For those of you unfamiliar with the topic of this post, here's your required reading:
The Wikipedia page for the "Sokal Affair"
A very funny and widely-shared screenshot of a 4chan post reads,
EXPLAIN DELEUZE TO ME RIGHT NOW OR I'LL LITERALLY FUCKING KILL YOu!
I will now describe this screenshot for visually impaired readers. The OP has posted a screenshot of a cover of "Difference and Repetition" by Gilles Deleuze. The post is simply titled, "Was it autism?" In the post's thread, three commentors offer their responses to the question asked in the title. The first simply says, "non". The second one says, "charlatanism". The third one says,
EXPLAIN DELEUZE TO ME OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU! DON'T DUMB IT DOWN INTO SOME VAGUE SHIT! EXPLAIN DELEUZE TO ME RIGHT NOW OR I'LL LITERALLY FUCKING KILL YOu! WHAT THE FUCK IS A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? WHAT THE FUCK ARE RHIZOMES? DON'T DUMB IT DOWN OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU
Let's try to unpack what the third commentor means by what they said.
First: the capitalized letters, the hyperbolic death threats, and the word choice all suggest that this commentor is extremely, viscerally frustrated about something. They are very frustrated that they don't already understand Deleuze.
Specifically, they say, "Don't dumb it down into some vague shit". This suggests a particular pattern of dialogue to which their frustration is directed: this is not their first time asking someone to clarify Deleuze's work. They have searched far and wide for something that explains Deleuze in a comprehensible, accessible manner, but all they have found is "vague shit" that "dumbs it down".
Imagine yourself in an alternate world where "common knowledge" does not include a solid understanding of why it rains. Now imagine that information about the actual functioning of the water cycle is all written in barely-coherent jargon that is only accessible to graduate-level academic meteorologists who have native-level proficiency in French. Now imagine that, when you try to find explanations of the water cycle given in terms that are easy enough to understand, it's all like, "So when clouds form in the sky, it's like when you have a bottle of ice water and the outside of it gets wet. Or it's like when you open the dishwasher and your glasses fog up." And anything deeper than that is exclusively written in French meteorlogical jargon, and not all of it has an English translation available.
Imagine yourself in this world as a person who doesn't speak French and doesn't know enough book learning for grad school. Would you not feel a sense of frustration in your quest to understand something that seems pretty important? Wouldn't you be posting,
EXPLAIN RAIN TO ME RIGHT NOW OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOu! DON'T DUMB IT DOWN INTO SOME VAGUE SHIT! WHAT THE FUCK IS "L'ÉVAPORATION"? WHAT THE FUCK ARE "NUCLEATION POINTS"? DON'T DUMB IT DOWN OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU
The third commentor wants to understand Deleuze. They *really* want to understand Deleuze. They are *fed up* with not understanding Deleuze. Part of them wishes they could *force* a Deleuze understander to enlighten them. A "body without organs" is what *you'll* be if you don't give them a key insight that you *must have* to reduce Deleuze to an intelligible interpretation.
Why does the third commentor want to understand Deleuze so bad?
Here is Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher frequently associated with postmodernism. He coined the term "deconstruction" to describe his methodology of textual analysis.
Jacques Derrida, looking cool as hell
Here is Rudolf Carnap, an Austrian philosopher who was part of the Vienna Circle. He was foundationally influential in the philosophy of "logical positivism".
Rudolf Carnap, looking like he's about to call you a "young man"
Sometimes, it feels like philosophy is just a whole bunch of bullshit, doesn't it? Like, okay, I'll read Marx, because Marxism is a philosophy that can be applied practically. He doesn't just tell me why capitalism is bad - he tells me how capitalism works, why it is not indefinitely sustainable, and how we might go about trying to build socialism. That's great. It connects to my sense of metaphysical malaise via Marx's critique of alienation, but it also connects to very concrete, practical problems, like how you can't get a decent meal for less than an hour and a half's wages these days, even if it's fast food.
So what does this have to do with philosophy seeming like a bunch of bullshit sometimes? Well, a lot of philosophy addresses the "metaphysical malaise" side of things while leaving unexamined the problem of the twenty-dollar burger meal. Why should I read Kant, for instance? Can I eat the *Critique of Pure Reason*?
If you enter philosophy with this attitude in mind, as I did many years ago, it feels emotionally satisfying to embrace logical positivism. The philosophy of logical positivism holds that the only meaningful statements are those which boil down to either empirical claims about reality (i.e. observations of the physical world) or tautologies that are undeniably and necessarily true (i.e. mathematics). Wielding the philosophy of logical positivism, one feels like Indiana Jones slashing his way through a jungle of meaningless pseudointellectual gibberish with a machete. Abstractions? Signs? Myths? Slash, slash, slash. All of metaphysics can thus be separated into two bins: one labelled "pure mathematics", the other "useless trash that I don't have to read".
Under conditions of scarcity, particular under conditions where *time* and *attention* are scarce, this grants a feeling of power: a feeling of having "mastered" philosophy. Textually, Indiana Jones is simultaneously an academic scholar and a hypermasculine 1980's action hero. He isn't stupid -- in fact, in-universe, he has a postgraduate degree in archaeology. But does he have the time to read about metaphysics, psychoanalysis, or critical cultural theory? Surely not, right? He's too busy punching Nazis and searching for the Ark of the Covenant, which, in the films, is a physical object that he, informed by his study of archaeology, successfully locates.
But why is there a jungle of academic jargon to slash through in the first place? The logical positivist, wielding the criterion of verification as a flaming sword with which to annihilate meaningless philosophy, masters a jungle of books -- they are intentionally refusing to engage with a large portion of the texts that get shelved in the "philosophy" section. Entire authors can be written off, cast aside for writing a bunch of flowery language with no reference to claims that can be approached with empirical inquiry. Because these authors are only encountered via their books, and not in the flesh, they have nothing to say back to the logical positivist's defiant refutation. Much like how the vines in the jungle simply grow of their own accord, passive and mute against Indiana's machete.
This brings us back to the topic of this post: Alan D. Sokal's famous shitpost, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".
In the first page of Alan Sokal's paper where he ridicules contemporary French critical theorists, he writes,
It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.
Later, in a retrospective, he says the following about his paper:
Social Text's acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory -- meaning postmodernist literary theory -- carried to its logical extreme. No wonder they didn't bother to consult a physicist. If all is discourse and ``text,'' then knowledge of the real world is superfluous; even physics becomes just another branch of Cultural Studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and ``language games,'' then internal logical consistency is superfluous too: a patina of theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors and puns substitute for evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely modest example of this well-established genre. [...] I say this not in glee but in sadness. After all, I'm a leftist too (under the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua). On nearly all practical political issues -- including many concerning science and technology -- I'm on the same side as the Social Texteditors. But I'm a leftist (and feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it. Why should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual high ground?
On the other side of the ocean, Le Monde asked Jacques Derrida to comment on Sokal's book "Fashionable Nonsense", a sincere articulation of Sokal's objections to "Theory". He said,
Ma réponse est : tout ce la est triste, vous ne trouvez pas ? Pour le pauvre Sokal,
d’abord. Son nom reste attaché à une supercherie (" the Sokal’s hoax ", " le canular
de Sokal ", comme on dit aux Etats-Unis) et non à des travaux scientifiques. Triste
aussi car la chance d’un réflexion sérieuse paraît gâchée, du moins dans un espace
largement public qui mérite mieux.
[...]
Je suis toujours économe et prudent dans l’usage de la référence scientifique, et
j’ai plus d’une fois traité de ce problème. Explicitement. Les lieux nombreux où je
parle en effet, et précisément, de l’indécidable, par exemple, voire du théorème de
Gödel, n’ont été ni localisés ni visités par les censeurs. Tout laisse à penser qu’ils
n’ont pas lu ce qu’il eût fallu lire pour prendre la mesure des ces difficultés. Ils
ne l’ont sans doute pas pu. En tout cas, ils ne l’ont pas fait.
In English (my translation):
My response is: don't you find all this sad? For poor Sokal, first of all.
His name is now attached to a prank ("Sokal's Hoax", "the Sokal Affair", as they say
in the United States) and not to scientific works. Also sad that the chance for a
serious reflection seems to have been tossed out, at least in the sphere of a
wider public that deserves better.
[...]
I am always sparing and prudent with the usage of scientific references, and more
than once I have dealt with this problem. Explicitly. The numerous places where I
speak generally, and precisely, about the Undecidable for example, even about
Gödel's theorem, have not been located or visited by the censors. It all leaves
one to think that they have not read what they should have to grasp the measure
of these difficulties. They, undoubtedly, were not able to. In any case, they didn't.
We will unpack this dialogue, and its implications for the real question of where the real boundary between social reality and asocial materiality lies, in a followup to this post.