Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair

One reason Sokal’s article stirred up such a fuss was that, when it was published in 1996, people still largely depended on edited, gatekept outlets for their reading and viewing. Although not mainstream media, Social Text was still selective about what it published, and the fact that its editors had chosen to publish Sokal’s hoax was a key point in the controversy. It would be a few more years before raw, self-published writing on the Internet would start to reach as many people as it does now.

Blown away by this article, thank you. I hadn't thought of the Sokal affair in ages but I remember when it happened and how gleeful everyone was in making fun of the journal at the time. To think that the author and journal co-editor at the time would wind up working together as early advocates for Palenstinian rights is an incredible plot twist.

From the intro to the original paper:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent 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; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...

And the reveal, including a brief discussion of the “ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment”: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingu...

And on the heels of the Sokal affair, came the Bogdanov Scandal, which at the time, some physicist thought was an elaborate pay-back prank and as it turned out, 2 Phd theses, one in Mathematics and the other in Physics made it through the system even if with the lowest grades (University of Nancy, France), where the content of both theses is utter nonsense, and yet peer pressure, and complascency made it so that something that fails even the lowest standards of consideration for a graduate research (in the context of Sokal's affair it would have been a masterful pay-back) was actually legitimate. Kind of a sobering story in these strange times.

Wow, they really showed the editors of Social Text. Somebody remind me of their names?

All of the readers of Social Text were really embarrassed. Or at least, I'm sure they were. I never actually met one.

There's some interesting stuff in here if you can tolerate the meandering and the way-back-when. Like you'd expect from po-mo wonks, everything's gotta be infinitely subtle and infinitely contextualized. So no big mea-culpa and no big defensive denial either. All of that's been hashed and rehashed many times already I guess. You'll find some self-deprecating humor, some spots with surprising self-awareness, some with a surprising lack of it. The main fresh thing is how they'd like to try and compare/contrast/contextualize it in this moment. For example:

> Being a gatekeeper by maintaining high intellectual standards is not what public opinion would associate with Social Text, to say the least. Yet that is what the journal practiced, mainly. And it is a practice worth defending, however elitist it might look. All the more so because of how the Trump administration has weaponized both the idea of the hoax and the program of anti-elitism. [..] We know what has befallen intellectual standards. [..] Is this ChatGPT, or is it Orwell’s doublethink?

Well ok, there's a conversation to be had about these things! This is not the time to pontificate though, it's the time for sweet revenge. There's never been a better time for po-mo wonks to lean on AI slop and blast physics journals with fake stuff about gravity until someone understaffed falls for the trick. Then you can do a big scandalous reveal about how you can't believe you got away it ;)

Sokal was right, of course. He deservedly made fools of a bunch of naked emperors. However, he also influenced a lot of people (myself included) to eschew a whole genre of thinkers for which there was a lot of truly brilliant ideas.

For example, Lacan is given a good spanking by Sokal both in his paper Transgressing the Boundaries and an entire chapter is dedicated to him in Intellectual Impostures. Lacan looks like a complete fool if this is your only exposure to his thought. Again, Sokal is not wrong on his criticisms in these excerpts. Lacan definitely uses mathematical terms incorrectly. He was making an attempt to formalize his field (psychoanalysis) by skimming textbooks/papers on topology, knot theory, and other mathematical subfields and, from the perspective of someone who uses those terms for precise things, rather haphazardly putting them together. His "mathemes" go through many updates throughout his career, getting ever more complex. Later, Lacan almost certainly was suffering from senility (as most of us will by age 80), and got rather obsessed with the fake math side of his own work.

However, if you actually read Lacan, this is a miniscule and often completely ignored side of his work. No Lacanian psychoanalyst is filling their notebooks with fake math formulas and computing what's wrong with your relationship with the objet petit a. They're metaphors, shorthand, or diagrammatic expressions of what he's really saying in the ~10k pages of his massive corpus. Many of us use compsci terms all the time to express things metaphorically (e.g., being out of bandwidth or disk space when we really mean real world time and mental memory). Think about it this way, and Lacan becomes a source of manifest brilliance, as I discovered only way later in life.

All that said, the critical theory and cultural studies space of the 90s was indeed a cesspool, living in the shadow of former intellectual greats. The great flood of mediocre intellects was starting to bear its rotten fruit, but the truly fatal problem was the politicization. Sokal only addressed this some, making surface-level wrongness his focus in some kind of defense of his own field's purity. Politics poisoned critical theory just like it did wherever else a field became subservient to the street-level goals of a political monoculture. Mindless foot soldiers, bleating about race and gender, capable of only bumper-sticker-length thoughts, make poor philosophers, it turns out. That should've been the core of his point, and could've been helpful framing for a countercurrent against it. Leftist intellectuals, or what was left of them, could've cleaned up their own space, and put the people like this article's author in a quiet corner where they belong. (Note how even here, he can't help but get sucked into the immediacy of the left-reactionary political zeitgeist; the spittle being anything but subtextual.) Instead it came to its inevitable, expensive conclusion of having the decolonization of the university from political imperialists done for them by their equally unthinking opponents.

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