Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 21:13:32 +0300 (EET DST)
Subject: Sokal article (fwd)


Anything interesting?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Sheila Peuse" <sheila_peuse-AT-macmail.ucsc.edu> (by way of
 bepstein-AT-nature.berkeley.edu (Barbara Epstein))

I have submitted the following piece to the New York Times, for their op ed
page, but my guess is they won't print it.  So I'm sending it to people who
might be interested.  If you want to pass this on, feel free to do so.  -
Barbara

On May 18, the Times reported the "hoax" that physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated
when his parody of cultural studies was published by the journal Social Text
as if it were a scholarly article. Accurately quoting cultural-studies gurus
such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Stanley Aronowitz, Sokal showed how
easy it is in some academic quarters to speak nonsense and get away with it.
His parody belongs to a long and venerable tradition of satire as a weapon for
the exposure of silly orthodoxies.

It would be easy to mistake Sokal's gesture as one more attack in an academic
turf war between natural scientists and humanists/social scientists. But as a
historian, I am delighted by Sokal's prank. He brilliantly satirizes a
"postmodernist" genre that a decade ago was asking interesting questions about
how language and culture affect society, but which has now hardened into a
dogma, promotes the worship of its own celebrities, refuses to address
critiques, and employs humiliation to silence dissent. Sokal's work has opened
up a discussion that was previously suppressed.

I teach on a campus and in a department where postmodernism rides high. When I
have criticized these currents, I have often been told I am washing the left's
dirty linen in public, alerting the right to our flaws. But the right, of
course, is perfectly capable of discovering the left's flaws on its own, and
the silencing of debate is never justified.

In any event, postmodernism and its search for the outrageous are scarcely
left-wing. It is absurd and unprincipled to reject traditional conceptions,
like scientific objectivity, regardless of their merit.  A left-wing
conception of radicalism means challenging inequalities of power and
resources, and attempting to make a more just, egalitarian, and peaceful
world. It does not mean going for the intellectual equivalent of shock.

In the subculture that surrounds postmodernism, dissent is often silenced by
ostracism, or squelched by the individual herself for fear of appearing
unsophisticated. Several years ago, the prominent feminist theorist Judith
Butler gave a lecture to several hundred, mostly women, at UC-Berkeley. She
began by asking who in the room regarded herself as a woman. Not one hand went
up. Presumably, every woman in the room was aware of Butler's view of the
concept of "woman" as a social construct. To hold up one's hand would have
been to offer oneself for ridicule. Not one woman among hundreds would admit
to regarding herself as a woman! To such lengths has the silencing and
self-silencing been carried.


This intimidation affects faculty as well as students. I am a tenured full
professor, and still at times I have lacked the courage to express my views
publicly. One friend, a literature professor at a major East Coast university,
had been cowed by the high priests of postmodernist Theory; because she could
not understand their work she thought it must be superior to hers. I argued
that incomprehensibility is not proof of scholarship. Last week she called to
say that this conversation had renewed her confidence in her own perspective,
and that she was thrilled to see Sokal's parody.

Suddenly these issues are being discussed. The day the Times ran the news
story about Sokal, I was at a conference on social movements with faculty and
students from many universities. Everyone was talking about these issues, with
opinions being expressed from all sides, and, as far as I could tell,
everyone's opinions being listened to.

And we certainly need open and honest discussion; for consider what has come
to pass as normal in the trendy attack on scientific reason. At a lecture at
the New York Academy of Sciences (Feb. 7 1996), Social Text co-editor Andrew
Ross said, "I won't deny that there is a law of gravity. I would nevertheless
argue that there are no laws in nature, there are only laws in society. Laws
are things that men and women make, and that they can change."

What could Ross possibly mean? That the law of gravity is a social law that
men and women can change? If so, Sokal was dead on target when he wrote, in
revealing his own "hoax," that "anyone who believes that the laws of physics
are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions
>from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor)." Or
perhaps all Ross means is that our understanding of the laws of physics
changes over time; but if that's what he meant, why didn't he say so, and
what's the big deal?

The key issues at stake are the defense of rationality, and the quest for the
best attainable truth.  As the postmodernists point out, we can never expect
to possess the complete truth about the world around us (or society, or
ourselves).  But there is nevertheless a world external to our consciousness,
about which we can gain knowledge. Some accounts come closer to the truth than
others.  It is the responsibility of intellectuals to pursue such accounts.
The defense of truth and objectivity is in no way the sole property of
conservatives.  In fact, the fearless analysis of objective reality is
especially crucial to those of us on the left: without it there is no solid
ground for social critique.

I believe in honesty and directness in human relations, in academia as
anywhere else. Sokal's parody -- it was hardly a hoax, for he exposed it
himself in the pages of Lingua Franca -- involved secrecy and deception.
Numerous people, including me, knew about the joke before Sokal revealed it
publicly, and supported him for his genuinely subversive act. I shared the
conviction that satire was necessary to show that the emperor has no clothes,
and that only a dramatic gesture like Sokal's would  clear the way to open
debate.  That a large number of people were disciplined enough to keep the
secret suggests the depths of the anger provoked by postmodernist arrogance.

The rejection of rationality -- which is manifested in religious
fundamentalisms and in New Age superstitions as well as in postmodernism -- is
an understandable response to chaotic social changes. But intellectuals,
especially those on the left, should resist this trend. Sokal's satire is a
call to the left to reaffirm its Enlightenment roots, and to intellectuals of
all political stripes to defend and extend rationality.



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