The sokal affair and the history of criticism

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 28, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 470-508

  Guillory, John ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 19844382943     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/449049     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. The basic dossier: Alan Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text 46-47 (Spring-Summer 1996): 217-52
2. hereafter abbreviated "T"; Sokal, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," Lingua Franca 6 (May 1996): 62-64, hereafter abbreviated "P"
3. Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins, "Mystery Science Theater," Lingua Franca 6 (July 1996): 54-57
4. and "The Sokal Hoax: A Forum," Lingua Franca 6 (July 1996): 58-62
5. A forum of responses to the Sokal hoax was published in Social Text 50 (Spring 1997): 123-52
6. 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," New York Times, 18 May 1996, p. Al
7. Sharon Begley and Adam Rogers, '"Morphogen-etic Field' Day," Newsweek, 3 June 1996, p. 37
8. Begley and Rogers, "The Science Wars," Newsweek, 21 Apr. 1997, pp. 54-56
9. Steven Weinberg, "Sokal's Hoax," New York Review of Books, 8 Aug. 1996, pp. 11-15
10. and Michael Holquist et al., "Sokal's Hoax: An Exchange," New York Review of Books, 3 Oct. 1996, pp. 54-56
11. Further responses include Stanley Aronowitz, "Alan Sokal's 'Transgression,'" Dissent 44 (Winter 1997): 107-10
12. 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, pp. 14-15
13. and Robbins, "Science-envy: Sokal, Science, and the Police," Radical Philosophy 88 (Man-Apr. 1998): 2-5
14. The academic Left was already under attack by a sector of the science professoriate, notably represented by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in their tract, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, 1994)
15. See also The Flight from Reason and Science, ed. Gross, Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis (Baltimore, 1996). Neither of these interventions had the media play of the Sokal hoax
16. In retrospect it is worth remarking the strangeness of the fact that a literary scholar such as Stanley Fish should rise to the defense of science studies, in which he had previously evinced little interest; see his op-ed piece, "Professor Sokal's Bad Joke," New York Times, 21. May 199G, p. A23
17. See Louis Althusser, "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists" and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster et al. (London, 1990). I have adapted Althusser's argument with some modification of its aims
18. see Theodore M. Porter, "The Death of the Object: Fin de siècle Philosophy of Physics," in Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, ed. Dorothy Ross (Baltimore, 1994), pp. 128-51
19. For the decline of the cultural critic, see the biased but still useful study of John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800 (Chicago, 1969)
20. see also Morris Dickstein, Double Agent: The Critic and Society (New York, 1992)
21. Thorstein Veblen was already commenting on the ascendency of science to cultural prominence in his 1906 essay, "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization": "On any large question which is to be disposed of for good and all the final appeal is by common consent taken to the scientist" (Thorstein Veblen, "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization," in "The Place of Science in Modem Civilization" and Other Essays [1919; New Brunswick, N.J., 1990], p. 3)
22. For an account of the epochal shift in the landscape of knowledge, see David Hollinger, "The Knower and the Artificer, with Postscript 1993," in Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870-1930, pp. 26-53
23. On the history of cultural criticism in the British tradition, see Raymond Williams's still-authoritative study, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (1958; New York, 1983)
24. On cultural criticism in America and its relation to literary study, see Grant Webster, The Republic of Letters: A History of Postwar American Literary Opinion (Baltimore, Md., 1979)
25. and Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, 1987). For the two cultures debate
26. see C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, with an introduction by Stefan Collini (Cambridge, 1993). Collini's introduction offers an excellent account of the history behind the Snow-Leavis controversy, upon which I have drawn in my own discussion
27. See also F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (New York, 1963)
28. Cultural studies' break with the elitism and conservative politics of cultural criticism can be acknowledged here without compromising the more difficult point I want to make, which is that a continuity of orientation toward science persisted through this transformation. For the relation of postmodernist criticism to mass culture, see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernity, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, Ind., 1986)
29. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)
30. see also Habermas, "The Idea of the University: A Learning Process," The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 100-27
31. Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition, pp. 242-43
32. I allude here to the phrase of Fredric Jameson, "the desire called cultural studies," in '"On Cultural Studies,'" Social Text 34 (1993): 17
33. [Collini, "On Highest Authority: The Literary Critic and Other Aviators in Early Twentieth-Century Britain," Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870-1930, p. 169]
34. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York, 1961), p. 17
35. See, for example, Scott, "Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly," and Begley, "The Science Wars." On the response of the scientific community to the topos of social construction
36. see Colin Macihwain, "Campuses Ring to a Stormy Clash over Truth and Reason," Nature, 22 May 1997, pp. 331-33
37. Sergio Sismondi points out that the notion of social construction had become common in science studies by the late 1970s; see Sergio Sismondi, Science without Myth: On Constructions, Reality, and Social Knowledge (Albany, N.Y., 1996), p. 58; hereafter abbreviated S
38. For a strenuous critique of cultural studies along these lines, see John Brenkman, "Extreme Criticism," Critical Inquiry 26 (Autumn 1999): 109-27
39. When Stephen Greenblatt writes that "identity is itself, as we have seen, a social construction," his use of this term seems in advance of its technical, disciplinary signification (Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare [Chicago, 1980], p. 209)
40. See Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). Hacking attempts to clarify the stakes in diverse forms of constructivism, particularly the philosophical or epistemological implications of constructivist arguments. His scrupulously hygenic account clears up a good many of what he calls philosophical "muddles," but one comes away from his study impressed by how relatively incommensurable are particlar uses of the constructivist topos
41. For three recent discussions, see Donald N. Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition (Chicago, 1995)
42. Nicos Mouzelis, Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? Diagnosis and Remedies (London, 1995)
43. and Charles Lemert, Sociology after the Crisis (Boulder, Col., 1995)
44. Most exemplary is Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump; see n. 7
45. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2d ed. (1976; Chicago, 1991), p. 5
46. See Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge, 1998), p. 6. The problem is that some versions of constructivism have never been able to abide by this self-limitation
47. Both Bloor and Latour started out as philosophers. Bloor writes, "Wittgenstein referred to his work as one of 'the heirs to the subject which used to be called philosophy.' My whole thesis could be summed up as the claim to have revealed the true identity of these heirs: they belong to the family of activities called the sociology of knowledge" (Bloor, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge [New York, 1983], p. 183)
48. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, Calif., 2000), p. 30
49. Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2d ed. (Princeton, N.J., 1986), p. 280
50. See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)
51. elsewhere Latour writes, "The idea that science studies may ignore philosophy altogether, or be content with philosophy of science, or not build up its own metaphysics and ontology is foreign to me" (Latour, "One More Turn after the Social Turn ⋯" in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli [New York, 1999], p. 288)
52. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 281
53. Harry M. Collins and Steven Yearley argue that network studies merely translate conventional histories of science into agential language: "The language changes, but the story remains the same" (Harry M. Collins and Steven Yearly, "Epistemological Chicken," in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering [Chicago, 1992], p. 315)
54. See also the critique by Shapin, "Following Scientists Around: Review of Latour," in Social Studies of Science 18 (1988): 533-50
55. See also his essay, "Holism without Skepticism: Contextualism and the Limits of Interpretation," in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), pp. 129-54
56. Harding, "Science Is 'Good to Think With,'" Social Text 46-47 (Spring/Summer 1996): 18
57. Andrew Ross writes in same issue of Social Text: "In opting for a program of social realism that eschewed value-laden and moralistic critique, SSK's passive 'explanation' of science's social and cultural construction met with charges of political quietism" (Ross, introduction to "Science Wars," Social Text 46-47 [Spring-Summer 1996]: 11)
58. See George Johnson, "It's a Fact: Faith and Theory Collide Over Evolution," New York Times, 15 Aug. 1999, sec. 4, p. 1
59. The procedure itself can be traced to Derrida's seminal essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," which sets out to expose the residual appeal to nature at the base of Lévi-Strauss's science of culture, a residual empiricism that occasions Derrida's ur-deconstruction. See Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, 1978), pp. 278-93
60. Cause and effect in this formulation might be conceived in terms of Althusser's "structural causality." It takes nothing less than the social totality to produce the phenomenon of racism, and scientific racism functions within this totality as both the effect and the support of racism generally
61. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 355
62. Charles Taylor, "Understanding in the Human Sciences," Review of Metaphysics 34 (Sept. 1980): 26
63. For a careful consideration of the utility and limits of the analogy between a text and social action, see Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 197-221
64. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn, ed. Trenn and Robert K. Merton (1935; Chicago, 1979). Fleck picks up Mannheim's notion of a "style of thought" (Denkstil) as a means of describing the formation of concepts in discrete scientific groups
65. This is not to say that there is no relation at all between postmodern thought and spontaneous postmodernism. The connection between skepticism and fideism, for example, is easy to see in Richard Rorty's later work, which advances a "frank ethnocentrism" as a necessary entailment of relativism. See "Solidarity or Objectivity?" in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. Jonathan Rajchman and Cornel West (New York, 1984), pp. 3-19. I suggest that each discipline, or complex of related disciplines, constitutes a kind of "ethnos," perhaps a good deal more culturally integrated than the society Rorty imagines
66. On the history of positivism, see Leszek Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought (Garden City, N.Y., 1968)
67. Christopher G. A. Bryant, Positivism in Social Theory and Research (New York, 1985)
68. and Peter Allen Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison, Wisc., 1989)
69. See also the works mentioned above by Lepenies and Dorothy Ross
70. See Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969)
71. Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective 1890-1920 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 199
72. See Frank Kermode's still interesting observations on the genealogy of Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" in The Romantic Image (London, 1957), p. 143
73. This is why the Sokal affair fails to map politically onto the Snow-Leavis controversy. For an analogous version of the above argument, see Carl Schorske, "The New Rigorism in the Human Sciences," in American Academic Culture in Transformation, ed. Thomas Bender and Schorske (Princeton, N.J., 1997), pp. 324-27
74. It seems to me that the Uncertainty Principle has no implications at all for the human sciences and that the interpretation implicit in quantum physics is simply incommensurable with the interpretation of indeterminacy or uncertainty in the social domain. Aronowitz believes that this holism supersedes the binarism of physical reduction versus social construction, but it really only universalizes a principle of interpretation generated from the cultural instance. As such, it stands as the correlative of the kind of positivist holism advocated by Wilson in his recent Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, 1998)-yet another version of the dream of a unified methodology of the sciences. By contrast, Bhaskar's formulation is precise: "the human sciences can be sciences in exactly the same sense, though not in exactly the same way, as the natural ones" (Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, p. 159)
75. In the Sokal affair, the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists has been carelessly identified with the historiographical concept of Enlightenment, as the rationalist precursor of positivism. Nowhere is the character of postmodernism as a spontaneous philosophy more evident than in the anathema that has come to be attached to the notion of Enlightenment, now equated with the most naïve realism and the most offensive politics. It should not be necessary to defend the Enlightenment in toto in order to restore to philosophical modernity both its discourse of reason and the possibility of a self-reflexive critique of rationalist universalism such as Herder inaugurated. On this subject we might invoke the entire oeuvre of Charles Taylor. For a comment on the conflation of modernism with the Enlightenment, see Hollinger, "The Knower and the Artificer," p. 49
76. The Sokal affair occasioned a regrettable split between the journalistic Left and the academic Left, as well as between different sectors of the academic Left. In both cases, the conflict turned on the reduction of science to belief or a levelling of the epistemological field upon which science and postmodernism confronted each other. The journalistic Left was represented by Katha Pollit, "Pomolotov Cocktail," The Nation, 10 June 1996, p. 9
77. and by Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet Mcintosh, "The New Creationism: Biology under Attack," The Nation, 9 June 1997, pp. 11-16. The occasion of the latter article was an incident in which a lecture by social psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth on a topic in biology was greeted with the extreme or "provocative" skeptical response, "You believe in DNA?" (p. 11)
78. On the other side of this intramural conflict, and equally unfairly, the notion of "left conservatism" was advanced by some in order to stigmatize figures such as Pollit, Ehrenreich, or Nancy Fraser for their critiques of postmodernist arguments. For this concept, see "Left Conservatism: A Workshop," Boundary 2 26 (Fall 1999): 1-61. Needless to say, there is no more point in questioning the left credentials of Ehrenreich and others than there is in questioning those of academic postmodernists
79. An analysis of New Historicism would confirm this point, inasmuch as the occasional thinness of its history and anachronism of its identity categories is the price it pays for fulfilling its correlative mission of cultural criticism. For an interesting argument about the peculiar way in which the empiricism that enables New Historical work is transmogrified with another turn of the screw into personal "testimony," another version of cultural criticism, see David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago, 1995)
80. One of the respondents to the Sokal hoax, Ken Hirschkop, drew the correct conclusion on this matter: "Cultural studies should recognize that it, too, is science, and should drop the frequently encountered pretense that it is the natural ally, or worse still, the theoretical reflection, of the new social movements" (Ken Hirschkop, "Cultural Studies and Its Discontents: A Comment on the Sokal Affair," Social Text 50 [Spring 1997]: 133)
81. This point is not, of course, a bureaucratic recommendation. The disappearance of the "humanities" no more entails the disappearance of history, philosophy, or literary study than Foucault's disappearance of man entails the disappearance of human beings. Finally, it is worth reflecting on Laurence Veysey's reminder in his seminal essay, "The Plural Organized World of the Humanities," that our present concept of the humanities did not become current until the 1940s, and that "in their modern meaning of a concrete grouping of academic disciplines rather their older meaning of classical language study, [the humanities] took on a more or less clear shape after the self-conscious arrival of the social sciences, not before" (Laurence Veysey, "The Plural Organized World of the Humanities," in The Organization of Knowledge in Modem America, ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss [Baltimore, Md., 1979], p. 57)