The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy [Paperback]

Here the editors of Lingua Franca have put together the definitive collection of articles on the entire succès de scandale including the text of physicist Alan Sokal's article itself, Sokal's revelation article in Lingua Franca, and the reply of the Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, whose publication of Sokal's parody of social constructionist thought and expression brought about their academic embarrassment. These are followed by selected letters to the editors in response to the affair. I particularly enjoyed the insightful letters by Franco Moretti of Columbia University and Lee Smolin of Penn State. Next are reactions from the press, both domestic and foreign, including stories by Stanley Fish, George Will, Bruce Latour, and seventeen others, including another piece by Alan Sokal from Le Monde (Paris). Then we are treated to some longer essays, some with responses and counter responses, including some excellent work by Steven Weinberg and Barbara Epstein. The final chapter entitled "Colloquies" provides some post bellum reflections by Andrew Ross, Sokal and others. All of this is very entertaining.

In addition to being entertained by this entirely engaging and balanced account I was given a kind of postgraduate course in social constructionist and postmodern thought and its critics. I came away feeling that however one may feel about Sokal's hoax itself, one positive result has been to stimulate thought and discussion on postmodernism and bring those ideas to a wider public than had previously existed. Whether that is good for postmodernism is problematic.

This kind of nonsense has been exposed by the Sokal hoax covered here, though in this case it's all within the academy. Sokal's fake paper, submitted to a trendy but gullible "cultural studies" journal, is an absolutely brilliant piece of parody in which he used a heap of big words, obtuse theory, and hip namedropping while saying absolutely nothing. This book presents Sokal's paper and then the defensive and whiny rebuttals of the journal's editors after they learned they were hoodwinked, followed by just about everything that was said in the international academic press about the whole affair. Unfortunately, this book really slows down as the academic commentaries become very repetitive, discussing the same aspects of the hoax again and again, while many of them devolve into the dense theoretical professor-speak that Sokal was trying to criticize in the first place. Also, in presenting never-ending arguments by defensive eggheads in the academy, we merely get a closed argument among people with no connection to the outside world whatsoever. The book fails to truly analyze the true issue behind this whole mess - the fact that real students from the real world are paying for an education made up of nonsensical theorizing about obtuse philosophical concepts that truly matter to nobody but a professor, who is trying to show off to another professor. This disconnection from reality in the modern university system is what has really been exposed by Sokal's hoax and the ensuing academic catfight. [~doomsdayer520~]

One of Sokal's important contributions is to quote liberally from the postmodern gurus of the French academic establishment. Reading Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattarri, and their colleagues for meaning is virtually impossible (the French, by the way, is no more lucid than the English translations), so the several quotes from their work in Sokal's essay are about as close as any rational reader will get to their work.

But what they say is indeed hilarious. Here is Derrida: "The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variablity--it is, finally, the concept of the game." This, of course, means absolutely nothing--even in context. But at least it is not wrong, as is the following from Lacan: "This diagram [the Mobius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject...it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease." Lacan is justly famous--here we see him taking silly to the heights of sublimity.

Here is Lacan again: "...human life could be defined as a calculus in which zero was irrational. When I say 'irrational' I'm referring not to some unfathomable emotional state but precisely to what is call ian imaginary number." How incredibly erudite-sounding to define human life as a "calculus" (whatever that is) in which zero is "irrational" and in which "irrational" means "imaginary." This is really rich!

There are some excellent essays in this book, besides that of Sokal. These include excellent pieces by Steven Weinberg (the physicist), Paul Boghossian (the philosopher), Meera Nanda (scientist/journalist), and Barbara Epstein. My favorite one-liner is Weinberg's tale of a physicist friend who, on his death bed, confesses to draw some consolation from the fact that at least he won't have to look up the meaning of 'hermeneutic' any more in the dictionary.

My favorite humor book is Woody Allen's Without Feathers. But this comes in a close second, and there's lots to learn, too.