I N T E L L E C T U A L   I M P O S T U R E S

Well, it seems the French are squawking like wet hens again.

This time, they're objecting to a book written by Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, and Belgian theoretical physicist Jean Bricmont. The book, titled Intellectual Impostures, goes after the trendy Left Bank French intelligensia, some of whose current favorite means of distinguishing themselves is by applying arcane scientific and technical terminology to mundane issues.

Reuters reporter Sara Henley notes that students on both sides of the Atlantic are expected these days to absorb the notions of persons such as Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. This would be a little easier, one suspects, if these paragons of brilliance didn't casually toss around such phrases as "dromospheric space," "the parabolic curve of history," and the "definitively euclidian war."

"Our goal is ... to say that the emperor has no clothes," write Sokal and Bricmont in their book. It targets the incoherence of supposedly learned people who, like 17th-century charlatans, try to dazzle their readers into submission by tossing around hefty terminology borrowed willy-nilly from quantum physics and other hard science milieux. Sokal, in an interview with the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, says he hopes his book, by "crying wolf," will improve education systems everywhere.

The French, meanwhile, feeling their mighty intellectual traditions are being scorned, reply full of indignant ire. "Who benefits from the rumor of deception, the insinuation of incompetence, the suspicion thrown on that generation of thinkers? To what new wave will it contribute?" fumes Roger-Pol Droit in the Paris daily Le Monde.

After reading examples of the work of these "thinkers" as found in Sokal and Bricmont's book, you may find yourself asking, "Who benefits from this unintelligible pseudoscientific gibberish?"

For example, we have Jacques Lacan, whom reporter Henley says is described as one of the most influential psychoanalysts of this century, praised by experts cited in the book for his "crystalline" clarity and for beefing up the territory laid out by Sigmund Freud with the scientific concepts it needed. "It is thus," Sokal and Bricmont quote Lacan, "that the erect (male) organ comes to symbolize the place of climax, not in and of itself, nor as an image, but insofar as it is the missing part of the desired image: that is why it is equatable with the square root of minus one of the highest significance produced, of the climax which it restores by the coefficient of its utterance in the function of a lack of signifier: (-1)."

Got that?

Moving on, they reprint an early contribution from Julia Kristeva, who posits a novel definition of what she calls "poetic language:" "Poetic language (which we will henceforth designate by the letters 'pl') contains the code of linear logic," she asserts. "Further, we can find in it all the combinatory figures that algebra has formalized. ... This stipulates that there is a univocal correspondence ... which associates all of the entities which are not empty of the theory (of the system) with one of its elements."

An equation follows. As Sokal and Bricmont comment, "Her sentences have more sense than those of Lacan, but she surpasses even him when it comes to the superficiality of her erudition."

A reviewer in Le Monde praises sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard for his sense of humor and precision. Waxing eloquent over the U.S.-led attack on Iraq in early 1991, he too finds enlightenment in mathematics. "It is the sign that the space of the event has become multiply refractable hyperspace, that the space of war has become definitively non-euclidian."

Sokal and Bricmont note instead that Euclid's geometry was based on ordinary experience. "The goal is doubtless to make an impression and above all to intimidate the non-scientific reader," they write in the introduction to Intellectual Impostures.

"Dromospheric space" is the brainchild of Paul Virilio: "Space-speed, it is physically described by what we call the 'logistic equation,' the result of the product of mass moved by the speed of its displacement (M x S)." Sokal and Bricmont deal with this one directly: "'Dromospheric space' is a Virilian invention."

Sokal, it turns out, has navigated these shoals before. Last year he succeeded in getting a parody of this kind of academia published by a respected U.S. magazine, Social Texts, without anyone so much as blinking. Its title was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which he and Bricmont now reveal means absolutely nothing. The whole article was conceived and executed as a hoax, Sokal says, stringing together gossamer threads of nonsense in a display of convincing--but utterly fake--erudition.

The French aren't alone in this sort of thing, of course. But because they figure predominantly in Sokal and Bricmont's book, they're doing most of the griping.

With any luck, the griping will soon come from the babblers infesting the U.S. universities, as the authors turn their attention to the purveyors of elegant emptiness in the Americas.

They'll have plenty to work with.

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