It hit the front page of the New York Times last May when Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, revealed that his article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was a joke. With a title like that, you might ask, who thought otherwise?
The editors of Social Text aren't laughing. Their prestigious journal has been a leading voice for the influential brand of thought that, broadly speaking, goes under the rubric "post-modern critical theory." Prominent intellectuals all, they published Sokal's article as serious scholarship, failing to notice its purposefully silly statements about the philosophical import of quantum physics and general relativity.
Nor did they notice anything unusual about its exaggerated style and worshipful references to the stars of their field, such as Jacques Derrida, the guru of "deconstruction," psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Social Text editor Stanley Aronowitz, known for critical writing about science and technology.
When Sokal revealed his hoax, Aronowitz and his colleagues compounded their embarrassment. Rather than acknowledging that their scholarly pants were at their ankles, they attacked Sokal, accusing him of bad ethics. Aronowitz said in the Times that Sokal was "ill-read and half-educated." These responses fanned the flames, as you'd expect, and the ensuing commentary -- article after article in newspapers and journals of opinion cheering Sokal's hoax -- showed that he'd struck a responsive chord.
On March 21, the Sokal affair -- as it's come to be called -- arrived in the flesh in our home town. An intellectual event of the first order, sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh cultural studies program, brought together Sokal and Aronowitz for their first face-to-face encounter. No blows were exchanged, but there was plenty of sound, a little fury, and it signified more than you could have gathered from Bill Steigerwald's column ("The hoax at Social Text will not die," Mar. 27).
Steigerwald took the predictable tack of thumbing his nose at the intellectuals. Fair enough. Sokal's major league, all-American stunt is good for a laugh at professors. Ironically, however, the Sokal affair highlights how some university intellectuals make it easy for the rest of us to write them all off as alien life-forms.
The value of Sokal's parody goes beyond a few chuckles. It dramatizes the folly of a fashionable style of writing and talking, which in its extreme forms, diverges so far from norms of intelligible, rational discourse that it defeats its self-professed aims to influence wider culture. And that's our loss.
I view the Sokal affair from an unusual vantage, having crossed and recrossed the divide -- chasm? -- between science and the humanities. After an engineering degree and several years working with computers, I spent six years almost getting a Ph.D. in literature at the University of Pittsburgh. Running low on money and motivation, I landed back on the other side -- as a science writer at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center -- where I interview scientists in many fields, from molecular biology to quantum physics, and write about their work for general audiences.
From my perspective, it's easy to see that post-modern critical theory, especially its forays into criticism of science, was a bubble waiting to be burst -- as Pitt cultural studies professor Colin MacCabe observed when he introduced the March 21 debate. Consider this morsel from Sokal's article:
The pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point . . . .
The central claim -- that the value of pi and the acceleration of gravity are not universal truths but, in critical lingo, "culturally determined" -- is laughable to scientists, as Sokal intended it to be. That this passed muster with reputed intellectuals in the humanities, who published it without even checking the scientific arguments with a scientist, points to a problem. Sokal calls it "sloppy scholarship" within an academic subculture. I'd say that's an understatement. Nothing Aronowitz said on March 21 suggested otherwise.
The verbiage stating this claim is also good for a wry laugh and shaking of the head, something like Wow, do they really write like that? They do. Here's another example, from a well known (within her field) feminist deconstructionist: "The law produces and then conceals the notion of 'a subject before the law' in order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law's own regulatory hegemony."
The problem here is not just big words. This verbose, wickedly abstract style can leave even sympathetic readers -- I speak from personal experience -- with the disorienting feeling of trying to gather sense and meaning where there is none. Or precious little. This passage discusses the (to deconstructionists) intriguing question of "the self" and whether there is such a thing outside language and social convention.
At book length, this writer says there isn't. It's an old idea (at least as old as Buddhism), with -- I suppose -- a somewhat new take, yet stripped of the layers of abstraction, the idea loses its allure and sounds almost like conversation with a friend. Conversational prose, however, doesn't get published in academic journals of cultural theory.
If you're a graduate student or young professor perhaps you opt for the obscurantism of theory partly out of a sense of showmanship, partly out of anxiety. Clarity may reveal you don't really have much to say.
Harsh? At a drama conference years ago, I heard a paper on Shakespeare by an untenured young professor from a prominent university. The paper was laced with deconstructionist jargon, and it struck me that the professor showed little conviction for his argument, whatever it was. At a reception later that day, I listened to him, in a small circle of conversation, explain that yes, he didn't really understand what he was saying either, but that's the game you have to play.
In my position as a science writer, I sit in on seminars where scientists describe their research to colleagues. They nearly always use visual aids -- overhead transparencies, slides and video -- to help drive their key points home, and they talk off-the-cuff, using notes to guide them, preserving as much as possible the animation of face-to-face discussion. In graduate school, I attended many similar seminars by cultural critics. Standard practice is to read their prose, often as abstruse as the examples here, from the page.
On one side, I see an earnest desire to convey information. On the other, I see a communication style that puts up unnecessary barriers, making it more difficult to evaluate claims and enter constructively into dialogue.
Are there valid reasons? It's interesting to me that the idea of a deconstructionist with visual aids seems almost ludicrous -- it could be a New Yorker cartoon. Deconstructionist thought is characterized by its convictions about the elusive, slippery nature of truth, meaning and reality, and an avowed deconstructionist, I expect, would say that visual aids imply the kind of static ("instantiated") illusion of truth that language all too easily leads us toward.
Lost yet? Me too. My capacity for intellectual abstraction fails at about this point, and fundamentally I believe in truth, meaning and reality. They're useful and necessary concepts. Sokal does too. His parody broadly lampoons pronouncements by cultural critics to the effect that scientific "truths" are cultural convention, "constituted" by language.
If you don't believe in scientific truth, says Sokal, you have nowhere to stand in countering socially debilitating pseudo-science, such as Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.
Much of Sokal's complaint about post-modern critical theory, in fact, is that it claims to be politically progressive. "I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist," he writes, "who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class."
I value much of the thinking that goes under the cultural theory label, and I think no serious person would argue with the emphasis on multi-culturalism, bringing new voices into the mix of university literature study, it has fostered.
But there are also rich ironies. Dogma is not lacking among deconstructionists. There's no such thing as "truth" they say, and if you think otherwise you're wrong. They talk and write about the need to democratize knowledge in ways that exclude all but the select few, perpetuating the class divisions they claim to be breaking down.
Thanks to Reaganism and Rush Limbaugh-ism, progressive social thinking -- the kind we traditionally associate with universities -- has fallen into disrepute, and there has seldom been a greater need to feel the influence of university intellectuals in the wider community. The bewilderingly windy and arcane style of communicating that has become a prominent feature of the university landscape, however, only plays into the hands of the Limbaughs of the world, who excel at nothing so much as deceitfully simple answers to our most pressing problems.