Probing, puncturing, and dissecting the conventional wisdom of the Washington Post
Post vs. Postmodern
by Steve FullerIn the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, a gossip magazine for academic humanists, physicist Alan Sokal revealed that he had just perpetrated an elaborate hoax on Social Text, perhaps the foremost cultural studies journal in North America. He managed to publish an impeccably documented article that purported to derive postmodern cultural implications from contemporary work in physics. The story quickly circulated throughout the world's media after it made the front page of The New York Times on 18 May. While The Times made a point of airing both sides of Sokal's story by speaking to the editors of Social Text, most other coverage has typically presented only Sokal's side -- the only side aired in the original Lingua Franca piece -- and sometimes even endorsed Sokal's side, as The Washington Post has done in its indignant editorial of 29 May.
A natural question to ask at the outset is whether Sokal's hoax is really worthy of The Post's pontifications, especially during a period of pivotal elections in India, Israel, and Northern Ireland. The fact that both Sokal and Social Text hail from New York City (indeed, New York University) obviously played a role in The Times's front page coverage. It was local news. Had the hoax been perpetrated in just about any other part of the US, it would have been lucky to receive any coverage at all in The Times. The Post's eagerness to get in on the dispute shows, in the first instance, that it is still a provincial paper that takes its cultural marching orders from New York.
In its editorial, The Post makes two assertions. On the one hand, it does not quite buy the reasons given by Social Text's editors for originally publishing Sokal's piece; yet, on the other hand, the editors should not have even bothered to offer reasons because they do not profess to have any standards in the first place (being postmodernists and all that...).
The first assertion is especially disturbing coming from a major newspaper that presumably supports the protection of free speech. One point repeatedly driven home by the Social Text editors is that their periodical functions more as a political magazine than a traditional academic journal, and as such its primary aim is publishing not what it thinks ought to be believed but what it thinks ought to be heard. For example, nothing in the writings of Social Text's two editors, Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins, would suggest that they are personally sympathetic to the style of reasoning that is parodied in Sokal's piece. In fact, in his introduction to the relevant issue of Social Text, Ross does not even mention Sokal in the course of tying the other pieces together in terms of some common themes. His article is presented in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion without editorial endorsement.
On to The Post's second assertion: As a piece of reasoning it is simply shoddy. If we grant that Social Text is a `postmodernist' journal, and that postmodernists generally believe that there are no universally valid intellectual standards, it does not follow that they believe that there are no standards whatsoever. Rather, the standards are relative to a particular culture, time, etc. Even Sokal seemed to recognize this, since there are some marked divergences between his article in Social Text and his gloss on it in Lingua Franca. In the Lingua Franca interview, Sokal suggests that if one truly believes that reality is socially constructed, then they should be able to walk out of windows unharmed. Had he said this in his Social Text piece, no doubt the editors would have refused publication, since no such absurdity is implied by the social construction of reality. Moreover, Sokal now erroneously uses the word "subjectivist" to describe the position staked out in the original article, even though this contradicts everything he said there about postmodernism's "decentering" of the subject. It seemed that Sokal knew when to `shut up', to echo The Post's elegant expression, which implies that he recognized that there were some standards he had to meet which went beyond flattering the editors and their cronies.
The question then arises as to why Sokal chose to suspend those standards when he went public. Part of the answer seems to be that the standards, such as they are, are not high enough, especially when cultural studies people start to pronounce on the social significance of this or that physical theory, equation, etc. Although Sokal may believe that science is under siege at the moment, he should be pleased by the ease with which The Post and other journalists took what he said here at face value. Thus, the reader was regaled with quotes from the bogus article that were alleged to be gibberish. But were they gibberish? A lot depends on whether one thinks it makes sense to understand the cultural significance of physics by focusing on the structure of particular physical theories and equations in the first place. The actual errors in physics committed in the article are, for the most part, rather subtle, and certainly not enough to warrant the charge that Social Text's editors are scientific illiterates.
Nevertheless, it may be reasonable to expect scholars in the cultural studies of science to have mastered enough of a given science to pass one of E.D. Hirsch's `cultural literacy' tests. At the same time, however, it might not be such a bad idea for scientists to master some basics in the history and sociology of science before they attempt to mobilize it in a public forum to legitimate a pet project. For example, when Leon Lederman and Steven Weinberg were opining wildly about how the Supercollider would answer the question set 2500 years ago by Thales, `What is matter?', the liberties they took with the socio-historical record did not merit front page coverage, even though their argument for public funding rested largely on the Supercollider's (allegedly) momentous cultural significance, since its practical payoffs would likely be indirect at best. If Sokal's hoax leads to some reciprocal interdisciplinary accountability of the kind suggested here, it may not have been entirely diversionary.
Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology & Social Policy at the University of Durham, United Kingdom. He received his Ph.D. in History & Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh (1985), and is the author of three books: Social Epistemology (1988); Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents (2nd edn, 1993); Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science & Technology Studies (1993). He is currently finishing up a book on the origins and impacts of the work of Thomas Kuhn. Some of his views on science policy recently appeared in Nature (23 May 1996), and he is a contributor to the issue of Social Text in which Sokal's article was published.