(This is long and it's about Sokal and Deleuze, etc so if you're not
interested read something else or better, go and see a movie).

Yes - quite so, Gregory. I wondered when someone was going to bring up
Prigogine and your timing is immaculate. Please contribute more if and
when can have a real discussion about the conncetions between art,
science and philosophy in relation to film, to which I for one remain
committed.   I find it amazing that after calling for engagement between
apparently combative areas one gets so little comfort. I guess one
should not be surprised - the debate is an old one - particularly in the
making of, and thinking about, films (more at the end on this!).

For me this has all been perversely useful in a re-thinking through of
both the issues involved and of the use of differentials in media
theory. I'm currently writing something longer on the latter which I
might post to the list when finished (as a URL). Despite the usefulness
of the discussion personally, though, I had decided not to continue this
particular discussion any more as it seemed to have degenerated to a
kind of anti-intellectualism and close-mindedness typical of the whole
Sokal project. It's a pity when one is forced to choose between
complexity and clarity, between pleasure and reason, between what one
knows and what one is challenged by, between a cultural condition of
postmodernity and politics - but there you go - that's what some seem to
want.

It's also a pity that suddenly you find comments like "there are a lot
of you" on this list - a lot of what? - 'postmodernists' I presume, as
in, 'people who I disagree with and are responsible for everything
that's gone wrong with the world' (that's the only thing I know for sure
I have in common with Gregory, Tim, Inna, etc, i.e. Ted's antipathy -
none of us have even writtent that we agree with everything Deleuze
writes and I for one have very ambivalent feelings about postmodernism -
properly understood). It's also a pity that some people seem to want to
forbid interests beyond their own. I, for example, am not terribly
interested in film semiotics, or even convinced by much of it, but I
have studied it, think it's a valuable project and would find it
unthinkable to say in general that no one should study the way that
signs function.

The issues are, of course more complex, but let's go to some basics...

Some basic issues do indeed need to be addressed here, despite my
reticence to need to. These are issues which are wider even than Deleuze
and whether he is fun or even right(!!). Here are 3 basic points drawn
partly from some preliminary research on the old ground of the Sokal
bizz. In all of this I'm just following the Sokal-Bricmont method (as
poor as it is) - insisting on terms being used correctly and on the
presence of a real world with certain facts that we can know. I'm also
using 'quote mining', a 'scientific' method S and B share with
creationists (and with mailing lists where it seems more appropriate
than in books as on mailing lists people can answer back).

1. Postmodernism: Although S and B say they are just taking up a few
points of science and don't claim any other project at some moments in
their discussion and protestations, many critics point out that they do
in fact have projects which are much broader than these statements would
indicate. These projects are echoed in several emails here and amount to
an attack on so-called 'postmodern thinking' in favour of supposed
'facts' or even of keeping the 'human' intact (the possible poetry of
the latter gives me *some* sympathy for Paulo's email which is at least
civil but let's stuck to the facts and the facts about the facts....).

There are endless problems with S and Bs conflation of postmodern
thinking and French philosophy. If this is echoed in some sections of
the US academy and elsewhere (pro or anti pomo) this is no excuse for
getting your broad cultural facts wrong:

(i) the French never took to postmodernism like the US and other places
- it came and went without a whole lot of discussion. The whole
juxtaposition of these French philosophers and postmodern thinking is
faulty in the first place. They are, most but not all,
post-structuralists perhaps (amongst other things) but that's a
technical matter far beyond S and B as they themselves point out. It's
nevertheless a crucial technical matter to S and B's argument as it's
really in post-structuralism that the philosophical arguments against
Truth, Science, a simple series of facts that you can put your hands on,
etc are made. So it's interesting that the more they went on, the more S
and B avoided attacking the leading post-structuralists such as Derrida
and Foucault (who would have been the obvious targets for those wanting
to promote what S and B want to promote..)

(ii) worse for S and B, those that do occasionally talk about pomo
revile it. Sadly, in general terms, S and B are missing some possible
allies in their broader project. Strangely enough these include Virilio,
whose project is precisely to object tirelessly to a possible passing of
the real into simulation. Virilio's his science may be bad here at times
(as is the science of many prophets) but his grasp of historical facts
is excellent, and his political diagnoses compelling (even though I
personally disagree with many). Those who want their films and film
philosophy 'nice' and untainted by the complexity of the late twentieth
century (not to mention the early twentieth century) should perhaps read
his _War and Cinema_ for a dose of salts. His disdain for our clumsy
loss of the 'empirical' world as we cosy up to the screen is only too
obvious in this book, as is his recording of it. For those who like
facts, this book is uncomfortably full of them.

It's true that Baudrillard seems the crown prince of Pomo sometimes but,
as with Virilio, he actually doesn't like postmodernism - or at least
the cultural condition that contains pomo. Despite all the critics who
wilfully portray him as the Postmodern Pied Piper he is basically a kind
of broad Marxist, who, yes, thinks that simulation is taking over the
world, but also seems to wish that it hadn't.

In fact, it's hard to think of anyone amongst those attacked here who
does like postmodernism, that is, if they ever bothered with it  -
remembering that, being French, postmodernism kind of passed them by as
a debate (if not a cultural condition). The exception here may be
Lyotard, who wrote _The Postmodern Condition_, although I believe this
was a commissioned work which was not one of his favourites, and even
here he seems luke warm about the whole idea - suggesting that Pomo and
modernism more or less circle around each other - things fall apart in
pomo and make room for the new in modernism. Of course, Lyotard is
diagnosing the condition here, not necessarily promoting it.

I'm trying to think if Deleuze ever even mentions pomo (maybe someone
can enlighten me) but I don't think so. As for Guattari - he can't stand
pomo. Guattari was a communist, very politically active (Sokal raises
his teaches physics for the Sandinista's once as if no one else has ever
done anything political), as was Lyotard (for many years he edited the
journal _Socialism or Barbarism_ and wrote a great deal on Algeria),
Foucault, Deleuze, etc etc. Here's what Guattari says about Pomo and
issues related to this discussion, if you'll excuse a little quote
mining:

"Rather than joining the fashionable crusades against the misdeeds of
modernism, or preaching a rehabilitation of worn-out transcendent
values, or indulging in the disillusioned indulgences of postmodernism,
we might instead try to find a way out of the dilemma of having to
choose between unyielding refusal or cynical acceptance of this
situation" (in _Incorporations_, Sanford and Kwinter:16).

Well we might try, if we are not S and B, or for that matter, Ted's
knight on the bridge in _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_.

Elsewhere Guattari has a go at both structuralism and, once again,
postmodernism, both of which he complains "have accustomed us to a world
which evacuates the pertinence out of human interventions incarnated in
concrete politics and micropolitics" (Les Trois Ecologies:32).

All this adds up to one simple fact: S and B don't begin to understand
the facts about the relation between postmodernism and these
philosophers - in fact, they don't seem to have much of a clue.
According to their own criteria they shouldn't be talking about it. But
there's worse...

2. Science and empiricism: I must say that I find S and B's notion of
empiricism rather crude (it's much more interestingly accounted for in
Deleuze's writing - surprisngly for some, no doubt, he was very
interested in empiricism). But we'll leave that aside for the basics
once again....

At this point I wave an almost fond farewell to S and B and their
followers, although admittedly I rely on the authority of others to do
it  - namely two reviewers. Just so Ted doesn't think I'm cheating I'll
point out that both of these agree with S and B on many of the basic
points - such as the confusion of speed and acceleration in Virilio.
One of these reviewers is possibly more hostile to 'postmodern thinking'
than S and B. Then again, like Guattari, this writer is a communist (or
at least writes for _Communist Voice_).

In any case, what's bad for S and B is that both these reviewers point
out that they get their facts wrong - worse, they get their scientific
facts wrong!   Now it appears - and I do say appears since I'm not a
scientist - that for S and B it's one thing to require philosophers to
get their scientific terms, facts and history right, but quite
anotherfor physicists to get their own wrong in the process.
Interestingly enough one of the things they misrepresent is the history
of differential calculus. Richard Harter
(<http://www.tiac.net/users/cri/fashion.html> agrees with S and B on
some of Deleuze's minor errors but then goes on -

"When calculus as a subject was young this was a live issue which was
discussed
  communally by philosophers and mathematicians. Over time two
traditions developed. As FN (S and B) notes, the issue was resolved in
the mathematical community by Cauchy's theory of limits, et al, and the
Calculus was placed on a rigorous foundation. As FN does not note,
Cauchy's treatment does not solve the philosophic problem but rather it
eliminates the issue from needing to be considered in Mathematics. (It
has been pointed out to me that limits and the delta-epsilon formalism
is a regular sticking point in teaching Calculus.)"

 More damning is Joseph Green in _Communist Voice_
(<http://www.flash.net/~comvoice/20cSokalLong.html>). He agrees with S
and B on pomo and politics and even on much of the science. On
differentials he even joins in their condemnation of Deleuze's wacky old
philosophy but then goes on -

"Deleuze's absurdities aside, Sokal and Bricmont are themselves
factually wrong. For one thing, infinitesimals, far from being solely of
historical interest, are once again used in mathematics.(56) Since the
early 1960s, Abraham Robinson and some other mathematicians have
developed a field called "non-standard analysis", in which
infinitesimals are once again used in the solution of the problems of
the differential and integral calculus and a number of other fields of
mathematics. This time the infinitesimal rests on a solid, logically
rigorous, foundation. This is not the work of some cranks, but is
respectable, orthodox mathematical work.So far, non-standard
analysis only plays a peripheral role in mathematics, but one can still
say of the infinitesimals that, "they're back"....Moreover,
infinitesimals were never fully banished from mathematics. Instead, they
were, so to speak, the  "illegal aliens" of mathematics: banned in
theory, in practice they were always employed on some field of work or
other....infinitesimals proved harder to remove from mathematics than
was expected.."

A discussion of d'Alembert and Cauchy follows, which, to my mind,
completely undermines S and B's assertions.

You might have thought that S and B, of all people, would not have lost
touch with scientific facts in the course of explaining them to the
popular market. Maybe, like some of the lesser popular science writers,
they had dollar signs in their eyes, not politics.

I don't want to be picky but since being picky is the issue for S and B
can we forget them at this point? They don't even pass their own sloppy
criteria for sloppiness...

Harter goes on to point out elsewhere
(<http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/nov98.html>) that S and B
also get chaos theory a little wrong, while Baudrillard gets it broadly
right but I'm sure I'm boring you already...


3. Relevance to film and the whole notion of film-philosophy:

Now what has this got to do with film, apart from the the fact that
Deleuze has made a major contribution to film theory (where, amongst
other things, he quite conservatively does exactly what I think Boris
required - i.e. deplores the current state of Hollywood cinema as he
wrote)?

Sadly, this debate reflects debates in film for the whole  of its
history: pleasure versus experiment, technique versus ideas, clarity and
safety (and money!) versus trying things out. It is as if all the latter
have to be opposed at every moment. Or as if any movement away from a
familiar romance, comedy or simple idea masquerading as profound would
destroy our peace of mind once and for all. Are people afraid that films
might be a form of thought, as Deleuze, but not only Deleuze, argued,
and that thought is sometimes difficult, sometimes about problems rather
than easy solutions, or sometimes about making some errors in order to
find  solutions to difficult problems. Would we have Godard, Eisenstein,
Lynch, or countless others if everything had to be clear, easily
digested and correctly accounted for before we even got off the ground?
I don't think so. Much as I like some of his films, we'd only have
Spielberg - technically brilliant but no ideas beyond the mundane.

Long may science, art and philosophy talk to each other in their
different languages and long may there be a productive confusion between
them...

cheers, Andrew

--
"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast
back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Dr Andrew Murphie - Lecturer
Media and Communication Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, 2109
fax:612 98508892 tlf:612 98508761 email:[log in to unmask]
http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/staff/andrew/amurphie.html




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