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PARTISAN REVIEW
laws of Nature," O'Brien declares. "We make the laws of Nature." And
can alter them at will, apparently, for "we control the mind" and the
only reality "is inside the skull." In its denial of any sort of objective
reality-even the axioms of mathematics, even the laws of physics–
Oceania practices, in O'Brien's apt phrase, "collective solipsism."
Orwell intended in his dystopia to counter this collective solipsism, of
course, this equation of truth with the dogmas of one or another of
what he called the smelly little orthodoxies of this age.
Although transmogrified, the smelly little orthodoxies that Orwell
despised are still very much with us, and their academic O'Briens are
busily at work in their respective Ministries of Love demonstrating to
bemused undergraduate Winstons that what they had taken to be truths
are merely cultural constructions not to be counted on. History, literary
studies, anthropology-such disciplines long ago succumbed to post–
modernist Pyrrhonism, but "soft" as they are, empirically challenged,
they do not pose the essential
defi
to postmodernism's claims that the
sciences do. To deny the possibility of objective knowledge, the sciences
would have to be culturally relativized. To this end, the hyper-trendy
postmodernist journal
Social Text
entitled its Spring
1996
issue "Science
Wars," indicating the editors' desire to extend the Culture Wars, in
which they had achieved more or less unconditional surrender from the
humanities and social sciences, to a more ambitious theater. One essay
in this issue included this representative sentence:
" It
has thus become
increasingly apparent that physical 'reality,' no less than social 'reality,'
is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific 'knowledge,'
far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies
and power relations of the culture that produced it." Merely O'Brien
with worse jargon. Somewhat to the chagrin of the editors, the essay–
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics
of Quantum Gravity"-was a hoax, a hilarious farrago of (mostly)
francophile gibberish, perpetrated by a professor of physics at CUNY,
Alan Sokal, who elsewhere confessed to being "a stodgy old scientist
who believes that there exists an external world, that there exist objec–
tive truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of
them." Still the quoted sentence as well as the entire essay that it encap–
sulates easily passed for the real thing, distilling the nonsense contained
in numerous citations of Derrida, Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and the like–
the porno pantheon of heavy hitters-as well as those of one of the jour–
nal's editors, Stanley Aronowitz, cited seventeen times. Most telling,
perhaps, was Sokal's revelation that, even after he had outed the essay
in
Lingua Franca,
another of the
Social Text
editors refused to believe
