#sokal

[polish-spirit]

Kościół pw. Matki Boskiej Pocieszenia w Sokalu (1918-1939).

[eattherude713]

Started playing Syberia. Again. This game series is so underrated. Benoit Sokal did a beautiful job on these. I wish more people knew about it.

[dataanxiety]

How Alan Sokal Won the Battle but Lost the Science Wars

A brilliant parody was the harbinger of 2023's dreadful present..

Sokal had come to bury post-modernism, not to praise it. 

Physicist Alan Sokal’s famous hoax article—a putative attack on the legitimacy of science and even on the notion of “objectivity” itself—appeared in the trendy academic journal Social Text...

27 years later, the academic absurdities lampooned by Sokal are neither beyond the pale nor uncommon.

This November 2021 Commentary Magazine article is paywalled, alas. I CAN link you to Alan Sokal’s original peer-reviewed article! I read it a long time ago, and recall being amused. Your mileage may vary. 

>>pause<<

Ah yes, it is all that I could have hoped for, with wonderful attention to detail. Start with the subheading, in which Sokal provides the perfect academic background: 

The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University. He has lectured widely in Latin America...during the Sandinista government, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua.

I’ve only read a few pages, but there is a nice mix of bona fide history of physics and critical theory. Sokal gets into feminism and non-hegemonic ways of knowing on the first page.

Feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity''... scientific “knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the discourse of the scientific community cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

In Section 1, Hermeneutics of Classical General Relativity, Sokal dives right in to Jacques Derrida's theory of structure and sign in scientific discourse. Brace yourself for the essential nihilism of relativity! 

Derrida's observations relate to the invariance of the Einstein field equation under nonlinear space-time diffeomorphisms (self-mappings of the space-time manifold which are infinitely differentiable but not necessarily analytic)... the infinite-dimensional invariance group erodes the distinction between observer and observed; the pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone.

One more passage, and I’ll leave you to browse the paper at your own pace, IFF you don’t become fatally de-centered like Derrida’s poor observer. 

Lacan points out the key role of differential topology

As Althusser rightly commented, “Lacan finally gives Freud's thinking the scientific concepts that it requires''.

A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease.

More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism60 and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS.

[vintage-ukraine]

Married couple from Sokal, Lviv Region, 1928

[mrdoctorgame]

Benoît Sokal, Creator Of The Syberia Series, Has Died

Benoît Sokal, Creator Of The Syberia Series, Has Died

Photo: Microids Belgian comic book artist Benoît Sokal, the creator of the adventure game series Syberia, died on May 28 after battling a long-term illness. He was 66 years old. The news of his passing was confirmed via a statement from game publisher Microids. Sokal began creating comics in the 1970s. One of his first characters was Inspector Canardo, a depressed anthropomorphic duck detective…

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[messouvenirssurleparquet]

465 - J'ai gardé le coup de griffe d'un canard.

RIP Benoît Sokal (1954-2021)

Inspiré par les Etagères du Capricorne

[gocrazydelusionstudent]

The issue, however, is not simply one of style; it concerns the categories of truth. Art too has its truth, but this is ignored. The new literary scholars extol an artistic approach, which yields neither literature nor rigorous thinking about literature. The practitioners of a literary mode aestheticize reality. Art devolves into theories about art. Anthropologists become literary; historians imaginative. However, this is not art, but its debased form, a pretense to be artistic, as if multiple perspectives and self-referential writing constitute art. The new literary professors abandon truth for art, and art for art appreciation. In their rebellion against scientism they alter the values but accept the terms. Objective is bad; subjective is good. In the name of subversion, they consign art to the reservation called subjectivity, in which it has long been imprisoned. Yet art is not simply subjectivity, multiple perspectives, and thick descriptions; it also partakes of truth, and hints of freedom and happiness. For this reason, poets like Wordsworth protested the casual talk of art as a taste, as if poetry did not also partake of truth and insight. The object of poetry, he stated “is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative.”* Many scholars and academics have not only prospered in the marginality business, they have unloaded old, slow-selling stock. In the close-out sale, they drastically mark down concepts that hint of old world Enlightenment or out-of-the world utopia. The new lines dispense with balky universals and one-size-fits all engineering. Designed for local markets, the new items are smaller, easier to handle, neater. A preference for the local and the specific is benign, even salutary. What is wrong with favoring the unique and distrusting universals? In the short run, nothing. Yet over time the suspicion of universals takes its revenge. (…) With deep misgivings about universals, an unwillingness to judge on the basis of them, and a trite notion of history, leftist intellectuals drift into a major current of conservatism that includes Burkean traditionalism, German romanticism, and American regionalism. All repudiate abstract and uniform systems of thought, usually associated with the French Enlightenment, and champion the particular and the different. The flat rejection of the universal leads to the rote affirmation of the unique and specific. History becomes the great excuse. This train of thought inexorably becomes conservative inasmuch as it sabotages the general propositions required to judge. Once writers and scholars isolate local conditions from universal categories, they lose the ability to evaluate them. They become cheerleaders, nationalists, and chauvinists.

JACOBY, Russell (1999) Thick Aestheticism and Thin Nativism. In “The End Of Utopia: Politics And Culture In An Age Of Apathy“

In “Thick Aestheticism and Thin Nativism,” he criticizes the turn toward aestheticism in cultural studies, with the attendant adoption of a literary mode that seeks only to paint pictures of events and practices rather than probe their deeper meanings. He denounces simplistic conceptualizations of power (and its endless rediscovery): “Traditionally, political thinking began, not ended, with the recognition of power. Now the fact of power appears as a dazzling insight.” And he criticizes the expansion of relativism into various outlets that, through its disregard for universals, weakens political thinking (and ends up, in its abandonment of universalisms, can engage in troubling forms of essentialism). Jacoby explains, “Although music or poetry may be culturally specific, this is less true for scientific axioms and philosophic principles. Are human rights invalid because they are violated or ignored–or unknown? If they are not recognized, does this make them false?” [Jonathan

[spoilersbelow]

A hoax that got out of hand

A hoax that got out of hand

I was angry with Alan Sokal back in 1996. He missed the point, to say the least, and, subsequently, did a great job providing everyone who didn’t want to think with an easy piece of shorthand to gesture at when they wanted to dismiss entire schools of thought without engaging with them (see also: Dawkins, Richard re: religion, whose blistering insights about the Problem of Evil and the…

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