CONFESSIONS OF A DISAGREEABLE MAN.

A review of The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy Edited by

the Editors ofLingua Franca, Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press.

If you give me your attention I will tell you what I am: I'm a genuine

philanthropist all other kinds are sham. Each little fault of temper and each

social defect In my erring fellow-creatures I endeavor to correct. To all their

little weaknesses I open people's eyes; And little plans to snub the self-

sufficient I devise; I love my fellow creatures I do all the good I can--Yet

everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man! And I can't think why!

W.S. Gilbert, King Gama's song from Princess Ida

I SEEM TO HAVE FALLEN INTO the role of professional

Diagreeable Man during the past few years; perhaps I have a natural

affinity for it. At any rate, many of the commentators to the volume under

consideration vigorously argue that I, along with various "science wars"

allies, am a nasty piece of work, intent on defaming worthy scholarship and

discrediting noble political aims. For my own part, hearing from one such

critic that "the book [Higher Superstition] by Gross and Levitt, did an

unbelieveable amount of damage," brightens up my day and puts aspring in

my step. Alas, however, The Sokal Hoaxis only incidentally about me, as the

title clearly indicates. The chief target of all the praise and blame is Alan

Sokal, whose well known prank at the expense of the journal Social Text in

1996 brought the science wars out of the dim corridors of academia and

thrust them onto the front page of the New York Times.

I

A few days after the now-celebrated (or reviled) hoax article appeared in the

"Science Wars" issue (double no. 46/47) of Social Text; Sokal blew the

whistle on himself in the magazine Lingua Franca, which might best be

described as a high-class gossip sheet for academics, especially young and

trendy types in the humanities and social sciences. From there, the story

took off and made a considerable media splash, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Comments proliferated in newspapers, and the Internet came alive with

discussion and polemic. A good deal of the response came from academic

bigwigs, for whom the Sokal affair brought to a head many of the

contentious issues that had been seething just below the placid

surface of university life.

The Sokal Hoax, edited (rather anonymously) by "the editors of Lingua

Franca," is a modest but useful compendium concerning the hoax. The

editors' terse introduction provides some chronology, but not much

substantive commentary. The book gets going in earnest

with areprint of Sokal's mischievious article "Transgressing the

Boundaries," followed by his Lingua Franca "confession," and the extensive

correspondence published afterward. Various newspaper accounts come

next, among them the New York Times story by Janny

Scott. A miscellany ofessays then provides a spectrum of academic views,

pro-Sokal and con. These include a numberof attempts by Social Text

editors to get themselves off the hook, together with a few of Sokal's

responses. The most substantial and valuable pieces, in my opinion, are

lengthy analyses by Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg and New York

University philosopher Paul Boghossian (originally published in the New

York Review of Books and the London Times Literary Supplement respectiv

ely.)

It's nice to have all these sources together in one binding, but most of them

were already three years old when the book went to press, and have already

been carefully scrutinized by Hoax aficionados. Much of this material was

posted to various Internet sites long ago. I gather that the volume was more

or less put together a couple of years back, and that publishing

arrangements took some time to complete. The worst effect of this delay is

that the most important development in the story since 1996, the

publication of Sokal and Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense (Impostures

Intellectuelles, in the original French edition), is completely ignored. This

book, a dead serious and systematic critique of the way in which prominent

postmodern intellectuals flaunt their supposed knowledge of science while

remaining substantially ignorant of the scientific matters involved,

generated a furor all its own, at least as venomous as and possibly more

revealing than the initial flap over the hoax itself. It would have been ver y

useful if The Sokal Hoax had included excerpts from Sokal/Bricmont, as well

as someof the reaction, for instance, J. Sturrock's sneering review "Le

pauvre Sokal" in the London Review of Books, together with the

unprecedented avalanche of disdain that LRB's readers subsequently

dumped on poor Sturrock's head.

Another defect is that, given the narrow focus on the minutiae of the hoax,

there is little broad discussion of the tensions afflicting the thought and

politics of university based intellectuals, ofwhich the "science wars" uproar

is one local manifestation. The larger story of how a journal originally

intended to foster theorizing useful to left-wing organizers and activists

eventually became the sort of thing that angered and exasperated honest-to-

goodness leftists like Sokal and most of his allies is pretty much ignored.

The real heart of the matter is the long-developing fissure in the

community of left-leaning intellectuals over the usefulness or

harmfulness of the trendy philosophical conceits that have recently besotted

so many academics. This, rather than the immediate squabbles, is what

gives Sokal's joke whatever lasting significance it turns out to have.

II

Ross's wit is an alien language. It is no more intelligible to Gross and Levitt

than the technical language of Levitt's topological research is to me.

George Levine, "What is Science Studies For, and Who Cares?" Social Text

46/47

The Sokal Hoax is also disappointing in that it tones down the comedic

aspects of the hoax, which, after all, was a deliberately dumb practical joke

that only worked because it was aimed at people who--let's face it--weren't

the sharpest knives in the drawer. The inside story had more than its

share of drolleries and ironies, which readers might well have appreciated.

First of all, there is the genesis of the Social Text "Science Wars' issue

itself. The compendium (I modestly point out) was originally conceived

as a collective counterblast against one particular book, Higher

Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, of which I

happen to be co-author. The chief instigators of the riposte were prominent

professors in cultural studies and sociology who had seen their books about

science, culture, and politics savaged in the pages ofHigher Superstition,

and, quite understandably, wanted to retaliate. On the other hand, Sokal

started working on his prank article in the summer of 1994

after a reading of Higher Superstition nudged him into checking into the

literature of postmodern, social-constructivist, and radical feminist science-

critique. The intellectual shortcomings of this stuff, as he was surprised to

discover, were even worse than had been alleged in my book. This prompted

him to concoct the hoax. Note that social Text was chosen as a target, and,

indeed, the hoax article was submitted to the journal, before its plans

for a special science-wars issue were even known to Sokal. The key factor

prompting that choice was that the Social Text editors, very familiar

characters on the New York left-intellectual scene, were--I search for a not-

too-disagreeablelocution--rather transparent souls. Loath as I am to

contradict my learned colleague George Levine, a reading of their purported

wit (or wisdom) makes it pretty clear how to push their buttons.

By a stroke of luck, Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries:

Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" arrived at

Social Text just as the science-wars issue was getting underway. It was

accepted very quickly as a welcome recruit in the struggle.

The long months between the acceptance of the article and its appearance

in print were a bit harrowing. The main worry was that someone with a little

knowledge of physics and math--or merely a little common sense--might

take a look at the essay in the interim. On top of that, at least one of the

other "Science Wars" contributors knew Sokal personally and was quite

awareof his skeptical attitude toward radical science studies. Though the

issue was advertised long in advance, she apparently never looked at these

promos, where Sokal's name appeared in close proximity to hers. Loose talk

from the ever-widening circle of those in the know was another threat, and

indeed, nearly upset the applecart when a free-lance writer

overheard a rumor that the upcoming issue of Social Text was going to

blowup in its editors' faces. Fortunately, he secretly tipped off Lingua

Franca, which then cleverly procured advance proofs of the journal. It was

not very difficult for the Lingua Franca staff to spot the ringer. This turned

into an additional bit of serendipity, since it put Sokal in touch with LF and

allowed him to place his confession--"A Physicist Experiments with Cultural

Studies"--in this widely-read magazine, timed to come out within a few

days of the publication of the hoax itself. Until then, it wasn't clear how the

gag would be revealed, nor whether it would even get much publicity.

As for my own modest role, I confess that several times I was embroiled with

the Social Text people in formal and informal debates where it was very

hard for me to keep a straight face. Knowing that you hold a trump card but

are forbidden to play it is an exquisitely painful circumstance! On the other

hand, by keeping Social Text's anger focused on me--an easy enough task for

such a disagreeable man--I flatter myself that I made it much less likely

that Sokal's intentions would come under scrutiny. For me, the crowning

episode of the whole affair occurred on the day Social Text 46/47 finally

came out after weeks of agonizing delay. Suspecting that it would make its

first appearance at a major New York conference of left-wing intellectuals

and activists, I popped by and was overjoyed to find copies on sale with

Sokal's article completely intact! On my way out, I chanced to run into a big

Social Text kahuna with whom I had repeatedly tangled. With a supremely

self-satisfied glint in his eye, he flourished his brand-new copy of the

Science Wars number. "Have you seen the new Social Text?" he asked,

gloating. Displaying my own copy in turn, I merely replied, in a tone as

bland and guileless as I could manage, "Oh ...yes I have." At moments like

that, one can almost believe that abenevolent Deity is in charge of the

universe!

But there were mild disappointments too. Worst of all, Lingua Franca,

though publishing aflood of letters (reprinted in The Sokal Hoax) on the

"Sokal Text affair" in its next issue, refused to print mine! This seemed a bit

unfair to me, since my own book was the occasion and the major

target of the booby-trapped issue of Social Text. But I suppose that my

letter crossed some kind of invisible line by suggesting that university

faculties occasionally harbor dummies with high sounding academic titles

and fat paychecks. This kind of lese-majeste suggests possibilities Lingua

Franca and most of its readers would rather not think about.

III

They had very little idea of what many of the sentences mean, and so were

not in a position to evaluate them for plausibility in the first place. The

plausibility, or even the intelligibility, ofSokal's arguments just didn't enter

into their deliberations.

Paul Boghossian, "What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us," in The Sokal

Hoax

It is only fair to ask whether any general proposition about the

state of academic life can be inferred from the Sokal Hoax. Were the

victimized Social Text editors singularly dim? Or are there

hosts of professors who would have been gulled just as easily? The

experiment can never be tried, of course, yet I believe that any

number of contemporary scholars would have been foxed by the prank

Many of Sokal's critics, including his most prominent victims, have claimed

that the affair, especially as reported by the mass media, distorts their

philosphical views. One Social Text editor protests that the journal "has

never been in the deconstructionist camp, nor do its editors...doubt the

existence of a material world." Another, citing a notorious slogan from

"Transgressing the Boundaries ("'physical reality'...is at bottom a social and

linguistic construct"), retorts that "no one on the Social Text collective

believes this."

Quite frankly, I don't question these assertions. The academics who are

hostile to Sokal generally speak in much the same terms, denying that they

disbelieve in reality or embrace extreme forms of relativism. Yet they are

the same folks whose books and papers rarely employ words like "reality,"

"truth," and "objectivity" without the sneering inverted commas. For the

most part, these are not people who do radical science studies, or even

postmodern philosophy, themselves. Rather, they constitute the much wider

claque that has canonized this stuff without ever scrutinizing it critically

because it seems emotionally gratifying as well as politically useful. The

ruthlessly anti-objectivist quotes that take up so much space in the

text of the hoax article come from works that are universally respected or

even revered within this community. The same is true of the writings

soberly examined in Fashionable Nonsense. One contributor to The Sokal

Hoax, comparing Sokal's piece to another (presumably serious) Social Tex t

essay, notes, "Had I been shown both...articles, and asked which might

be a hoax, I would have said that both are either hoaxes or nonsense."

The fact is that the academic left wants to have it both ways where

relativism is concerned. Its ethical and political claims presuppose that

there are objective facts about the world and reliable principles for judging

the moral worth of political ideas, Yet the oppositional subculture now

entrenched at universities finds it psychologically comforting, rhetorically

convenient, and tactically indispensable to cite relativistic slogans loudly

and frequently. Consider the following passage from a recent article in the

professorial house-organ Academe, a piece that stridently demands that

"ethnic studies" programs be given a dominant role in higher education:

Ethnic studies scholars perceive as their primary responsibility interrogating

any and all received wisdom-particularly those truths presented as universal

without regard to the context or perspectives of the people generating

them. Equally important is demonstrating alternative ways to construct

knowledge, so as to redefine the nature of knowledge and how it is used to

understand the physical world and the human condition.

It is fair to say that most of the people who decry Sokal would agree with

this description ofethnic studies and, like its author, back such programs to

the hilt. Clearly, if one is committed to traditional scholarly

standards of evidence and logic and accepts the obligation to strive, at least,

for objectivity, the task of interrogating received knowledge and

demonstrating alternative ways to construct knowledge (especially of the

physical world!!) is an Augaean undertaking, and might well prove futile or,

indeed, lead to politically unpalatable conclusions. Relativism provides an

easy and convenient escape from this dilemma. When facing a troublesome

fact or daunting opposing argument, just declare it to be socially

constructed in the service of hegemonic injustice or the tainted

product of an oppressive discursive regime. Keep a packet of sneer quotes

handy to pour deconstructive scorn on what you can't actually refute.

Presto! You've kept faith with your political dogmas and

produced a publishable (by current standards) paper to add to your vita, all

in one easy step.

That, I daresay, is the real secret behind Social Text's

acceptance of "Transgressing the Boundaries." It's not that they studied it

with scholarly care and found enough validity and coherence in its

arguments to make it a worthwhile contribution. Rather, they saw it as

another piece of rhetorical ordnance to add to the stockpile, not all that

different from many things already stacked there. It was a weapon that

might come in handy during anticipated slanging matches, particularly

because the author seemed to be a real live physicist. The subcultural

resonance of Sokal's piece was far more important than its arguments or the

specific assertions it contained. Thus, it was irresistible bait There are

hundreds, indeed thousands, of professors (and graduate students and

academic press editors) who would have been suckered just as easily.

IV

I mean, it would be presumptuous to condemn radical ideas simply because

they appear to me to be self-evidently stupid and criminal if they do happen

to be at the same time radical.-"George Moore" in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers

If I seem to be suggesting that academic life has fallen upon especially evil

days, that's because I am. That's what leaves me feeling so

godawful disagreeable. I'm not particularly susceptible to nostalgia; I

wouldn't suggest that we have fallen away from a golden age of scholarship

and learning in which the university shone forth like a city on a hill.

Academic life has always been full of nasty quirks, of systematic unfairness

and favoritism, of insular disdain for the interests or opinions of anyone

outside the ivy-covered sanctum, and of complicity with the worst sins ofthe

ambient society. There have always been thick-witted professors; the

absurdly obtuse pedant has been a figure of fun since medieval times. But in

this country, at least, the story of higher learning was one of overall, if not

incessant, progress toward an ideal of liberty of thought and inquiry,

together with the sovereignty of reasoned discourse.

There have been ups and downs in the struggle against pressures for

political conformity, but overall, independence of mind has been nurtured

and clear thinking accorded singular respect. But the melancholy truth is

that within the last decade or two, the hard-won supremacy ofintellectual

freedom and precise argument has been seriously eroded. Narrow factions

that have scant regard for these ideals have obtained extraordinary power

over both the curriculum and the canons of ostensible scholarship. More

and more courses in the humanities and social sciences, and

in a host of newly-invented quasi disciplines, have been made into sectarian

dog-and-pony shows. This, depressing though it is to have to say so, is

almost exclusively the work ofthe heirs of what once was the left. The leftist

tradition at its frequent best was long associated with militant struggle

against the thought police and the obscurantists. Yet now the academic left--

a term inevitably imprecise, but preferable to any current alternative--se

ems destined to claim a place in the sorry history of repression of ideas and

deification of muddle.

The "left" is not the only factor in the current debasement of academic life.

The mercenary cynicism and corruption of "big time" college athletics has

swelled beyond challenge or restraint at those schools bedazzled by the

lure of bowl games or March Madness. "Revenue" sports typically

make a mockery of educational standards and breed hypocrisy and flagrant

dishonesty. The new craze for making universities over into entrepeneurial

ventures, demanding research whose payoff can be measured in cash rather

than knowledge, is extremely worrisome. In the sciences especially, the

hunger for "transferable" technology and joint ventures with corporations

endangers the long tradition of open publication and unfettered

communication among colleagues. One could easily argue that these

problems are more serious long-term threats to the integrity of learning

than the mere antics of poststructuralists. Yet, perhaps because those

menaces are imposed from outside academic life, it is considerably more

depressing to contempl ate the Invasion of the Deconstructionist Mind-

Snatchers, which is really homegrown tomfoolery on the part of the

postmodernist pod people amongst us.

A fairly homely example, far removed from the stridencies of the science

wars, quietly epitomizes what has gone wrong. At my school, Rutgers,

students in the undergraduate history program have a fairly wide

choice of courses. There are four offerings on Latin America, two on African

civilization, two on the Islamic world, and one on China. By contrast, there is

but asingle course on the central event of our national history--the American

Civil War--and that one covers the entire period from 1848 to 1880, the

Mexican War to the end of Reconstruction. I don't claim that there's

anything wrong with any of the courses on Third World history; for all I

know, they may be excellent. Nor would I insist that every last history major

has to learn how Grant took Vicksburg. But surely, in a major American

state university, wouldn't one expect that an undergrad eager to learn how

Grant took Vicksburg should have no trouble finding acourse that will tell

him?

Women's Studies, by now an ineluctable aspect of life on every major

secular campus, is obviously one of those areas. It is an almost uncanny

fulfillment of the joking prophecy ofGilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida,

which, 120 years ago, created the world's first Women's Studies Department

at Castle Adamant, a scholarly institution founded on the principle that

"Man is Nature's sole mistake." There is a danger in taking potshots at

Women's Studies (now busily re-naming itself as Gender Studies in many

places, since the regnant dogma currently maintains that sexual identity is

merely "performative" and gender a purely social convention). One can

easily fall into the trap of dismissing all historical claims of feminism against

the blatant misogyny of university culture as it existed 40 years ago. I don't

mean to do this, nor even to deny that some valuable scholarly work has

been carried out under the rubric ofWomen's Studies. But, as a general rule,

political monocultures encourage intellectual insularity, tendentious

standards, superficial scholarship, special pleading, and savage

enforcement ofdoctrinal conformity. Most of my academic colleagues will

concur that this pretty well describes Women's Studies as long as they don't

have to say so in public. It is now beyond challenge that a"discipline" may be

little more than a propaganda operation for a fervent political movement,

yet still be accorded the trappings of a genuine scholarly enterprise.

Challenging this assumption gets one in even more trouble than agitating

for an end to big-time football. A maverick professor in the midwest was

rudely reminded of this recently when he attempted to organize a formal

course on "political correctness." His nervous colleagues quickly shot down

the idea, having been notified by a representative of the feminist scholarly

community that "We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech."

Free speech has been a favorite target of postmodern gunslingers, among

whom Stanley Fish is arguably the most prominent. His most popular book,

please recall, is There's No Such Thing As Free Speech And a Good Thing,

Too, whose central precept he tried to put into effect by demanding that his

political opponents on the Duke University faculty be barred from voting on

tenure and promotions. Fish is often said to be the model for the fictional

Morris Zapp, who appears in several of David Lodge's comic novels about

academic life. But the comparison doesn't stand up; Zapp is much too

nice a guy! On the other hand, there is Tom Stoppard's surrealistic comedy

Jumpers, which, though 30 years old, uncannily presages the "political

correctness" phenomenon. Looking through it the other day, I was amazed

to find Stanley Fish staring out at me in the maleficent person of Archie, the

Vice-Chancellor, the play's embodiment of ruthless sophistry and academic

power-politics at its most insidious.

What has Fish's deviltry to do with The Sokal Hoax? Stanley Fish is

one of the prominent contributors to the volume. As head of Duke

University Press, proud publisher of Social Text, Fish was livid at the Hoax.

In an op-ed piece reprinted from the New York Times, Fish rails at Sokal's

alleged nastiness and dishonesty. "He carefully packaged his deception,"

growls Fish, "so as not to be detected except by someone who began

with a deep and corrosive attitude ofsuspicion."

Not so, Stanley! It was packaged so as not to be detected except by anyone

who has avoided pickling his brain in the deep and corrosive

brine of academic pseudopolitics. I can attest that Sokal's piece was tried

out on a number of quite ordinary citizens who usually caught on to the joke

after a few paragraphs. The article could only have proved deceptive to loyal

inhabitants ofthe empire that Stanley Fish, as much as anyone, has built

within the walls of academia, arealm where the false coin of crackpot

academic theory circulates freely, where aspiring scholars dingbat their way

to tenure, and where petulance and narcissism pass as political idealism.

That, alas, is the true lesson of Sokal's Hoax.

Dr. Norman Levitt is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University in

New Brunswick, NJ. He specializes in geometric topology and the

topology of manifolds, and is the author of "Grass-mannians and Gauss

Maps in Piecewise-Linear Topology." Along with biologist Paul R. Gross, he

wrote Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science.

Subsequently, Gross and Levitt; along with Martin W. Lewis, edited The

Flight from Science and Reason, avolume based on a conference held at the

New York Academy of Sciences.COPYRIGHT 2009 Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights or concerns about this content should be directed to Customer Service. For permission to reuse this article, contact Copyright Clearance Center.