Why is it when the officially sanctioned experts of the world step outside the cover of their specialties they tend to behave like sophomoric fops brandishing digital stilettos as if wielding death rays? It's an ignorance of some magnitude to think of Postmodernists, as Alan Sokal apparently does, as a monolithic lot; one can find within the collective body of their theoretical poetics a unity in word only; one finds innumerable divergent and/or opposed theoretical constructs and definitions. But it's as pointless to expect Postmodernists to produce a coherent manifesto as it was to have expected the Futurists, either the Russian or the Italian version, to have produced one. That colonies of critical scholars continue to find ever more elusive connections and nuances is due principally to the nature of the demands of scholarship, and reflects proofs presupposed by the rigor and the questions that produce them. It's within this closed space that strategies of scholastic determinism are played out, and for this reason theory can never do more than be subsumed by art. It should be perfectly clear by now that rational processes aren't necessary for the creation of art. Art arises from more heterogeneous sources, whether in an illiterate wood carver from Blowing Rock, N.C. or a depressed Postmodern poet from Back Bay Boston. No one can predict in advance whence art will appear, fully grown, as a tear in the real.

The creative force that drives art isn't measured in speed, as that huckster Filippo Marinetti puts it, nor in Sokal's literary B.T.U.s; this force arises in the truth of the creation which captures it and causes it to be re-experienced over time. One needn't follow prescribed practices for this metamorphosis to occur; whether the first principles of a movement arise heuristically from the collective work or are logically deduced and imposed as practice has no lasting determining influence. It's for this reason that whenever particular ideas or techniques become formalized, the voices of those demanding recognition grow more and more insistent until they too take their place in the chorus line, destined one day to be similar objects of derision for the coming generations whose sensibilities refute the established order, either from outright defiance or from a general inability to follow. In this manner the force of art is continually renewed in the radical rediscovery of its iron truths. And by truth I don't mean that which exists within the true, but that which exists outside of it, unencumbered with contexts and proofs. There are truths revealed in art that dwarf even the loftiest of scientific discoveries; there's no rift between art and science that needs stitching up, à la Snow, they have nothing to do with each other. What's more absurd than the specter of a physicist like Sokal crawling haphazardly among his equations searching for the ethereal substratum of his primordial soul?

The truth that art reveals has nothing to do with beginnings or ends, nor can it be contained within a series, or sets of series. Literary neophytes like Sokal can't begin to imagine the unshakable power of art as it regenerates itself in the very actions which annihilate it, and to understand that art can't be robbed of its tradition, or stand to have tradition stuffed down its throat. Apart from the ugly political implications inherent in Sokal's actions -- who can deny his posture as that of a political operative? -- his attacks on Postmodernism in whatever area are of no intellectual importance; he operates at the most vulgar level of metaphor, that of counting, and he is therefore defined by the blinders of his discretionary field. It doesn't occur to him there could be truths other than scientific proofs, and to which scientific methods can't provide access; his bias is that of a scientist and his demands for proofs are correspondent to that level. Thus he is able to impulsively seize upon literary or psychological references to science and denounce them as contrary to scientific understanding and application, and therefore worthless. Whether or not Stanley Fish & Company were taken in by his ruse is valid only at the level of "got'cha." Sokal's intent is not to point out inconsistencies or mistakes from a scientific viewpoint, but to discredit the Postmodern movement as a viable area of literary study -- hence the covert nature of his act. If he genuinely intends to make serious contributions to the development of Postmodern criticism, he would simply point out the errors he detects and offer alternative strategies. Instead he resorts to methods designed to humiliate and defrock those he perceives as leaders in the movement. There can be no sensible opposition to this conclusion except to claim that such tactics have a rich history in the long tradition of literature -- a conclusion that falls somewhat short of a justification when one considers that book burning, ignorance, error, plagiarism, and outright lying also have rich histories in this same tradition. Still, his methods provide insights into his motives. It would be a coup of unimaginable proportions for intellectual yokels like Sokal to extend their narrow, hegemonic proofs into a field of truth in which they are both subordinate and unrecognized. Art and concepts of art are not reducible to specific scientific paradigms; although art's truths are momentary and elusive, they are also eternal and concrete, an accomplishment scientists can only dream of.

Expect the usual stale denials and pious outrage from Sokal and his cohorts, who drape themselves in appeals to integrity and character -- as if such translucent qualities could hide their blatant toadyism. They may have integrity and character, but one would have to use the poetic equivalent of an electron microscope to see them. The chutzpa of such intellectual dilettantes throwing their weight around in this arena is surpassed only by the crude indifference their masters display toward the work they produce. It's not necessary that Sokal ever get anything right, it's important that he exist as quotable opposition with which to bludgeon undesirable elements into submission and literally drive them underground. Anyone who fails to see in this tactic a basic characteristic of the Big Lie isn't paying attention. Sokal and kind are not engaging in sincere intellectual pursuits, they're out here as marauding night riders intent on burning out huge segments of our intellectual and artistic landscape. This isn't intended as a defense of Postmodern thinkers of the Fish & Company school; they epitomize career academicians who are overly aggressive in both their professional and personal ambitions, and a fair amount of what they promote is silly. So what? Most theoretical thought in any field is laughable. No, this is a defense of artistic freedom against the increasing onslaught of right-wing financed whackos. And although it's the little fish of the universities currently on the hook, Sokal's real snag is that band of copernican thinkers that includes Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault, authors whose works breathe dynamic change into modern epistemology. Those unfruitful to the whip of the scientific underpinning of so-called democratic capitalism must be purged from the universities and from scholarship. But literature isn't Sokal's only area of interest; I understand his latest target is none other than that Freudian pariah of orthodox psychology, M. Jacques Lacan, himself. Well, not quite himself. I predict Sokal will discover that Lacan, although deceased, is a long way from dead.

The weakness in Sokal's critique of Lacan's psychoanalytic metaphor of the erect male organ is his demand that it conform to the laws of mathematics when in reality it can only be confirmed within the praxis defined by psychoanalysis, which Freud in his wisdom always insists on. Sokal's criticisms of the Lacanian metaphor are hilarious, for they have absolutely nothing to do with Lacan's meaning; the emperor may have new clothes, but one has to be able to see the emperor to know that. Sokal can't grasp the significance of the Lacanian metaphor of the erect male organ because he doesn't have access to the theoretical framework that makes its truth manifest; it's a simple case of using numbers metaphorically. He doesn't realize that it's the metaphorical form of the equation, that of an imaginary number, that provides the context in which to locate the missing square root of minus one. This metaphor is entirely consistent within Lacan's formulations of the imaginary, which is where the subject of the unconscious is imprisoned. Should Sokal ever take the ten or fifteen years necessary to master Lacanian concepts, he might come to appreciate the level of humor that Lacan normally operates at; and should he attain this heady level, he'll have absolutely no problem pinpointing that missing piece, and his role in its loss. It never occurs to Sokal that although in mathematics one and one always makes two, in psychoanalysis, as in art, one and one might make a blooming neon penis, with or without a socket to plug into.

Psychoanalysis has absolutely no business submitting its constructs for verification from a field which is not of its blood. The proofs of psychoanalysis result from an attention to speech as language, and not from measurement. Scientific parameters exist at the limits of science, not at the limits of knowledge -- known or potential -- or of metaphor. And these remarks only apply to science at its paradigmatic ideal. The slavish way scientists now submit to corporate and governmental institutional control is dangerously skewing the intellectual playing field as never before. It's absolutely essential that one have read and understood Freud before one undertakes to read Lacan and have any chance whatsoever of making sense of what his thought portends. The richness of the Lacanian metaphor is to be found in the unique ways in which he combines meaningful elements from other disciplines to form a rebus, the solving of which lets one in on the discussion. Lacan, sensitive to the dangers inherent in any discussions of his subject, speaks in tongues so that those who do get it are those who should; if Sokal doesn't get it, it's because he wasn't meant to. To say something doesn't weigh what one's calculations say it should while not having the slightest notion of what one is weighing is considered in most circles to be idiotic. However, admonitions such as mine don't seem to register with Sokal, who's frequently seen in various combative postures of self-righteous confusion trying to explain away another crass stupidity, such as saying we show that if [Lacan] seems incomprehensible, it is for the very good reason that [he] has nothing to say. Not wrong, mind you, not even confused, but having no meaning at all! What intellectual arrogance! Not even Lacan's most ardent critics have accused him of having nothing to say. As someone who has taken the necessary preparation to read Lacan, I can say that in every instance of textual confusion, and there were an embarrassing number of such instances, I never once thought it was Lacan who didn't know what he was talking about; and indeed, when the scales of ignorance finally fell, they fell from my eyes and not Lacan's. You may appreciate the zeal with which I look forward to the full text of Sokal's latest sortie, whose potential for self-disaster is exponential to its length. The problem of not having sufficient command of the areas of expertise into which one is venturing turns out to be no problem at all, since Sokal's function is not one of honest intellectual research, but rather to prowl around and destroy all vestiges of opposition to the hegemonic authority of science to define the real.

Had Sokal made the effort to understand Lacan, he might realize that when Lacan says he intends to raise psychoanalysis to the level of science, he doesn't intend to reduce it to a series of mathematical equations. He means he wants psychoanalysis to be as rigorous a discipline as mathematics, but not mathematics. It's critical that Lacan's equations find confirmation within the structure of psychoanalysis; it's within this space that the mathematics must add up. Lacanian equations aren't constructed, as Sokal so arrogantly assumes, to allow journeyman mathematicians to see immediately the ephemeral structures of psychoanalysis; they're constructed to guide psychoanalysts through the conflicted unconscious of a human psyche. Sokal's tactics and conclusions exemplify the drone-like brutality of those who attempt to impose one field over another in an attempt to smother it into submission. At the theoretical level that positivists like Sokal operate, the only psychology that's possible is a general psychology faithful to the numbers that they support, a psychology more like obedience school than the lonely and often terrifying search for one's hidden identity that is the sole purview of psychoanalysis. It's all the difference between one who is spooning for metaphors in his soup dining with another who keeps shoving the check in his face. There's no benefit of the doubt in Sokal's approach, there's no search for the legitimacy of other points of view, there's not a milligram of honest scholarship; it is shot through with the same anti-intellectual bias that one finds at a suburban mixer. Sokal's attacks on Postmodernism reflect a neurotic overcompensation of a premonitory angst, which he shares with authors such as Norman Levitt, Paul Gross, Alan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza and Francis Fukuyama, that if science is the most exact form of measurement and observation, it is at the same time the least. It's this fear that lurks behind a pedantic posture that's both reactionary and cranky. It's no accident that Lacan's formulation of an erect penis evokes such a blind denunciation. There's absolutely no justification to point the finger at Lacan for reducing the psyche to the phallic level when one can plainly see that schmeckles like Sokal do it to themselves.