Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 13:44:14 -0700
Subject: Sokal's Spoof


  Just read an article in the NY Times about how a 
  physicist by the name of Alan Sokal managed to 
  get a spoof article published in the journal 
  _Social Text_.  The article attempts a parody of 
  cultural studies/poststructuralist gobbledygook.
  The article was read by half a dozen or so 
  editors, but with none of them twigging, it was 
  still thought to pass muster.
  
  Now that's not the bit that really matters to 
  me.  What I found more interesting was that the 
  NY Times started off (on the front page) by 
  identifying the spoof as highlighting the 
  conflict between the 'left', which apparently 
  favors the kind of thing the article was 
  supposed to be parodying, and 'conservatives' 
  who believe in objective truth, etc.  Only later 
  (on page 11 where the article continues) is it 
  revealed, without further comment by the Times, 
  that Sokal is in fact a self-described 'leftist 
  and feminist', whose motives in attempting his 
  spoof were both 'intellectual and political', 
  and who believes that postmodern baloney is 
  politically eviscerating for the Left (see 
  others who have made this point explicit in 
  recent times in Monthly Review, New Left Review, 
  etc--Meiksins Wood, Geras, et al).  
  
  Pity this bit was not emphasised in the article; 
  if you had just read the front page portion of 
  the article, you would have assumed that Sokal 
  was one of those objective truth-loving 
  conservatives.  I suppose the Times was, with 
  self-conscious irony and playful postponement of 
  the 'facts', attempting to lure the unwary 
  reader into its own hide-and-seek game with 'The 
  Truth', all the while wallowing in the 
  pleasurable and multiple signification of 'the 
  Left'.
  
  Peter
  pburns-AT-lmumail.lmu.edu


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