Latour, Kristeva, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc

[HoreTore]

So, they want to get Putin, right?

C'mon, throw me a bone here.

Actually, this is the reason I've been reading these, Sarmatian. It first started when Latour was awarded the Ludwig Holberg-prize(major irony alert) earlier this year. Fast forward a couple of days, and the old and bitter professor Jon Elster publishes a chronicle in aftenposten, demanding the prize is shut down as it has disgraced itself by giving awards to charlatans(Kristeva, Jameson and Latour). This sparked several other chronicles, either attacking Elster or joining his attack on Latour.

These were published on the net as well, with open commentaries. Now, these are usually cesspits of vulgarities from "the facebook-conservatives"(derogatory norwegian term for the right-wing nonsense manifesting itself on the net). On these articles, however, it was completely silent. I found this fact both interesting and hilarious. What we had was a high temperature debate between Marxists attacking each other for politically correct science. You'd think that would make any right-winger firing on all cylinders, yet it was completely silent. One of the chroniclers even joined the comment section, yet no right-winger reared its head, it was just a collection of various academics. Apparently, the debate was conducted at a level too intelligent for your average islamophobe, and they're all too uneducated to even know what the Marxists were talking about...

Oh, and several of them were of the dangerous cultural-Marxist flavour as well...

im reading about Derrida and Baudrillard atm

First of all: you have my deepest condolences.

if you have a less vague/more serious question, perhaps i can help you or pass the question on for you.

Well, as chronic vagueness seems to be a trademark of these writers, you'd think it was appropriate to ask them vague questions...

But okay, I've got a question which is as concrete as it gets:

Kristian Bjørkdahl attempted to defend Latour from Elster's criticism. As one example of Latour's worth, he attempted to explain that 2+2=4 is not necessarily true. Rather, 2+2=4 is just a convention that scientists agree on, and represents no fundamental truth(which doesn't seem to exist anyway, but that's another story). 2+2=4 s apparently only true because of the meaning given to "2", "+", etc.

Now, as I see it, this sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding of what mathematics actually are. So, my question is: is it possible to maintain that 2+2=4 does not represent a fundamental fact without having misunderstood the very basis of what mathematics are?