A Physicist Deconstructs Cultural Studies
Alan D. Sokal
Dept. of Physics New York University
The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by
the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and
perspectives is --- second only to American political campaigns---the
most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism
in our time. Larry Laudan Science and Relativism 1990,
p.x
For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the
standards of intellectual rigor in the trendier precincts of the
American academic humanities. But I'm a mere physicist: if I find
myself unable to make head or tail of jouissance and differance,
perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy.
So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to
try an (admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would the leading
North American journal of cultural studies --- whose editorial
collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew
Ross --- publish an article consisting of utter nonsense if (a)
it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological
preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Interested readers can find
my article, ``Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity'' (!), in the spring 1996 issue
of Social Text.
What's going on here? Could the editors really not have
realized that my article was a parody?
In the first paragraph I deride ``the dogma imposed by the long
post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook'':
that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent
of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole;
that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws;
and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and
tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective''
procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called)
scientific method.
Is it now dogma in Cultural Studies that there does not exist
an external world? Or that there exists an external world but
science obtains no knowledge of it?
In the second paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence
or argument, that ``physical `reality' [note the scare quotes!]
is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.'' Not our
theoriea of physical reality, mind you, but the reality
itself. Fair enough: anyone who believes that the laws of physics
are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those
conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first
floor.)
Throughout the article, I employ scientific and mathematical concepts
in ways that no scientist or mathematician could possibly take
seriously. For example, I argue that the ``morphogenetic field''
--- a crazy New Age idea due to Rupert Sheldrake --- constitutes
a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. I claim that Lacan's
psychoanalytic theories have ``recently been confirmed by Witten's
derivation of knot invariants (in particular the Jones polynomial)
from three-dimensional Chern-Simons quantum field theory.'' And
I insist that the axioms of equality and choice in mathematical
set theory are somehow analogous to the homonymous concepts in
feminist politics.
But the most amusing parts of my article were not written by me:
they are direct quotes from the Masters (whom I shower with praise).
Here, for example, is Jacques Derrida holding forth on the theory
of relativity: The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is
not a center. It is the very concept of variability --- it is,
finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the
concept of some thing--- of a center starting from which
an observer could master the field --- but the very concept of
the game.
And Deleuze and Guattari on chaos theory:
To slow down is to set a limit in chaos to which all speeds are
subject, so that they form a variable determined as abscissa,
at the same time as the limit forms a universal constant that
cannot be gone beyond (for example, a maximum degree of contraction).
The first functives are therefore the limit and the variable,
and reference is a relationship between values of the variable
or, more profoundly, the relationship of the variable, as abscissa
of speeds, with the limit. There's more --- Jacques Lacan and
Luce Irigaray on differential topology, Jean-Francois Lyotard
on cosmology, Michel Serres on nonlinear time --- but let me not
spoil the fun.
Nor is all the nonsense of French origin. Connoisseurs of the
work of Stanley Aronowitz, David Bloor, Jonathan Culler, Donna
Haraway, Sandra Harding, Katherine Hayles, Barbara Johnson, Arthur
Kroker, Andrew Ross and Slavoj \v{Z}i\v{z}ek --- among many others
--- will find ample food for thought.
How did I do it? I structured the article by inventing an ``argument''
linking Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, and quantum gravity. I then
threw in, for good measure, a pinch of feminism, a dab of multiculturalism,
and a sprinkling of New Age ecology. All this was quite easy to
carry off, since my argument wasn't obliged to respect any standards
of evidence or logic.
I intentionally wrote the article so that any competent physicist
(or undergraduate physics major) would quickly realize that it
is a spoof. Evidently the editors of Social Text felt comfortable
publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering
to consult anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics.
But why did I do it? Certainly not just to show that I
could hoodwink a bunch of gullible humanists. My method was satirical,
but my motivation is utterly serious. 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, or (when
challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical
relevance. These attitudes are most prominent under the now-fashionable
banners of ``postmodernism'', ``poststructuralism'' and ``social
constructivism'', but their indirect influence is far wider.
My concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual
and political. Intellectually, the problem with postmodernist
doctrine is that it is false (when not simply meaningless). There
is a real world; its properties are not merely social
constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane
person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic
theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious
truths --- the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through
obscure and pretentious language.
Social Text's acceptance of my article exemplifies the
intellectual arrogance of Theory --- meaning postmodernist literary
theory --- carried to its logical extreme. No wonder they didn't
bother to consult a physicist. If all is discourse and ``text'',
then knowledge of the real world is superfluous: physics (not
to mention sociology and history!)\ becomes a branch of Cultural
Studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and ``language games'',
then even internal logical consistency is superfluous: a patina
of theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility
becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors and puns substitute for
evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely
modest example of this well-established genre.
Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this
silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing
here a profound historical volte-face. For most of the
past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science
and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought
and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and
social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted
by the powerful --- not to mention being desirable human ends
in their own right. The recent turn of many ``progressive'' or
``leftist'' academic humanists and social scientists toward one
or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage
and undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social
critique. Theorizing about ``the social construction of reality''
won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies
for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in
history, sociology, economics and politics if we reject the notions
of truth and falsity.
The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least,
that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left (or
so-called Left) have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors
of Social Text liked my article because they liked its
conclusion: that ``the content and methodology of postmodern
science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive
political project.'' They apparently felt no need to analyze the
quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even
the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.
I say this not in glee but in sadness. After all, I'm a leftist
too (during the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at
the National University of Nicaragua). On nearly all practical
political issues I'm on the same side as the Social Text
editors. But I'm a leftist because of evidence and logic,
not in spite of it. Why should the right wing be allowed to monopolize
the intellectual high ground?
And why should self-indulgent nonsense --- whatever its professed
political orientation --- be lauded as the height of scholarly
achievement?
Was It Ethical? I'm not oblivious to the ethical issue. Professional
communities operate largely on trust; deception undercuts that
trust. But it is important to understand the limited nature of
the deception in this case. My article is a theoretical essay
based entirely on publicly available sources, all of which are
meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real, and all quotations
are rigorously accurate; none are invented. There is only one
significant deception: whether the author believes his own arguments.
But why should this matter? The editors' duty as scholars is to
judge the validity and interest of ideas, without regard for their
provenance. (That is why many scholarly journals practice blind
refereeing.) If the Social Text editors find my arguments
convincing, then why should they care if I don't? (Or are they
more deferent to the ``cultural authority of technoscience'' than
they would like to admit?)
But there's another reason I resorted to parody, and it's a pragmatic
one. The targets of my parody have by now become a self-perpetuating
academic subculture --- some might say a racket --- that is largely
oblivious to reasoned criticism from the outside. Numerous critics
have tried, like Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in their book, Higher
Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science
(Johns Hopkins, 1994); but all they have gotten for their labors
is praise from the likes of Roger Kimball (a fate worse than death!)\
and vilification from the so-called Left. Obviously, a more direct
demonstration of the subculture's intellectual standards was required.
But how to prove, incontrovertibly, that the emperor has no clothes?
Satire is by far the best weapon; and the blow that can't be ignored
is the one that's self-inflicted. I offered the Social Text
editors an honest opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual
rigor. If they failed the test, don't blame me.
Finally, let me observe that the ethical and intellectual issues are logically independent: the content of my character is irrelevant to the validity or invalidity of my ideas. So, consider me an arrogant bastard if you must, but judge the ideas on their own merits.