Old Email Archive

digest 1997-01-03 #001


11:29 PM 1/2/97 -0800
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2 Jan 1997 13:01:17 -0800
From: "Frank E. Durham" 
Subject: Re: So how was the SLS conference?
Dear litsci listci,
At 11:04 AM 12/31/96 -0800, Gilbert J. Brown wrote:
>I have been a curious reader of the recent conversation presumably
alluding
>to a two
>cultures clas[h] at the last SLS meeting.  I did not attend the
meeting and
>would be interested to hear what happened.
>Thanks.
________________
I raised the question about Paula Treichler's keynote presentation at
SLS
Atlanta 1996, and the exchange that followed.  And I did that because I
doubt that we could agree about "what happened."  To the
extent that my
conjecture may be correct, that evening can be seen to have produced a
complex and irreducible verbal construction--a literary artifact.  Is
that
good?  Literature from science studies?  Because literature is humane
and
responsive?
So here is how it looked to me.  Paula Treichler, who is not from SLS
but
who has been active over many years in erasing the boundaries between
science studies and science policies, spoke from her experience: how
theory,
as cultural studies, has influenced the outcomes for HIV/AIDS in
positive
ways during the past 15 years.
Paula, like many veterans of the early years of those battles, has a
feisty
style and is more concerned with truth than with politeness, or so it
seems
to me.  This, because--again from my perspective--defining AIDS has
been
more important recently than defining the cultural uses of Maxwell's
equations.  And she was responding directly to an assertion, from the
fractious collective called "Alan Sokal," that science studies
could never
influence a cure for AIDS.  (My hope initially was that Paula would
enter
into this post-conference exchange.  And maybe Alan Sokal as well.)
Anyway, at one point I heard Paula refer to a well-attended panel that
she
helped to organize at her university (Illinois/Urbana-Champaign) to
discuss
questions raised by the Sokal-based attack on the conjoining of
literary
theory with physics.  A number of physicists were there to hear that
panel,
she said, and (approximate quote) "they certainly did not raise
the
intellectual level of that discussion."
Then at the end of Paula's lecture, Sid Perkowitz, a physicist from
Emory
and the local host for SLS, rose to object, so it seemed, to such a
characterization of physicists.  "This is reprehensible," I
heard Sid say.
I took Sid's meaning to be--well, I am not sure what he meant, maybe
that we
should be careful not to offend each other.  Paula was not apologetic,
and
even defended Andrew Ross.  The meeting began on a sour note.
That, as I say, is what happened.  (One Tulane professor once rose in a
general faculty meeting to move that the word "stated" be
changed in the
minutes to "alleged" everywhere that the remarks of another
faculty member
were recorded.)
As a physicist who has known Paula Treichler for several years, I was
not
surprised by Paula's report of physicists not doing their homework.  But
I
was disappointed that elsewhere in her presentation she assumed a
certain
political commonality within a group that hopes for diversity.  Was
that
your point, Sid?
I will reserve my usual generalizations about the perils of
interdisciplinarity for a later stage of this discussion, should it
continue.  I agree with Nancy Barta-Smith that kindness is a worthy
goal.
Where is it to be found?  Maxwell's equations can be cruel beyond
bearing,
as Sister Helen Prejean has noted.
Best wishes for 1997,
Frank Durham
New Orleans LA USA