Back to Cultural Studies Central
So it's over. Cultural Studies has been assassinated. The end. We may as well get back our day jobs (those of us who've given them up!). Alan Sokal killed it, so that's that.
That's certainly what you'd think had you been reading some of the reactions to Sokal's crude, wrong-headed, misdirected, and roguish act of cultural terrorism in the Spring/Summer issue of Social Text. For those of you who haven't heard, a physicist named Alan Sokal pulled off a savage and successful hoax on one of the leading American journals of cultural studies. He wrote a social constructionist critique of the scientific method using what he considers the appalling rhetorical devices and references he feels are endemic to cultural studies as a whole. Since Sokal shares the political leanings of those who control the content of the journal, he was considered friendly and, presumably earnest. They published his critique in a special issue devoted to "The Science Wars." Unfortunately for Social Text, he didn't believe a word of what he wrote. It was intentional gibberish. Sid Caesar would be proud.
Most of the victims responded with what can only be described as extreme defensiveness. They didn't know what to do or say. Backed into a corner, they merely cringed.
Stanley Aronowitz, a co-founder of Social Text (and, I should disclaim, my dissertation advisor) told the New York Times that Sokal was "ill-read and half-educated." Andrew Ross, who helped organize the "Science Wars" issue, went into damage control mode, telling the mainstream media (who developed a sudden interest in cultural studies) that the editors suspected something was up because they originally found the piece to be "a little hokey" and "sophomoric and/or outdated." Uh, they knew it all along -- yeah, that's the ticket. Apparently his piece was published in deference to both his academic and political credentials. (Which, if true, is really a larger and more serious problem than the controversial ideological concerns that have been frequently addressed regarding the matter.)
But the biggest problem of all is that they felt themselves victims of the setup and immediately went into a retreatist, traumatized stance. They came up with desperate, lame excuses that they knew wouldn't fly. But why, really? What exactly is the point of doing so when the project of cultural studies is to question everything under the sun: perhaps even our own field! Would it not have been wiser, and more in keeping with the spirit of the field to simply say "good show, man! You got us." And then move to aggressively counter the hoax with some clever (if more ethical) ploys of their own?
There have been many arguments, of course, about the morality and ethics of Sokal's actions in violating academic trust. I certainly agree that his breach could have deleterious consequences to others in the academic community, especially in the physical sciences where lives often depend on this particular type of trust. What if a crazed biologist, annoyed with a particular school of AIDS research decided to follow Sokal's lead and publish a "parody" of his own? He might very well get people killed that way. But why should the cultural studies community really even give a petunia about such issues of propriety? Aren't we the ones who should be engaging in just these sorts of shenanigans ourselves? Shouldn't we be speaking truth to power this way? (Or at least what we feel is truth to what we feel is power.) Would The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal -- who both apparently thought Sokal's gag was a healthy thing for academia -- be so amused if the denizens of cultural studies pulled a good one on them? Food for thought . . . (We jest, we jest; seriously, folks, no one here is suggesting that anyone do any such thing. You DIDN'T hear it here first. Understood?)
Why are the movers and shakers in the cultural studies community, usually so bold and impervious to such lightweight criticism as Sokal's, suddenly so all-fired concerned about matters of academic propriety, for Chrissakes? Propriety is what we need to be struggling against to some extent.
Perhaps the only thing about the current state of cultural studies that Sokal really exposed was the creeping weed of dignity that has infected the field. A dignity that impedes the field from its real business: calling everything in the modern world into question! If that's taboo, then we really are all sunk.
Copyright © 1996 by Robin Markowitz. All Rights Reserved.
Send your responses! - All good quality, good faith responses will be published on this site, space permitting. Please try to keep it to 7 kb of plain text and simply indicate where your submission begins and ends.