Go back to the Sokal Affair
Originally at http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/chronicle/96/12/02/08SokalBetrays.html
As The Chronicle pointed out ("Professor critiques post-modernist thinkers," Nov. 25), Alan Sokal is a "self-described leftist," and his reasons for hoaxing the journal Social Text were, as he stated in his Nov. 22 speech, "basically political." Sokal blames cultural theory and French post-structuralism for the general decline in solid, hard-hitting criticism of the gross economic disparity and social inequality created by capitalism.
What the article did not point out, however, is that the audience Sokal attracted last Friday, with a few notable exceptions, was made up of people who found his Leftist political views just as comical as the post-structuralist theory that he was seeking to ridicule. They had a good belly laugh at "the faulty use of math and science" by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and others, but they also laughed at the term "bourgeois" in one of those passages. More frighteningly, when Sokal, in all innocence, made a reference to a friend of his teaching in Santa Cruz whom he described as a "normal Marxist feminist," they burst out laughing again. Sokal looked up, blinked and then felt called upon to defend his usage.
What the audience reaction points to, I take it, is that Sokal is incredibly naive if he believes that talks such as the one he gave will actually do very much for the Leftist cause he wishes to advance. It looks much more likely that he is simply playing into the hands of political forces that would be just as merciless in their treatment of his Santa Cruz friend as they would be of other post-structuralist theorists.
James Mahon
Graduate student
Department of Philosophy