First of all, when considering a text by Alan Sokal we must remember two things:
1) It could be complete nonsense.
2) It is automatically biased against particular discourse communities.
Recall the infamous Sokal Affair. What a big hero he was to write a paper full of jargon and get it published. What a spit in the eye of academia. Boy, he really shook things up with that triumph. [Is my sarcasm transparent enough?] What I love best is his explanation for why he did it:
“I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. 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 that my job is to discover some of them.”
The key phrase is: “I…never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class.” You know, Alan, I believe you. But just because you can’t understand it doesn’t make it invalid – that’s your first mistake. Chances are, we could fill the universe with stuff you don’t understand and still have leftovers.
Furthermore, his assertion that D&G misuse scientific concepts because they have a shaky understanding is so arrogant it’s actually offensive. Seriously? After you just got through saying you don’t understand deconstruction, but felt obliged to write about it as if you did? My mother used to say, “That’s like the pot calling the kettle black.”
Sokol is one of those annoying gatekeeper-types. He wants to hold power. He wants to say who can use what kind of discourse approach and under what circumstances those approaches should be deemed acceptable. He sounds like a fascist in “old leftist” disguise.
Last time I checked, there was ONLY shaky ground in science, particularly quantum physics. To my understanding the Higgs boson has yet to be discovered, the LHC is still not operational, and the grand unified theory has yet to be figured out – thus, it would be sorta hard to “be correct” when it comes to science since “correct” literally doesn’t exist.
Think about all those fools running around thinking Newton’s theory of gravity was “correct.” Boy, did they have egg on their face when Einstein came along and proved how he was wrong. Newton thought gravity was a force! A force! Can you believe it! HAHAHAhAhaHA. How incorrect. As Einstein showed us, gravity is in fact the movement of matter along the shortest space in a curved spacetime.
My point here – if I’ve got one – is that “correct” only exists contingently. “Correct” is always becoming. It is never static. For Sokol to conceive of “correct” as a state that can be achieved, he is sorely mistaken. Only a Platonist would affirm something as silly as “absolute truth” or “correctness.” Perhaps Sokol didn’t get the memo about Deleuze overturning Plato just as Einstein overturned Newton.
Schizophrenic Summer ~ 
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