wikipedia love #1,600,042

[cimorene]

today's actual homework led me in just one click to the sokal affair:

In an attempt to discredit hermeneutic, postmodern, and other forms of “non-scientific” knowledge, Sokal wrote a paper which he intended to be complete gibberish, to see if a postmodern cultural studies journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". The paper, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" [1] , was accepted and published in the journal Social Text.[*]

wikipedia: learn something fabulously entertaining every day! 

Footnotes contain more obvious jokes, like the one which comments "Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and 'pro-choice', so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice."

this reminds me of what i was telling wax, namely that humanism is, according to the rev. jerry falwell, one of the five greatest threats to, well, something: "[The Rev Jerry] Falwell noted 'five major problems that have political consequences, political implications, that moral Americans should be ready to face: abortion, homosexuality, pornography, humanism, the fractured family'"¹.







Kepel, Gilles 1994: The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity)

quoted in

Giddens, Anthony 2001: Sociology (Cambridge: Polity) 4th ed.

Comments

[coquettemoves.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read The Third Policeman? Because it reads a lot like that.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

hee! no, i'd never heard of it. i just read the wikipedia article. it sounds fun--and the description reminded me of stoppard's novel lord malquist & mr moon.

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

Uh. Yes. The horrors of humanism! It's all been downhill from the middle ages onwards!