Making academia irrelevant

Bastard Hat
    By David Auerbach

Alan Sokal would have remained just another physics professor if he hadn't decided last year to play a joke on Social Text, the noted journal of cultural studies. He submitted an article entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Liberally invoking prominent authorities, from Lacan to Foucault to the editors of Social Text themselves, through an incoherent argument that somehow linked quantum mechanics with gender theory, the article found its way into publication. Sokal then revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca, and was met by outrage and a vehement defense from Social Text's editors. They saw their field skewered in periodicals ranging from Tikkun to The Nation, whose writers saw the hoax as confirmation of their suspicions that postmodernist theory was an ego-stroking exercise in verbiage (best article title: "Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Total Bullshit"). But despite the widespread reaction, very little has changed, mostly because no one who agreed with Sokal would have bothered reading Social Text in the first place. ST editor Bruce Robbins said as much in writing that his "main feeling was titillation. We were worth attacking!" displaying a bizarre inferiority complex that colored his every word.

Sokal is back, and this time he's hunting big game. Unable to dismiss an entire field in one prank, he and Belgian Jean Bricmont have published Impostures Intellectuelles, devoted to attacking disparate post-modernists (in particular, French theorists Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray) for flagrant misuses of scientific concepts. Published last month in France, luminaries like Julia Kristeva have already attacked it as being yet another assault on the French by American philistines.

To the uneducated layman, Sokal's job seems simple. Statements like Lacan's "the erect male organ, not as itself, not even as image, but as the missing piece of the desired image, is thus equal to the square root of -1 of the highest produced meaning," seem designed for instant ridicule, no matter what their context. When Irigeny claims that physics has emphasized solid mechanics over fluid mechanics because men do not menstruate,she is invoking science while simultaneously trying to trump it, attempting to show that ineffable cultural factors make purported scientific findings dubious. (Hence Robbins calling Sokal and his other enemies homophobes and sexists for no apparent reason.)

But Sokal is not targeting the theories themselves. The problem is not that Social Text published patent nonsense, but that they did so for political reasons. Robbins says he published the "politically convenient" piece out of "enthusiasm for a supposed political ally." An agenda took priority over scholarship and sense. It may be just an isolated incident of overeager polemicism by a hyperactively post-Marxist journal. But it's happened before.

The spectre lurking behind this entire conflict is that of Paul de Man, who is curiously absent from Sokal's missives, and even from his original hoax paper. De Man was one of the most prominent professors at Yale in the '70s, spreading the word of Derrida's deconstruction to the American literati. After his death, a young man named Ortwin de Graef stumbled upon 92 articles written by de Man for the French collaborationist newspaper Le Soir during World War II. In these articles, de Man promoted Hitler as bringing about "the definitive emancipation" of Germans, and suggested "the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe" as "a solution to the Jewish problem," while claiming that "Jewish writers have always remained in the second rank."

Anti-Semitism is threaded through much of western thought, from Kant to T.S. Eliot, and it hardly invalidated de Man's work per se. But consider the Jewish Derrida's "deconstruction" of de Man's articles, which "proves" they weren't anti-Semitic, a piece that stands in Derrida's corpus as Céline's infamous pamphlets do in his. Or Richard Rand's absurd claim that "Paul de Man and his deconstruction [are] somehow overwhelmingly Jewish," among many other defenses of de Man's statements. Reading such things, one realizes that de Man's cult of personality ballooned amongst his supplicants and friends. In the words of one anonymous academic, they were "so much under the sway of the man they cannot bear to consider what they are doing."

Impostures Intellectuelles is meant to be a flank attack on such personality cults: Sokal is tearing down the wallpaper in hopes of collapsing the house. By proving the inadequacies and loopiness of one aspect of the writings under consideration, he hopes to show that "these writers have become international stars for sociological rather than intellectual reasons." That is, their theories are not necessarily wrong, but they have become irrelevant; hence Sokal's lumping of diverse philosophies together under the de facto heading of "trendy stuff." But we learned from the de Man incident that under such mindless veneration, many supporters will never abandon their beloved "stars." If blatant anti-Semitism didn't do it, faulty science sure won't.

The obvious question to ask is, why just theory? Sokal seems to think that the extremist relativism of cultural studies and post-modernism makes it particularly ripe for mysticism and idol-worship. But it's been said that if MIT computer scientist Marvin Minsky had spent 20 years finding a solution for the inadequacies of neural nets rather than relentlessly attacking them, the field would be that much farther ahead. And the endlessly recounted tale of junior professors denied tenure out of one senior faculty member's obstinacy strikes the point bare: rationality is often second to seniority in all groves of academe. That Social Text has published articles on precisely this point only reveals the tacit acceptance of a pathetic hypocrisy that allows anti-Semites to become Semites and psychologists to become mathematicians. If science is late to catch up with the humanities in the cancerous growths of nepotism, the objectivity that Irigaray, Robbins, and many others attack is perhaps the only check in place.

Ultimately, Sokal's threat is not one of debunking but of irrelevancy. If he can reveal the incestuousness of certain academic circles, he will only succeed in pushing them further from the limelight, perhaps not engendering reform, but at least preventing their dominance. Robbins' insecurities all but admit this threat. And if only those who disagree with me are still reading this last paragraph, all others having fled in apathy from my minefield of references and allusions, so much the better.

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