[Marxism] Alan Sokal follow-up

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, May 9, 2004

FOLLOWING UP

Jargonical Adversary Repursues Pedagogy

By JOSEPH P. FRIED

He is focusing again on his "first career," Alan Sokal says. But he
agrees that he is far more likely to be remembered for his shorter
"second career."

Dr. Sokal, 49, is a professor of physics at New York University, where
he has been teaching since 1981. His specialties include quantum field
theory and mathematical physics.

But when he burst into the spotlight in 1996, it was in another pursuit:
fighting what he calls pretentious academic writing in which scientific
and mathematical language is misused to produce cultural and social
commentary "that denies the existence of objective realities."

That year, he tricked a scholarly journal, Social Text, into publishing
as a serious article a parody studded with jargon and gibberish and
titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."

He then revealed his hoax - setting off a much-publicized debate in
which he was portrayed as either a constructive hero or a destructive
zero. Supporters saw an innovative warrior against scholarly
obfuscation. Critics said he was deceitful and misunderstood the ideas
he was attacking.

Dr. Sokal and a Belgian physicist, Jean Bricmont, followed up with a
book, titled "Intellectual Impostures" in France and "Fashionable
Nonsense" in the United States.

"Not within a million years," Dr. Sokal said recently, had he expected
his campaign to draw such attention. A possible reason it did, he said,
is that he was telling laymen baffled by academic writing that the
authors might be using "highfalutin language that didn't mean anything."

Dr. Sokal spoke from Paris, where he was doing research in mathematical
physics - a field in which, he said, he had "slowed down" while taking
part in "lots of seminars" in the debate he had joined with his Social
Text escapade and his book.

These days he is involved in fewer such seminars, he said, adding, "Some
of the acrimonious parts of the debate have died down and the more
serious interdisciplinary questions have come to the fore."

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