[ Top : Articles : "An Interview with Bruce Robbins" : Other Articles ]
March 6, 1997
ER: Why did Social Text decide to dedicate an
issue to the relationship between science and
culture? Why are humanities scholars concerned
with this link?
BR: In the mid-1980s, multiculturalism and related curricular
developments in the humanities were assaulted in what came to be
called the "Culture Wars". A year or two ago Andrew Ross saw that
the energy of the Culture Wars was now being channeled into wars
over science. Among other things, we were seeing a backlash against
cultural explanations, in favor of explanations of social and
cultural phenomena in terms of the physical sciences--a sort of
imperialism in which physical science models claimed the right to
explain human or sociopolitical phenomena. This is one reason why
the topic needed attention. The Gross and Levitt book, Higher
Superstition, was one small sign of a much larger situation.
ER: Steven Weinberg, in a commentary on
Sokal's hoax in the New York Review of Books
(August 8,1996) said that any physics
undergraduate could have detected the
inconsistencies of Sokal's article. If this is
the case, how did it pass the editorial
process of one of the leading journals in
cultural studies?
BR: Thank you for the compliment. Frankly, I think our enemies
have often called us the leading cultural studies journal just so
they could feel they've taken down an opponent of the proper
stature. But in any case, I disagree with Weinberg that any physics
undergraduate would have been able to see Sokal's article was a
hoax. A day after the hoax came out, I gave the article to a
friend of mine, a well-known physicist. She told me two things:
one, that I should have given it to a physicist like her first,
which is of course true; and two, that if I had given it to her,
she wasn't sure she would have been able to tell me it was a hoax.
She would have been able to tell me only that most of it was very
badly written, and that some elements of it were extremely
controversial.
In fact the article was both badly and very cleverly written.
It was written so that one would need expertise in several very
different areas of science and mathematics to see the deliberate
mistakes, where a piece of vocabulary from one area was being
misapplied to another. It has been in the interest of the media, of
course, to present the hoax as perfectly transparent, something
that they themselves would certainly have caught. But I don't think
that's so. Alan Sokal argued that quantum physics, properly
understood, would lead one to doubt conventionally accepted notions
of truth in the sciences. A senior writer from Scientific American
wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times in which he said that
although Alan Sokal subsequently declared the article a hoax, Sokal
had in fact been exactly correct in his original argument. Despite
the deliberate errors in the margins, he said, the fundamental
structure of Sokal's argument about the epistemological
consequences of the theory of quantum gravity was sound. Judge for
yourself what this means. It may not justify our publication of
the article, but it does offer an interesting commentary on media
representations.
Social Text took Alan Sokal to be a physicist reporting to
non-physicists about things that any physicist would know. We saw
his article as an act of translation or popularization in which a
physicist critical of physics was reporting to non-physicists about
material that within physics itself was not controversial. In
short, we took him for who he was claiming to be. Thus the idea
did not even occur to us that we had to check his physics. We just
assumed that any credentialed physicist would get that part right.
Our doubts were about the quality of the translation. We thought
he was misunderstanding us, his intended audience, and we asked him
to remove some of the sillier quotations with which he had amply
stocked his article. Obviously he refused, and in retrospect we
can see why: he wanted to make us look silly by allowing him to
publish these things as if we believed them. We didn't put
ourselves behind these authorities or like his way of obsessively
citing them. But we were willing enough to have a credentialed
physicist express his sort of general idea. And we were willing to
put up with the awkwardness of his prose. This, of course, turned
out to be an awful embarrassment.
ER: In his revelation of the hoax in Lingua
Franca, Alan Sokal said that Social Text
accepted his article because it flattered what
the editors' ideological presuppositions and
sounded good. How do you respond to this
claim?
BR: First of all, it didn't sound good. It sounded bad. Sokal
seemed to be trying to speak to us, but not quite managing it. It
didn't sound like any other essay in our Science Wars issue, and we
spent some time puzzling over whether or not to take it. What was
the value, we asked ourselves, of having a physicist making
arguments that nobody on the Social Text collective actually
believed, for example that the physical universe is a social
construct?
I have spent 12 years going to editorial meetings for Social
Text, and nobody has ever talked this way. To be on the Left (and
we are a journal of the Left), one cannot be a simple social
constructionist. One has to believe in reality, in whatever
complicated and mediated sort of way. You just can't have our kind
of political commitment if you don't think some things are
unmistakably real. So this article did not actually speak to our
ideological presuppositions. Yet, it wasn't quite unacceptable
enough for us to say, "O.K., here we draw the line. Nobody saying
anything this silly can get published." And I regret that now,
because of course it permitted the public and the media to brand
all of us as a crowd of airheads who don't believe in the existence
of physical reality.
Sokal seems to see himself attacking postmodernism. Yet all of
the serious philosophical positions that have been taken in recent
decades would be equally unacceptable to him, not just "postmodern"
ones. Basically, he is attacking the entire enterprise of
philosophy, and saying, "we do not need to ask philosophical
questions. Let's stop having philosophy. We know what we know, we
know everything we need to know, so what's there to talk about?"
This suggests a certain incoherence. He doesn't seem to know
exactly whom he is addressing.
ER: In your rebuttal to Sokal in Lingua Franca
(Mystery Science Theater), you mentioned that
Social Text articles are not submitted to
experts for anonymous review, but that Social
Text is a journal of opinion. This has opened
the door for criticism that Social Text does
not follow the norms of the academy. Do you
think the academy should commit itself to peer
review?
BR: I am not in any position to render judgement on how other
journals ought to work. But I would be very skeptical about the
claim that other journals never do what we do, that is, never look
for significantly situated individuals and names whose opinions on
a particular matter are of weight because of who they are.
People who know science much better than I do have argued that
even scientific journals of the highest caliber do this all the
time, hence are also vulnerable to hoaxes. When the double helix
was discovered by Watson and Crick, there was not enough time to
actually check the essay that would alter history forever. The
publishers of Nature took the opinions of people associated with
the lab, who themselves had not had the chance to really check it
out. In other words, they relied on authority and reputation,
thinking, "well, if so and so seems to think its O.K., then we'll
go with it and take our chances, since no one has had time to
really check this out or replicate the experiment."
I think peer review is a bit of a delusion. People pretend to
an objectivity they can't actually practice, whether in pursuit of
truth or in decisions about publication. Of course I am not
against essays being reviewed by people who have expertise in the
relevant field or fields. But that's very different from blind
review, in which one does not take into account who the author is,
what else that person has published, or what kind of reputation he
or she may have.
Sometimes, too, allowances must be made for certain kinds of
error, which can be useful in stimulating debates. Scientists and
nonscientists disagree on what publication means in scientific
journals and in nonscientific journals. I think Common Purposes is
a bit like Social Text, after all. You want interesting, informed
opinions on subjects you care about, subjects you know your
readership cares about, but subjects on which there may be no final
truth. You do not see yourself as publishing things only if they
are absolute advances on previously established knowledge, do you?.
Unfortunately, scientists sometimes tend to think that that's what
publication has to mean. It's an absolute advance in knowledge, or
it's nothing.
ER: You mentioned that the Sokal Affair has
had negative repercussions for the enterprise
of cultural studies and the humanities. How
so?
BR: There is already a backlash under way against cultural
studies, and against other related projects which might not
identify themselves as cultural studies. As I said, it's an
imperial move on behalf of the models of the physical sciences.
Its proponents basically say, "we don't need psychology to explain
mental illness, it can be explained in terms of chemistry," and
"identities you thought were socially constructed, open to human
will, are actually determined by genetics." And so on. We are not
just talking here about the limits of social constructivism as a
paradigm. We are talking about a pressure emanating from the
sciences to deny explanations of identity and behavior that leave
room for some degree of freedom and fluidity, a pressure to deny
that our interpretations of ourselves and the world go into
fashioning the sort of world we live in, and could live in.
Scientists and pseudo-scientists who prefer physical and chemical
explanations of social and cultural phenomena have obviously gotten
a big boost from the Sokal affair, whether or not this is what
Sokal himself intended, and they are taking full advantage of it.
Scandalous personnel decisions are being made in which Social
Text's blunder is sometimes mentioned. People whose work seems too
much in our vein, however nationally and even internationally
respected, are getting fired. They are being fired by people who do
not judge them as individuals, but judge them as representatives of
an entire intellectual tendency.
ER: In one of your rebuttals to Sokal, you
mention that the debate he has brought up is
not new. Nevertheless, he has brought these
issues to the realm of the general public like
never before. Why do you think the media has
suddenly became so fascinated by this issue?
BR: Some of it is just a general American anti-
intellectualism. The media grabs any opportunity to make fun of
intellectuals. Some of it probably has to do with the increased
pressure on the American population to be knowledge workers. For
better or for worse, the university has come to play a larger and
larger role in American society, such that without a college
degree, it's that much harder to earn a living now. It's even
difficult WITH a college degree. So more and more people are being
forced to jump through university hoops, intellectual hoops, and
anyone forced to jump through hoops is going to resent those who
are holding the hoops.
The response also justifies Andrew Ross's intuition that the
science wars are a key sensitive point in society-- that one is
touching the sacred when one touches science. In touching it, we
get a reaction that we don't get from other things. Science has
become a functioning religion. People who think they have some
other religion, or no other religion, often in fact worship at that
particular shrine.
We have also seen negative reactions to the Sokal Affair from
people who are otherwise sympathetic to what Social Text stands
for, and this has to do in part at least with the odd position of
a journal like ours at the juncture of the political and the
professional. We are political in the sense that we aspire to a
role in a movement toward cultural democracy, however broad and
diverse you might think this movement is, and we welcome many kinds
of allies, see ourselves as connected to various people and groups.
But we are professional in the sense that, like it or not, we are
part of a marketplace of publications, a machine for making
reputations and careers, and we publish only a very small
proportion of even the authors we learn from most and agree with
most. This has created an interesting and painful ambivalence in
people who on the one hand feel they are on our side, but on the
other hand, are pushed by various imperatives, including
professional ones, to publish the things they have to say. They may
have a certain resentment toward a journal like Social Text,
feeling it holds them back from the kind of professional success
they may richly deserve. But unfortunately, we can publish only a
very small section of what we receive. It is very difficult for any
journal to sustain these dual roles. I think some of the lingering
resentment may be related to that.
ER: Right-wing people like D'Souza argue that
multiculturalism contributes to a lowering of
academic rigor. While the Sokal Affair doesn't
directly raise this issue, Sokal does speak
about what he sees as a decline in the rigor
of the review process. Has multiculturalism
contributed to this decline in standards? By
publishing the article, did Social Text
inadvertently give validity to Right-wing
claims?
BR: As far as the journal is concerned, sales are up. People
who have never heard of us before are hearing about us now. But
many people engaged in serious multicultural scholarship are
suffering in what I think is becoming a genuine right-wing
backlash, and our mistake has contributed directly to it. All I
can say is that I feel the need for us to apologize. However, I
don't feel the mistake was a characteristic one. I don't think the
mistake indicates, as so many people in the media have concluded,
a fundamental structural weakness in cultural studies or cultural
politics. But on the other hand, there is no question that it has
had the effect of giving weapons to people who would really like to
close down these intellectual enterprises.
Otherwise, I don't think anything multiculturalism does could
possibly lower standards any lower than they've been lowered by the
Sokal Affair itself. The standards of discussion that the media,
Sokal, Gross, Levitt, and others have adhered to have been
extremely low; their statements have been full of outright
inaccuracies. This really throws into doubt their credibility as
people complaining about the lowering of standards.
Any global opinion regarding multiculturalism is very
difficult to arrive at. We are talking about so many different
kinds of scholarship, by so many different people, doing so many
different kinds of things. I can't argue that such expansions in
the field of knowledge have not led, under any circumstances, to
things getting by that might not have gotten by if they were judged
by the previous standards. Naturally, anybody can think of
anecdotes in which new jargon has seemed to allow the publication
of an argument that doesn't reach the necessary degree of rigor.
But multiculturalism has allowed informed, critical discussion of
many texts, experiences, perspectives that otherwise would not have
been talked about or studied, and I think that's important. When
one is breaking new scholarly ground, one cannot expect to find
protocols of interpretation already in existence. They are
invented as one goes along. Rather than complaining--as if we'd be
happier with modes of interpretation that repeated the same thing
over and over!--it makes more sense to recognize the extent to
which these new protocols of multicultural scholarship have already
been and are still being invented.
We hear of many attacks on so-called "identity politics," a
political agenda that is supposedly being pursued under the more
innocent rubric of multiculturalism. One hears endlessly about how
fragmentary, divisive, and relativistic this "identity" scholarship
is. But it seems to me that, strictly speaking, it's the old
fashioned defenders of the humanities rather than the
multiculturalists who are really playing identity politics. These
defenders are pressing for the humanities to stay true to an
identity that is already established, fixed in time, and different
from anything else. Multiculturalism, however, is not and cannot.
Those working within the paradigm of multiculturalism subject
themselves by that very fact to the pressures of all the identities
around them that are not theirs. Thus they are obliged to cultivate
a certain ethical sensitivity. When the claim is made for identity
X, it cannot simply be presented in its own terms, as its own
justification. One has to ask what it means for identity Y and Z,
which may well overlap with it, as race, gender, class, and sexual
identities overlap. You have to negotiate simultaneously with being
a member of category X but also of gender Y, or sexuality Z, and so
on. An immense, and largely unrecognized tendency exists within
multiculturalism pushing people to negotiate with other identities.
There is a necessary striving for common ground, for mutual
translation, and for ethical commonality. This is what I sense all
the time in essays I read. Yet these aspects of multiculturalism
never seem to enter into the diatribes against it. Rather, it is
simply branded as being divisive.
ER: Meera Nanda, in a Dissent article titled
"The Science Wars in India", argues that
constructivist theories of science, such as
those promoted by Andrew Ross and Sandra
Harding, inadvertently open the door for the
promotion of ethno-sciences in places like
India. She argues that the language of critics
of science parallel the ideas and sentiments
of reactionary nationalist groups like the BJP
in India. What are your thoughts on this
issue?
BR: The association with nationalism is really grotesque.
Where does one find the strongest anti-nationalist sentiment: among
scientists who are funded by the military and the government, or
among multicultural critics?
Nanda seems disillusioned with the American Left. My sense is
that she does not know the subjects of her criticism very well. She
tries to simply push together multiculturalism with forms of
irrationalism. In doing this, she pushes it together with the Hindu
Right, the opponents of secularism. I would argue that
multiculturalism, even on a very American model--and there's no
doubt that it IS very American, even when many of its outstanding
contributors have been from elsewhere--has a lot to teach someone
like Nanda who is primarily concerned with India. It's about a
struggle to achieve something common, a struggle forced onto people
by their contiguity with other people who are themselves struggling
with their own complex identities. In the jargon, we say people
occupy multiple subject positions. People struggle with identities
that are different, yet similar-- overlapping, yet not identical.
This is in fact the way the common is arrived at, not by just
positing it. It is achieved through this process of bringing real
differences together, and searching out what is common and what is
not.
In terms of the Indian context that Meera Nanda is referring
to, if I may speak about something in which I am so far from being
an expert, it seems to me that many South Asian scholars here are
producing work that is actually extremely useful for those there
who feel the need to reinvent Indian secularism. Such work would be
absolutely crucial for those who find the Congress Party version of
secularism inadequate to the present political situation in India,
who feel that some other way of achieving the common or the secular
is necessary. This kind of cultural work is much closer to what's
going on in India than Nanda thinks it is, and more useful than
Nanda's hackneyed denunciations of poststructuralism. It certainly
tries harder to address emancipatory projects in developing
countries than the likes of Gross and Levitt do.
ER: Concerning the relationship between social
and literary theory and political activism,
Meera Nanda has commented that there is "an
inverse relationship between the explosion of
high theory and political activism. Is the
criticism that many academics are disconnected
from "real" political struggles a sound one?
Have Leftists turned away from real life
concerns?
BR: Well, I must dispute the terms of the question before I
can answer it. I don't think that struggles in the academy are
unreal. According to the calculation of a friend of mine, the
proportion of Americans taking freshman composition today is higher
than the proportion of Englishmen who read Dickens in the 19th
century. And Dickens is the most significant writer who allied
himself with programs of political reform, perhaps the most
efficacious political novelist Europe has ever seen. Thus, we who
teach courses like freshman composition are involved with a very
real and significant section of the public merely by doing our jobs
in the academy. What we do in the academy engages with
constituencies that extend very far outside the academy. To me,
these things seem very real and significant.
Some critics have accused intellectual work, academic or not,
of betraying or turning away from genuine political work. Such
criticisms come from very different motives, and can never be taken
on their own terms. There may of course be some truth to them, but
it's important to notice the ways in which this is not simply a
truth, but a reaction born of the particular disappointments and
resentments of the people who make the charge. It is not merely a
coincidence, for example, that many straight white men are suddenly
exclaiming that the academy has "turned its back" on genuine
political activity. We are in a historical moment when women and
people of color have assumed a kind of centrality in the academy
that formally only straight white men could enjoy. One wonders
about that. I certainly don't think the resentment of lost
privileges is the only cause of this particular line of critique,
but I think an awful lot of the complainers turn out to be straight
white men.
On the other hand, some of these charges come from an
understandable frustration that many progressive people feel, a
confusion about what real politics ought to be. Now that's a
genuine and very profound question. To explore the history of this
new cultural politics, one would have to go back to certain moments
of frustration with other sorts of politics. Many of us have
despaired of getting certain issues addressed or even recognized at
the level of legislation. One example has been the United States'
imperial involvement with the most awful regimes around the world.
Many of the student movements of the 1960s were associated with
this. It has often been extremely hard, outside the sphere of
culture, to make any case at all against an almost unconscious
Americano-centric or American nationalist tendency. Cultural
politics has been a sort of Trojan horse, allowing certain opinions
that had no place in the media or Congress to be smuggled into
public debates.
Now, you may ask, what's the reality of all that, when it's
not likely to really take form as legislation, or a change in
American foreign policy any time soon? The fact is, it does have
effects on public opinion, but these are more subtle, less visible.
We don't know to what extent popular indignation against the
Vietnam War had to do with the ending of the war, although I would
like to think that it had some effect. In a recent talk at Harvard
the philosopher Richard Rorty, who has often been impatient with
the cultural or non-policymaking left, was generous enough to say
that al least it deserved credit for helping to end the Vietnam
War.
ER: One of Levitt's and Gross's criticisms
against multiculturalism is that it encourages
individuals to engage with disciplines that
they have no intimate knowledge of. What do
you think about this?
BR: Life is short, and time and energy are limited. Obviously,
any interdisciplinary work will engage people in areas in which
they lack the same expertise they presumably have in their original
discipline. Granted that anyone doing interdisciplinary work would
find it in their interest to learn as much as they can in the new
area, still, to defend an extreme disciplinary territoriality would
mean that no interdisciplinary work would be done, which would send
us far backwards in terms of scholarship.
How much of the technical operations of science a humanist
would have to know remains an open question for me. Many people
within science itself would agree that some very basic questions
have not been a matter of public debate and scrutiny. These include
questions such as: Who sets research agendas? What interests are
served by these agendas? It's perfectly possible for scientists to
use their specialized knowledge to wall off such matters from the
public's view. They can claim that the public has no right to know
because it has no means of knowing properly, because the public
lacks technical scientific knowledge. This would be a disaster. I
don't think it's in the public's interest to allow anybody to use
disciplinary boundaries to protect or exclude in this way. But I'm
afraid that's what people like Gross and Levitt are advocating,
whether or not they think they are doing so. Their argument has the
effect of taking away from public scrutiny matters that are much
too important to be left to scientists alone. Many progressive
scientists would say the same thing.
ER: How is the political activism of the 1990s
different from the activism of the 1960s?
BR: That's too large a question for me to take on. Maybe I
can reframe it. One clich is that students now are more
interested in economic, bread-and-butter issues (tuition hikes,
health benefits, jobs) and less in the cultural and national issues
of the 60s. I think that in fact students now are seeing how much
these two political levels are interconnected. This is a point
that Nancy Fraser makes very eloquently in her new book Justice
Interruptus. If you are African American, for example, and a
victim of racism, you also get ripped off in economic terms, but
this is partly due to cultural discrimination, what Fraser calls a
lack of recognition. As she says, the same is true for women. The
economic and cultural dimensions of discrimination are actually
entangled with each other in very complex ways. I believe that a
struggle for economic redistribution (which has got to be a
fundamental tenet of any Left that deserves to call itself a Left)
has many cultural dimensions which cannot be overlooked. These
dimensions are complex, not obvious, and political practice is
crippled if they are not understood. Understanding them is one
proper job of the academy. Thus, however indirectly, the academy
is a necessary part of the struggle for economic redistribution.
Those who draw a simple line between the cultural and the
economic are oversimplifying things in an extremely
counterproductive way. For example, Edward Said shows us cogently
how literature played an important role in culturally preparing the
way for imperialism. Similarly, with regard to the Science Wars,
there was the cultural preparation of scientific racism, which has
been such a prolonged fact of life here in the United States.
ER: Gross and Levitt claim that the
progressive scholars in the academy today were
the activists and hippies of the 1960s. They
mention that the "rude tactics of campus
militancy -- picketing, sit-ins, a generalized
rhetoric of suspicion and scorn toward nominal
academic hierarchy -- are recycled in the
science and cultural wars of today. Do you
think there remains a strong resonance between
the style of the academic left and the wider
counter-culture of the 1960s?
BR: This is just another sign, among many, that Gross and
Levitt have not been listening to the people they've supposedly
been arguing with. For better or for worse, many activists of the
sixties have now become members of the academy. To me, this is not
nearly as bad a thing as it is to some people, but it does mean
that many of us--I include myself--are now academics and not
activists. And it does not mean we are necessarily ready and eager
to join in the more confrontational politics that many feel the
campus now needs.
Social Text has recently published one issue and put together
another about academic labor. Our interest is in campus attempts to
organize graduate students and other employees, efforts which
involve some of the same tactics people used in the sixties.
Interestingly, it has been extremely difficult to gain the support
of senior faculty for the cause of students and other employees,
and this includes those who are very sympathetic ideologically to
the kinds of cultural analysis that bother Gross and Levitt so
much. It will take ingenuity and serious mobilization if graduate
students, who are clearly an exploited class of workers, are going
to get tenured or tenure track faculty members to support them.
That support cannot by any means be taken for granted on the basis
of some kind of sixties background that we faculty members are
supposed to have.
ER: The issue of "the West versus the rest"
has become entangled in the "science wars".
Levitt and Gross argue that science is
uniquely associated with Western culture: "The
greatest theoretical physicist in the world
may be Xhose or Maori by descent, but his
intellectual temperament will be Western."
What are your comments on this?
BR: My God! What Gross and Levitt say about the European
origins of science would be a real surprise to the Arabs, wouldn't
it? This is a very bad history of science. It simply does not take
into account actual sources. It is not even a proper account of
sources that seem to "count" for Levitt and Gross.
Perhaps I can draw a parallel here with the question of the
intellectual sources of human rights. This might be a cleaner
historical analogy than the actual history of science, which does
NOT have exclusively Western roots. Let's say that human rights,
as presently constituted in an international global discourse, come
more fundamentally out of European liberal rationalistic thought
than out of other traditions. Whether or not this is true, many
human rights activists around the world are saying that it doesn't
matter. It doesn't matter, they say, because over the last few
years, definitions and priorities in human rights have begun to be
influenced powerfully by input from OUTSIDE Europe or "the West,"
input (for example via non-governmental organizations based in Asia
and Africa) that MAKES human rights into a genuine common
instrument of our common purposes. Their original sources are not
the most important thing about them. They remain Eurocentric in
origin, perhaps, but that does not mean they are condemned to
FUNCTION in a Eurocentric way--as long as non-Westerners have a
loud say (as they did in the women's rights conference in Beijing)
about setting agendas and establishing priorities. And as long as
that strong non-European input continues, anyone in the non-
European world who speaks against human rights as merely a Western
imposition would look to their own fellow citizens like a defender
of injustice in Third World societies.
What these Asian and African activists have done with human
rights is perhaps not a bad model for science. The crucial
question is not where science comes from, although it does in fact
come from non-European sources that Gross and Levitt neglect. The
real question is how much more humane science could become if
various groups around the world had more democratic input into
setting its agendas for research and controlling its applications.