Thinking about modernity - in satire and economics

Abstract

Abstract The history of the structuralist and post-structuralist theory, in France and the United States, is marked by two famous discussions (it is tempting to consider them as its beginning and end … ): the fIrst is the polemics between Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes in 1965-6 about “la nouvelle critique”; the second, the international controversy around Alan Sokal's anti-postmodern mystification published in 1996. The two discussions were unusually abrupt and violent, mixing intellectual reasons with moral accusations. It is sufficient to say that the two books resuming the “anti-theoretical” views were containing in their titles the same word imposture: Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture? by Raymond Picard and Impostures intellectuelles by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. And those who defended the “theoretical” approach to culture utilised non-academic arguments too, trying to discover under the attacks against the theory a self-interested tendency: thus for example Roland Barthes, opening his response to Picard and his supporters in periodicals, talked about “something primitive” which “began to move”, that is to say the corporate solidarity of the “university criticism” threatened by the new methods of literary studies. And in the course of Sokal's debate, which took an exceptionally wide scope thanks to Internet, some authors pretended Sokal's aim to be an anti-French attack from the direction of American scholarships or a public relations device with the purpose of regaining financial credits for exact sciences, diminished after the end of the Cold War.