[ Top : Articles : "A Commentary" : Other Articles ]
Social Text. Volume 50, Spring 1997.
In the six months that bookstores stocked the special Science Wars issue of Social Text, a little under eight hundred copies were sold, a modest number for a double issue on a topical subject, even for an obscure, small-circulation journal like Social Text. It's reasonable to conclude that relatively few people actually read the issue, and yet there seemed very few who did not have a strong opinion about the Sokal affair, as it came to be known, and not a few who used the occasion to cast judgement on entire fields of scholarship, such as science studies and cultural studies, without showing much evidence of having read one word of the scholarship. For a brief time, the contents of this largely unread issue were a scandal of public record, bringing down ridicule upon Social Text and its editors for opinions that we do not hold, let alone represent. This is not a good situation to find yourself in, although it is quite typical of life in the Culture Wars. Nor did it come as much of a surprise to those who study the workings of public opinion-making. After all, Lingua Franca's scoop of the Sokal hoax framed the story to fit the template of a particular kind of yellow media expose, and virtually all the press reports ran a version of the Sokal/Lingua Franca narrative without questioning any of its inflated claims. As a result, public discussion was limited to this frame in its treatment of concepts with a complex intellectual background. Social constructivism and other approaches in science studies were reduced to the status of disbelief in the physical world, a blatantly dishonest reduction introduced by Sokal himself. So, too, ideas associated with postmodernism/cultural studies/poststructuralism/critical theory--widely perceived, for much the same reasons, as interchangeable terms--were reduced to the status of gibberish, in the name of no-nonsense appeals to the moral fundamentalism of plain speech and plain thinking. None of this was surprising. Radical ideas, no less than radical politics, are fringe topics in the public media, sources of highly processed material for genre stories and op-eds about the silly excesses of radicals, whether in the academy or elsewhere. Denied a place on the spectrum of media opinion, the left is used to berating itself for performing ineptly when thrust in the spotlight to play a pre-scripted role. Under circumstances framed as a scandal, the Social Text editors had very few choices that offered dignity. Our response, which ran in the summer issue of Lingua Franca, tried to summarize our regret for having erred, our offense at having been deceived by a fraudulent author, and our obligation to describe the editorial process that led to the publication of Sokal's article. Our response satisfied some, and inflamed others. If the Sokal affair had been just one more incident worked up by the Right to fuel the media-oriented Culture Wars and Science Wars, its impact would have been limited. But the story also played well in the left press and in liberal and neoliberal publications. The attacks begun by Gross and Levitt attracted sympathy from some unlikely quarters, and Sokal's call to "reclaim the Enlightenment roots of the left" was accompanied by a minor bout of intolerance among those who had decided they belonged to the true left, morally authorized to punish the backslidden. How did this happen and what can be done about it? Two points might be emphasized; 1) the degree to which these attacks are different from the Culture Wars, and 2) the degree to which they are the same. 1) While most progressives (including scientists) welcome criticism of science's serviceability to corporate and military and state needs, many are less willing to question science's close affiliation with positivist rationality, and value-free knowledge, for fear that compromising the path of positivism somehow amounts to a betrayal of those "Enlightenment roots," or that it represents the first step down a slippery slope to nihilism. Many others, however, believe that progress in social thought is not possible without a thorough critique of the Enlightenment, whether for its justification of the domination of nature, or its authoritative support for belief-systems like scientific racism or sexism, or for the monocultural legacy of its assumptions about universality. Still others believe that the critique of technoscience is an extension of the radical scepticism generated, in large part, by the Enlightenment. And yet discussion of the Sokal hoax has invariably been presented in the form of a needlessly polarizing dispute about the Enlightenment--are you for or against? If these are the only choices, most progressives would choose the former. But does this choice then bind us to the view that scientific knowledge is not like all other forms of knowledge, and that it is somehow off-limits to critical inquiry of its social, cultural, and historical components--inquiry of the sort that the Science Warriors see as irrationalist or counter-Enlightenment? Of course not. Then why are we so easily seduced into arguing along these lines? In whose interests exactly is it to polarize opinion in this way? 2) The Sokal hoax played into, and reinforced many of the divisions that have been opened up in the Culture Wars' prolongued backlash against feminism, multiculturalism and the queer renaissance. We hear more and more progressives, not unlike Sokal himself, appealling to Enlightenment ideals of universality and common value as a prescription for rescuing the left from its patronage of the politics of social recongition. Left-wing jeremiads inform us that in our preoccupation with race, gender, and sexuality, we are being led astray. Inevitably, such voices recall the reason why the label of political correctness was first devised--in order to temper the knowingness of those who dwelled on the errors of others. This is always a sad spectacle, especially when it features anti-intellectual sentiment masquerading as "sufficient" political consciousness. Ellen Willis satirized this disposition well in her Village Voice article: "Capitalism is screwing people! What goes up must come down! What more do we need to know?" To which, I would again add: In whose interests is it to believe that this is all we need to know? What use then can knowledge be to public politics? This is surely one of the questions that arises out of incidents like the Sokal affair, and it certainly lies close to the heart of cultural studies, conceived as an intellectual movement that seeks not only to bridge traditional (though not ancient) divisions in the field of knowledge but also to transcend the rift between the academic specialist and the public generalist/cultural critic. Inevitably perceived as an overreacher, cultural studies often focuses on material that is "out of place" in academic life, just as it brings critical analysis considered too "complex" to the life of public discourse. Complaints about the lack of scholarly standards from one side compete in volume with protests against over-cerebrality on the other. These grievances often find common cause in the objection to high theoretical language, infamously, though not exclusively, associated with cultural studies. If nothing else, the Sokal affair generated widespread agreement on this particular charge, though it was a longstanding complaint, even within the cultural studies community. I am no dissenter in this matter. There is no excuse for obscurantism, just as there are no critical insights which cannot be phrased in a readily intelligible manner, without causing eyes to glaze over. If folks who subscribe to the loosely shared ideals of cultural studies do not make the effort to forge an inclusive language, then many of these ideals will become objects of antiquarian nostalgia and not daily customs of intellectual life. I happen to believe that the language problem is a serious one (there is a high theory ghetto, and there is a way out), but I also suspect that the most significant resistance to cultural studies stems from its intellectual activism--its challenges to specialist turf and the disciplinary carve-up of the field of knowledge, its challenges to proprietary journalistic self-interest and to left-wing piety about pure politics. While I do not think the Sokal affair proved anything (it was an anomaly in almost every respect), it did expose a landscape of resentments and suspicions that may have to be negotiated. More than ever, we will have to learn to forge alliances while respecting our disagreements. But this will involve choosing carefully: some struggles are simply not worth the energy, just as some caricatures are not worth rebutting. Self-criticism always helps: guilt-tripping and abjection do not. Encouragement improves all of us, intolerance does not. The deceptive basis of Sokal's hoax might have generated widespread distrust for scientific authority, while reinforcing the fierce insularity of many scientists. This is unfortunate, coming at a time when the call for the public accountability of science has never been more critical. But let us hope that the mutual embarassment--for scientists and nonscientist commentators alike--will generate new and unforeseen kinds of dialogue. First, we will have to agree to put aside false polarities--such as realism versus relativism--that have framed so much of the Science Wars, compelling people to take sides over spurious choices. And while we're at it, we might lay to rest another phantom in the left's version of the Culture Wars by fully acknowledging that social identity and cultural politics are a component of, and not a diversion from , the fight against economic injustice. As a postscript, something ought to be said about the role of a publication like Social Text, since some commentators averred that the Sokal affair demonstrated the academic impropriety of a nonrefereed journal. Social Text is not simply a nonrefereed journal, it is a journal of tendency, edited by a collective that meets to discuss manuscripts in a face-to-face manner. This is an anomaly among academic publications, although there are a number of collectively edited journals of left and feminist persuasion--such as Socialist Review, Camera Obscura, Radical History Review, Feminist Review, Rethinking Marxism--which share some of our history, and which tend to favor some version of that editorial procedure. Without heroicizing the work of these journals, they have managed to survive, usually with scant institutional support, and to carry on the practice of face-to-face collective work primarily in an academic environment geared to rewarding individual careerism. To most academics, this is a concept that belongs with the dinosaurs, or else one that is anathema to scholarly standards. But enough is surely known about the often stultifying outcomes of a blind-review process (and the corruptions of peer-reviewing in general) to believe that there is still an important role, however anomalous, for such journals to play.