.
|
|