why the hell is there a national controversy over at social text?... how
might it have been defused, if not avoided?... in what follows, i'd like to
work through some of the ins & outs of this ongoing debate, in the process
advocating a more fully dialogic use of electronic fora... for those who
missed the social text brouhaha as it unfolded: a physicist, one alan
sokal, publishes a piece entitled "transgressing the boundaries: toward a
transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity," in the spring/summer 1996
special issue of the magazine social text, an issue devoted to the
so-called "science wars"... now, in most academic circles, social text
enjoys a fairly esteemed rep., published as it is by duke u p under the
co-editorial leadership of none other than andrew ross & bruce robbins...
anyway, subsequent to publication, sokal writes in the may/june issue of
lingua franca that he has published his piece in order to answer the
following (loaded) question: "would a leading journal of cultural studies
publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good
and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?"... sokal, a
self-professed "leftist," has evidently been incited to his prank after
confirming on his own the legitimacy of claims made by paul gross & norman
levitt in their 1994 book, higher superstition: the academic left and its
quarrels with science - a book that presumes to take on the evils of
postmodernism, cultural studies, & the like...
after sokal's revelation, ross himself composes a rather detailed
electronic defense of the editorial policies leading to the publication of
sokal's piece (ross's defense makes its way to poetics via list member
steven shoemaker's decision to forward same, steve's tag line quoting
courtney love's "i fake it so real i am beyond fake")... which details are
later denied in at least one substantive way by sokal (in a rejoinder sokal
distributed electronically after the ny times apparently refused to print
it because of its length): ross claims that sokal was "resistant" to any
"general revisions" of the sort social text recommended, while sokal
claims that he asked repeatedly for "substantive comments, suggestions and
criticisms," but never received any (thanks to aldon lynn nielsen for
pointing this out - on poetics)... anyway, here's the core of ross's
response:
in sum, sokal's assumption that his "parody" struck a disreputable chord
with the woozy editors of social text is ill-conceived. indeed, its
status as parody does not alter substantially our initial perception of,
and our interest in, the piece itself as a curio, or symptomatic document.
of course, the whole affair may say something about our own conception of
how physicists read philosophy, but that seems less important to us than
that his prank does not simply lead to a heightening of the hysteria which
the science wars have induced.
ross's response is followed by a longish op-ed piece in the 21 may ny
times, "professor sokal's bad joke," by none other than stanley fish, head
honcho of duke u p and a professor of english & law at duke... in his
piece, fish claims that sokal is culpable on the count of "two
misunderstandings": first, that sokal "takes 'socially constructed' to
mean 'not real'"; & second, having not properly understood those
sociologists who advocate science-as-socially-constructed-practice, sokal
"thinks that the sociology of science is in competition with mainstream
science" (fish elucidates all of this via the analogy of baseball, a là
stephen jay gould - an antic that, in this case, only muddies matters
further)... hence fish concludes that sokal, because of his inadequate
understanding of sociology as a "research project," has managed a
"deception" that "threatens to undermine the intellectual standards he vows
to protect"...
well, let's see if i understand fish correctly: sokal has not correctly
grasped sociology of science, ergo he has through his paper unwittingly
undermined professional-intellectual standards... but here fish is culpable
on the count of two misrepresentations: first, sociologists of science
themselves continue to have profound disagreements over the status of
social constructivism, known in shorthand as socon... for example, warren
schmaus, ullica segerstrale & douglas jesseph, in the journal social
epistemology ("a manifesto"; 1992, vol. 6, no. 3) refute what they (with
tongues-in-cheek) refer to as "the soft program" of socon, which includes
socon in the "strong sense," on the grounds that, in this latter, "the
cognitive commitments of scientists are either denied or treated as
irrelevant" (243; & i'm not taking sides here)... so sokal is at least not
wrong in having presumed residual (if somewhat mitigated) controversies
over socon-based research... fish's second misrepresentation has to do with
the status of sokal's "hoax" itself: fish suggests fraud and impropriety
on sokal's part, even as he attributes a certain ignorance of epistemology
to sokal's paper ... but if sokal has *incorrectly* grasped a field of
inquiry, how could his "hoax" possibly produce fish's "corrosive
effects"?... fish himself argues that sociology of science poses no
"threat" to science, that the "integrity" of a research enterprise will not
come from "presumptuous outsiders" but from "insiders who decide not to
play by the rules or to put the rules in the service of a devious
purpose"... yet sokal is *not* an insider - he's clearly an outsider...
what's missing here is any substantive discussion of *why* the formal
maneuvers sokal deployed in his "parody" made it past the social text
editorial board... if the research conventions of a given field of inquiry
are so transparent as to permit such deception to take place, then at the
very least we need to take a long hard [wink] look at those conventions...
now before any of my readers get the wrong idea about me or my position on
such matters, let me cut & paste from a few of my initial posts to poetics:
i think mebbe ross oughtta just cop to it, and admit that sokal's prank got past the editorial board...
nevertheless, i find mself on the ross side of things in terms of
challenging sokal's "leftist" motives, and in terms of what sort of work i
find valuable, even as, again, i do think that sokal managed to put one
over on social text, all naysaying to the contrary...
why is it that this controversy, at least as it's coming
down the pike, is taking place over there, in print?... at least among the
contenders, i mean - ross, fish, sokal, etc?... why the hell don't we have
an electronic forum where sokal, ross, fish and anybody else who's
interested can converge to chew over these... discrepancies?...
a lot of the hogwash that's likely to emerge from this controversy could
probably be addressed and dispensed with in just a few email exchanges...
which, of course, is hardly to argue for progress, but which is to make a
claim for process, due and otherwise...
so those who choose to explore the interconnections among (?) these domains
are bound to find themselves in mixed company, so to speak... it's fraught
terrain, punctuated by territorial struggles and anxieties... and practical
jokes (like sokal's) aside, there's a certain need, as i see it, to try to
speak in ways that promote dialogue, not division...
still, i'm ultimately on ross's side on this, if i've gotta choose sides, i
mean... i don't think he's been disingenuous, i think rather he's merely
saturated with his subject position, and is seeping here & there...
ysee, on poetics i have the benefit of a number of other thinkers & writers
(400 or so subscribers at the moment) to help me hone my own thinking, as
well as to kick around these issues w/o any of us necessarily digging in...
here are some particularly trenchant observations by rob wilson, advisory
editor at boundary2 (another duke journal):
shaking the foundations of professional expertise at and around
s[ocial]t[ext], sokal
is now accused of having written a sophomoric 'fraud' and having violated
the very professional ethics and professional decorums that sustain such
expertise knowledge communities (stanley fish, predictably, in his op-ed
take-out so-called sokal piece); but what the nyu professor of physics has
actually written is not so much 'fraud' as a parodic miming of the pomo
cult codes (some of his footnotes are pretty hilarious) and a sending up
of an over-extended 'culturalism' colonizing domains of
reality/history/material production and reproduction where it may just
fall apart or become wishy-washy and inadequate.
that st editors ex post facto can now claim (via a[ndrew] r[oss] on www) that
they knew all along it was a 'sophomoric' piece of cultural studies by a
naive scientist; that st is never 'refereed' (what is the in-house critical
collective but a set of primary discrimination makers of the in/out,
enacting [sure, informally] the rules for what passes as any "social text"
text?); and that the sokal essay was going to be dropped from the expanded
book edition at duke u p (this would be an unusual post facto decision to
make, as duke u p usally runs all the essays and whatever else the editors
choose to add from its journals' "special issues," within space limits of
course), sounds like more critical two-step shuffle to me: why not admit
to having been deceived and work from the insights and struggles of that
moment? sure, it's a postmodern black hole now: that a pro-sandinista
physicist can be embraced as an ally by rush limbaugh on right-wing talk
radio and be stimulated by the "higher superstition" faction of
anti-pc-construction science to write such a piece just plays into the
spectacle of media reductions - some at b[oundary]2 have suggested this will
only
drive up the subscription lists of st and generate more cultural capital
and "science war" discourse for the players (if they don't fall or leap
from nyu windows and fall upward, "deconstructing postmodern gravity,
slyly") and the press.
but sokal has, I think, caught ross and the st "star wars" discourse
apparatus in an over-extension of their 'culturalism,' miming the codes in
devious simulacrous ways that reflect and refract where the journal is
philosophically at. as somebody has said, under such pressure, the
"subject position" is oozing into "position(s)."
more might be added here about ross's gloss on the institutional site of
his journal - "social text has always seen its lineage in the 'little
review' tradition of the independent left as much as in the academic
domain"... but when all is said & done, after having read many if not all
of the related documents, it's evident to me that this latter controversy,
fraught as it appears to be with ulterior motives, might have been attended
to in a public forum that does not itself feed, directly, the mainstream
news tendency to ostracize intellectual-eggheads (that's me too), to
capitalize on the anti-intellectual leanings of mainstream public life in
the u.s... & that this might itself have mitigated, if not avoided, a
public dispute that exacerbates the academic in-fighting scene & magnifies,
in the mainstream public eye, the irrelevance of (for one) humanities
scholarship... which in turn feeds the current corporate-vocationalizing
pressures on academe, however indirectly (& on my tech. campus, it's not
all that indirect)...
& OK: i'd rather that our articulate proponents on the left hadn't left
behind me & a host of others sympathetic (& unsympathetic) to more
liberatory agenda by conducting their disputes in more mainstream print
fora, fora that few of us have access to...
my reading of the sokal text debacle - as i posted to the poetics list in
response to rob wilson's fine insights - was that all parties had been
insufficiently *literary*, finally... that the social text editorial
board might have seen sokal's parody for what it was, not simply as a
"curio" (ross)... that sokal might not have mistaken his intentions, or the
resulting generic form said intentions took (parody, or satire - & there is
a difference), as a somehow intrinsically-discounted contribution to
knowledge-as-we-know-it (the piece may in fact have some residual, say,
metaphorical value, however much bullshit is "in" it - but i won't belabor
this latter point here)... & that this itself suggests that we attend to
our discourses, to our writing & reading practices, with a better
understanding of the various writing & reading publics 'out there'... not
that attending to the literary as such gets us "out" of our various
institutional predicaments, as rob himself was quick to point
out - online...
though i've never been entirely happy with mcluhan's distinction between hot
(user-passive) & cold (user-interactive) media, he *did* happen to mention, in
his characteristically sage way, that one "vantage point from which to test
the difference between hot and cold media is the practical joke"... & this may
be just the point at which my invocation of the "literary" falters (that is,
unless i modify it some): so many critics & theorists of culture & literature
just may not get it, they may not quite see their own investment in the
literary values of a bygone era, much as interrogations of canonicity can
often obscure same old same old exercises in discursive preciosity - talking
the same old ways to the same old crowds... for mcluhan, the "hot literary
medium excludes the practical and participant aspect of the joke"
(understanding media 32)... mcluhan isn't saying that such jokes don't
exist, but simply that literary-inclined folks generally find them
"distasteful"... but by "literary" mcluhan means immersion in print literacy,
typography & the like...
one nice thing about the emergence of electronic media, for those
so-inclined, is that such media tend to render the forms, contents &
motivations of print practice much less transparent, thereby auguring a
more informed & inclusive understanding of the literary as a varying site
of literacy... perhaps this development itself might encourage a certain
sense of disciplinary humor, a capacity for not taking one's professional
Self too seriously, however serious or passionate one may be about one's
work... but we'll have to tune our wits in, too, to the very real
possibility of online news forgeries & the like... after experiencing
numerous rounds of virus gags (the perennial "good times" virus comes
immediately to mind), i think myself more savvy, & less vulnerable, to
pranks & tomfoolery... but who am i kidding? - i'm just a bit more aware
of how easy it is to be fooled when one's critical/creative faculties are
stuck in the holding pattern of publication (*this* holding pattern)...
this is not exactly what you'd call news, & andrew ross, for one, knows
it... he's written insightfully on "technoculture," on popular culture &
media, on poetry & poetics... but perhaps writing "on" or "about" such
stuff prevents him from fully recognizing the distance, & leverage, such
prepositions effect... in any case, i wouldn't want to find myself in the
ungainly position of advocating only more performative media forms, esp.
not these days... it's just that we need an enhanced awareness of a wider
range of practices...
so, as to publishing policies: it's not a matter of winnowing submissions
more methodically... it's more a matter of understanding the broad range of
possibilities available for sustained discussion & exchange... from a
teaching point of view (& i am a teacher), it's imperative that educational
systems teach critical reading, writing & thinking less as a function of
skills acquisition & more as a matter of helping students to engage with
the incredible variety of reading & writing communities present in this
country & around the globe (& when i write "reading & writing," i mean to
refer to symbolic practices in general)... & again, though online technologies represent the
techno-triumph of advanced industrialization & should always be viewed with
critical prophylaxis in place, they can be helpful here... writing &
reading communities often correspond to formally substantive textual
orientations, but such communities don't begin & end there... an
identifiable cadre of poets, for example, may be enamored of a diverse
range of aesthetic techniques; on the other hand, there are specific
aesthetics that at times induce specific artistic groupings... the point is
to increase as well as expand upon current conceptions of literacy, to
recognize a much wider array of aesthetic possibilities, discursive
possibilities, *social* possibilities than are generally given press in the
various press outlets... for example, i mentioned online that -
there is a journal - as i recall the title, the journal of
irreproducible results - that provides a forum for mock-scientific studies
of mock phenomena, playing specifically off of *scientific* jargon and
methodology, and playing specifically to scientists and the
scientifically-inclined... i mention this by way of indicating that sokal's
parody has precedent within scientific discourse communities...
if what sokal did is, as ross calls it, a "boy stunt," it is
also connected with the general ethos of scientific discourse, if only on
this latter's (lunatic?) fringes... an ethos emerging from a long history
of proving, disproving, and, on occasion, offering up false proofs as a
challenge, or for a few laughs - whatever the residual positivism or, as
some would have it, male-adolescent leanings...
so what i have to say goes for academia & academics as well... antagonisms
of left & right (& shall i declare, like the rest, my leftist leanings?)
are not about to go away, nor am i suggesting, again, that online spaces
will necessarily allay tensions owing to same... i for one intend to remain
adamantly opposed to specific conservative agenda, regardless the medium...
but -
let's take the ebr effort specifically: rather than "focus" an "issue"
on a "piece" (albeit originally a talk given) by michael bérubé (or anybody
else), why not set up, instead, an interview forum whereby the ebr
editorial staff holds a one week long list-exchange between michael & any
number of invited participants?... in fact this could be a wholly open
affair - it's not necessarily the case that a cast of thousands will show
up to participate, & in any case the list itself may be moderated... the
forum could begin by focusing on a specific topic, & be permitted to
digress from there, as list exchange generally does... most readers will
note that this is hardly something new - irc's, moo's & the like have been
providing synchronous gathering places for years now... the only
kinda new thang (at this point) is the rather fuzzy publication aura of
this process... can we academics put this sorta thing on our vitae?...
well, why not?... if you think you need to do so, why then do so...
in any case, the result would be an archive-able log of give & take over a
set duration... this log might be edited into a summary of various cogent
posts... or it might simply be archived as such & presented as "THIS
MONTH'S FORUM" (of course, this has precedent in print media)... readers of
ebr might be encouraged to post commentary in response to the forum to
ebr, as well as (& this is crucial) to the various participants
themselves... all participants should be required to post their email
addresses, a stipulation that should ensure online access to all
participants from all participants, as well as discourage any participant
from treating the list forum as a monologic publication zone (of course
there are no guarantees this won't happen)...
& with a bit more generosity, & a more informed understanding of - or at
least concession to - their own place as a print journal in the diverse
range of print & electronic fora, the social text folks might have
proceeded similarly (to put the burden on the publisher, that is, & not
sokal)... & invited sokal, ross, fish, robbins et. al. to participate in
precisely such a forum... which latter might have been edited for a
subsequent issue of the journal... which result would seem, as well, to
satisfy ross's description of social text as a non-refereed journal
(which assertion raised more than an eyebrow on poetics, incl. my own,
because many of us understood the journal to be refereed)... in any case,
nothing prevents social text from opting to accept participation 'over
the transom,' esp. in an online forum... such online fora may, in fact, be
an esp. useful strategy when discourses collide... if only in retrospect,
the gradual migration of the social text debate into these regions -
ross's post, sokal's rejoinder, my essay - suggests as much...
one liability of online space warrants specific elaboration here: as most
electronic lists bear witness to, there are many more men than women
presently occupying such spaces (albeit more women are logging-on than ever
before), &, to hazard an essentialism of sorts, men - we men, most of us
- do in fact bring with us our defensive conversational habits &
male-territorial urges... but again: no reason not to take this as further
impetus for more renowned folks like ross & bérubé to use their
institutional leverage, incl. their insight into gender issues, to help
populate these spaces with more women & more women-friendly conversational
structures...
running out of breath & winding down to a provisional end: i find the
slippage/seepage in ross's AND bérubé's subject positions problematic to
the extent that these latter two gents continue to deny their own
investment & complicity in maintaining a "position" predicated on
privileged institutional status of one sort or another - that is, a
complicity of privilege, & one rooted in print publication practices... for
bérubé & ross, little seems to
disrupt their apparent critical sobriety, & they go about their business
with business-as-usual cool - two visible, if not powerful, spokespersons
for the many on the left... but hey, guess what? - I'M NOT, uhm, COOL,
anymore than i'm hooked on phonics, however hot &/or cold the medium... if
what we homo sapiens are about is finding ways to engage in more open &
candid exchange, with the objective of reducing oppressive, discriminating,
normative practices, then we can ill-afford the orthodox stance of speaking
only to those who have ears for us... sure, allowance must be made for
dissonant articulations (sometimes i'd rather not be understood, really, so
much as *felt*) & for complex communities (which latter are likely to
persevere underground in any case)... "to publish" means to go public, yes,
but one can go public w/o exactly publishing... & as just about anybody
who's spent any time at all in the online world will tell you, it's not
necessary to enter an electronic list & say things for once & for all, as
though your professional life depended on it... to be willing to mix it up
some, to be willing to listen to grad. students & undergrad. students,
academics & non-academics, folks who may not publish all that much but who
nonetheless may have a helluva lot to add to the discussion, & whose
experience may differ greatly from one's own - this is the best of the
online world... as to the effect online lists can have on print publishing
venues, & vice versa - as well as questions pertaining to the serious
social & cultural work, even in a more hybrid print-electronic era,
encompassed by the qualifier *literary* - these latter are open to
anybody's speculation - anybody, that is, reading along these lines...
0
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