Textual Reckoning

By Thomas Frank

Almost from its inception, the playful practice of poststructuralism has been dogged by a curious sense of its own absurdity. The high theorists of the genre often veer toward—and sometimes beyond—high silliness. There's something about the field's combination of nearly incomprehensible jargon, its grand claims of subversiveness and its practitioners' air of self-importance and professorial correctness that makes it a natural, even obligatory, target of parody and farce. A discipline that makes much of puns and cleverness, it issues a standing challenge to the prank-inclined: I dare you to outwit me. …

This is why most of the professors and graduate students I know reacted with giddiness when they heard about physicist Alan Sokal's admission in Lingua Franca that his article on postmodern science that appeared in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, the respected journal of cultural studies and theory, was in fact a hoax. Sokal's essay bears all the earmarks of a classic prank: Plausible enough on the surface to get by Social Text's panel of respected academic editors, it is spotted as a hoax immediately by those who are more skeptical of the magazine's mission.

Titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," it conforms to the genre's conventions with a hilariously studied slavishness. Sokal carefully includes the usual pious references to the "subversive" power of interdisciplinarity; he takes pains to flatter and agree with the editors of Social Text and goes out of his way to assail their usual targets; he summons the usual barrage of references and quotations, many of them predictably impenetrable; and he closes with confused calls for an "emancipatory mathematics" and "a liberatory postmodern science."

"I confess, I don't understand half of the jargon I used," Sokal says. "But that's part of the point, that one can get an article accepted and look like an expert even if you don't understand what you're talking about." A long-standing leftist (Sokal taught in Nicaragua under the Sandinista government, a fact he takes pains to foreground whenever discussing his deed) and disturbed by what he calls "sloppy thinking" in the academic left's critique of science, Sokal resolved to intervene in a forcible and humiliating manner. "I took the silliest things written about physics and mathematics by the most prominent people," he recalls, then “invented an argument relating it all.” …

The most revealing reactions to the prank are those of Social Text's publishers. In spite of its usual tendency to celebrate the upending of authority, the twitting of order and anti-hierarchical gestures, the journal has retreated quickly into talk of professional ethics and betrayal of academic good faith. Even Stanley Fish, executive director of Duke University Press (Social Text's publisher) and a scholar who has deftly transmuted textual indeterminacy into professional renown, has gotten involved in the question, issuing a statement supporting Social Text and chiding Sokal for using his "professional credentials" to deceive.

And one can't help but conclude that, in one sense, maybe Fish has got it right: For all the big issues that appear to be involved, this is ultimately a battle over competing definitions of professionalism, nothing more. The poststructuralist jargon Sokal deployed so devastatingly is the sacred talk of a professional group, a private banter whose function is precisely to keep outsiders like Sokal out. But it's a jargon with a curious twist, a professional language that celebrates anti-professionalism, that fetishizes the subversive power of transgression and the virtue of the democratic multitude. Over the years it has always moved quickly enough — obsoleting itself as soon as it is taken up by a wider audience — to stay ahead of the crushing consequences of this contradiction, allowing cultural studies academics to present themselves, with only limited difficulty, as a professional vanguard of the popular will. But it is the exposing of this contradiction that gives Sokal's deed such resonance.