Alan Sokal's "Transgression"
Aronowitz, Stanley
Explaining his now famous parody in Social Text's "Science Wars" issue, Alan Sokal writes in Dissent ("Afterword," Fall 1996): But why did I do it? I confess I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who...
...If so, he has either misread the burden of its seventeen-year history or was capricious in his choice or has perpetuated the saddest hoax of all: on himself...
...Nor can we fully grasp the ubiquity of artificial intelligence apart from its uses in the computerized workplace or the devolution of molecular biology into a commercially configured technoscience...
...When Fredric Jameson, John Brenkman, and I started the journal we gave it the subtitle "Theory, Culture, Ideology...
...For the fact is that Social Text, of which I am a founder and in whose editorial collective I served until 1996, has never been in the deconstructionist camp...
...But the reading is theory-laden...
...In the history of science it was invoked by scientists as a defense against the attacks of the Church and the state to which it was allied in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and became relevant again during the era of Nazi science and of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union...
...And, reasonably, logically, this must include the most accepted propositions...
...If this is so, and science reflects on social and cultural influences, on its visions, revisions, and its practices, and perhaps more to the point, on its commitments, then there is hope for a liberatory science...
...Racial science reappears when society experiences a sense of economic and social crisis and needs scapegoats to explain its panic...
...If all knowledge, including natural science, is mediated by the social and cultural context within which it has developed, then its truths are inevitably relational to the means at hand for knowing...
...He has an abiding faith that through the rigorous application of scientific method nature will yield its unmediated truth...
...indeed, some molecular biologists have declared its relevance to "perfecting" our species...
...what the scientific communities believe to be the case today may be revised, even refuted, tomorrow...
...The point is to show science as a social process, to bring it down to earth, to remove the halo from its head...
...The use of the term "ideology" in our subtitle revealed our critical intent...
...Sokal cites Andrew Ross and Sandra Harding as representative deconstructionists...
...What determines what it actually studies...
...Newton made true discoveries but, needless to say, they were overturned by "better" truths—relativity and quantum mechanics...
...If interpretation and consequences of discovery are integral to the meaning of scientific knowledge, it takes more than the conventional procedure of repeatable experiments or calculations to "prove" that molecular biology is not a technoscience when most of its practitioners have eagerly sought alliances with drug companies and other commercial interests...
...So: are the uses made of such knowledge part of science...
...Which means pure description based on observation is not possible...
...At a recent forum on the so-called Sokal/ Social TextAffair, Sokal readily agreed that facts must be interpreted, but maintained that proper scientific method filters out social and cultural influences in the process of discovery...
...Physics, like any other human activity, is subject to these influences...
...I would conjecture that this underlying belief informs the widely held judgment that what Murray and Herrnstein have asserted is bad science as much as the counterfactuals that may be offered in evidence...
...Has not science increasingly directed its energies in biology as well as physics to technical applications...
...In these and other cases ethnographic and historical studies proceed from Vico 's idea that "making is knowing...
...They put into question one of the underlying precepts of modern science: seeing is believing...
...Latour and Woolgar and Sharon Traweek are among those who have inWINTER • 1997 • 109 Arguments vestigated everyday life in the laboratory to figure out how science is produced...
...There is much to note in this "confession...
...Our objective was to interrogate Marxists' habitual separation of political economy and culture and to make a contribution to their articulation, even reunification...
...otherwise we might agree with those who have proclaimed the "end" of science...
...I confess I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class...
...We were appalled by the orthodox Marxist claim that culture had nothing to do with burning issues of economic justice and were equally opposed to a "culturalist" deconstruction of reality in which all that mattered was language...
...However, I hold that an account of science that ascribes to it what Harding calls a "political agenda" is necessary but not sufficient to understand its tendencies...
...What did science not study because of its funding sources...
...Is the emergence of bio-engineering, for instance, not subject to political, even economic interrogation...
...Scientists require other tools such as machines and mathematics, and infer what they see from what they believe...
...nor do its editors or the preponderance of its contributors doubt the existence of a material world...
...What is at issue is whether our knowledge of it can possibly be free of social and cultural presuppositions...
...Neither fits this characterization...
...Their point is not to deny the importance of observation but to show that its role in knowing is not free of presuppositions, that to show the social origins of observation as a foundation for scientific knowledge is at the very least worthy of inquiry...
...This may be the postmodern project, but it is not the project of science studies...
...Did Sokal believe its editors were unabashed deconstructionists who doubted the existence of an external world or that they were anti-science...
...On the one hand its applications fight disease with salutary effects...
...So Sokal never interrogates the nature of evidence or facts, and simply accepts them if they have been adduced within certain algorithms that bear the stamp of "science...
...A few examples: Shapin and Schaeffer examined the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle about the nature of knowledge...
...The point is not to debunk science or to "deconstruct" it in order to show it is merely a fiction...
...Herein lies Sokal's confusion...
...To say that the increasing dependence of science on socially and economically permeated technology, the cultural milieux within which science is done or the political agendas of the fenders invalidates results would be foolish...
...Of course they are false, not only because one can adduce counterfactuals to refute them but because they violate the criterion of humanistic universalism according to which together humans have evolved into a unified species...
...According to this doctrine there are "objective truths," because the earth revolves around the sun, gravity exists, and various other laws of nature are settled matters...
...The trajectory that Sokal presents— quantum mechanics gave rise to solid state physics, which, in turn, is the basis of the quantum electronics—is indisputable...
...what is the influence of the power relations within the scientific community on what counts as legitimate knowledge...
...Harding, in her essay on "Why 'Physics' is a Bad Model for Physics," argues that (a) facts do not speak for themselves but are subject to interpretations marked by the values and beliefs of scientists as well as the political imperatives of ruling WINTER • 1997 • 107 Arguments groups who fund scientific work...
...Social Text was founded, and remains within, the Marxist project, which is profoundly materialist...
...On the other hand, it may be linked to a revival of eugenics...
...And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and my job is to discover some of them...
...To ignore the universal of domination is to fail to understand why, in the face of "definitive" refutations such as Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, they come back to us like a stopped-up toilet and in each generation win new adherents, even among some reputable scientists...
...But it is one thing to insist on the autonomy of science from the state—the sort of battle that leading scientific institutions have not really engaged since some atomic scientists sought to prevent further production of the bomb in the late 1940s—and the flatfooted statement that the "objective truth" of science's postwar discoveries has nothing to do with its alliances with the military...
...for us "practice" was not a mental, but a material category...
...Beyond immediate issues concerning the relation between science and politics lie important metatheoretical questions...
...We followed the contemporary Marxist view that all processes of knowledge, including science, are mediated by their practices...
...and what are the ideological frames within which science is done...
...She cites racial theories using scientific conventions, which have recurred throughout the modern era...
...So the issue is not whether reality exists, but whether knowledge of it is "transparent...
...This marked us decidedly as not "old leftist" because we questioned the naive old materialism that holds that knowledge simply reflects reality...
...If one acknowledges that the domination of nature is intimately linked to the domination of humans, we can better grapple with racial "science" than by simply arguing that theories of racial and gender inferiority—like those of Shockley, Herrnstein, and Murray, or the nineteenthcentury mainstream scientists who held women to be incapable of reason because of their biology—are false...
...It was not deconstructionists but many historians of science who demonstrated that Newton's Principia is rooted in the mechanical worldview that was widely shared by scientists and laypersons in his time...
...In their Laboratory Life, a study of the Salk laboratory in La Jolla, Latour and Woolgar discerned the relevance of conversation, inscriptions, and machine technologies for producing knowledge...
...These have been standard questions in the sociology of science since its emergence as a line of inquiry in the 1930s...
...Bioengineering is a case in point...
...He believes that reason, logic, and truth are entirely unproblematic...
...The questions bear on how we understand how science is done, not whether what it does is a "distortion" of truth...
...Among other questions a materialist science of sciences asks are what is the role of laboratory life where, after all, much of science is still done, in the configuration of scientific knowledge...
...This, it seems to me, is an article of faith akin to a religious belief...
...Why choose a hoax on Social Text to make these points...
...b) there is no such thing as "pure description...
...But 108 • DISSENT Arguments we cannot abstract the steady drumbeat of these pseudosciences from the degree to which the ideal of domination informs all scientific inquiry...
...Cultural change, as much as internal debate among scientists, contributes to science—social and natural— as an evolving activity...
...It was not deconstruction but the Frankfurt School that pointed to a dialectic of the Enlightenment, arguing that the modern cultural ideology of the scientific-technical domination of nature has direct political parallels...
...In fact, in much of microphysics what is called observation is often the effects of machine technologies, a reading of effects...
...Scientific truth cannot be absolute...
...What it means is that scientific knowledge is not immune from broad cultural or narrow political influences and its methods cannot function as a filter...
...c) "we need critical social theory" to account adequately for causality and other scientific ideas...
...Harding acknowledges, as I do, both the liberatory as well as the questionable sides of the history of science...
...For us, ideology was not "false consciousness" but a form of "lived experience...
...How do cultural influences—worldviews, for instance—bear on science...
...What it leaves out is what influence military sponsorship has had on the selection of appropriate scientific objects and on the results of scientific work...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
