Dom wrote (re the Baudrillard statement that Peter quoted from Sokal's
_Intellectual Impostures_):
<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 audrillard is an incisive epigrammatist.>
Okay, fair enough as far as it goes, but what IS the context for his
statement, and why would you think there might be something wrong with it?
Its context is its context, and since Sokal has presumably taken it out of
that context, it would be helpful if you'd recontextualize it for us
(thanks). Sorry that I didn't realize you were applying "funny" to it in a
different sense (i.e., as Baudrillard's joke) from Peter's "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?" (So do let us in on the joke as well--please!)
[Aside to Peter: the reservation registered in your parentheses indicates
exactly the problem I have with Sokal's m.o.--but I also wonder if the
Baudrillard quote strikes you any differently now, in light of Dom's saying
that it's meant to be a joke--?]
Here's a possibly useful exercise in comparativist reading that puts
Baudrillard's statement in play not with science but with poetry. Do his
words still raise a laugh (or a snigger) when counterpointed by Wallace
Stevens's poem, or vice versa: does the Stevens poem strike us as funny in
conjunction with Baudrillard's statement? (The ellipses in the 5th stanza of
the poem are Stevens's, btw.)
Candice
"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."
Soldier, There Is a War between the Mind
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.
They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,
Two parallels that meet if only in
The meeting of their shadows or that meet
In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.
But your war ends. And after it you return
With six meats and twelve wines or else without
To walk another room . . . Monsieur and comrade,
The soldier is poor without the poet's lines,
His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,
Inevitably modulating, in the blood.
And war for war, each has its gallant kind.
How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;
How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,
If he must or lives on the bread of faithful speech.
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