AS I SEE IT:
PSEUDO RADICAL BABBLE:


I've been at this game (leftism) for over 40 years now, and I certainly have accumulated a scrapbook full of "stupid things lefties believe and do". Back in those deep dark days of my youth a lot of the smellier bullshit used to revolve around the word dialectics .This, of course, had its own secret Marxist meaning in addition to a regular definition that had nothing whatsoever to do with either Hegel or Marx.



To be "dialectic about it" the use of the language that surrounded this supposed "quick key to understanding the world" was "contradictory". It was a supposed path to understanding that might change the world, but, on the other hand, it was the occasion of nothing more than endless word games and attempts at pseudointellectual posturing. As such its acceptance which was supposedly a "plus" for changing the world made the left an object of ridicule or disgust. Exactly the opposite of what its speakers intended. I wonder what the synthesis of this quandary would be if you were to stay in this literary form ?


Back in those days , as it did in generations past "dialectics" served a number of leftist functions but was an absolute failure in what it was supposed to do. While it never led to any unexpected insights that couldn't have been seen via less complex common sense it did give its practitioners at least the illusion of superiority to those of lesser "consciousness". But that illusion provoked more hostility (and sometimes ridicule)than acceptance of the "dialectical message" because of its "superiority". Posturing has a tendency to finally be found out.



Ah but academic lefty fashions come and go, and these days it is hard to find many advocates for "dialectics" except amongst a quite aged cadre of academics. A few decades ago the fashion shifted, both in the academy and in the real world. The interests of younger radicals (once again unfortunately most represented in social science departments of universities) changed from Leninist dreams of becoming a new ruling class (though that's never how they would have put it) to issues that had more "emotional charge" if not exactly the same objective importance as "class struggle".


It is not coincidental that the final social configuration that the rebellious 60s and 70s produced offered all sorts of hitherto unknown opportunities to exercise power over others outside the realm of actual productive enterprise. "Revolution" would hardly be of benefit to this emerging caste/class who, in the end, prey on the weaknesses of various marginals in a society that produces more and more of them. Similarly a totalitarian vision of the world such as Marxist philosophy held little attraction for the "resentariat" who saw the road to power open and clear.


The new 'magical key' that replaced dialectics was "post modernism". If anything this replacement in academic fashion was even more trivial and useless than its ancestor. The trivial disguise of such commonplaces as, "nothing lasts forever and everything changes", "there is struggle in all social systems", etc. including some statements that are demonstrably false such as Marxism's belief that history in inevitably "progressive" gave way to a new set of truisms and falsehood.

The baby was named "post-modernism", and it was born in the most appropriate academic manger ie literature departments which didn't even have the tenuous connection to reality that many social sciences had. The baby was a bastard from the get-go. It espoused a "radical relativism" towards anything but its own theories and conclusions. In this it repeated the fallacy of the 'necessary being argument' for the existence of God while being blithely unaware that it was setting up an eternal mirror paradox.

But essential value or not the baby was indeed born at the right time when there was widespread "radical sympathy" for a great number of 'new causes' while at the same time the traditional leftism was saying its before death prayers. The totalitarian system of Marxism had been replaced by a vague collection of "oppressions", not all of them of equal importance. The trainers of the new segment of the ruling class arrived at their tenure, usually without any opposition that they couldn't shout down. What to do ? What to do ?

By the time that post-modernism became the dominant ideology, at least in the North American academy, pretty well everything that could be said about "oppressions" had been said already repeatedly. Now understand something about that particularly vicious, close to chimpanzee social interactions, "politics" that happens in the academy. The theory is that an academic has to continually produce original thought or investigation. By the time the "anti-ists" began to populate the departments the various oppression veins of ore had pretty well been mined out. Not such a good thing if you are trying to advance yourself in such a cutthroat situation as a social science department.


Now "dialectics" and writing about it certainly had its stylistic difficulties of which a vague abstract way of speaking was one. Still, it was a cut above the academic fashion of post-modernism. The champions of dialectics did indeed say things that were wrong and even ridiculous to those outside the magic circle. But most of what they said actually made sense. With the advent of post-modernism it became the fashion to write in a way that was both "beyond grammar" and also "beyond sense". Without the imaginary clothes of the emperor what was called "intersectionality" would have been seen as the triviality that it is. For those without an acquaintance with academic leftism (lucky you) "intersectionality" means that you collect a handful of "isms", sexism, racism, classicism (sic), etc., etc., etc. off into increasingly bizarre "oppressions" and you note that almost all individuals may be both "oppressors" or "victims" depending upon how you look at their situation.


To say that this is a trivial observation actually overstates the case. One can expand the oppressions and the isms endlessly and there is no dou7bt that leftists have already plumbed most of what is open to human imagination..."lookism" ???? The problem is that even with this tool there comes a point where there is no longer anything, true or false, to be said about the subject. A bad situation for those who wish to be published in academic journals.


Ah here's the meat of this long essay. I came across the following question on an usually sane anarchist board, "Is the idea of Kyriarchy more revealing and useful than intersectionality"?. Well, the short reply is that it is somewhat difficult to be less than zero, but it still can be achieved. Now, I had an advantage here as an ex-Catholic in that I remember the old "Kyrie eléison" which meant "Lord have mercy" in the Mass. So I go in search of the originator of this neologism. I'm not disappointed as the originator is one Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza a "feminist Catholic theologian". Work your mind around that little tidbit of information.

Now I have little doubt that Professor Fiorenza has a vast academic knowledge of the subject of Biblical studies, and she even hold many opinions that she doesn't dare voice for fear of the discipline of the Church. I also suspect, though I am not certain of this, that she is literate in ancient Greek. Since that may be the case let's get really pedantic here. The word from which this all derives is the Greek "Kyrios" for Lord. In the Catholic mass "Kyrie" is the 'vocative case' use in speaking to an individual, in this case the Lord. Now to make an English word out of this Greek and to mean it to say "rule of the Lord" you would have to use "kyrionarchy"(the possessive case). Not as snappy as the using the old Catholic vocative case for sure.


However that may be one can forgive Professor Fiorenza for using a word form that she was convinced nobody would check up on. But let's investigate the meaning of her neologism. "Kyriarchy" means, if you excuse the grammar of its originator" "Lord Rule" ie "Rule of the Lord". Fascinating isn't it that the definition of "Lord" already assumes the function of "ruling". What else do "Lords" do pray tell ? So what does 'Kyriearchy' mean ? It means "rule by those who rule". Only in the hothouse of academic leftism where connection to reality has long since been abandoned could this be said to be an "advance" on anything.

Anyways I'm sure everybody has been bored to death now, but that's as I see it.

LEFTIST LANGUAGE:

BAD WORDS:

The last post put me in mind of a matter that I have been pondering for decades ie the misuse of language by "the left". God knows there are dozens upon dozens of examples where the use of a term works to prevent thought rather than expedite it, and the "left" is hardly the only sinner in this regard. Still, being 'of the left', however much I may be a protestant against a lot of its rhetoric, I choose the following as examples, both old and new. So, starting from the last post, here are a few examples and criticism of them. I have no doubt that readers could contribute others.

1)Bourgeois (British term 'Middle Class'):

Beginning as a French term for 'town dwellers' this is perhaps the granddaddy of all abused leftist terms. While it has an actual meaning in leftist economics/sociology (despite the great confusion about what the prefix "petit" means) as the "owners of the means of production" it is only very rarely used in that way today (or for many decades previously). It would actually be very hard to use this term accurately in any modern economy where a large segment of the economy is directed through the state and another very large segment is "owned", if not controlled, via dispersed stock ownership such that the "working class" are the nominal owners of same.

Accuracy, however, is a very minor point when the real point is to insult. Historically the term has been used by socialists to insult their socialist opponents. It has also been used, very unfortunately, to refer to the opinions of those who disagree with the particular flavour of socialism that the insulter favours. This would be harmless is it were merely a matter of sectarian politics, but it unfortunately usually generalizes into an arrogant condemnation of the majority who disagree with the socialists. In the present day this arrogance has been raised to an art form by various 'primitivist' and 'post leftist' perversions of anarchism in the USA. They have elaborated this insult term into essays that take up thousands of words of nonsense.

2)Working Class: After 4 decades of experience I have come to know that people who use this term have nothing but the best intentions. God knows I have used it myself at times and, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, will undoubtedly use it again. The intent is good, but the effect is not necessarily as good. Marx had his own private definition of something called "the proletariat" which someone who, like myself, is willing to subject themselves to reading his too often quoted but rarely read 3 Volumes of 'Capital' can discover. To say the least it is not what leftists today refer to as the "working class" , or even what Marxists usually referred to in their bids for power. Marx was very clear about what the "proletariat" was ie a class of people who sold their labour (and were thereby exploited by selling their labour for less than its actual value) to produce a "commodity" that would be sold on a 'close to free' market where the cost of the commodity would approximate the labour cost of its production. Such "free markets" were very much an ideological construct of the situation where Marx wrote Capital. Today the whole idea is quite absurd as such "commodities" are very much a tiny minority of the goods and services of any developed economy. State services are not sold. The prices of other goods are "set" by mechanisms that have nothing whatsoever to do with the labour involved in their production.

All that is merely a criticism of Marxism. The more important point is that there is not a "working class" but rather many working classes. People who work are very much divided by a number of different factors such as the source of their income (state versus private), the "necessity" of their work (luxuries such as social work and jewelry versus food production), the degree with which they exercise "authority" in their work, the status of their work, the remuneration of their work, etc.,etc.,etc.. It makes no sense, no matter how ideologically satisfying or "apparently" useful politically to pretend that there is one working class. The use of the term "might" be justified in terms of propaganda. Myself, I prefer to use terms such as "workers" or "ordinary people" that leave such sociological questions in abeyance.

3)INTERSECTIONALITY

This is a new one that I have only seen popping up in the last few years in anarchist and general leftist propaganda. It is very much the creation of an "academic name" for something that is simple common sense ie that there are "many" different ways in which an individual exists in the world. At its best- though it rarely is at its best because it is an academic creation-this would lead to a certain scepticism about the claims of liberation movements a to z because life is always more complicated than ideologues can describe. At its worst it's one more way for leftist academics to not just build their careers but also to paralyze the movements that they claim to support via endless personal disputes. The examples are endless. At its worst it is also one more way whereby "politics" is reduced to "psychology", once more I would submit a particularly American vice. At its best it is merely a statement of the obvious. A common sense observation that we all have as long as we are not in "ideological church". I especially object to the use of this buzzword in public statements that are presumably meant for the average person.

4)DIALECTICS

This is an "old one" and something that is mercifully no longer in fashion, at least from what I read from the effusion of academic bullshit today. They have their own nonsense that makes them appear profound and hides their ignorance. The original meaning of "dia" "lectos" in Greek philosophy was actually very simple. The conversation between two people whereby one took the premises of the other as given and "questioned" the consequences until one arrived at either a logical contradiction or an absurdity was actually a "method". The pretensions of the heirs of Germanic philosophy that they have a "method" of acquiring truth are absurd. Unless, of course, you think that taking a given aspect of a situation as its "essence", abstracting that and doing "logical calculations" on these terms with no reference to reality. Neither the right wing justification of fascism nor the traditional Leninist "dialectical materialism" had any relation to reality beyond the coincidental.

With the end of Stalinist hegemony there were many attempts to "recast" dialectics as some sort of superior way of thinking that went beyond ordinary logic and empiricism. All of those were tainted by the will to power of their exponents, and, at best, they put common sense observations such as "things change" or "things should be looked at in their history" into arrogant academic language. At their worst they shaded into the academic cult of post modernism. But that is another and disgusting subject.

POPULAR CULTURE:
THE MICHAEL JACKSON DEATH CIRCUS:
Sigh!!!!!! I guess it's inevitable. Everyone has to have their two cents worth about the death of Michael Jackson, and Molly has joined the crowd. To be honest I never though much about Michael Jackson one way or the other before his death. He was lumped into the category of "celebrities whose names I was unfortunately unable to forget". I've spent years working towards the goal of being unable to recognize the name of any celebrity, music, sports, film, TV, etc.. I do this because I really and truly don't like having my thoughts manipulated. The thing about celebrity is that all so-called "facts" about them are absolutely unverifiable. This applies equally to "good Prole-feed" as it does "bad Prole-feed". Jackson may or may not have been a "great artist", but there are no objective criteria to judge this. He may or may not have been a child-molester. Probably, even though he has never been convicted. Not having been on a jury where all the facts were presented I, however, have no basis for a firm opinion one way or the other.




What I do have a firm opinion on is the obvious- that, like all objects of the "celebrity industry", Jackson was an occasion for making profit by an industry where the concept of "truth" is even more degraded than it is in the aphasic ramblings of post-modern "scholars". I often like to say of any celebrity that, "they don't exist", and in one way this is very true. Like the others the Michael Jackson that some (now a great number) worshipped and the Michael Jackson that some (temporarily a small number) hated never existed in the same sense as you and I and the others we meet in real life "exist". Whatever highly developed primate who was given the identity tag in the verbal system of the pair of mammals whose DNA united to form his fetus bears only a chance relationship to the 'Michael Jackson' that was produced for entertainment by the media.




I'm actually quite slack jawed in amazement about the circus that has been going on about his death, and the points of interest are many and various. The actual quantity of interest that I have, however, is quite limited. I hope to be able to forget all the hype, both good and bad. before I die. I have, however, opened up a poll over at our sister site Molly's Polls so that you can have your say about the matter. I guess that I'll have to place a post there so there is room for any ranters. A painful process actually as, comparing things, I definitely think more about the squirrels in my backyard and all their ramifications than I do about Michael Jackson. By a factor of about 100,000 to one actually. Not a day goes by that I don't think of them. They exist for sure. Whatever may be the primate designated by the term 'Michael Jackson', well, I'm not too sure.




See Molly's Polls for the question, "What Do You Think of the Michael Jackson Death Circus ?'.
WWWWWWWWWWW
By the way, for those of you with a taste for the weird, as I have, check out the "evolution of Michael jackson's face at http://www,uglychart.com/archives/2005/03/a_history_of_mi .

ANARCHIST THEORY:

INTELLECTUAL IMPOSTURES:

The following article is taken from the Africa Project for a Participatory Society website, though it was published elsewhere before. The author is the famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has numerous books, articles, DVDs, etc. to his credit and independently coined the term "meme". He is presently very much in the news due to his anti-religious book, 'The God Delusion'. While not specifically "anarchist" Dawkins is very much a left-winger, which has earned him no end of attacks. The following is quite pertinent for anarchism as there are numerous instances where so-called anarchists (usually of the whackier variety) deliberately using obscure meaningless language that covers up their basic ignorance. A great corrective for such tendencies. If you want to learn more about Dawkins visit his website above or see the Wikipedia article on him.

....................................

Intellectual Impostures

By Richard Dawkins

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:

"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously".

This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered". Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze, had a similar talent for writing:

"In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast."

This calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose): Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought...

Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says:

"I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose."

This is from Medawar's 1968 lecture on "Science and Literature", reprinted in Pluto's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982). Since Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has raised its voice.

Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described by the celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the greatest of the great... Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian." Sokal and Bricmont, however, think otherwise: "These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences -- sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous -- and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge."

But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans?

Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively, New York University and the University of Louvain in Belgium. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal. On Jacques Lacan, for example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments throughout US and British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound understanding of mathematics:

"... although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish. "

They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan:

"Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely: "

You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous. It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a further piece of reasoning that is entirely typical of the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ

"... is equivalent to the of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1)."

We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about.

The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:

"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."

You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem: the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve. In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion of relativity with relativism, Jean-François Lyotard's 'post-modern science', and the widespread and predictable misuses of Gödel's Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, "though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view":

"Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes."

I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's text "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense". They again call attention to "the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology -- inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning". Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticized here and lionized throughout America:

In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.

But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, and no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when someone punctures the established bag of wind.

As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the US journal Social Text a paper called "Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity". From start to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), an important book that deserves to become as well known in Britain as it is in the United States. Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it. In the words of the journalist Gary Kamiya:

Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for 'advanced' thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords ('hermeneutics,' 'transgressive,' 'Lacanian,' 'hegemony', to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted... Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the 'real world'), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy)... And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit -- a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city.

Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear, attacking the 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool notions as the existence of the real world. They didn't know that Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly have detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for literature.

Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic establishment. Ross has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like,

"I am glad to be rid of English departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature";

and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words:

"This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them."

He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are not harmless eccentrics at third-rate state colleges. Many of them have tenured professorships at some of the best universities in the United States. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees, wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say, anthropology. I know -- because many of them have told me -- that there are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but who are intimidated into silence. To them, Sokal will appear as a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant, that his own left-wing credentials are impeccable.

In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal notes that, in addition to numerous half-truths, falsehoods and non sequiturs, his original article contained some "syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever". He regrets that there were not more of these: "I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack." If he were writing his parody today, he would surely be helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne, Australia: the Postmodernism Generator.Every time you visit it, at http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern , it will spontaneously generate for you, using faultless grammatical principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before seen.

I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6,000-word article called "Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context" by "David I. L.Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge University" (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge that saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here is a typical passage from this impressively erudite work:

" If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious."

Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate.

As for the harder task of reclaiming US literary departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We must hope that it will be followed.
___________________

Richard Dawkins is at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PW, UK.

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POLITICAL DOCETISM:

Molly is presently reading 'The Politics of Jesus' by Obery M. Hendricks. This book is a "left Christian" piece of apologetics for considering the message of the Bible as one of social justice rather than individual morality. Reverend Hendricks is a professor of Biblical studies at the New York Theological Seminary and an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The argument of the book is extensive, and Molly hardly has the space to present all of it here- besides, I'm not finished reading it. Some parts of it are convincing. Others are less so.

What Molly wants to bring to light here is the use that Obery makes of the heresy of 'Docetism'. This was a heresy held by most gnostics and later the Manicheans that the actual physical body of Christ was an 'illusion', that Jesus only "seemed" human, and that, especially, his crucifixion and death were an illusion. At its extreme end this shades into the Platonic "cave metaphor" that all of existence is illusion. A western version of Maya if you will. (Molly aside; almost all the philosophical thoughts that can be thought occur in all traditions. Those that claim some "uniqueness" for a given philosophical or religious tradition reveal far more about their own desires for prestige than they do about the reality of such traditions) The gnostics were particularly elitist about this whole matter, following in the footsteps of Plato's elitism. The parting of the veil of the illusion was to be accomplished via the "hidden knowledge" that the gnostics were presumably privy to. This whole scam is more than slightly familiar as it echoes in endless variations down through human history. For those who are interested see the Wikipedia article on Docetism and also the more extensive Catholic Encyclopedia article on same. Molly has little stomach for the controversies of Christology here and now. The sword of Constantine decided these long ago, and medieval crusades against Albigensians and Burgomars merely wrote finis to the epilogue. Modern disputes about these matters are merely dim echoes of what could have been. As an aside the Qur'an teaches the same dogma, that the crucifixion of Jesus was an illusion.

The important part here is that Hendricks makes the point that right wing interpretations of the New Testament assume a sort of "political Docetism" that even if the interpreters hold orthodox Christian views they still try and make an unrealistic separation between the Christ of their choosing, concerned only with personal morality, and the real Jesus as a human being embodied in a real social, political and economic context as a 1st century Jew in a country colonized by the Roman Empire and viciously exploited by both the conquerors and their quislings ie the priestly aristocracy of Judea. Hendricks takes off from this in situating Jesus and his works and sayings in a much more radical interpretation that brings out the egalitarian and "justice seeking" aspect of the Christian message. As I said I am more convinced by some of Hendricks' arguments than I am by others, and I am particularly disappointed by the book's ignoring of its predecessors in both the Catholic left and the Protestant Social Gospel.

Still I find the use that Hendricks makes of the term 'Docetism' to be very much a good tool for looking at a lot of political thought. On the right the neo-cons and the shrinking Christian right hold to Docetist heresies. They believe that the real national and corporate interests that lead to wars and conflicts within societies are merely "illusion" and that it is some metaphorical "clash of civilizations" or "good versus evil" that drives history. They refuse to look at reality. They ignore real economic threats to families in favour of an illusionary ideological spook of some left wing conspiracy against "family values". Their politics is a politics of illusion.

Not that the "left" cannot be equally deluded. Through most of the 19th and 20th century the radical left was defined by Marxist illusions of great dialectical forces struggling for some "synthesis" that was presumed to be inevitable even if it was falsified by Marx's literary executor, Bernstein, over 100 years ago. The pseudo-scientific pretensions of Marxism, the bastard child of the Hegelian academy, were exposed long ago, but the lure of ignoring reality for a world of comforting abstractions was far too great. According to Marx and orthodox Marxism real history was an "illusion" that was exposed by the "hidden knowledge of dialectics" to be merely form in the working out of world history ala a scheme more desired than proved.

The spectre of Docetism infects the anarchist opposition as well. One merely has to consult the convoluted oracles of "primitivism" and "post leftism" to see it at work. Real struggles of real people are read, often via a very obvious covering of half digested convoluted rhetoric and pseudo-intellectual "analysis" that attempts to give an illusion of profundity to what is very crude in its reality, as "signs" of some great and overwhelming "collapse of civilization" or whatever. Contrary "signs" ie the full spectrum of reality are more than conveniently ignored. To each their own narrow, claustrophobic, world.

The ultimate, of course, is the academic fad of "post-modernism", a meme that infects fascists, Marxists, liberals and anarchists alike without apparent predilection for any ideological body. Only the American style of conservative seems to be immune, protected by an exoskeleton of ignorance, as intellectual conservatives who are aware of their roots,especially the fascist roots, are just as susceptible to this fad as the most naive 3rd year Marxist poly-sci student. This is the ultimate in Docetism as it not only says that "reality" is illusion, but that all talk about reality is similarly illusionary and that one can read in whatever meaning one wants to into the "discourse" of a "text". At its basis this depends on a Stalinist interpretation of "correctness" ie whatever one can force by political intrigue (or in Uncle Joe's interpretation by having more tanks).

Of course "movements" built on the illusion that all is illusion don't last very long for obvious reasons unless they tie themselves to a class system that grants the possessors of the "hidden knowledge" real and actual power to kill in reality(Tibetan Buddhism ?). Should the traditional left, Marxist or otherwise, continue to wallow in nonsense it will be replaced by a new left, perhaps based on the realism of Evangelical leftists such as Hendricks who are much closer to reality. To put it bluntly, the whole idea of traditional Christian theology with its trinitarianism and other contradictory beliefs is less of an assault on reason than many things held "sacred" by the left. There are indeed many 'Protestants' on the left who try and drag it back to reality. Molly is one of them. May we escape the inquisition of a traditional left in power.