guillory

Winter 2001
Volume 28, Number 2

Excerpt from
The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism
by John Guillory

The sciences are small power, because not eminent, and therefore, not acknowledged in any man . . . For science is of that nature, as none can understand it to be, but such as in a good measure have attained it.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

1. The Spontaneous Philosophy of the Critics
The Sokal hoax shares with other controversies of our time the typical feature of erupting suddenly with the threat of dire consequence, only to disappear quickly and nearly completely from public consciousness. No longer perceived as a crisis of the day, the affair is more likely now to elicit weariness with this particular battlefield of the culture wars. I revisit the controversy with the purpose of grasping its continuing claim upon the present even as it recedes into the limbo of the recent past. This claim is nothing other than its significance in the history of criticism. If the Sokal affair belonged to a certain moment in the culture wars, it also has a place in the longer history of conflict between the sciences and the literary humanities, or what goes conventionally by the name of the two cultures debate. Yet the relation between the Sokal affair and this longer history is by no means obvious. I will argue in this essay that in the Sokal affair the matters at issue in the "two cultures" debate were confused with those at stake in the culture wars. A clarification of the actual relation between these distinct conflicts will reveal that the Sokal affair has less to tell us about the politics of science, or science studies, than about the history of criticism.

See Also

Leonard B. Meyer: Concerning the Sciences, the Arts-- AND the Humanities (Autumn 1974)

Charles Spinosa and Hubert L. Dreyfus: Two Kinds of Antiessentialism and Their Consequences (Summer 1996)

Mary Poovey: ~~Sex~~ in America (Winter 1998)

The discussion to follow assumes on the reader's part a general but not a detailed recollection of the texts comprising Sokal's hoax and the responses.1 Because any account of the controversy, even the barest narrative summary, will already have embarked on an interpretation, I will remind my readers before proceeding further of those aspects of the affair most pertinent to the interpretation I advance here. Chief among these is the fact that the title of the Spring 1996 double issue of Social Text in which Sokal's hoax article appeared, entitled Science Wars, deliberately connected controversies within science studies to the culture wars.2 The framing of the Social Text issue by the notion of science wars--a term not previously in wide circulationÑhighlighted new (at least to many in literary study!) and sometimes controversial work in the history, sociology, and anthropology of science, some of it associated with the so-called Edinburgh school of the sociology of scientific knowledge (usually abbreviated SSK) or with the French "network" school associated with Bruno Latour, some of it with feminist critiques of science, and some of it with versions of cultural studies largely based in U.S. literature departments. Emerging from several disciplinary contexts, these projects were (and still are) capable of being advanced independently of each other. The gathering of these projects together in Social Text is crucial to understanding the effect of Sokal's hoax article, which in a similar "interdisciplinary" fashion assembled disparate citations from theorists in literary studies and science studies under a single rubric, "postmodernism"--a term highly inappropriate for at least some of his references, although extremely resonant in the context of the culture wars and of academia's relation to this conflict.3

1. The basic dossier: Alan Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text 46Ð47 (SpringÐSummer 1996): 217-52, hereafter abbreviated "T"; Sokal, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," Lingua Franca 6 (May 1996): 62-64, hereafter abbreviated "P"; Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins, "Mystery Science Theater," Lingua Franca (July 1996): 54-57; and "The Sokal Hoax: A Forum," Lingua Franca (July 1996): 58-62. A forum of responses to the Sokal hoax was published in Social Text 50 (Spring 1997): 123-52, including essays by Donna Haraway, Ken Hirschkop, Val Dusek, M. Susan Lindee, Jackson Lears, Toby Miller, and Andrew Ross. Notices in the mass media include Janny Scott, "Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly," The New York Times, 18 May 1996, p. A1; Sharon Begley and Adam Rogers, "'Morphogenetic Field' Day," Newsweek, 3 June 1996, p. 37; Begley and Rogers, "The Science Wars," Newsweek, 21 Apr. 1997, pp. 54-56; Steven Weinberg, "Sokal's Hoax," New York Review of Books 43, 8 Aug. 1996, pp. 11-15; and Michael Holquist et al., "Sokal's Hoax: An Exchange," New York Review of Books, 3 Oct. 1996, pp. 54-56. Further responses include Stanley Aronowitz, "Alan Sokal's 'Transgression," Dissent 44 (Winter 1997): 107-110; Paul Boghossian, "What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us: The Pernicious Consequences and Internal Contradictions of 'Postmodernist' Relativism," Times Literary Supplement, 13 Dec. 1996; and Robbins, "Science-envy: Sokal, Science, and the Police," Radical Philosophy 88 (Mar.-Apr. 1998): 2-5. Responses too numerous to list could be found in various other mass media and on internet sites. The interventions listed above along with others have been conveniently gathered in The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy, ed. The Editors of Lingua Franca (Lincoln, Nebr., 2000). Additional responses will be cited in notes below.

2.Andrew Ross remarks on "a new arena of conflict some have dubbed the Science Wars, a second front opened up by conservatives cheered by the successes of their legions in the holy Culture Wars" ("'Culture Wars' Spill Over: Science Backlash on Technoskeptics," The Nation, 2 Oct. 1995, p. 346). I am not aware of earlier uses of this term in print.

3.The editors' strategy of framing science studies in the context of the culture wars was reinforced, moreover, by the positioning of Sokal's article in the volume's ultimate place, where it could be seen as summing up the theoretical and political implications of what preceded by virtue of its laudatory invocation of postmodernism. This position might also be read as an afterthought. Whatever the intentions of the editors, the summary theoretical statements contained in Sokal's essay function give the volume a shape very different from the edition of Science Wars republished by Duke University Press (Durham, N.C., 1996), from which Sokal's essay was, of course, omitted.

John Guillory is professor of English at New York University and the author of Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation(Chicago, 1993). He is currently working on two projects, a sociology of literary study in the Anglo-American university and a book on the development of philosophical prose in Early Modern England.

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