[Marxism] A review of Alan Sokal's latest book

[Louis Proyect]

http://www.powells.com/review/2008_08_14.html
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture
by Alan Sokal

Truth's Caper
A Review by Simon Blackburn

Every reader of this magazine is likely to have heard of the "Sokal 
hoax," the most celebrated academic escapade of our time. Everyone is 
also likely to know the story in outline: how in 1996 the radical 
"postmodernist" journal Social Text published an article submitted by 
Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University, with the 
mouthwatering title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a 
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Sokal then revealed the 
article to be a spoof, a tissue of nonsense that he had painstakingly 
assembled in order to parody the portentous rubbish that flew under the 
colors of postmodernism. By publishing Sokal's submission, the emperors 
of that tendency revealed themselves to be as naked as the rest of 
academia had always suspected, and with this one coup Sokal himself 
became the toast of the town, a celebrity, a hero of the resistance.

Since then, he and others have written extensively about the hoax and 
its significance. Some have attempted to defend the editors of Social 
Text, but they could not do much to stop the laughter. Some pursed their 
lips at the impropriety of hoaxing, but ridicule is a good weapon. Most 
thought that the editors had brought it on themselves. Sokal himself has 
written numerous essays, and also a book about it, with Jean Bricmont 
(Impostures intellectuelles, published in America in 1998 as Fashionable 
Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science). His new book 
brings together ten essays, beginning with a thoroughly annotated text 
of the hoax submission itself. Most of these essays have been published 
at various times since the hoax came out, and the hoax itself, in all 
its delicious pottiness, is easily available on the Web.

For dedicated followers of the aftermath of Sokal's useful mischief, 
there may be a sense of deja vu here. Indeed, Sokal begins his preface 
somewhat defensively: "I have a visceral distaste for books that have 
been confected by pasting together a collection of loosely connected, 
previously published essays.... So the reader may legitimately wonder: 
Am I not now publishing just such a compilation?" The answer, he assures 
us, is that he is not, because the essays form a coherent whole. I 
expect most authors of collections feel the same, viscerally or otherwise.

But the more pressing problem is that the kind of postmodernism that was 
Sokal's special target is now widely held to belong to yesterday. Before 
September 11, the story goes, academe allowed its "anything goes" 
tendency to grow unchecked. With long prosperity, the disappearance of 
the Cold War, and the lack of any great causes to substitute for it, a 
certain playfulness--an ironic, aesthetic, and disengaged attitude to 
life -- was quite tolerable. This was history's leisure time. We did not 
need too much self-scrutiny, and certainly not nervous and serious books 
about who we are and what we stand for and where we may be heading. The 
relativist could hold court as the lord of misrule. You disagree with 
me? Whatever. That's your view, and who's to say? I expect it is true 
for you.

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