Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly

By JANNY SCOTT

Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company

University physicist, fed up with what he

sees as the excesses of the academic left, hoodwinked a well-known

journal into publishing a parody thick with gibberish as though it

were serious scholarly work.

The article, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a

Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," appeared this

month in Social Text, a journal that helped invent the trendy,

sometimes baffling field of cultural studies.

Now the physicist, Alan Sokal, is gloating. And the editorial

collective that publishes the journal says it sorely regrets its

mistake. But the journal's co-founder says Sokal is confused.

"He says we're epistemic relativists," complained Stanley

Aronowitz, the co-founder and a professor at CUNY. "We're not. He

got it wrong. One of the reasons he got it wrong is he's ill-read

and half-educated."

The dispute over the article -- which was read by several editors

at the journal before it was published -- goes to the heart of the

public debate over left-wing scholarship, and particularly over the

belief that social, cultural and political conditions influence and

may even determine knowledge and ideas about what is truth.

In this case, Sokal, 41, intended to attack some of the work of

social scientists and humanists in the field of cultural studies,

the exploration of culture -- and, in recent years, science -- for

coded ideological meaning.

In a way, this is one more skirmish in the culture wars, the

battles over multiculturalism and college curriculums and whether

there is a single objective truth or just many differing points of

view.

Conservatives have argued that there is truth, or at least an

approach to truth, and that scholars have a responsibility to

pursue it. They have accused the academic left of debasing

scholarship for political ends. "While my method was satirical,

my motivation is utterly serious," Sokal wrote in a separate article

in the current issue of the magazine Lingua Franca, in which he

revealed the hoax and detailed his "intellectual and political"

motivations.

"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," he wrote in Lingua Franca.

In an interview, Sokal, who describes himself as "a leftist in

the old-fashioned sense," said he worried that the trendy

disciplines and obscure jargon could end up hurting the leftist

cause. "By losing contact with the real world, you undermine the

prospect for progressive social critique," he said.

Norman Levitt, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University

and an author of a book on science and the academic left that first

brought the new critique of science to Sokal's attention, Friday

called the hoax "a lot of fun and a source of a certain amount of

personal satisfaction." "I don't want to claim that it proves that all

social scientists or all English professors are complete idiots, but it

does betray a certain arrogance and a certain out-of-touchness on

the part of a certain clique inside academic life," he said.

Sokal, who describes himself as "a leftist and a feminist" who

once spent his summers teaching mathematics in Nicaragua, said he

became concerned several years ago about what academics in cultural

studies were saying about science. "I didn't know people were using

deconstructive literary criticism not only to study Jane Austen but to

study quantum mechanics," he said Friday. Then, he said, he read

"Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrel With Science"

by Levitt and Paul R. Gross.

Sokal said the book, which analyzes the critique of science,

prompted him to begin reading work by the critics themselves. "I

realized it would be boring to write a detailed refutation of these

people," he said. So, he said, he decided to parody them.

"I structured the article around the silliest quotes about

mathematics and physics from the most prominent academics, and I

invented an argument praising them and linking them together," he

said. "All this was very easy to carry off because my argument

wasn't obliged to respect any standards of evidence or logic."

To a lay person, the article appears to be an impenetrable

hodgepodge of jargon, buzzwords, footnotes and other references to

the work of the likes of Jacques Derrida and Aronowitz. Words like

hegemony, counter-hegemonic and epistemological abound.

In it, Sokal wrote: "It has thus become increasingly apparent

that physical 'reality,' no less than social 'reality,' is at

bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific

'knowledge,' far from being objective, reflects and encodes the

dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that

produced it."

Andrew Ross, a co-editor of Social Text who also happens to be a

professor at NYU, said Friday that about a half-dozen editors at

the journal dealt with Sokal's unsolicited manuscript. While it

appeared "a little hokey," they decided to publish it in a

special issue they called Science Wars, he said.

"We read it as the earnest attempt of a professional scientist

to seek some sort of philosophical justification for his work,"

said Ross, director of the American studies program at NYU "In

other words, it was about the relationship between philosophy and

physics."

Now Ross says he regrets having published the article. But he

said Sokal misunderstood the ideas of the people he was trying to

expose. "These are caricatures of complex scholarship," he said.

Aronowitz, a sociologist and director of the Center for Cultural

Studies at CUNY, said Sokal seems to believe that the people he is

parodying deny the existence of the real world. "They never deny

the real world," Aronowitz said. "They are talking about whether

meaning can be derived from observation of the real world."

Ross said it would be a shame if the hoax obscured the broader

issues his journal sought to address, "that scientific knowledge

is affected by social and cultural conditions and is not a version

of some universal truth that is the same in all times and

places.