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October 17, 2004
Possible worlds and impossible words
From Momus’ post today, Iron heels and possible worlds, on the seductive nature of “possible worlds”:
Possible worlds and parallel worlds, the lies that tell the truth, are a constant in art. And they’re especially topical now, with the US electorate on the verge of choosing between two different Americas which are, for the moment, fictions.
From today’s chilling New York Times magazine cover story, a statement that emphasizes the full, terrifying impact of that truth (this same quote’s already shown up in the comments of Momus’ post):
The aide said that guys like me [article author Ron Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
It occurred to me later that the famous Alan Sokol parody of academic theory, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (some background on this essay here) might be the nearest precedent for the beliefs described above. In his introductory paragraphs, Sokol writes that any “reality” that seems to exist, is created by the ideologies of the dominant, “history’s actors”:
[scientists and others] cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method. But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science … have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. 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; … that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status….
Posted by Andrew at October 17, 2004 01:24 PM
Comments
Hi Andrew interesting to tie in Sokal. The thing is, I think with his parody of cultural critique, Sokal is actually advancing an argument for positivism, i.e. the possibility of certainty. Bush’s position is a bizarre combination of Sokal’s actual position and his ironic one: a mystical (anti-empirical) positivism, positivist faith. I think that’s called fascism.
It reminds me of a conversation Marike had with a colleague who made a disdainful remark about deconstruction as a “culture of death” because it eliminates the possibility of certainty. Bush would no doubt agree that certainty is more desireable than critique. But it’s hard to see how you can hold that view in light of history. I’m more inclined (influenced by Benjamin, perhaps) to argue that the catastrophes which characterize recent human history (last couple hundred years) have never been the result of too much doubt or critique. Disaster is born of too much certainty.
Posted by: Ben at October 19, 2004 12:16 PM
“I think with his parody of cultural critique, Sokal is actually advancing an argument for positivism, i.e. the possibility of certainty.”
Absolutely (no pun intended). Sokol is explicitly saying that empirical scientific truth is measurable, reliable, and consistent. Not just a “possibility of certainty”, but a guarantee that certainty exists.
Posted by: Andrew at October 19, 2004 12:37 PM