Truth Without Scare Quotes: Post-Sokalian Genre Theory.

By all established criteria of expository and argumentative writing, the essay that physicist and would-be “theorist” Alan Sokal published as a hoax in Social Text in the spring of 1996 was a terrible piece: name calling, unsupported judgments, ambiguous use of language, uncritical leaning on authorities, and not a trace of sustained logical reasoning. Since these vices in form did not go unnoticed by the editors of the journal, as they acknowledged in the debates generated by the affair, their decision to publish the paper must have been motivated by one of two factors: they considered the established norms of academic writing to be obsolete; or much more likely, they liked the message so much that they were willing to ignore the shortcomings of its formulation. The fact that Sokal was an outsider to the field of critical theory gave even more force to his thesis: here was a scientist, with no interest at stake in defending postmodern positions (publishing in Social Text certainly wasn’t going to help him to any grant or promotion), who nevertheless endorsed the view of science promoted by the said theory. What could have led Sokal to his positions, if not pure intellectual objectivity? Except that the thesis ironically defended by the spoof precludes the possibility of pure intellectual objectivity. The essay claims that recent development in science and mathematics, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty, Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness of axiomatic systems, chaos theory and the mathematical investigation of nonlinear phenomena have (scientifically?) demonstrated “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.” ¹ This lends support to a comparison widely circulated in cultural studies: science is like literary fiction, because (1) it constructs reality more than it describes it; (2) it is a language-game “on a par with the others,” ² that is, another discursive practice constituted, and not merely regulated, by social conventions; (3) it is dominated by metaphors, because language is never literal; (4) it is self-referential, because it creates its referent. ³ It is easy to see why literary critics would be tempted by this analogy with fictional discourse: it undermines a hierarchical system, supposedly inherited from the Enlightenment, ⁴ that views science as the highest form of knowledge, and it replaces it with a system that puts all discourse under the jurisdiction of literary criticism.

The debate between postmodern science studies and the philosophy earnestly endorsed by Sokal was renewed in a public confrontation between the physicist and his Social Text editors, Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, held at New York University in November 1996. Here is an extract from what The New Yorker reported about the debate:

It was Sokal’s point that some people on the left had let their allegiance to postmodernism muddle their thinking. He gave as an example an archaeologist who asserted that there was no incompatibility between the position of scientists who had evidence that Native Americans came to North America across the Bering Strait more than ten thousand years ago and the position of Indians who believed that their ancestors arose, fully formed, from a subterranean spirit world. Sokal said that the positions were incompatible, and asked which one was true. His question seemed entirely reasonable, at least until the postmodernists in the audience began to pick it apart.

“On whose authority should we be forced to answer your question?” someone at the back asked Sokal.

At this, Sokal appeared a bit puzzled, and so Stanley Aronowitz, the City University sociology professor who co-founded Social Text, stepped in. “It’s a metatheoretical question,” he said. “He’s asking whether the framing itself is subject to interrogation.”

“I don’t understand,” Sokal responded, a little exasperated. “These are two theories that are mutually contradictory.”

“Oh, no,” someone else chimed in. “The question...