Give us a break

Though it remains hands down the best English-language news magazine, even as it quaintly refers to itself as a "newspaper", The Economist sometimes wraps its head around its ankles. In its year-end issue it devotes a couple of pages to mocking lit-crit types who've been "deconstructing" the Economist, making fun, in particular, of their quasi-exegetical pretensions to finding and decoding domineering and exclusionary master narratives within its articles. Great. It's always fun to pick on the goofy excesses of graduate students and junior faculty. It sells magazines and grants an air of intellectual superiority.

But wait! In the same issue, in its cover story on Apocalypticism, millenarianism, etc., the Economist does its own bit of lit crittery, and not a particularly inventive one at that. Succeeding earlier cyclical cosmologies, Zoroaster begets apocalypticism and a linear conception of history, bequeathing it to Judeaism and Christianity (OK. Standard fare). Marxist historiography also has an apocalyptic master narrative (also not news). Manifest destiny and even the idea of "progress" depend on a the imputed presence of an End (Lit Crit 201). In short, this is all a type of grand hermeneutics which is inconceivable without the speculative inheritance of the literary theoretical tradition which stretches from Nietzsche to the present.

I can see scientists cringing in their lab coats, gazing longingly at their pin-ups of Allen Sokal. "It's all so speculative, there's no data, no proof!" But here's the thing: scientists have budgets for labs. They make lots of mistakes there, and don't publish them. They also publish tons of useless or soon-to-be-superceded work. Humanists have only one good lab: the market. They discuss things with colleagues, which could be likened to preliminary due diligence, get drafts read, and then publish. At that point in time, their ideas really enter the lab. So yeah, there's lots of funny stuff floating around out there. The real reason magazines don't make fun of scientists so much is not that there's not lots of foolishness out there, but that their work doesn't provide as much good comic material.