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 non-refereed 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 post-enlightenment 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: