HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES
@ 1997 SAGE Publications
[0952-6951(199708)10:3]
Vol. 10 No. 3
(London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi)
.9-
A so-called ’fraud’: moral
modulations in a literary
scandal
MICHAEL LYNCH
ABSTRACT
Physicist Alan Sokal achieved a moment of fame by announcing that he
had succeeded in publishing an article in the cultural studies journal
Social Text, which was ’sprinkled with nonsense’ about developments
in quantum gravity physics that supposedly converge with postmodernist themes. Sokal announced his hoax in an article in the literary magazine Lingua Franca. This touched off an intense flurry of
commentary. Many commentators praised Sokal for exposing shoddy
editorial standards in the cultural studies field, while others denounced
him for committing scientific fraud. With few exceptions, both Sokal’s
celebrants and detractors accepted his claim that he did not believe what
he said in the Social Text article. Under the circumstances, it is puzzling
that they took seriously what he said in Lingua Franca, and did not consider that he was once again ’successfully pretending to be himself’. In
this paper, I suggest that the Lingua Franca article also achieved a
parody, and that those who took Sokal seriously were once again taken
in by the voice of scientific authority.
Key words fraud, hoax, science, social construction, Alan Sokal, text,
voice
One of the attractions of the notion of ’voice’ is that it differentiates between
agencies of enunciation in a text. The meaning of a text no longer traces back
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10
intentional centre, but emerges from a colloquy of voices, whose actions
variously represent, mediate, oppose, or hide authorial responsibility (Lynch
and Bogen, 1991). As I understand it, the literary figure of ’voice’ is based on
an analogy: just as a speaker can raise, lower, or inflect her voice in order to
impersonate another speaker (a little girl, an elderly man, a celebrity, a robot,
a cartoon character, herself in a different guise, etc.), so can a writer multiply
the characters, interlocutors and other agents in, of and as a text. ’Voice’ can
be used to modulate the degree of full (or feigned) commitment to what is
said. There are, of course, many standard devices for identifying, differentiating, diffusing and displacing textual voices. Perhaps the clearest and most
familiar of these are the devices of quotation, dialogue, acknowledgement and
citation. The more explicit of these devices clearly demarcate the sources of
specific lines, passages and narratives. Often, however, the voices in a text
present readers with puzzles. Who (or what) is saying this? How does the
author stand with respect to what any or all of the voices say? Which of the
voices speak for the author, and which of them act as foils, interlocutors,
informants and authorities? Is the author being serious, or is there a hint of
irony here? More radically, a reader might be led to question the very idea
that a coherent author stands behind the voices, as though orchestrating their
gestures and feeding them lines like a puppet master. Considered strictly
within the hermeneutic circle of text and reader, the author is no less of a contingent ’presence’ than are any of the other voices in the text.
The ambiguities and uncertainties of voice not only present readers with
analytic problems; they provide writers with resources for showing and
hiding authority and responsibility. Like accused murderers who claim multiple personality as grounds for defence, authors can sometimes evade
responsibility for offences attributed to their texts. ’Those are not my words;
I didn’t really mean what I wrote.’ Voice may be an elusive grammatical
figure, but it is an interesting one partly because of its elusiveness. Modulations of voice are simultaneously modulations of responsibility. Setting up,
qualifying, switching, disguising and impersonating voices are grammatical
moves in a moral game. To convey an appreciation of such moral modulation, and of the stakes in the game, I will discuss a recent, widely publicized
scandal: the so-called ’hoax’ article written by Alan Sokal, and published in
a cultural studies journal.
to an
SOKAL’S PARODY/HOAX/FRAUD
According to several stories that were published, reproduced and circulated
widely on the worldwide web, Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, submitted an article to the journal Social Text. In the article - ’Transgressing the Boundaries: toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
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Gravity’ - Sokal presents himself as a physicist working in the field of
’quantum gravity’ research who has become aware of a number of thematic
parallels between cutting-edge theoretical physics and the writings of prominent deconstructionists, feminist epistemologists and others in the science
and cultural studies fields. The article contains numerous footnotes and a
huge bibliography. After discussing the parallels between physics and cultural
studies, Sokal (1996a: 228) points the way to an emancipatory physics that
would embody a social constructivist critique of objective science. As soon
as his article was published, Sokal (1996b) exposed his hoax in a brief article
in the magazine Lingua Franca.
The story was quickly picked up by the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal and other popular sources in the United States and elsewhere. Literary critic Stanley Fish (1996) wrote an editorial response to Sokal in the New
York Times, and Social Text editors Stanley Aronowitz and Andrew Ross
wrote public letters defending their journal and the larger cultural studies
field. Numerous other writers contributed to a flurry of letters and electronic
mail messages. The press response was summarized in headlines like ’Illogical Dons Swallow Hoaxer’s Quantum Leap into Gibberish’ (Ferguson, 1996).
Terms like ’gibberish’ suggest that Sokal’s article was inherently nonsensical,
illogical and unintelligible. Presumably, the Social Text editors failed to recognize this nonsense because of the way Sokal cleverly appealed to their prejudices. This angle was played up in the New York Times as follows:
To a lay person, the article appears to be an impenetrable hodge-podge
of jargon, buzzwords, footnotes and other references to the work of the
likes of Jacques Derrida and Professor Aronowitz. Words like
hegemony, counterhegemonic and epistemological abound. (Scott,
1996: 22)
A Wall Street
Journal editorial put it more bluntly: ’In short, the essay is
deliberate nonsense from start to finish’ (Kimball, 1996). The implications
were obvious: Sokal had written an article that traded upon the inherent ’nonsense’ and ’gibberish’ of the cultural studies genre, and by accepting the
article the journal’s editors exposed the fact that they hold no meaningful
standards. Celebrants of the hoax were quick to note that the absence of standards simply followed from the anti-objectivistic ideology that holds sway
in ’postmodernist’ and other ’academic left’ circles. As if to add insult to
injury, Sokal (1996b: 64) professed himself to be a political leftist who agreed1
with many of the political and feminist ideals held by the Social Text editors.
He claimed to be concerned about the way academic hubris and lunacy had
confused and obscured serious leftist and feminist issues. Kimball (1996),
who did not profess to be a leftist, drove this point home: ’This of course
makes his hoax all the more embarrassing for the academic left’, and just in
case readers might consider the exposure to be limited in scope, Kimball
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added: ’it is important to understand that Mr. Sokal’s hoax is embarrassing
only for Mr. Ross, Mr. Aronowitz and company, but also for the entire
project of cultural studies’.2 Kimball’s characterizations of that ’project’ and
of the ’academic left’ were borrowed from Gross and Levitt (1994), whose
attacks on social and cultural studies of science had set the stage for Sokal.
The devastation was maximized by the fact that the offending article was
published in a special issue of Social Text devoted to answering Gross and
Levitt and other critics.
Fish, Ross and other defenders of cultural studies took deep offence.
Unlike Sokal (1996b) who characterized his article as a satirical ’parody’, and
a ’rather unorthodox experiment’, Fish (1996) spoke of it as ’a bad joke’, ’an
elaborate hoax’ and a ’deception’. He closed his editorial with a quotation
from a 1989 report published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science (Volume 86, 1989: 9068). According to this account, fraud arises when
scientists intentionally publish inaccurate results. Fraud goes ’beyond error
to erode the foundation of trust on which science is built’. Fish added: ’That
is Professor Sokal’s legacy, one likely to be longer lasting than the brief fame
he now enjoys for having successfully pretended to be himself’. Ross, in a
letter he circulated on electronic mail, called Sokal’s act a ’breach of ethics’.
Aronowitz, Fish, Ross and others all attempted to correct the impression left
by Sokal and various other commentators that social constructivism implied
disbelief in the reality of natural laws and the efficacy of science.3 Ross mentioned that, contrary to what Sokal and others had implied, the Social Text
editorial group was unimpressed with Sokal’s mastery of their field, but
decided to publish the article because ’We read it as an earnest attempt of a
professional scientist to seek some sort of philosophical justification for his
work’ (quoted in Scott, 1996: 22).
not
THE CHALLENGE AND THE RESPONSE
So how does the notion of ’voice’ shed light on this dark incident? I believe
it may enable us to recognize that Sokal’s achievement - described in Fish’s
(1996) backhanded compliment as a matter of ’having successfully pretended
be himself’ - raises an interesting challenge for cultural studies that Fish,
Ross, Aronowitz and other defenders of that field have for the most part
to
in their serious responses. The challenge is nicely articulated by
Sokal himself: ’Now it’s true that the author doesn’t believe his own argument. But why should that matter?
If the Social Text editors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I
don’t?’ (Sokal, 1996b: 64). This is an excellent question, and it is not addressed
by citing the official definition of scientific fraud in The Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science. The citation suggests that Sokal ’transgressed’
bypassed
...
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13
ethical standards by submitting a fraudulent paper to a scientific journal; a
paper that contained results that the author knew were inaccurate. This definition begs the question of whether Social Text is a scientific journal, one that
publishes results of empirical research that can be assessed for their accuracy.
I believe the answer would have to be that it is not such a journal. Cultural
studies is an academic hybrid that includes anthropology, feminism, literary
criticism and other fields. Many participants in the field are not committed
to empiricist ideals of factual representation and quantitative accuracy.
Indeed, it is commonplace in the field to challenge representationalist idioms,
and deliberately to transgress the conventions of ’serious’ academic discourse
in order to problematize distinctions between literal, ironic, fictional, factual,
playful and fraudulent expressions of meaning and identity. Canons of
scholarship do nevertheless apply in the cultural studies literature: editorial
judgements demand that, unless otherwise indicated, quotations should be
accurate and relevant sources acknowledged. Sokal (1996b: 64) claimed that
his essay was ’based entirely on publicly available sources, all of which I have
meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented.’ Fish, Ross, and others did not dispute
this claim.4According to Sokal, the only deliberate inaccuracy in his article
was about physics:
Throughout the article, I employ scientific and mathematical concepts
in ways that few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously. For example, I suggest that the ’morphogenetic field’ - a bizarre
New Age idea proposed by Rupert Sheldrake - constitutes a cutting
edge theory of quantum gravity. The connection is pure invention; even
Sheldrake makes no such claim. I assert that Lacan’s psychoanalytic
speculations have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field
theory. Even nonscientist readers might well wonder what in heaven’s
name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis; certainly my
article gives no reasoned argument to support such a link. (Sokal, 1996b:
63)
He summarizes by saying that he ’intentionally wrote the article so that any
competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math
major) would realise that it is a spoof’ (Sokal, 1996b: 63). Consequently, those
who would accuse Sokal of scientific fraud are faced with a paradox. He
would be guilty of fraud if his article had been accepted by a physics journal,
but (at least according to his account) had he submitted it to such a journal
it would have been dismissed out of hand by the editors. The ’spoof’ would
not have been taken seriously enough to become a fraudulent publication.
Moreover, according to Sokal’s account of his own motivations, his act was
designed to protect and defend trust in scientific objectivity against antifoundationalist attacks. This, of course, is contrary to Fish’s suggestion that
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the ’fraud’ would ’erode the foundation of trust on which science is built’.
Explaining the ’serious’ motivation of his ’satirical’ article, Sokal (1996b: 63)
denounces the ’proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se,
but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the
existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence
but downplays their practical relevance’. He does not go so far as to charge
proponents of ’epistemic relativism’ with fraud, but he comes close to this by
suggesting that the falsity of their subjectivistic ways arises from wilful disregard of truth, consisting ’precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths’
(Sokal, 1996b: 63).
Perhaps the strongest point in favour of calling Sokal’s essay a spoof,
parody, or satire designed to expose (rather than promote) bogus research, is
that he exposed the ’hoax’ himself. From a social constructivist point of view,
plausible deployment of the moral grammar of ’discovery’, ’error’, ’selfdeception’, ’hoax’, ’fraud’ and ’practical joke’ is not governed by the inherent properties of the historical (f)acts in question. Instead, contingent matters
of timing, interest, audience reception and interactional negotiation can make
every difference in the world for what counts as a discovery, replication,
hoax, joke, or fraud (Brannigan, 1981; Ashmore, 1993). Sokal did not expose
his hoax5 in order to confess to wrongdoing; rather, he did so in order to
expose wrongdoing on the part of the Social Text editors. He also counted on
the fact that the mainstream press would reproduce his modulation of the
event as a deceptive act that was justified by its exposure of a larger, more
pernicious, error. Now, of all people, Stanley Fish and his colleagues are
unlikely to be surprised or impressed by what I have just said. The problem
for them, as they probably recognized, was that they were put on the spot.
As a matter of practical media politics, they were faced with defending cultural studies against critics and journalists for whom words like ’epistemological’ and ’hegemonic’ are meaningless tokens of ’impenetrable jargon’.
They took up the task of rebutting arguments to the effect that social constructivists refute their own relativistic arguments whenever they step aboard
Boeing 747 aircraft.6They defended the seriousness, rigorous standards and
scientific integrity of cultural studies research, and denied that the field was
populated by ’epistemic relativists’ who question the real existence of scientific laws. Under the circumstances, this may have been a wise strategy. To
express indifference to the ’scientific’ status of cultural criticism, to celebrate
transgressive and poetic discourse, to call in question the very ideas of ’standards’ and ’objectivity’ and thereby to embrace Sokal as an unwitting ally,
perhaps would not have been admissible in the court of public opinion. So,
instead, hermeneuticians and critical theorists who otherwise profess antifoundationalist views and defend subjugated knowledges against the
hegemony of ’science’, were put in the position of defending the cultural
studies field against an offence defined by the National Academy of Sciences
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deliberate transgression of standards of
the foundations of science.
as a
to
empirical accuracy and a threat
THE ANALYSIS OF NONSENSE
In his Lingua Franca commentary on the hoax, Sokal begins with an
assertion: ’For some years I’ve been troubled by an apparent decline in the
standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities’ (Sokal,
1996b: 62). He then follows this with a conspicuously modest claim: ’But I’m
a mere physicist: If I find myself unable to make heads or tails of
jouissance
and
differance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy’ (Sokal, 1996b:
62). Continuing in this vein, he refers to his effort to ’test the prevailing intellectual standards’ by conducting ’a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled)
experiment’. He proposes to test the following hypothesis: ’Would a leading
North American journal of cultural studies ... publish an article liberally
salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’
ideological preconceptions?’ (Sokal, 1996b: 62). The form of this experiment
should be familiar to social psychologists and commercial advertisers: present
an inherently meaningless (or deceptively designed) stimulus to the
subject,
suggest that it is the genuine article, and test whether the subject’s desires,
hopes and prejudices get the better of his judgements. In this case, Sokal
scores a hit. His initial modesty helps lend maximum
impact to the result: the
successful hoax should not be viewed as the result of an attempt to embarrass a political opponent. Instead, the victims of the hoax show themselves to
be their own worst enemies: ’the blow that can’t be brushed off is the one
that’s self-inflicted’ (Sokal, 1996b: 64). After announcing the result of his
experiment, Sokal resumes his modest voice: ’I say this not in glee but in
sadness.’ At this point he announces that he too is a ’leftist’. Again, the
modesty enhances the effect: Sokal is no right-winger playing dirty tricks on
political enemies, he is a sympathetic witness of a self-destructive act.
The ironic effect of the hoax is set up by the claim, echoed in the press, that
Sokal’s (1996a) article is inherent nonsense. But what exactly is this nonsense?
Where does the nonsense begin and end, and who is in a position to recognize it? Does the recognition of this nonsense depend upon the wisdom of
hindsight? The moral and epistemic implications of Sokal’s act depend on
where one locates the nonsense. Sokal and his expositors sometimes locate
the nonsense in his paper’s accounts of maths and physics, at other times they
find it pervading the entire paper, and at still other times they find it infecting the entire cultural studies field. Let us examine each of these sites of nonsense
production.
(1) Scientific nonsense: by his own account, Sokal relied upon the fact that
the Social Text editors would
not
detect the
physical
and mathematical
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16
in his
article, and would not send the article to reviewers with the
requisite physics education (a likelihood enhanced by the fact that Social Text
nonsense
refereed journal). He also acknowledged that he disguised such inaccuracy by embedding it in an article that adhered to conventional standard
of scholarship.
Much of the apparent appeal of the article arises from its being written by
a physicist who argues that cutting-edge developments in that hardest of hard
sciences converge with some of the general ’postmodernist’ themes promoted
in literary and cultural studies. It is as though the article lends scientific authority to humanistic arguments that are often thought to be anti-scientific.
One might argue that Sokal’s voice of scientific authority hoodwinked a
group of postmodern critics to forget their suspicion of scientistic metanarratives. By this account, the most telling nonsense in the article is in its
accounts of quantum gravity, and its publication demonstrated the hazards
of pretending to a critical understanding of science without mastering the
is
not a
technical prerequisites. It is important to keep in mind that, according to
Sokal, the physical and mathematical inaccuracies would be hilariously
obvious to any competent physicist or mathematicianIn other words, the
hoax was designed to fool only those readers who lack the competence (but
not the hubris) to evaluate scientific developments.
(2) Literary nonsense: newspaper commentaries on the hoax treated the
nonsense as pervading the entire article. They pointed to Sokal’s use of academic ’buzz-words’ and ’gibberish’, his illogical arguments and his citation
of impenetrable passages from the likes of Derrida. Accordingly, the nonsense is not limited to technical misrepresentations of physics smuggled into
an otherwise sensible academic paper. The paper itself was ’nonsense from
start to finish’, and the readers who failed to recognize this fact were simply
’illogical’ and beclouded by ideology. Sokal encouraged such assessments
when he avowed that even non-scientists should recognize the lunacy of
juxtaposing quantum physics with psychoanalytic theory.
If, as Sokal claimed, the article is filled with meaningless prose, implausible claims and impenetrable passages, then anyone who finds it sensible is
simply deluded. To publish such nonsense indicates more than an editorial
lapse - a failure to send the paper to technically competent reviewers - it is a
symptom of madness. Note, however, that terms of evaluation for assessing
nonsense have now shifted. As Sokal observes, specialized education is
needed for recognizing the scientific and mathematical nonsense in his article,
but no such education is necessary for recognizing that the article is sprinkled
with impenetrable buzz-words. The tables have turned. Where the editors of
Social Text were initially faulted for relying upon their non-specialized
understandings of esoteric physics, they are now faulted for accepting esoteric jargon that lay persons find impenetrable. Where the editors were initially faulted (on Sokal’s authority as a physicist) for failing to see that he made
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nonsense out
authority)
for
of physics and maths, they
failing to see that he made
are now
faulted (on a lay reader’s
of the common lan-
nonsense out
guage.
(3) Philosophical nonsense: the most pervasive charge of ’nonsense’ spills
beyond jargon into broader philosophical territory. We can see how this
by examining a passage from the hoax article that Sokal quotes in his
Lingua Franca expos6 (Sokal, 1996b: 92). This is his characterization of a
’Western intellectual outlook’ that constructivists supposedly disavow:
that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole;
that these properties are encoded in ’eternal’ physical laws; and that
human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ’objective’ procedures and
epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific
works
...
method.
Sokal (1996b: 92) passes over the possibility that serious philosophical questions can be raised (and have been raised for centuries) on questions of
whether physical laws are ’eternal’ and whether adherence to ’objective’ procedures warrants absolutist claims about ’knowledge’. Instead, he goes on to
ask, innocently: ’Is it now dogma in cultural studies that there exists no
external world? Or that there exists an external world but science obtains no
knowledge of it?’ It is as though critiques of naive (or even not-so-naive) conceptions of ’an external world’ necessarily entail disbelief in (rather than a
reconceptualization of) the possibility of stable scientific knowledge. Sokal
(1996b: 92) continues explicating the nonsensical philosophical claims he had
voiced without belief:
In the second
paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence or
is at
argument, that ’physical &dquo;reality&dquo; [note the scare quotes]
bottom a social and linguistic construct.’ Not our theories of physical
reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough. Anyone who
believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited
to try transgressing those conventions from the window of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)8
...
unexplicated assertion, vaguely recalling a classical idealist position, is
quickly equated with sheer madness, and the fact that the editors let it pass
counts against their sanity. A case could be made that Sokal’s (1996b) translations degrade the extent to which the original passages can be read as sensible, if crude and unsupported, philosophical assertions.
Sokal’s injection of physical and mathematical nonsense now infects the
entire text, and ultimately the entire cultural studies project. The transitions
from physical nonsense, to literary nonsense, and then to philosophical
An
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effected through a series of juxtapositions of esoteric and commonplace usage. The Social Text editors are caught in the middle of Sokal’s
(1996b) alternating, asymmetric appeals to esoteric knowledge and ’obvious
truths’. An education in physics is sufficient to expose Sokal’s (1996a) nonsensical uses of terms like ’morphogenetic field’, but an education in literary
nonsense are
and cultural studies obscures common sense.
Sokal certainly did show that it is possible to publish an inaccurate account
of physics and maths in a non-refereed cultural studies journal. He succeeded
by smuggling ’nonsense’ physics into a text that was likely to be reviewed
only by non-physicists. However, in the aftermath of the successful smuggle,
the nonsense is redistributed and begins to metastasize. For Sokal, and for
others who celebrated his achievement, ’deliberate nonsense’ and ’gibberish’
now pervade the entire article, and they run rampant through the entire cultural studies field.
CONCLUSION
The modulations of Sokal’s voice are not keyed by an announcement, a signal,
a clearing of the throat, a change of tone, or a gesture. Sokal - successfully
pretending to be himself to the Social Text readers - speaks in the same voice
that (he claims) any competent physicist or mathematician should recognize
as a parody. As Sokal (1996b) admits, his Social Text article is intentionally
misleading; it misrepresents what the author believes. In his Lingua Franca
article Sokal again purports to represent what he believes. Most comments
on the hoax accept Sokal’s (1996b) word that the original (1996a) article is a
hoax, but they do not ask ’Is Sokal not, once again, pretending to be
himself?’9 The absence of scepticism is odd, especially in light of the blatant
rhetoric Sokal (1996b) employs to present himself as a modest witness of the
fiasco he helped create. Sokal - even more successfully pretending to be
himself in the Lingua Franca article - speaks in a modest, self-effacing voice
that any competent analyst of scientific rhetoric should recognize as a
parody; a rhetorical disguise for a triumphant announcement.1° Only, in this
case there is no further ironic exposure to embarrass those who took him seriously the second time around.
The pity of the Sokal affair is that the ’hoax’ offers such a fine study for
the academic community it embarrasses. Sokal’s voice invites us to extend the
series of parodies. The tendency to react seriously - to disavow epistemic
relativism, to affirm belief in objective reality, and to denounce scientific
fraud - is understandable under the circumstances. Serious things are at stake,
and writers for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal apparently have
limited tolerance for epistemic play, irrealist irreverence and loosely policed
thinking. But, to me, it seems a mistake to capitulate to the way the ’hoax’ is
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framed
by Sokal and his journalist expositors. Although there may be no
around
the embarrassment of a group of editors, the hoax should not
getting
be taken to demonstrate that any argument that critically examines the intertwining of language and physical reality is an expression of madness. The
problem is not that Sokal was allowed to get away with fraud, but that he was
allowed to get away with an esoteric ’test’ of ’obvious truths’. Both in his
original article, when he cites quantum gravity physics to support radical
scepticism about the ’Western intellectual outlook’, and in his later expose,
when he cites his ’modest experiment’ to affirm the obvious truth of that
intellectual outlook, Sokal offers spurious ’scientific’ support for metaphysical beliefs. That is Sokal’s hoax.
NOTES
later ’afterword’ to his hoax article, Sokal (1996c: 340-1) supplies quotations
illustrate leftist concerns about the corrosive effects of postmodernist/poststructuralist/social constructivist writings. Sokal’s ’transgression’also received
supportive reactions by some writers for left-leaning American journals like The
Nation and In These Times (Pollitt, 1996; Frank, 1996). One of the Social Text
editors wrote an objection to such criticisms by fellow leftists (Robbins, 1996).
2 Kimball’s celebration of the hoax as a blow against the ’academic left’ reinscribes
the very left-right division that Sokal’s avowal of leftist sympathies problematizes.
Such polarity (and the related science vs humanities polarity) is belied by the
enthusiastic praise of Sokal expressed by many participants on the PHIL-LIT
electronic mail list. Frank (1996: 22) mentions that ’many of the professors and
graduate students’ he knows reacted with ’giddiness’ when hearing of Sokal’s
hoax, and the editors of the anti-pomo journal Philosophy and Literature later
published Sokal’s (1996c) ’afterword’ and added Sokal to the editorial board
(Dutton and Henry, 1996). Several of my colleagues in social studies of science,
who are not by any stretch of the imagination members of the political or academic ’right’, have quietly expressed appreciation of Sokal’s hoax in personal communications. The drawing of polarized ’lines’ is far from irrelevant, however, as
my colleagues who have expressed sympathy with Sokal’s distaste for ’postmodernist’ hubris also are aware of the indiscriminate denunciations of social
studies of science being generated as part of the so-called ’culture wars’ in the
1 In
a
to
USA.
by the Social Text editors to Sokal’s revelation of his hoax
published in the next issue of Lingua Franca (Social Text, 1996).
Frank (1996: 23) mentions that Barbara Epstein of the University of California,
Santa Cruz History of Consciousness Program was a ’Sokal collaborator’. Others
(in personal communications with me) have attributed virtual authorship of the
article to Epstein. If this is so (and I have no idea if it is), the accusation would be
that Sokal failed to give due credit to his covert co-author, and not that he pub-
3 The official response
was
4
lished fraudulent scientific results.
name most often used for Sokal’s article was ’hoax’, and I
5 The
am
using it here for
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convenience. Sokal and others who
wrote about the affair used the terms ’satire’,
’hoax’ more or less interchangeably. Sokal tended to choose
terms that connoted humour. Fish used the expression ’bad joke’ as well as ’hoax’,
but leaned toward ’fraud’. The latter term was promoted only by the most severe
of Sokal’s critics.
If the design, manufacture, regulation and control of the safety of such aircraft is
not a matter of social construction, I don’t know what is.
Despite Sokal’s (1996b) claim that any competent mathematician or physicist
should be able to recognize his ’spoof’ for what it is, a point that Weinberg (1996)
echoes, a few colleagues with postgraduate degrees in physics have told me that
this would not be as easy as he implies. According to one physics PhD, many of
Sokal’s howlers require some knowledge of quantum gravity research, a relatively
esoteric field.
The quoted passage is from Sokal (1996a: 217), brackets in the original. This is a
curious argument. Driving on the left-hand side of the road is a ’mere social convention’ in Britain (in this case a convention with the authority of law). I believe
that if I were consistently to transgress that convention, I would be in no less
danger than if I were to leap out of Professor Sokal’s window.
Ross noted in a letter he circulated on electronic mail (19 May 1996) that one
member of the Social Text editorial group ’suspected that Sokal’s parody was
nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a
folding of his intellectual resolve’, but most commentators did not question
Sokal’s good faith when he admitted that his earlier article had been written in bad
faith.
Shapin and Schaffer (1985) identified the theme of the ’modest gentleman’ in their
study of the etiquette of argumentation in the 17th-century Royal Society, and
Haraway (1996) deploys the idea of ’Modest Witness’ to outline a masculinist
figure in the discourse of modern science.
’joke’, ’parody’ and
6
7
8
9
10
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11-15.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Department of Human Science at Brunel
has
University,
published widely and researched extensively in the social
studies of science and popular culture media. Amongst his publications are
Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action (1994) and (with David Bogen) The
Spectacle of History: Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings
MICHAEL
LYNCH, Professor in the
(1996).
Address:
Department of Human Science, Brunel University, Kingston Lane,
Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK. [email:[email protected]]
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