Suppose you legitimately wanted to grasp the writings of an intellectual, but they proved to be difficult for you to understand. What course of action could you take? Would you try your best to do a close reading? Would you consult secondary sources to see if they could shed some light on the topic? Would you try to find books or articles by those influenced by the intellectual, to see if his or her legacy produced any useful concepts?

Suppose instead that you had already made up your mind that the intellectual is an impostor, and you just wanted to demonstrate that he or she had nothing important to say. Would you quote a difficult passage out of context? Would you find a short, jargon-laden passage and then leave it up to the reader to make sense of it? Well you could, but that would be intellectually lazy and disingenuous.

That’s exactly what Richard Dawkins did in this ten year old review of Fashionable Nonsense, a book that supposedly “outed” French intellectuals for abusing scientific terminology. You can think of Dawkins’ review as a condensed version of the book. In it he focuses on Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigary, and Jean Baudrillard.

Dawkins apparently takes issue with the Deleuze and Guattari, not for their ideas, because he’s hardly tried to understand them, but for their writing style. In a strange turn, he then decides to quote scientist Peter Medawar, because apparently his style is something to be emulated:

“This calls to mind Peter Medawar’s earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar’s own elegant and clear prose): Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought… ”

That’s elegant and clear? Really? I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. But, that’s the thing about style. It’s like taste. Who cares what you like? It has little to do with intellectual rigor. As for the charge that the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari are meaningless unless they can be phrased in an easier to understand language, I would recommend reading Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLanda.

There you go. There’s your magic bullet, Mr. Dawkins. The same applies to Noam Chomsky (whom I just noticed is erroneously placed in the philosophy section of Wikipedia). Chomsky says here that, “The proponents of ‘theory’ and ‘philosophy’ have a very easy task if they want to make their case. Simply make known to me what was and remains a ’secret’ to me: I’ll be happy to look.” How intellectually lazy can one be? Here, I’ll provide a link to the MIT Library, just for you.

Slavoj Zizek makes a strong case against the over-celebration of Chomsky’s political writings and rejection of theory and philosophy,

Chomsky and people like him seem to think that if we just got the facts out there, things would almost take care of themselves. Why is this wrong? Why aren’t “the facts” enough?

Let me give you a very naive answer. I think that basically the facts are already known. This is what I’ve referred to as “postmodern cynicism.” Let’s take Chomsky’s analyses of how the CIA intervened in Nicaragua. Ok, a lot of details, yes, but did I learn anything fundamentally new? It’s exactly what I’d expected: the CIA was playing a very dirty game. Of course it’s more convincing if you learn the dirty details. But I don’t think that we really learned anything dramatically new there. I don’t think that merely “knowing the facts” can really change people’s perceptions.

But, let’s get back to Richard Dawkins. He makes a few good points in his review. I agree to a point that some “postmodern” writers are full of bull. But that’s no reason to lump them all together. The most audacious accusation that he makes against Deleuze and Guattari is that they abuse scientific concepts. I would argue that it is more accurate to say that they use scientific concepts speculatively, in new contexts, in the hope that they might later become useful. And we all know that a pure scientist like Dawkins would never do anything like that. Oh wait…

I almost forgot about memes.