The Sokal Affair

FEED contributor Phil Bereano took on a related subject in his September piece on genetic patenting, "Could You Patent the Sun," featuring extensive documentary evidence on the Human Genome Project and other science and democracy issues.
By now, everyone who still reads a newspaper has heard of the Sokal Prank. The story of the literary hoax perpetrated by Alan D. Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, found its way onto the front page of The New York Times, two more articles in the Times, an AP wire story, and even the front page of my local daily, The Austin American-Statesman (which serves a university town but which does not typically cover the arcane intellectual parrying of the academic elite). While the prank probably reached its half-life a couple of weeks after Sokal admitted his hoax, it may have faint ripples for some time to come. Predictably, however, reportage of the Sokal Prank blows obscuring smoke before an important issue that the mainstream media rarely mentions: the role of science and technology in a modern democracy.
For all cave dwellers with Internet connections, here is a summary of what happened: Sokal submitted an article, with the hair-raising title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to the journal Social Text, regarded as the premier organ of the left's latest intellectual fashion, "cultural studies." Sokal's article was included in a collection dedicated to an examination of the so-called "Science Wars," which have pitted some angry and vocal practicing scientists against social theorists who study the sociology and politics of science.
Sokal's article, last in the collection, is mind-numbing in its use of postmodernist jargon, its descriptions of difficult theories of contemporary physics, and its amateurish recitation of ham-handed caricatures of recent left and feminist critiques of science and technology. It's a paper and ink barbiturate. Andrew Ross, co-editor of the issue and chairman of the American Studies Department at Sokal's own campus, NYU, called the piece a "curio," a somewhat bizarre and novice attempt by a scientist to get into the lingo and the "project" of criticizing science's power in the modern world. In addition to Sokal's deadpan, over-the-top earnestness (which perhaps should have raised some suspicions among the editors), the article is weighted with hundreds of footnotes and dozens and dozens of references, ten times or more the number provided by other authors in the Social Text collection. Ross said that the editors took this to be a novice's lack of self-confidence in new intellectual terrain, and, once they decided to devote an issue to controversies over science, they published Sokal's piece as a kind of affirmative action for a physicist. To their regret, they didn't run it past another physicist prior to publication.

The always-astute Alt.Culture site has a helpful entry for "Cultural Studies," and even includes a brief bio of Andrew Ross himself.

Ross penned a piece on the "Science Wars" for The Nation last October, which The Cultural Studies Times has re-published on their Web site.

Lingua Franca's latest issue hasn't gone to press yet, but you can read Ross's response to the prank at the Social Text site.
Shortly after the issue of Social Text appeared, Sokal announced that his article was a prank, a hoax, a parody, and an "experiment" to see what kind of nonsense would get past the editors of a major journal of social criticism. Sokal claims that any physicist would have "laughed out loud" by the second paragraph of his article in Social Text, because it is there that he mimics the postmodernist sages with: "It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical 'reality,' no less than social 'reality,' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific 'knowledge,' far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it." He later said that anyone who believes this is welcome to jump out his apartment window, which is on the twenty-second floor.
Sokal's explanation is carried in the current issue of the journal Lingua Franca (a response from an unamused Ross will run in their next issue), but word of his mischief had already been circulated on the Internet, where it produced a brief but intense bout of screaming and ranting from both sides. It wasn't long before newspapers picked up the story, and, judging by the coverage, journalists and editors found the whole episode hysterically funny. Defenders of cultural studies leapt to the field's aid -- Stanley Fish wrote an uncharacteristically sober defense on the op-ed page of the Times. Their critics, especially a group of scientists who have been energetically thrashing social theorists for a couple of years now, were giddy over the results of Sokal's "experiment." Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University, told The New York Times that Sokal's parody was "a lot of fun and a source of a certain amount of personal satisfaction."
The real opening salvo in this ice cream war was fired via a thorough but acidly tart book published in 1994, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, by Levitt and Paul R. Gross (Sokal says he was inspired to write his article after reading this book). Gross, a biologist at the University of Virginia, and Levitt scorched the postmodern theorists of science studies for unacceptable ignorance about science, and "a widespread, powerful, corrosive hostility toward science." Levitt has elsewhere deplored "the dreary conceits of postmodern thought and the platitudinous self-righteousness of an academic left in full flight from the demands and disappointments of real politics." Levitt and Gross deny that they're conservatives jumping on left-wing academics for sport. But a conference they helped organize in June of last year, at which two hundred academics and journalists sparred over growing "irrationality" in the U.S., was funded in part by the right-wing Olin Foundation.
Sokal himself denies aiding the right-wing, calling himself a "leftist and a feminist"; he told The New York Times that he's a "leftist in the old-fashioned sense," and he points out that he taught mathematics in Sandinista Nicaragua. His dispute with cultural theorists -- who include longtime stalwarts of the left like Stanley Aronowitz -- is that they have allegedly abandoned "reality" for something imported from France: the airy deconstructionism of Derrida, Barthes, and others, which focuses on language, "texts," complex power relations, and an ultimate loss of subjectivity. All of that is hogwash to Gross, Levitt, Sokal, and many other scientists, even those who think of themselves as leftists or progressives. And they're especially peeved when the black magic of deconstruction is used to describe what they, as scientists, do -- which is, as they see it, to find the truth about the world. Levitt, the most combative (and witty) of the combatants, snorts at what he calls cultural studies' "hermeneutic hootchy-koo" and he has poured gas on this raging fire by saying that if the entire humanities faculty at MIT quit, the science and engineering faculty could make do, while the reverse would not be true.

Higher Superstition seems to be at the center of all the various "Science War" debates. You can read more about it at the Amazon.com site.

The recent reprint of Report from Iron Mountain includes a new introduction that sheds light on the complicated history of the hoax. You can read more about it at the Amazon.com site.
Why has the press found this dispute so titillating? There is, of course, the pants-down embarrassment of the editors of Social Text, who unfortunately do represent a class of intellectuals who have developed a jargon so leaden and obscure that it radiates arrogance. Everyone loves a clever prank, especially one that bursts balloons of ego, and intellectuals of the left, particularly those fluent in French deconstruction, are barn-sized targets.
Sokal's hoax is reminiscent of a similar prank that started back in the 1960s and was revived, oddly, in 1995: the book called Report From Iron Mountain, by Leonard Lewin. Lewin wrote this as an allegedly suppressed government report from the Kennedy administration, top secret but heroically revealed to the public, about how the U.S. had become so dependent on military spending that it could not possibly reform to a peacetime economy should the Cold War end. Report From Iron Mountain was a masterly manipulation of government bureaucratese and a thicket of acronyms, with footnotes (all except two) that referred to real publications (just like Sokal's). It was published in 1966 but only revealed to be a hoax in 1972. Ironically, the Report resurfaced last year in a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal because it's been adopted as a "bible" of government conspiracy by right-wing militias (and republished by The Free Press). The "loonies in the boonies" -- as they are called by The Nation's publisher and longtime editor, Victor Navasky (who had a hand in the parody) -- in a surreal twist, regard the claim that the Report was a hoax as even further proof that the government is trying to hoodwink the public. Lewin is discouraged by this latest turn of events, because, paradoxically, he wrote the book to serve the peace movement.
In the case of the Sokal Prank, there seems to be a little bit of postmodern, cafe cachet to the whole affair. No doubt the "Science Wars" issue of Social Text will sell out and urban poseurs will be seen with a latte in one hand and the journal in the other, most of them having never heard of it before. Baby-boomers might be getting a light buzz from nostalgia over the reenactment of debates from their days in college, when Marcuse and Ellul were on the nightstand. Other newspaper customers who paid attention to this whole japery might just be enjoying the unusual public spectacle of flaming eggheads.
Unfortunately, however, there is an urgent and important issue in this whole debate that is (typically) obscured by the amused frisson of mainstream press coverage. That is the power and authority of science and technology at the end of the twentieth century. Langdon Winner, a professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, says in his contribution to the Social Text issue that the debate called the "science wars" is set in the context of a "renegotiation of the social contract of science" triggered by the end of the Cold War. Theorists in cultural studies have asked, along with others, whether the privileged and priest-like role that scientists and engineers enjoyed during the decades of that conflict is compatible with a post-Cold War vision of democracy. Because scientists and engineers are facing grave uncertainties in the continuation of their funding from the public treasury, not to mention in their status, some of them have reacted to this probing critique with hysteria, even naming left social scientists as allies of creationists, New Age nuts, and other anti-science cranks. The cultural studies theorists have not done themselves any favors with their own attitudes, however, especially in the development of a style of writing and speaking that is anything but democratic. But the issues they're trying to raise, in the closing years of a century marked by both wonder and horror over the products of science and technology, are no joke. It's too bad the Sokal Prank is being regarded as such fun, especially by the right. Perhaps, like the Report From Iron Mountain, what starts out as a clever, convincing, and amusing parody may come back to haunt you.
(June 6, 1996)

Feed Reader Collin Glassey writes in: "I agree entirely that a debate needs to be engaged in the west (it goes beyond the United States) about what should be funded in science and why. I annoyed several of my friends in the Berkeley physics community in the 1980s by arguing that the Superconducting Super Collider was not a project that the U.S. Government should be funding. My main argument was (and still is) that Government funding is a zero-sum game, if high energy physics wins, everyone else (like history, oceanography, etc.) loses."
Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.

FEED contributor Phil Bereano took on a related subject in his September piece on genetic patenting, "Could You Patent the Sun," featuring extensive documentary evidence on the Human Genome Project and other science and democracy issues.	By now, everyone who still reads a newspaper has heard of the Sokal Prank. The story of the literary hoax perpetrated by Alan D. Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, found its way onto the front page of The New York Times, two more articles in the Times, an AP wire story, and even the front page of my local daily, The Austin American-Statesman (which serves a university town but which does not typically cover the arcane intellectual parrying of the academic elite). While the prank probably reached its half-life a couple of weeks after Sokal admitted his hoax, it may have faint ripples for some time to come. Predictably, however, reportage of the Sokal Prank blows obscuring smoke before an important issue that the mainstream media rarely mentions: the role of science and technology in a modern democracy. For all cave dwellers with Internet connections, here is a summary of what happened: Sokal submitted an article, with the hair-raising title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to the journal Social Text, regarded as the premier organ of the left's latest intellectual fashion, "cultural studies." Sokal's article was included in a collection dedicated to an examination of the so-called "Science Wars," which have pitted some angry and vocal practicing scientists against social theorists who study the sociology and politics of science. Sokal's article, last in the collection, is mind-numbing in its use of postmodernist jargon, its descriptions of difficult theories of contemporary physics, and its amateurish recitation of ham-handed caricatures of recent left and feminist critiques of science and technology. It's a paper and ink barbiturate. Andrew Ross, co-editor of the issue and chairman of the American Studies Department at Sokal's own campus, NYU, called the piece a "curio," a somewhat bizarre and novice attempt by a scientist to get into the lingo and the "project" of criticizing science's power in the modern world. In addition to Sokal's deadpan, over-the-top earnestness (which perhaps should have raised some suspicions among the editors), the article is weighted with hundreds of footnotes and dozens and dozens of references, ten times or more the number provided by other authors in the Social Text collection. Ross said that the editors took this to be a novice's lack of self-confidence in new intellectual terrain, and, once they decided to devote an issue to controversies over science, they published Sokal's piece as a kind of affirmative action for a physicist. To their regret, they didn't run it past another physicist prior to publication.
The always-astute Alt.Culture site has a helpful entry for "Cultural Studies," and even includes a brief bio of Andrew Ross himself.
Ross penned a piece on the "Science Wars" for The Nation last October, which The Cultural Studies Times has re-published on their Web site.

The recent reprint of Report from Iron Mountain includes a new introduction that sheds light on the complicated history of the hoax. You can read more about it at the Amazon.com site.	Why has the press found this dispute so titillating? There is, of course, the pants-down embarrassment of the editors of Social Text, who unfortunately do represent a class of intellectuals who have developed a jargon so leaden and obscure that it radiates arrogance. Everyone loves a clever prank, especially one that bursts balloons of ego, and intellectuals of the left, particularly those fluent in French deconstruction, are barn-sized targets. Sokal's hoax is reminiscent of a similar prank that started back in the 1960s and was revived, oddly, in 1995: the book called Report From Iron Mountain, by Leonard Lewin. Lewin wrote this as an allegedly suppressed government report from the Kennedy administration, top secret but heroically revealed to the public, about how the U.S. had become so dependent on military spending that it could not possibly reform to a peacetime economy should the Cold War end. Report From Iron Mountain was a masterly manipulation of government bureaucratese and a thicket of acronyms, with footnotes (all except two) that referred to real publications (just like Sokal's). It was published in 1966 but only revealed to be a hoax in 1972. Ironically, the Report resurfaced last year in a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal because it's been adopted as a "bible" of government conspiracy by right-wing militias (and republished by The Free Press). The "loonies in the boonies" -- as they are called by The Nation's publisher and longtime editor, Victor Navasky (who had a hand in the parody) -- in a surreal twist, regard the claim that the Report was a hoax as even further proof that the government is trying to hoodwink the public. Lewin is discouraged by this latest turn of events, because, paradoxically, he wrote the book to serve the peace movement. In the case of the Sokal Prank, there seems to be a little bit of postmodern, cafe cachet to the whole affair. No doubt the "Science Wars" issue of Social Text will sell out and urban poseurs will be seen with a latte in one hand and the journal in the other, most of them having never heard of it before. Baby-boomers might be getting a light buzz from nostalgia over the reenactment of debates from their days in college, when Marcuse and Ellul were on the nightstand. Other newspaper customers who paid attention to this whole japery might just be enjoying the unusual public spectacle of flaming eggheads. Unfortunately, however, there is an urgent and important issue in this whole debate that is (typically) obscured by the amused frisson of mainstream press coverage. That is the power and authority of science and technology at the end of the twentieth century. Langdon Winner, a professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, says in his contribution to the Social Text issue that the debate called the "science wars" is set in the context of a "renegotiation of the social contract of science" triggered by the end of the Cold War. Theorists in cultural studies have asked, along with others, whether the privileged and priest-like role that scientists and engineers enjoyed during the decades of that conflict is compatible with a post-Cold War vision of democracy. Because scientists and engineers are facing grave uncertainties in the continuation of their funding from the public treasury, not to mention in their status, some of them have reacted to this probing critique with hysteria, even naming left social scientists as allies of creationists, New Age nuts, and other anti-science cranks. The cultural studies theorists have not done themselves any favors with their own attitudes, however, especially in the development of a style of writing and speaking that is anything but democratic. But the issues they're trying to raise, in the closing years of a century marked by both wonder and horror over the products of science and technology, are no joke. It's too bad the Sokal Prank is being regarded as such fun, especially by the right. Perhaps, like the Report From Iron Mountain, what starts out as a clever, convincing, and amusing parody may come back to haunt you. (June 6, 1996)

Feed Reader Collin Glassey writes in: "I agree entirely that a debate needs to be engaged in the west (it goes beyond the United States) about what should be funded in science and why. I annoyed several of my friends in the Berkeley physics community in the 1980s by arguing that the Superconducting Super Collider was not a project that the U.S. Government should be funding. My main argument was (and still is) that Government funding is a zero-sum game, if high energy physics wins, everyone else (like history, oceanography, etc.) loses." Click here to post your responses in our Feedbag discussion area.