Critical Animal follows up on Sokal

I was so busy that I missed CRITICAL ANIMAL’S RESPONSE TO MY RESPONSE about Sokal, made five days ago. Hard to disagree with anything Critical Animal says here.

There’s also an interesting exchange at the bottom between Paul Ennis and someone named Craig as to whether Sokal should have run a better “experiment” by not immediately announcing that he had hoaxed the journal, but instead by waiting for awhile to see if people took it seriously. Craig says yes, Paul says it wasn’t necessary.

I’m not sure what I think about that; Craig’s point actually hadn’t occurred to me before.

However, I suspect that no one would have responded to Sokal’s article at all. Or very few people. One thing continental philosophy does lack (and there’s an upside to this as well as a downside) is a highly developed journal article culture of the sort found in analytic philosophy, where most references are “horizontal” ones to recent articles by professional peers. It’s relatively rare in continental philosophy (and the humanities disciplines in close contact with it) for critical controversies to erupt over journal articles. In our circles, such articles tend to be treated as samples of a more general position, as hints of someone’s “larger project” to be developed more fully in forthcoming books, and so forth. Unlike analytic philosophers, we don’t tend to treat journal articles as key moments of intellectual momentum-shifting that need to be supported or countered as quickly as possible. Continental philosophy is simply a slower-moving culture.

(And Paul Ennis was also correct to cite my claim that “these people ruined my youth”. That was said partly tongue-in-cheek, since I did meet a lot of top-notch people in graduate school, both faculty and students. For me it was more a matter of being a fish out of water. Not only was I a metaphysician in a Heideggero-Derridean culture, I didn’t quite consciously realize I was a metaphysician until right around the time I defended my dissertation. If I had simply been able to consciously tell myself “I do metaphysics” from about 1992, I would have had a greater variety of conscious options. I could have become a Whitehead fan earlier, for instance. I could have started paying more serious attention to Aristotle from an earlier age. And other such things. Instead, I was somehow convinced that even though my reading of Heidegger was obviously a bit off the beaten track, I was still basically working within a Heideggerian framework. And that really wasn’t true, or certainly not from about 1997 onward. But it wasn’t solely a matter of delayed self-understanding; there really are some serious flaws with the 1980’s/1990’s way of doing continental philosophy, and I think those flaws should have been evident to people much sooner. End of digression.)

The downside of the absent journal culture in continental thought is that progress on individual issues tends to be slow. People weigh in on topics without necessarily even knowing other recent secondary literature on it, since the main referent is to primary texts– whether that be established classics like Plato and Hegel, or people currently filling the “primary literature” sort of role, such as Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou, Ziezk, and the like.

But there is also an upside to this absence of a developed journal culture, and that is the fact that continental philosophy is less likely to take recent micro-controversies too seriously. This problem with the analytic culture has been noticed even in analytic philosophy itself; I’m too tired to look for it now, but Barry Smith and a couple of co-authors made similar points in an article that had a lot to say about frivolous fads in analytic philosophy. If I remember to do it tomorrow, I’ll post the link to that article, which I found generally enlightening. Too much is said about the supposed faddishness of continental philosophy (especially of the French variety) and not enough about the whirlpool of rapidly changing “hot” analytic topics, many of which vanish without much of a trace.

In any case, it’s quite possible that if Sokal had let the article sit for a couple of years before revealing the hoax, he might actually have received no written responses at all. But that doesn’t mean people wouldn’t have been privately saying: “wow, what a terrible article.” I certainly would have, though again, I can’t claim for sure I would have recognized it as a hoax. More likely I would have asked: “Have things really become this shallow in our discipline?”

(On a side note, in Prince of Networks I briefly consider the possible consequences if a document were discovered, authored by Immanuel Kant, revealing that the whole of the Critical Philosophy was a Sokalesque hoax.)