(3089/898) Culture crashers

1800) [W]hat [modern "luddites" such as Kirkpatrick Sale are] really opposed to, I believe, is not technology alone, it is the entire development and history of Western civilization and, one must not forget, its culmination in America. Beginning with the invention of critical reason by the Greeks, continuing with the development of natural science, the experimental method and scientific rationality in the early Renaissance, along with the nearly simultaneous invention and evolution of capitalism and the development of economic rationality during the same epoch, and extending even further into the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant growth of technological rationality from the early eighteenth century onwards, the whole project of Western humanity is one colossal mistake and disaster.

Steven Marcus
"Rage Against the Machine" in
The New Republic (6/10/1996)
[review of Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites
and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for
the Computer Age by Kirkpatrick Sale]

1801) [Alan D. Sokal, physicist and author of a deliberately bogus article published by a postmodern journal] showed [that] the sciences and humanities are not identical enterprises. In both, knowledge is required, premises must be accepted along with rules of argument, and institutions of authority are established. But [...] in science there exists facts and truths that are invariant - unaltered by culture, politics and prejudices [...] That may be one reason why science has such prestige and power.

[...] [W]hat makes science and mathematics powerful is what makes them different from games. Unlike baseball, science reveals something about the world outside of itself and outside the culture that produces it. Kepler's laws may have been the product of their time, but still describe the movement of the planets with great accuracy; Einstein's Special Theory is a valid in South America as it was in Europe; and pi, though it was approximated in ancient Egypt and Greece, is a constant everywhere. It appears in the Bible and it is used extensively in constructing skyscrapers. A variable pi, or a non-extant pi, wouldn't just give us a different culture; it would give us a different physical universe. Mr. Sokal invites anybody who feels the physical laws are mere social constructs to defy them by leaping from his 21st-story window.

These arguments, though, would be of little concern to the practictioners of "science studies," who [...] may be more interested in politics than in the nature of scientific truths. But that doesn't stop them from gazing at science's privileged position with envy and condescension, yearning for its power awhile having to make do with their own game of postmodern baseball.

Edward Rothstein
"When Wry Hits Your Pi
From A Real Sneaky Guy"
New York Times Week in Review (5/26/1996)

[discussing Sokal's article "Transgressing the Boundaries:
Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity", in the journal Social Text
(Spring/Summer 1996), and his description of the hoax in
"A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies"
in the journal Lingua Franca (May 1996)]

[Note: For more on "Sokal's Hoax", see #1906-1913 Weinberg.]

1802) The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view - whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dali, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game - these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia - preside over his life, as over ours.

J.G. Ballard
Introduction (1974) to
Diary of a Genius by
Salvador Dali (auto-biography)
posted by J.B. Fleming on the
J.G. Ballard mailing list (5/30/1996)