Professor's Hoax Fuels Culture Wars
New York Times FAX
18 May 1996
A New York University physicist fed up with what he sees as the excesses of
the
academic left hoodwinked a well-known journal into publishing a parody
thick
with gibberish as though it were serious scholarly work. The article,
entitled
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum
Gravity," appeared this month in Social Text, a journal that helped invent
the
trendy, sometimes baffling field of cultural studies. Now the physicist,
Alan
Sokal, is gloating. And the editorial collective that publishes the journal
says it sorely regrets its mistake. But the journal's co-founder says
Professor
Sokal is confused. "He says we're epistemic relativists", complained
Stanley
Aronowitz, the co-founder and a professor at CUNY. "We're not! He got it
wrong.
One of the reasons he got it wrong is he's ill-read and half-educated." The
flap goes to the heart of the public debate over left-wing scholarship and
particularly over the belief that social, cultural and political conditions
influence and may even determine knowledge and ideas about what is truth.
This
is another skirmish in the culture wars, the battle over multiculturalism
and
college curricula and whether there is one objective truth or just many
differing points of view. Conservatives have argued that there is truth, or
at
least an approach to truth, and that scholars have a responsibility to
pursue
it. They have accused the academic left of debasing scholarship for
political
ends. In this case, Professor Sokal intended to attack some of the work of
social scientists and humanists in the field of cultural studies, the
exploration of culture - and, in recent years, science - for coded
ideological
meaning. "While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious,"
Professor Sokal wrote in a separate article in the current issue of the
magazine Lingua Franca, in which he revealed the hoax and detailed his
"intellectual and political" motivations. "What concerns me is the
proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a
particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the
existence
of objective realities," he wrote in Lingua Franca. By JANNY SCOTT
-------------------------------------------------------------
Chuck Warman
cwarman@sol.wf.net
"The abdication of Belief / Makes the Behavior small."
--- Emily Dickinson