Gullivers, Lilliputians, and the Root of Two Cultures

In The Knowable and the Unknowable, Arkady Plotnitsky takes on (at least) two unenviable double tasks. He endeavors to explain to nonexperts the rationally necessitated departure from traditional visual representation that, in part, characterizes “modern” or “nonclassical” physics and mathematics while—equally if not more arduous to achieve—distinguishing and defending groundbreaking philosophical reflection from the scattershot of slighter minds. In addition, rather than succumb to the ready pleasures of polemic in carrying out these aims, he carefully provides, in his own writing, an example of intellectual scrupulousness so striking as to inspire the improbable hope that The Knowable and the Unknowable might set a discursive benchmark to which less circumspect commentators may one day rise. Finally, Plotnitsky does all this while managing to avoid the fate to which his theoretical expertise and abilities could easily condemn him, that of being hamstrung by his own level of understanding, tied down, or compelled to talk down, like a Gulliver captive among the uncomprehending.

Such discrepancy of stature is both the inspiration for and subject matter of Plotnitsky’s project. While describing and addressing cognitive issues of historic and (literally) immeasurable scope, The Knowable and the Unknowable also represents and responds to a tempest in a teapot, a battle in print of truly Swiftian disproportion: the recent controversy regarding the supposed use and abuse of science by contemporary theorists and philosophers. The so-called “Science Wars” in which Plotnitsky intervenes were inaugurated by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, but were brought to popular attention under the spotlight of scandal with the publication of Alan Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries—Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in Social Text. The uproar it caused stemmed not from the content of the “transgression” that Sokal’s article nominally proposed but from the fact that its proposal for publication received approbation at all. Following squarely in the tradition of discursive interaction that J. L. Austin named “speech acts,” whose uncircumscribable, working principle the author of the action entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries...” would perforce disavow, Sokal’s article was less about what it said than what it did. And what it did was speak double talk to great effect, perpetrating a hoax which the editors of Social Text “failed” to recognize as such (the general failure of quiddity in the face of effectivity, or at least their nonidentity, being what speech-act theory is all about). Sokal “successfully” presented what, in his view, would constitute a poststructuralist view of quantum physics, travestying both contemporary theory and quantum physics to achieve that pragmatic end. One year later, buoyed by his imposture, he joined forces with Jean Bricmont to publish Impostures intellectuelles, subsequently translated into English as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. In the interim, Nobel-prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg reflected on “Sokal’s Hoax” in The New York Review of Books, followed by “Steven Weinberg Replies” and “Sokal’s Hoax: An Exchange,” and Plotnitsky and Richard Crew engaged in their own “exchange” on the “Wars” in the pages of this journal.

For the active wagers of the “Science Wars,” however, the de facto inauguration of hostilities took place long before their own maneuvers, with a tentative answer by Jacques Derrida to a question posed to him at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1969. The proceedings of that watershed event, compiled into the now-classic volume The Structuralist Controversy by editors Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, include contributions from and exchanges among many of the leading theorists of two generations working in Europe and America (then and now). As the title of the volume indicates, these historic discussions occurred previous to the coining of the catch-all chronological denomination “poststructuralism.” Heterogeneous, neither “structuralist” nor identifiably anything else, they in large part exposed for the first time, at least in the U.S., the prospect of modes of thinking as yet undesignated and unknown, work so...