Thomas Herakovich
English 401, Final Paper
It has 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; that the truth
claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and
consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its
undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with
respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or
marginalized communities. (Alan Sokal, The Sokal Hoax, 12)
The Sokal Hoax: Consequenses?
The 1996 Spring/Summer issue of Social Text contained an article by Alan Sokal,
a little known physicist from New York University - "Transgressing the Boundaries:
Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." From a scientific point of
view, the article propounded something to the effect that gravity was simply a state of
mind, and from a cultural studies point of view, the article seemed to be recantation, by a
scientist, of scientific objectivity and the immutable nature of mathematics. A few days
after the publication of the article, Sokal announced in the French journal Lingua Franca
that the article was a hoax.
The reactions to the hoax ranged from outrage over abuse of academic ethical
behavior, to endorsement by fellow physicists. Both sides of the issue, culture studies
represented as "soft" science on one side and physics as "hard" science on the other,
reacted to the hoax as though it threatened the underpinning of academia. The truth is,
that less than a few outside of American academia cared one way or the other, for the
press inside of America it was a short lived "hot" story, and for the world press it was
simply a small blip on the radar screen. In order to lend credibility to his scheme, Sokal
publicly related to Social Text as "a leading North American journal" ("A Physicist…,"
50), while the editors of the journal referred to themselves as a 'little magazine' (Robbins
and Ross, 55). The press in America tried their best to pound it into a story, with large
news papers like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles
Times, running multiple articles, essays, and rebuttals. And if there was damage, albeit
short lived, it was not to the whole of academia, but rather to the intellectual left. Peter
Osborne, a professor of Philosophy, complained that "Sokal has also provided the press
with an ideal occasion to prosecute two of its favorite pastimes - disparaging
intellectualism, of any kind, and travestying the left - while bolstering the sagging image
of the 'scientist' as a figure of authority and a man of reason and good sense" (Osborne,
197). As an ironic aside, it is notable that in 1994, in his article "The Scholar in Society,"
Gerald Graff wrote these lines:
It is true that since academics rarely have direct access to the mass media,
they are vulnerable to being caricatured there. But it is also true that the
caricatures of the academy nourish when academics fail to explain
themselves in terms the public can understand. As long as academic
humanists are unable or unwilling to make their debates accessible in the
public sphere, it will continue to be their detractors who speak for them.
(355)
Although Graff's missive brings much to the table by way of academic debate, at least in
this instance, the Sokal affair proved Graff to be prophetic. And, whether Sokal chose to
polarize the academic community - right and left - humanities and science - he
nonetheless accomplished that feat; reading through the various articles, essays, and
newspaper pieces, one is immediately struck by the polemic nature of the writing, and it
becomes all to clear that there is very little middle ground from which to assess the
material.
On the surface, it would seem that Sokal simply wanted to point out "a particular
kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities"
("A Physicist…," 51). These charges of "nonsense and sloppy thinking" were not being
leveled at his brothers in the "hard" sciences, but rather at what he seemed to believe was
the heart of the humanities - the left wing of cultural studies. The charge by Sokal that
those involved in the studies of culture, whether right, left, or center, deny the existence
of objective reality, of a "real world" ("A Physicist…," 51), is debunked by academics in
the humanities writing in defense of the discipline. Interestingly, this accusation of
disbelief in a real world finds its way into much of the writing by Sokal's fellow
physicists, but is always introduced as a sort of "common knowledge," an indisputable
fact that, unlike other specific accusations, is aimed at some euphemistic postmodern
shade - a sort of humanistic "caricature" (Terry, 100).
This idea of a "caricature," a possible common knowledge sent me looking for a
source text - a sort of "Q Gospel" (13). Higher Superstition, authored by Paul Gross and
Norman Levitt, "a biologist and a mathematician who shared [Sokal's] disdain for
critiques of science done in the name of postmodernism, cultural studies, and science
studies" (Sokal Hoax, 1), was mentioned not only by the editors of The Sokal Hoax (1);
but also by Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, editors of Social Text (Robbins and Ross,
57). Further investigation reveals it be a source text (Q Text) for rash generalities and
unabashed attacks by Gross and Levitt on the "caricatures" of leftist postmodernism,
feminism, cultural studies, and deconstructionism, all grouped conveniently under the
umbrella of the "academic left" (Gross and Levitt, 2).
Higher Superstion as a Q Text seems to be not only the origins of the
"postmodernist" generalities that plague Sokal's work, but also the complaint about
Derrida and the "Newtonian Constant" that has trickled down from Gross and Levitt to
Sokal and hence into the writings of other scientists commenting on Sokal's hoax (Gross
and Levitt, 79) (Sokal, 16) (Weinberg, 149, 170). At the least, it seems interesting that
Gross, Levitt, Sokal and the rest have found, out of the prodigious amount of Derridian
text, only one thing to complain about - evidently leaving the field of "hard" sciences at
the lowest end of any department in the university!
There is little good to recommend Higher Superstition; the supposed centrist
position of the authors evaporates as the text quickly degenerates into blatantly racist and
anti-feminist doctrine. Robbins and Ross write in their defense of Social Text, "Like
Gross and Levitt, [Sokal] appears to have absorbed these critiques only at the level of
caricatures and has been reissuing these caricatures in the form of otherworldly fanatics
who deny the existence of facts, objective realities, and gravitational forces" (57). And it
would seem upon further investigation that, even Gross and Levitt's presumption of their
place as centrist disconcerned watchdogs attacking a group of anti-science leftist
vagabonds is skewed. Ron Strickland, a professor of English Studies, writes that "they
are setting up a centrist-conservative discourse, calling it liberal, and then citing it as an
example of how liberals are sloppy scholars" (Strickland).
While managing to avoid the obviously bigoted tenor of Higher Superstition, and
under the guise of his own self-proclaimed leftist position, Sokal unfortunately iterates
much of the same doctrine. In his initial Lingua Franca essay, "A Physicist Experiments
with Cultural Studies," exposing his hoax, Sokal complains that Social Text is an nonrefereed journal, and that if they had doubts about his article they should in fact have sent
it off to a physicist for further exploration. This seems to beg the question as to why he
picked a non-refereed journal, planning from the beginning to slam them for doing and
being exactly what they are? On the other, he complains that even if the editors of the
journal couldn't make heads or tails of the physics, they should at least have been able tell
from the first few paragraphs that the article was so problematic that it should not be
published. The first paragraph of his hoax essay seems to get the most attention:
There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue
to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural
criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to
their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very
foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of
such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long postenlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can
be summarized briefly as follows: 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 method. ("Transgressing…," 11)
It would appear that the editors of Social Text were allured by the possibility that
a "'real' working scientist" had finally seen the light and had written a cultural critique of
science (Berube, 144). As mentioned earlier, much of the ensuing debate centered on the
interpretation of Sokal's allusion an objective "external world," a "real world," and the
acceptance of it by hard science and his assertion that those in cultural studies believe
otherwise. In the words of Michael Berube, "…you [Sokal] purchased your authority to
speak partly by being a scientist" (141).
Personally, outside of the issue of an obscuranist jargon laden text, I don't find it
odd that the editors of a non-refereed cultural studies journal gave Sokal's piece its day in
print. As a society and a culture, we tend to put science and the scientist on a pedestal.
We most often defer to the scientist. And it is in this light that I perceive Sokal as having
overstepped an ethical boundary. In his expose', Sokal explains his first paragraph,
feeling as though attack on the objectivity of science were enough to alert the careful
reader of the problems to come. But I must disagree even with his evaluation of his own
writing. As a careful reader, Sokal's seeming challenge to a quantifiable "real world,"
raised my suspicions, and challenged my slippery foothold in what was known to my
generation as "earth science," I nonetheless found myself surrendering, to the mystique of
the physicist, offering a sort of special dispensation to Sokal as an expert in a field of
study that was, and continues to be, beyond my personal comprehension.
Sokal, it seems, wants it both ways - he wants to be thought of as "objective" and
yet he wants us to understand that truth is not incontrovertible, and he is not alone. In his
essay in The Sokal Hoax, Steven Weinberg, physic's professor at the University of Texas
at Austin makes it abundantly clear that he would keep the scientific high ground free of
the layman's misunderstandings and possible abstractions:
Those who seek extrascientific messages in what they think they
understand about modern physics are digging dry wells. In my view, with
two large exceptions, the results of research in physics (as opposed, say, to
psychology) have no legitimate implications whatever for culture or
politics or philosophy. (152)
I find this attitude to be the act of digging trenches for turf wars - the sacred knowledge
that can be held and understood only by the elect - in this case the scientist. Weinberg,
like Gross, Levitt, and the press at large, seem ready to abstract the publication of Sokal's
hoax in a small non-refereed journal into an academic collapse affecting the entirety of
the humanities. Weinberg writes, "Such errors suggest a problem not just in the editing
practices of Social Text, but in the standards of a larger intellectual community"
(Weinberg, 151).
In his article, Weinberg attacks, among others, Social Text editor Andrew Ross,
and his efforts to discredit Ross bring up two interesting points. The first being that a few
pages later, Norton Wise, professor of History of Science at Princeton University, guts
Weinberg's arguments (Wise, 163-6), causing the reader to wonder just how much, like
Weinberg, Sokal, Gross, and Levitt have tipped the scale in their favor by writing to an
audience that doesn't understand their language or history? Wise also raises the question
of Weinberg's own "cultural agenda in his attempt to rewrite history" (Wise, 166).
The other point, and perhaps the more far reaching of the two, is that even in the
field of science, including physics, there exists the archetype of the humanities based
non-refereed "tendency journals" - "hypothesis journals" (Lloyd, 265). "The hypothesis
journals… serve as the cutting edge for ideas… that's why hypothesis journals exist in all
the sciences and in medicine…" (Lloyd, 265). I find it interesting that Social Text has
been abused consistently by Sokal et al. for editorial practices that are legitimate within
its definition as a non-refereed journal, while the existence of the similar hypothesis
journal was never mentioned.
Out of the questions raised by Social Text's editorial decision grows the debate
about multidiscipline work. And the debate points up many of the problems that occur
when we try to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. Much has been made of the
"obscuranist language propagated by the French Intellectual movement (and almost
without missing a beat - Derrida). Did Derrida and the French Intellectuals throw a
wrench into the language of theoretical works? Yes, undoubtedly. The language they
invented, their disdain for history, their forays into other fields including psychology and
philosophy, and their subsequent twisting of metaphysics turned Humanities departments
upside down. And yet in a Marcusian sense it took something that drastic to open the
academy to a new paradigm, to construct a "refusal." John Bender in his essay
"Eighteenth-Century Studies," relates the necessity for change that preceded the
endorsement and acceptance of the French Intellectual movement in American
academics:
Until recent revisions of critical method by feminism, new
historicism, and cultural materialism, Anglo-American investigation of
eighteenth-century literature proceeded largely within deep-rooted
postulates - within a frame of reference - that fundamentally reproduced
enlightenment assumptions themselves and therefore yielded
recapitulation rather than the knowledge produced by critical analysis.
(79)
It was a drastic pendulum swing, but as many of the critics of Sokal, Gross, and Levitt
note, it has since swung back toward the middle - thick deconstructionist text is rapidly
disappearing. Robbins and Ross comment on Sokal's choice of language and theory is
telling:
Like other journals of our vintage that try to keep abreast of cultural
studies, it has been many years since Social Text published direct
contributions to the debate about postmodern theory, and his article would
have been regarded as somewhat outdated if it had come from a humanist
or as a social scientist. (Robbins and Ross, 55)
To a large extent these early arguments have been well hashed through in the
press and other journals, and are a means to wander from a deeper problem that arises
from the writing of Sokal, Weinberg, Gross, and Levitt - the point that there seems to be a
complete misunderstanding by physicists of writing in the humanities - they just cannot
seem to read outside their discipline. And while I think all could agree that there is an
inherent need for a specialized knowledge and understanding of the language and
terminology's of a science in order to investigate and understand concepts organized and
explored in those scientific fields, it seems odd to me that Sokal et al. have not only
criticized the professional language of the postmodernist as obscuranist - while failing to
mention the ever widening gap that separates hard science not only from the
understanding of the layman but also other academic fields outside of the "hard" sciences.
Sokal writes, "But I am a mere physicist: if I find myself unable to make heads or
tails of jouissance and differance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy" ("A
Physicist…," 49). And that really is a central problem. After reading Sokal's various
responses and rebuttals written about his hoax, one is forced to ask whether or not he is
capable of reading abstract literary theory?
In Sokal's "A Plea for Reason, Evidence, and Logic," he manages in a few short
pages to aver that science should not be held accountable in any way for delivering
objective observations to the nonscientific world, presented as fact and gleaned from the
use of scientific knowledge that turn out to be untrue, he again proves his inability to
interpret or hold in context, writing outside of his own discipline, and implicates the
academic left as a threat to our democratic lifestyle.
Sokal quotes Robbins as having written that "It was not long ago that scientists
gave their full authority to explanations of why women and African Americans were
inherently inferior" (252). And reacts to Robbins' interpretation that "truth can be another
source of oppression" (252), by writing:
Sure, lots of people say things about women and African Americans that
are not true; and yes those falsehoods have sometimes been asserted in the
name of 'science,' 'reason' and all the rest. But claiming something doesn't
make it true, and the fact that people - including scientists - sometimes
make false claims doesn't mean that we should reject or revise the concept
of truth. Quite the contrary: it means that we should examine with the
utmost care the evidence underlying people's truth claims, and we should
reject assertions that in our best rational judgement are false. (252)
I for one, find it interesting that Sokal dissertates on the nature of truth while attempting
to negate Robbins' simple assertion that what science once presented as truth was used as
a means of oppression, and that in calling for the use of empirical evidence for evincing
this truth, he then calls on us to interpret the information with our "best rational
judgement."
As if that sort of interpretive failure were not enough, Sokal then takes on the
world of the Zuni Indians through the writing of archeologist Roger Anyon. In attempting
to explain the religious beliefs of the Zuni Indians, Anyon writes, "that science is just one
of many ways of knowing the world…. [The Zuni's worldview is] just as valid as the
archeological viewpoint of what prehistory is about" (251). Sokal, throwing any last
vestiges of wisdom freely to the wind, responds by writing:
We have here two mutually incompatible theories. They can't both be
right; they can't both even be approximately right… It seems to me that
Anyon has quite simply allowed his political and cultural sympathies to
cloud his reasoning. And there's no justification for that: We perfectly well
remember the victims of horrible genocide, and support their descendents'
valid political goals, without endorsing uncritically (or hypocritically)
their societies' traditional creation myths. More over, the relativist's stance
is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith,
obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscuranist factions as
spokespeople for the whole. (251)
I'm affriad Sokal's comments speak for themselves; although it might bear mention that in
the previous paragraph he intimates that science should be allowed ownership of ancient
Zuni tribal remains - I suppose that's how he purports to "support their descendents."
All of this brings us back to the concept of a Q Text. Sokal, Weinberg, Gross, and
Levitt would have us believe that there is a "crisis" in academia, that the crisis is being
perpetrated by left wing cultural studies professors, and these professors and their disdain
for the objectivity and imperical methods of the hard sciences could cause not only the
downfall of academia but could also be responsible for the overthrow of society as we
know it today. And at the risk of creating a caricature of the western scientist, it does
seem that at least these four "scientists" are unable to extricate themselves from the
empiricism of western science - the closed box of black and white thinking, and
consequently, they are unable to torque their minds in such a way as to grasp the concept
that the problem being discussed lies in the very definitions that they attempt to elaborate,
in the very logic of their arguments. Hence, when unable to grasp a concept that lies
outside of their box they, in keeping with their complaint about the academic left and its
apparent failing regarding multidisciplinary thinking and writing, offer up opinions that
are less than enlightening or even entertaining.
One is forced by the evidence of Sokal, Weinberg, Gross, and Levitt's own
writing as to question their motives - to question whether or not the root of their
complaints stem from a conservative 'hard science" agenda or whether their seeming
propensity for misrepresentation stems from an almost complete misunderstanding of
reading and writing outside of their own discipline?
Using Gross and Levitt's work as a spring board and as a template, Sokal set to
work on a slippery foundation, and his hoax it would seem had little to do with the reality
of the task he had set himself. And yet, while hopefuly short lived, the consequences have
been wide ranging. Certainly the mistrust and misunderstanding that has long separated
the hard and soft sciences have grown worse - the gap widened not shortened by the
hoax. The American press was also given fuel for the fire of propagating the myth of the
"academic ivory tower."
On the other hand, it seems like "much ado about nothing." There are only a
handful of pointed scientific mistakes that are cited in Higher Superstitions (and after
Wise's having taken Weinberg to task, one is forced to question even the validity of
these). If there are authors that are guilty of sloppy scholarship, shame upon them, but the
facts seem to point to minimal real error, and to a possible handful of authors as having
made them, and further, that these authors are certainly not representative of the whole of
the humanities. The real problem seems to be differences of philosophy.
Consequently, after wading through Gross and Levitt's brash racist and gender
intolerant ideology, and noting little other than self-serving innuendo and generalities
about the academic left, postmodernism, and the enormity of the problems growing out of
their doctrines, and after reading numerous articles by Sokal in defense of his hoax, I was
left wondering - where's the beef? I expected a scientific approach to the supposed
problems, text laden with examples and dates and references to back up the now exposed
attack on a scientific "Motherhood and Apple Pie" ("A Plea," 250). It never materialized.
What Sokal et al., have really opened up is not so much a specialized language
problem, or obscuranism, or left wing postmodernist plots on the American way, but
rather the collapse of the boundaries that inhibited multidisciplinary studies. Perhaps at a
time when multidisciplinary work is at its most prevalent, we should instead be
concentrating on setting the ground rules for multidisciplinary tasks and the possible
necessity of the collaborative nature of successful work that originates in the intention to
transcend disciplinary boundaries.
In the end, it is Social Text editor Andrew Ross, that furnishes a moment of
clarity, "While I do not think the Sokal affair proved anything (it was an anomaly in
almost every respect), it did expose a landscape of resentments and suspicions that may
have to be negotiated" (Ross, 248).
Works Cited
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