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Postmodernism and cultural theory

Sokal and Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures
Entitled Intellectual Impostures, this book made no distinction
between postmodernism and post-structuralism, which were
even defined so as to include structuralism (Sokal & Bricmont,
1998, pp. 11–12). It contained only a very brief discussion of
Lyotard, whole chapters on Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard,
Deleuze and Guattari, but nothing substantial on Lévi-Strauss or
Barthes, Foucault or Derrida. Sokal and Bricmont’s main target
was the supposedly widespread notion among English-speaking
devotees of French theory that ‘modern science is nothing more
than a “myth”, a “narration” or a “social construction”, among
many others’ (p. x). Their argument was not intended as a gen-
eralised polemic either against the humanities or against political
radicalism. Indeed, they either acknowledged assistance from or
quoted with approval such prominent humanities radicals as
Bourdieu, Eagleton and Noam Chomsky, the anarchist Professor
of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (pp.
xiii, 187, 189). Rather, their polemic took as its object something
much more specific: ‘intellectual confusion’ (p. xii).
It is difficult to dispute these natural scientists’ right to defend
their disciplines against what they saw as a misappropriation
of key terms and concepts. So, for example, they judged
Baudrillard’s use of chaos theory a ‘gradual crescendo of
nonsense... high density scientific and pseudo-scientific term-
inology...in sentences that are . . . devoid of meaning’
(pp. 141–2). And they found Deleuze guilty, in turn, of deploy-
ing valid technical terms in the service of an argument ‘devoid
of both logic and sense’ (p. 156). The nonsense is not always so
obviously nonsensical, however; sometimes it is simply non-
scientific. So, for example, when they take Irigaray to task for her
2
view that Einstein’s E = Mc is masculinist for ‘having privileged
what goes the fastest’, they miss the point that the equation might
indeed be masculinist, even if it is ‘experimentally verified’
(p. 100): the social genealogy of a proposition has no logical
bearing on its truth value. Moreover, their later objection that to
‘link rationality and objectivity to the male, and emotion and
subjectivity to the female, is to repeat the most blatant sexist
stereotypes’ (p. 112) is obviously political, rather than scientific,

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