A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies
Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, pp. 62-64
by Alan Sokal, NYU, Physics Department
[intro paragraph from editor of Lingua Franca]
The interdisciplinary university is not always a
peaceful place. In recent years, scientists and humanists have
cooperated in new ways-and quarreled in new ways as well. On
many campuses, practitioners of "science studies" take a close
look at what scientists do in the laboratory and theorize boldly
about the social construction of scientific knowledge. Some
scientists welcome the attention. Others worry that this sort of
scholarship, when taken too far, threatens the legitimacy and
validity of what they do. Underlying much of this discussion are
some nettlesome questions: How much knowledge of science does a
critic of science need to have? And what happens to intellectual
standards when the notion of objectivity is put into doubt?
These questions are often discussed in highly abstract terms.
But not always. In the essay printed below, professor Alan Sokal
of NYU discusses his unusual attempt to play with-some might say
transgress-the conventions of academic discourse. Lingua Franca
invites readers to respond to Sokal's article.
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"Tbe displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by
the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and
perspectives is-second only to American political campaigns-the
most prominent and pernicious manifestation of
anti-intellectualism in our time." Larry Laudan, Science and
Relativism (1990)
[Sokal's defense]
FOR SOME YEARS I'VE BEEN troubled by an apparent decline in the
standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities.
But I'm a mere physicist: If I find myself unable to make heads or
tails of jouissance and diffirance, perhaps that just reflects my
own inadequacy. So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I
decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:
Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies-whose
editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and
Andrew Ross-publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a)
it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological
preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Interested
readers can find my article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," in the
Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text. It appears in a special
number of the magazine devoted to the "Science Wars." What's going
on here? Could the editors really not have realized that my article
was written as a parody? In the first paragraph I deride "the dogma
imposed by the long postEnlightenment hegemony over the Western
intellectual outlook":that there exists an external world, whose
properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed
of humanity as a whole- that these properties are encoded in
"eternal" physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable,
albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to
the "objective" procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed
by the (so-called) scientific method is it now dogma in cultural
studies that there exists no external world? Or that there exists an
external world but science obtains no knowledge of it? In the second
paragraph I declare, Without the slightest evidence or argument,
that "physical 'reality' [note the scare quotes] ... is at bottom a
social and linguistic construct." Not our theories of of physical
reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough: Anyone who
believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is
invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of
my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.) Throughout the
article, I employ scientific and mathematical concepts in ways that
few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously. For
example, I suggest that the "morphogenetic field bizarre New Age
idea proposed by Rupert Sheldrake-constitutes a cutting-edge theory
of quantum gravity. This connection is pure invention; even
Sheldrake makes no such claim. I assert that Lacan's psychoanalytic
speculations have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field
theory. Even nonscientist readers might well wonder what in heaven's
name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis; certainly
my article gives no reasoned argument to support such a link. Later
in the article I propose that the axiom of equality in mathematical
set theory is somehow analogous to the homonymous concept in
feminist politics. In reality, all the axiom of equality states is
that two sets are identical if and only if they have the same
elements. Even readers without mathematical training might well be
suspicious of the claim that the axiom of equality reflects set
theory's "nineteenth-century liberal origins." In sum, I
intentionally wrote the article so that any competent physicist or
mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize
that it is a spoof. Evidently, the editors of Social Text felt
comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without
bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject. The
fundamental silliness of my article lies, however, not in its
numerous solecisms but in the dubiousness of its central thesis and
of the "reasoning" adduced to support it. Basically, I claim that
quantum gravity-the still-speculative theory of space and time on
scales of a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth
of a centimeter has profound political implications (which, of
course, are "progressive"). In support of this improbable
proposition, I proceed as follows: First, I quote some controversial
philosophical pronouncements of Heisenberg and Bohr, and assert
(without argument) that quantum physics is profoundly consonant with
"postmodernist epistemology." Next, I assemble a pastiche-Derrida
and general relativity, Lacan and topology, Irigaray and quantum
gravity-held together by vague references to "nonlinearity," "flux,"
and "interconnectedncss." Finally, I jump (again without argument)
to the assertion that "postmodern science" has abolished the concept
of objective reality. Nowhere in all of this is there anything
resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations
of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald
assertions. In its concluding passages, my article becomes
especially egregious. Having abolished reality as a constraint on
science, I go on to suggest (once again without argument) that
science, in order to be "liberatory," must be subordinated to
political strategies. I finish the article by observing that "a
liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of
the canon of mathematics." We can see hints of an "emancipatory
mathematics," I suggest, "in the multidimensional and nonlinear
logic of fuzzy systems theory; but this approach is still heavily
marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production
relations." I add that "catastrophe theory, with its dialectical
emphasis on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding,
all indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but
much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can
become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis." It's
understandable that the editors of Social Text were unable to
evaluate critically the technical aspects of my article (which is
exactly why they should have consulted a scientist). What's more
surprising is how readily they accepted my implication that the
search for truth in science must be subordinated to a political
agenda, and how oblivious they were to the article's overall
illogic.
WHY DID I DO IT?
While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious.
What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and
sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and
sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective
realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays
their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text
raises important issues that no scientist should ignore - questions,
for example, about how corporate and government funding influence
scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to
further the discussion of these matters. In short, my concern about
the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and
political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that
they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world;
its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and
evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And
yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of
attempts to blur these obvious truths. Social Text's acceptance of
my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of
Theory-postmodernist literary theory, that is-carried to its logical
extreme. No wonder they didn't bother to consult a physicist. If all
is discourse and "text," then knowledge of the real world is
superfluous; even physics becomes just another branch of cultural
studies. if, moreover, all is rhetoric and language games, then
internal logical consistency is superfluous too: a patina of
theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility
becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors, and puns substitute for
evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely
modest example of this well-established genre. Politically, I'm
angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating
from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a profound
historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left
has been identified with science and against obscurantism-, we have
believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of
objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for
combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful not to mention
being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent turn of
many "progressive" or "leftist" academic humanists and social
scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism
betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile
prospects for progressive social critique. Theorizing about "the
social construction of reality" won't help us find an effective
treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global
warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology,
economics, and politics if we reject the notions of truth and
falsity. The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the
very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic
Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social
Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that "the
content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful
intellectual support for the progressive political project." They
apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the
cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to
the purported conclusion.
OF course, I'm not oblivious to the ethical issues involved
in my rather unorthodox experiment. Professional communities operate
largely on trust; deception undercuts that trust. But it is
important to understand exactly what I did. My article is a
theoretical essay based entirely on publicly available sources, all
of which I have meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real,
and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented. Now,
it's true that the author doesn't believe his own argument. But why
should that matter? The editors' duty as scholars is to judge the
validity and interest of ideas, without regard for their provenance.
(That is why many scholarly journals practice blind refereeing.) If
the Social Text editors find my arguments convincing, then why
should they be disconcerted simply because I don't? Or are they more
deferent to the so-called "cultural authority of technoscience" than
they would care to admit? In the end, I resorted to parody for a
simple pragmatic reason. The targets of my critique have by now
become a selfperpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores
(or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside. In such a
situation, a more direct demonstration of the subculture's
intellectual standards was required. But how can one show that the
emperor has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon; and the
blow that can't be brushed off is the one that's self-inflicted. I
offered the Social Text editors an opportunity to demonstrate their
intellectual rigor. Did they meet the test? I don't think so. I say
this not in glee but in sadness. After all, I'm a leftist too (under
the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National
University of Nicaragua). On nearly all practical political
issues-including many concerning science and technology-I'm on the
same side as the Social Text editors. But I'm a leftist (and a
feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it. Why
should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual
high ground? And why should self-indulgent nonsense-whatever its
professed political orientation-be lauded as the height of scholarly
achievement?
Alan Sokal is a professor of physics at New York University. He is
coauthor with Roberto Fernandez and Jiirg Fr6hlich of Random Walks,
Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory
(Springer, 1992).
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