Living in a Mythopoeia: Part II

Anthropologist Bruno Latour’s article “Why Has Critique Run Out Of Steam?” (originally published in Critical Inquiry, 2004), is the focus of this episode, and its background is the “Science Wars” which began when scientists criticized the work of certain “Postmodernist” philosophers. Prominent examples of such philosophers include Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), and Jean François Lyotard (1924-1988). Significant context is provided in the Episode itself, but one example is mentioned which is documented more fully here. In 1985, French feminist philosopher Luce Irigary (born 1930) published Speculum of the Other Woman, which commented on scientific research in a way some scientists found objectionable. Alan Sokal (American physicist, born 1955) and Jean Bricmont (Belgian physicist, born 1952), in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science(English version 1998; published in French in 1997), quoted the following comment on physics from Chapter 6, “The Mechanics of Fluids,” in this book:

Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... These idealizations are reinscribed in mathematics... In the same way that women are erased within masculinist theories and language… so fluids have been erased from science.

A number of scientists argued that passages like this placed empirical sciences like physics on the same epistemological level as Freudian psychological speculations, thus demonstrating a failed understanding of the scientific method. Biologist Richard Dawkins read Irigaray’s passage in a talk “On Postmodernism Invading Science,” (2013) adopted from “Postmodernism Disrobed: A Review of FashionableNonsense, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont” (first published in Nature, 1998). Although we do not actually discuss the famous “Sokal Hoax,” it was arguably the central event in the “Science Wars,” and occurred when Alan Sokal, perhaps the most important voice on the “Science” side of the “Science Wars,” published a hoax paper (see entries listed under Alan Sokal in the show notes). 

Near the end of the podcast, the tragic case of French instructor and scholar Margaret Mary Vojtko is mentioned. See Lindsay Ellis’s “An Adjunct’s Death Becomes a Rallying Cry for Many in Academe” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2013).