[PEN-L:28609] Irigaray's feminist take on science

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: Irigaray's feminist take on science

[was: RE: [PEN-L:28549] RE: Re: rejecting a school]

I have two comments on the posting below; they are off-beat because I don't know what they imply. (1) Stephen Wolfram's theories have hardly been generally accepted; it's hard to justify Irigaray's assertion on this basis alone. (2) John Nash, the famous game theorist and schizophrenic, had some success with the fluid dynamics referred to below. It is notable that he is extremely individualistic and "male" (though at times confused about his own sexuality).

BTW, it's pretty obvious to me that there are biases and distortions in science, including those arising from gender, class, ethnic, and similar issues. However, like the author, I don't have the time to get a complete take on Irigaray's contributions.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

 
> We don't pretend here at adequacy to understand the French feminist
> philosopher and critical theorist Luce Irigaray in any great
> depth. Since
> male life expectancy is only 74.5 years in the USA, and what with
> maintaining this website, keeping up with the newspapers and
> trying to read
> some of the classics of Western literature, we frankly doubt
> that we're ever
> going to have the spare time to get into her work. Maybe
> perdida, with the
> extra five years' life expectancy her gender brings, will
> give it a crack
> some time.
>
> Because of our ignorance about what Irigaray actually wrote,
> we're reduced
> to getting our information third hand, via people like Alan
> Sokal and Jean
> Bricmont. They wrote a book called " Intellectual Impostures
> " in order to
> tell us, at mind-numbing length, that Irigaray and other
> French critical
> theorists were Very Bad People and Not Worth Reading. Indeed,
> so many people
> are of this opinion, and so many of them are folks (like
> Richard Dawkins and
> William Safire) who have turned out to be utter a??eholes on
> every other
> subject, that I at least among the Adequacy staff had come to
> the conclusion
> that if literally the entire
> inflated-self-esteem-hard-science-equals-hard-d?ck-know-it-all
>  community
> hated Irigaray enough to write a whole big book about how
> stupid she was,
> there was almost certainly something to be said for her.
>
> What I didn't expect was that one of the greatest
> mathematical geniuses of
> the last twenty years would prove this view to be crashingly and
> resoundingly right.
>
> For those of you with better things to do with your time than
> keep up with
> the Science vs Sociology wars, the rap sheet against Irigaray
> boils down to
> one specific charge; that she did recklessly or with malice
> aforethought
> suggest that there might be some connection between
>
> 1)  the way in which classical mechanics concentrates for the
> most part on
> the motions of medium-sized rigid objects, and
>
> 2) the fact that most scientists in history have been men,
> and therefore for
> the most part obsessed with the motions of a particular kind
> of object, an
> object which is often decidedly less rigid and decidedly more
> medium-sized
> than its owner would like, but which could charitably be
> assumed to tend
> asymptotically toward the Newtonian ideal.
>
> Specifically, the great sin which got Irigaray into the Black Book of
> Postmodernism was to suggest that mathematics was not as
> value-independent
> and Platonic a field of inquiry as one might think. In an attractively
> adventurous quote, she speculated that things would have been
> different
> (specifically, our view of which classes of applied maths
> problem are easy
> and which difficult) if women had been in charge of the whole
> enterprise
>
> "The Newtonian break has ushered scientific enterprise into a
> world where
> sense perception is worth little, a world which can lead to
> the annihilation
> of the very stakes of physics' object: the matter (whatever
> the predicates)
> of the universe and of the bodies that constitute it. In this
> very science,
> moreover [ d'ailleurs ], cleavages exist: quantum theory/field theory,
> mechanics of solids/dynamics of fluids, for example. "
>
> Or as American writer Katherine Hayles puts it...
>
> " The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed
> the inability of
> science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the
> association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have s?x
> organs that
> protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak
> menstrual blood and
> vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that
> science has not
> been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The
> problem of
> turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of
> fluids (and of
> women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated
> remainders.
>
> Hard questions
>
> So, to sum it up, male maths is obsessed with h?rd-ons, while
> women's maths,
> if it existed, would be able to solve problems of turbulent
> flow because
> women are more interested in it. Not, one might have thought, all that
> outrageous a piece of speculation about the sociology of
> mathematicians. But
> apparently this small mention of our old pal the pen?s was
> enough to bring
> out a long parade of male academics absolutely eager to spell
> out exactly
> where Luce Irigaray had gone wrong. So we have...
>
>
> Irigaray, in sum, does not understand the nature of the physical and
> mathematical problems posed in fluid mechanics, " -- Sokal & Bricmont,
> Fashionable Nonsense
> " You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy
> absurdity of this
> kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too
> familiar), but it helps
> to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason
> why turbulent
> flow is a hard problem: the Navier-Stokes equations are
> difficult to solve.
> " -- Richard Dawkins, Nature."
> Irigaray's invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse
> than dodgy "
> -- John Sturrock, LRB
> 
> And so on.
> 
> What we are obviously meant to conclude is that there is no
> sociological
> reason whatsoever why turbulent flow is generally considered to be an
> intractable calculation; it has to be intractable, because
> the only way to
> model turbulent flow is via the Navier-Stokes partial differential
> equations, and these have no closed-form solution, so they
> are intrinsically
> difficult. Case closed. Irigaray didn't know sh?t, so let's
> burn the witch
> for lying about science. Or is that the end of the story?
>
> OK, we're going to be a bit rude about some scientists here,
> so sensitive
> souls should look away.......
>
> There is a much easier way to model turbulent flow than
> trying to solve the
> Navier-Stokes equations by brute force, and if Sokal,
> Bricmont, Dawkins and
> the gang had held themselves to their own intellectual standards and
> bothered to look up the science before shooting their fckng
> mouths off,
> they'd have known about it.
>
> In 1986, Uriel Frisch, Brosl Hasslacher and Yves Pomeau
> published the paper
> " Lattice-gas automata for the Navier-Stokes equation " in
> Physical Review
> Letters. In this paper, they demonstrated that by modelling a
> turbulent
> fluid using the theory of cellular automata as invented by
> John von Neumann
> and developed by Stephen Wolfram, one could achieve a step jump in the
> mathematical tractability of the modelling of turbulent flow.
> Interestingly,
> this paper appear some ten years before Sokal and Bricmont published "
> Impostures Intellectuels ", presumably some time after
> Sokal's knowledge of
> the field had ossified, but one year after Luce Irigaray set
> out her views
> on fluid mechanics in " This S?x Which Is Not One " in 1985.
>
> So what's the big deal? Well, as Stephen Wolfram, the
> mathematical genius
> and author of computer program Mathematica, argues in his
> recent book, " A
> New Kind Of Science ", the theory of cellular automata (the
> eponymous " new
> kind of science") is a massively important development in
> mathematics. By
> stepping back from the differential equations way of thinking which
> described classical mechanics so well and allowed us to calculate the
> trajectories of cannonballs so accurately for so many years,
> it is possible
> to use this new method to dissolve all sorts of problems which had
> previously appeared to be utterly intractable. It gets
> better. The theory of
> cellular automata is best illustrated by reference to the
> famous " Game of
> Life ", in which tiny little cells, which look a lot like
> ova, propagate
> themselves by growing, dividing, gestating and increasing in
> complexity in a
> way which only someone who was utterly blind or trying to be
> annoying on
> purpose could avoid seeing as inordinately analogous to the
> workings of the
> female reproductive system.
>
> Cellular automata theory doesn't deal with rigid things which
> fly around in
> continuously differentiable trajectories; it deals with
> things which diffuse
> outward gradually, then experience sudden unpredictable changes in
> complexity. The parallels with Irigaray's writings on the
> feminine as fluid
> are unarguable:
>
> " continuous, compressible, dilatable, viscous, conductible,
> diffusable...
> it enjoys and suffers from a greater sensitivity to
> pressures... it changes
> - in volume or in force... it allows itself to be easily
> traversed by flow
> by virtue of its conductivity to currents... it mixes with
> bodies of a like
> state, sometimes dilutes itself in them in analmost
> homogenous manner, which
> makes the distinction between the one and the other problematical: and
> furthermore that it is already diffuse " in itself ", which
> disconcerts any
> attempt at static identification. "
>
> So in other words, Sokal and Bricmont (and later on, their crowd of
> wannabes), were heaping fun on Irigaray for predicting, one
> year before the
> FHP paper, that the problem of fluid mechanics would only be
> soluble by
> turning to an area of mathematics which is vastly more suited to the
> description of female sexuality than male, and being right.
> We at adequacy
> think that an apology is probably in order. .