Selected Letters from Readers
| September 21, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 07, Number 3, May 1997 |
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Editors’ note:
We received many letters addressing our move to Johns Hopkins University Press and to a subscription-based model of recovering our costs. That model in brief: with the January 1997 issue, PMC is published as part of Project Muse of Johns Hopkins University Press. The most current issue of PMC remains freely available on the Web; back issues, however, are now restricted to individual and institutional subscribers.
Many readers wrote to lament the move to a subscription plan of any kind, citing PMC’s accessibility as its single most powerful asset. We also received several letters from contributing authors who felt that restricting access to their work changed, in fundamental and disturbing ways, the terms under which they initially published their work in this journal. Several letters pointed out that, under this model, contributing authors lose access to their own work once the issue in which it appears is no longer current.
Rather than simply represent these letters in this column, the editors sought to foster discussion of the crucial issues these letters raised, issues central not only to the continued health of PMC but also to electronic scholarly publication more generally. In March, we began an electronic mailing list discussion and invited readers, authors, Board reviewers and representatives from John Hopkins University Press to join the discussion. The full archive of the discussion to date is available here.
The discussion has already had one immediate result: the publishers have decided to provide free text-only access to the journal and its back issues. Further details about this plan will be made available on the discussion list and in the September issue. We invite those interested in joining the discussion to send mail to pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu. We plan to include an edited version of the discussion in our September issue.
Reader’s Report on David Golumbia’s “Hypercapital,” PMC 7.1
Golumbia’s “Hypercapital”, while an excellently written article full of deliciously interesting links, is clearly hoist of its own petard. How can he claim that “The world of corporate capitalism is dominated by actors who do not truly see the play of which they are a part, and dicta whose consequences are themselves beyond the ken of all but the most foresighted of capitalists” with such elitist, self-congratulatory insouciance?
A touch more humility would go a long way to enhancing the credibility of such far-reaching articles. The brightest minds are not all cloistered in academia, and visions of truth are not all granted to the lucky few.
These comments are from: Donald Summers
dsummers@metrolink.net
Reader’s Report on Arkady Plotnitsky’s “‘But It Is Above All Not True’: Derrida, Relativity, and the ‘Science Wars,’” PMC 7.2
Granted, Gross & Leavitt, Sokal, Weinberg, et al may not have properly translated or understood Derrida. Does the same apply to many of the other authors of articles in the issue of Social Textthat published the Sokal hoax? Or do we scientists misunderstand as well what they are saying about science?
These comments are from: Gordon Banks
geb@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu
Arkady Plotnitsky replies:
These are important questions in the context of the current debate concerning the relationships between science and the humanities or the social sciences (the debate that has acquired the rather misleading name of the “Science Wars”), and I am glad to have an opportunity to comment on these questions here. The main question here is double: on the one hand, that of the discrimination between lesser and better work, and, on the other, that of the “ethics of reading” and/as public criticism.
First of all, as I have said in my article, we in the humanities must acknowledge without hesitation that some of the “postmodernist” (using this, often in turn misleading, term for the sake of convenience here) work on science is indeed based on woefully inadequate knowledge and lack of careful thought. It is true, however, that discriminating between what is sense and what is nonsense on science in the current humanities is not always easy, especially because of the unfamiliar (to most scientists) critical idiom accompanying such arguments. Nor, in part for the same reason, is it easy to discriminate among the secondary commentaries on Derrida and other key postmodernist authors, commentaries on which scientists often rely in forming their views and which they have often used in their critical arguments in the current debates. Some of these commentaries are at best confused. Indeed, problematic commentaries on science and on postmodernist figures and ideas are sometimes found in the same works. The discrimination between good and bad work, on all sides, may well be the greatest problem here, and the confusion (and bewilderment) on the part of scientists is understandable and, to a degree (but only to a degree), justified.
It would be difficult for me, in part for the reasons just indicated, to comment here on the articles in the “Science Wars” issue of Social Text. These articles should, however, be evaluated with the factors just indicated in mind. Certainly specific problems found there, however severe (and some are), cannot be extrapolated so as to attack or dismiss any given areas of the humanities or the social sciences–whether cultural studies, deconstruction, gender studies, science studies, or whatever.
That said, scientists (or other readers) are entitled to have a negative or indeed dismissive opinion about any work, however such work is regarded in its own field or elsewhere. It is a different matter, however, when a public criticism is at stake, especially in print. The ethics of public criticism demands that, if one wants to argue against lesser or even outright “junk” work, one has the obligation to read this work carefully and to support one’s argument accordingly. This is, unfortunately, not what we have seen in most recent commentaries by scientists in the wake of Gross and Levitt’s book (and in the book itself). The best work is often dismissed or attacked without a careful reading, or by egregious misreading, and without paying any attention to the context or the meaning of basic terms involved. The problem of discrimination, discussed above, cannot therefore serve as an excuse here.
That is not to say that there are no exceptions in recent criticism of the humanities by scientists, nor, of course, that certain points concerning the lack of adequate knowledge and thinking on science in the humanities are not justified. It may be pointed out, however, that the humanists, while they should not be absolved of all responsibility, are not always entirely to blame. On the other hand, some popular, and sometimes even specialized, literature on science is not without some blame, or at least some responsibility. Quite a few misconceived or misleading statements on science in literary and cultural studies come directly from such literature. Unfortunately, too, the borderlines between radical views and bad thinking (and both occur in statements by scientists and humanists alike) are not always easy for nonspecialists to recognize.
For ethical and conceptual reasons alike, then, much caution is required on all sides–and with respect to all sides. This caution is perhaps what has been most lacking thus far. This is one of the reasons for my conclusion in the article: “Scholars in the humanities should, of course, exercise due caution as to the claims they make about mathematics and science, and respect the areas of their specificity. Reciprocally, however, scientists and other non-humanist scholars should exercise due care and similar caution in their characterization of the humanities, especially when they are dealing with innovative and complex work, such as that of Derrida, and all the more so if they want to be critical about it.” By taking this approach, we may also develop a better sense of the meaning and quality of whatever we read, whether we do it for ourselves or, especially, when we want to communicate this sense to others.