Anders
Sandra Harding had her time in the limelight; now it’s Andrew Ross’ turn. Fair’s fair. All children are talented, all children are special, all have something to say, we must listen politely to all of them and not make some feel bad and excluded and marginalized and of low worth by ignoring them. Nor must we throw the little bastards out of school merely because they threatened or assaulted a teacher, unless a gun or a knife was used. Once again, fair’s fair. Exclusion damages the academic performance of people who are excluded (except when it doesn’t), therefore it is important to avoid exclusion except in the most extreme of cases. A child who shoots up the classroom with an AK-47 would probably do better in another environment, but short of that, it’s all love and inclusion and extra attention for the dear little mischief-makers. But that’s another subject. We were talking about hip trendy Andrew Ross.
It’s interesting reading Ross right after Harding, because in a way he is far more sophisticated than she is, but in another way he isn’t. There is a veneer of sophistication of sorts in his writing – in the style rather than the substance – that is very different from the way Harding writes. You don’t keep getting that dismayed feeling that you’re reading the work of a small child, or at best a teacher of small children who has forgotten how to write for grown-ups. No, you can tell this guy is an adult, all right, and that he’s been around, he knows what’s what, he knows how to push the buttons and impress the right-on. But a veneer is all it is. It’s about a millimeter thick; it’s all surface. The content is just as dopy as what Harding says. And there’s almost as much self-betrayal. There is for instance the way Ross informs us that he’ll be taking a good hard look at the rhetoric of science, while all the time he is peddling nothing but rhetoric himself. That’s exactly why his writing seems so silly: it’s so obvious, the way he simply relies on sly emotive language in place of evidence or argument – and yet he fancies himself a debunker of rhetoric! It’s a joke, and one that he seems to be blithely unaware of. So not as sophisticated as he’d like to think. Apparently he’s quite good-looking though, so that’s all right.
You’ll be wanting some examples.
While I occasionally analyze the language, philosophy, and rhetoric of the dominant scientific claims, my chief interest lies in describing how various scientific cultures – sublegitimate, alternative, marginal, or oppositional – both embody and contest these claims in their cultural activities and beliefs…I have devoted a good deal of attention…to alternative cultures like New Age that are subordinate, marginal, or opposed to official scientific cultures governed by the logic of technocratic and corporate decision-making.
There, that’s good, don’t you think? See what I mean? On the one hand you have ‘cultures’ that are marginal, oppositional, alternative, subordinate, opposed, sublegitimate (do you begin to get his drift, or is it too subtle?), and on the other you have ‘cultures’ that are dominant, official, governed (ew) by the logic (oh no not that) of technocratic (urrgh) and corporate (ow!) decision-making (fascists!). Impressive stuff.
Consequently I focus on how the authority of dominant scientific claims is respected and emulated even as it is contested by apprentices, amateurs, semi-legitimates, and outlaws who are detached in some degree from the authoritative institutions of science.
That’s a great one. Notice how he manages to refer to ‘authority’ twice in the space of one sentence! Now I call that resourceful. And of course he doesn’t limit himself to that. Certainly not. Why bother with precision when you have a nuke in your pocket. No, throw in dominant and institutions while you’re at it, and of course on the other side talk of semi-legitimates who ‘contest’ (always a great hurrah-word), and especially those dear detached outlaws.
Yep, you bet, that’s how the work of ‘contesting’ the ‘authority’ of ‘dominant’ scientific ‘cultures’ is carried out: via vocabulary and innuendo. That’s all it takes. Just say one side has all the advantages – authority, dominance, all that stuff – and the other side has all the other thing – marginalization, opposition, outlawhood – and the job is done. Obviously science is the exact equivalent of slaveowners, feudal masters, priests, landlords, bosses: possessors of arbitrary unjust power which they use to dominate and trample everyone else and engross all the riches. There’s no need to know anything at all about actual science – and Ross doesn’t: notoriously he dedicated this book (Strange Weather) to all the science teachers he never had. Nope; rhetoric is all-powerful. But it’s not authoritative, so that’s all right.
I recall an article by Steven Wienberg (I think I found it, once upon a time, through a link on Sokal’s site) which got a nice dig into Ross (Isn’t Ross one of the editors of Social Text, which published Sokal’s hoax?).
Weinberg noted Ross’s claim that science had moved from the linearity of Newtonian Mechanics to the non-linearity of quantum mechanics, which, to Ross I suppose, represented something suggestively sociological, even “subversive.” Weinberg, with a straight face, merely pointed out that the mathematics of Newtonian mechanics is non-linear, whereas the mathematics of quantum mechanics is linear, and given that both theories are grounded in mathematics, he (Weinberg) couldn’t figure out what Ross was talking about.
Touche.
Thinking about Ross, and other anti-science screeds that proceed out of English professors and literary critics (I believe Ross is an English prof, but don’t quote me), I was reminded of a book by a Canadian postmodernist. It is a biography of Galileo, and it is notable for its premise that all Galileo biographies to date have it wrong. And how do they have it wrong? The Church was right! I will look up the title and author for reference, but I couldn’t forget a book with a thesis like that (remember: A publishing house bought it! LOL).
I found it. Written by Wade Rowland, it is entitled “Galileo’s Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation between Galileo and the Church.”
From a review by Stephen Barr, particle physicist, U of Delaware:
“Rowland . . . holds a chair of Ethics in Communications at Ryerson University in Toronto. He is not a historian, philosopher, theologian, or scientist, at least to judge from the rather gross errors he makes in all those fields. It is remarkable that one so ill-equipped should undertake a reinterpretation of so complex episode in history. What is most remarkable about the book, however, is its thesis, which is essentially that Galileo had it coming.”
Yup, that’s who Ross is all right. (It couldn’t have happened to someone who deserved it more. Ha!) Yup, that Weinberg article is terrific. We have it in Flashback.
Thanks for Galileo thing; very interesting. I’ll have to look into that.
It’s an academic thing, of course, especially in fields that really aren’t cumulative. You have to say something, and if it’s something outrageous, well, you’ll get that much more attention. Even if it’s bat-loony. It worked for Ross – irritatingly enough. No doubt it worked for Rowland.
Oh and yes, Ross is an English prof. From the flap copy – he ‘teaches English and Cultural Studies at Princeton’ (Princeton how thou art translated!). Yeah, just the guy we want telling us what’s wrong with the ‘authority’ of science – a cult stud.
He isn’t that good-looking unless you consider cocaine chic attractive.
[laughing a good deal]
No, true. But you can tell he thinks he is! He has that ‘I’m so cool’ look. So that’s what I meant really.
Look at the bright side. It’s so much EASIER to write bullshit than to make a genuine contribution to knowledge. If most readers can’t tell the difference anyhow, the postmodern bullshit generators can seem so much more PRODUCTIVE than those fuddy-duddy traditionalists who prefer to get their facts straight than to shoot their mouths off.
OB, I’m afraid that if you don’t lower the standard of your contributions DRASTICALLY you are NEVER going to make anything approaching the same amount of noise as Andrew Ross and his empty drums.
Don’t you envy them?
Cultural Studies? That reminds of a comment I heard somewhere. If an academic “discipline” ends in “Studies,” it is characterized by 2 things: 1. It has no methodology; and 2. It has no content. LOL
All this bashing of academe prompts me to refer you to that famous institution, the University of Bums on Seats:
http://www.cynicalbastards.com/ubs/
Here you can buy a degree in ‘Issues’ or ‘Post-Rational Discourse’ from the comfort of your home.
The problem with “Cultural Studies” is not just the vague “Studies” part, but the “Cultural”. “Culture” = patterns of human behaviour = really, really big field. In a wide enough definition, virtually all of the traditional arts/humanistic sciences/Geisteswissenschaften could be encompassed by the moniker. I do not know about the methodology of “Cultural Studies” but the name itself is foreboding enough.
Oh yes, it’s easier to write bullshit all right. Especially this kind, which really doesn’t even have a ghost of an argument. It’s just a couple of hundred pages of meaningless innuendo.
Cultural, yes – that’s another thing. This whole business of calling science a ‘culture’ all the time. More innuendo. It’s just another Kulcha, with its own peculiar customs, nothing more than that.
The trouble is that Ross is *close* to a (not very important) point – scientists do have a culture (mathematicians give seminars and drink lots of caffeine, chemists spend lots of time in labs then drink beer).
But of course this shouldn’t change their results – a mathematician who doesn’t give seminars or drink coffee can still prove theorems, and so on. *Science* itself doesn’t have a culture (or at least it shouldn’t) even if those who practice it do.
Of course, I think Ross is being deliberately vague, so that it’s harder to work out exactly what he’s saying (and to work out that it’s either trivial and right, or nontrivial and wrong).
“…so that it’s harder to work out exactly what he’s saying (and to work out that it’s either trivial and right, or nontrivial and wrong).”
Or indeed meaningless and “not even wrong” as Feinman may have phrased it.
Yes, and that’s one of the things (though far from the only one) that’s so irritating about him. The deliberate vagueness and all the rhetoric and innuendo certainly make it seem that he has some idea of how little warrant he has for what he says. So what does he say it for! But then that’s standard practice.
There’s another glaring example of that kind of fancy footwork, that I might post later.