Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair | Hacker News Reader

Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair

thebaffler.com

55 pointsHooke42 comments

One reason Sokal’s article stirred up such a fuss was that, when it was published in 1996, people still largely depended on edited, gatekept outlets for their reading and viewing. Although not mainstream media, Social Text was still selective about what it published, and the fact that its editors had chosen to publish Sokal’s hoax was a key point in the controversy. It would be a few more years before raw, self-published writing on the Internet would start to reach as many people as it does now.

Except at the time many scholars in psychology and other disciplines were raising alarm bells about replicating tested and published results. So Social Text was in good company.

That's not how I remember the event. The fact that "people still largely depended on edited, gatekept outlets for their reading and viewing" played no role, as far as I know. Newspapers wrote about the Sokal-Bricmont story, not because they were concerned as gatekeepers, but because it was a spectacular hoax. I was in academia at the time, and it was widely discussed.

The hoax intended to show two facts:

- Philosophy and social studies sometimes have an unsuitable fascination for science, with a tendency to wrongly apply scientific concepts they don't understand. Some impostors had perfect fame in their academic domain, despite writing this pseudo-scientific gibberish.

- Scientific journals were supposed to publish provable or reproducible articles, so when a flawed article went through the publishing process, there was hope the errors would be detected and other articles would fix it. And a publication in a top-tier journal would bring intense scrutiny. In philosophy and social science, nonsense could get published, widely accepted, and even studied.

BTW, I remember Jean Bricmont telling how much he liked good philosophy, and how he was pained when reading fraudulent philosophy.

Thank you for your response. Let me explain a bit more what I intended by my comment above.

Though I wasn’t in academia at the time, my memory of the event is basically the same as yours. But I wonder if younger people today, used to the current Internet-based media environment, would understand why such a hoax attracted so much attention outside of academia. My recollection is that, before the Internet, there was much more interest in and discussion of what media outlets decided to publish or not and how they slanted stories. While such interest still exists, it might seem a bit odd to someone who mainly consumes social media. The current issues around filtering and algorithms are quite different from the often intense discussions a few decades ago about how, say, the New York Times or CBS News covered particular stories.

What would happen today if someone got a similarly ridiculous article accepted by a magazine or website like Social Text? My guess is that it would not attract anything like the widespread attention the Sokal hoax did.

At the time it was seen as revealing the particular field being prone to bullshit. But since then there have been other hoaxes and scandals in other fields, so it seem more like a general problem with peer-reviewed journals.

Blown away by this article, thank you. I hadn't thought of the Sokal affair in ages but I remember when it happened and how gleeful everyone was in making fun of the journal at the time. To think that the author and journal co-editor at the time would wind up working together as early advocates for Palenstinian rights is an incredible plot twist.

Is it that much of a plot twist? It’s possible for more than one thing to be true at once – that postmodernist nonsense deserves to be mocked and belittled, and that Palestinians deserve rights.

Not OP, but I think the plot twist is, maybe we need to be able to entertain "obviously absurd" ideas to be able to land on a correct position if the culture we're inside of is not ready for those ideas yet. (No idea if the journal was really that early on this particular position though)

Crucially, entertaining ideas isn't the same as believing them, it's about giving them some time and space so you can work out whether it's consistent, rich, useful. Even in math this stuff is hard to get right, just look at the resistance and ridicule that Cantor had to go through, or look at the development of non-Euclidean geometry. And that's a space where proof is actually possible. Critical theory is a real thing but is always walking this fine line between being nonsense or being revolutionary.

By its very nature, postmodernism can't be correct or incorrect. The most it can do is provide a perspective or method of analysis. Some people might find it interesting or even useful. (Personally I see it as trite intellectual masturbation, but that's just me.)

It is very, very rare that a fringe or radical ideology that holds fringe views on almost all topics happens to hold a correct and important stance that is also very rare among non-fringe ideologies. Support for Palestinian rights has definitely not been as common as it should have been in the United States, but was still quite common among many non-fringe groups and individuals. You didn't, and don't, need to go to a radical Marxist critical theory publication to be better informed about that topic. I think the author makes an admirable defense of his magazine and shows it was not quite as crazy or worthless as the Sokal affair initially made it out to be, but we don't need to go all the way in the other direction.

Despite Alex Jones watchers all citing it as a great reason to watch him, you don't, and didn't, actually need to watch Alex Jones to learn about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. Alex Jones was not the person who broke that story or even popularized it - and even if he were to have been, it wouldn't mean he was factually correct about most of it or about anything else.

Sometimes there are brilliant people with fringe, contrarian views or findings that initially get ridiculed and are later found to be correct or valuable. But Cantor was already a respected individual for his past work; he was not some no-name crank mailing theory-of-everything letters to mathematicians. Ramanujan was closer to that, but Ramanujans are so incredibly rare that you really need to be extremely cautious. And math is unlike almost every other field, where fringe claims can generally be objectively and independently confirmed or refuted, so you need to be far more cautious about nearly every other field out there.

However, I agree with your point that at the very least all sides should be initially heard out. Just not necessarily heard for very long.

Agree with all this; see my other comment in thread for more color, more math. I don't want to come across as embracing pseudo-science, misinformation, etc.

I do like to think about the distinctions and boundaries for hard/soft/squishy knowledge though, and try to challenge assumptions and misconceptions about it. Invariably people have weird ideas about how "hard" their pet area is and how "soft" that thing they love to hate really is, which is itself a kind of dogma or superstition. Plus I think it's a public service to try and interest gear-headed nerds in things like criticism and philosophy (or vice versa, pushing engineering and math at the literature nerds). Last time I waded into this kind of debate I was pointing out that Frege worked on semiotics.

I think it's great that they were early advocates for Palestinian rights (I'm a liberal capitalist and dislike Marxism but have always been very sympathetic to the Palestinians and their cause), but, as this article states, this is a Marxist magazine. For a very long time, Marxists have been on this side. Don't see why it would be a twist.

Early advocates for Palestinian rights, in 1996?

Curious.

Yeah, this is an odd word choice. Even as someone only born in that decade, I've heard at least one case from someone directly about their advocacy from before that year; a history professor I had in college once told an anecdote during a lecture about a time he briefed the elder President Bush, who was apparently considering whether to try to pressure Israel to halt settlements on the West Bank (which the professor told us was an example of how much more attention to detail he perceived in the elder compared to his younger one when he became president). I'm sure there are plenty of people around who can recall things much earlier than this.

> early advocates for Palenstinian rights

Early? https://enwp.org/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight

In retrospect, the Sokal hoax to me is both incredibly significant in its role as a signal flare of what was to come, and in its total old-fashioned, epistemic failure.

It was a signal flare because it is a perfect example of the kind of uninformed criticism the internet would later make rampant; the hoax tried to deflate and entire body of practice, knowledge, and language that it simply didn't understand. It was a category error. It presented a false equivalence between social facts and physical facts. The constructivists of the time are largely talking about social not physical issues. Yes, epistemology touches on the social, so that was apart of the game, as was examining the social components of science, no one, however had seriously argued that the epistemic claims of science, once their fundamental premises were accepted are contestable—Sokal, in bad faith, tried to discredit claims of an entirely different nature by effectively presenting a straw man.

Second, it is a epistemic failure because recent events, if anything, have largely proven that constructivism wins. Today, people inhabit multiple realities. Yes, the scientific method is the one that is best with respect to finding truth, but it turns out people don't really care. The constructivist insight that, ultimately, autonomous individuals decide what they want to believe has far greater force in our world today. Science and logic, unfortunately, have no binding power. Fools can and will in fact deny reality as it slaps them in the face. To really understand the present, a constructivist bent is actually more fruitful for establishing a basis for an analysis with explanatory power.

In short it's just a classic example of hubris and scholars taking past each other.

And on the heels of the Sokal affair, came the Bogdanov Scandal, which at the time, some physicist thought was an elaborate pay-back prank and as it turned out, 2 Phd theses, one in Mathematics and the other in Physics made it through the system even if with the lowest grades (University of Nancy, France), where the content of both theses is utter nonsense, and yet peer pressure, and complascency made it so that something that fails even the lowest standards of consideration for a graduate research (in the context of Sokal's affair it would have been a masterful pay-back) was actually legitimate. Kind of a sobering story in these strange times.

BobbyBroccoli's videos about the Bogdanoff scandal were informative and entertaining.[1]

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=2O1QA1VoRMM

From the intro to the original paper:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...

And the reveal, including a brief discussion of the “ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment”: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingu...

From the concluding paragraphs of the latter document:

“Why should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual high ground?”

Wow, how times have changed.

>1979 critique of Zionism was early not really, not even close even with the "US-based" qualifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_anti-Zionism

call me when sociology has any kind of predictive power and testable explanation then people might take your social classes hypothesis seriously. It's not just the foundation problems, the practical applications of social "sciences" have been failure after failure from demography to economics. If modern physics and chemistry concepts that we rely on today were as reproducible as the ANY social science concepts none of us would be here right now. Fundamentally there is nothing stopping social scientists from reducing the scope of their experiments to the reproducible. They haven't, largely so they can feel good about winning cheap political points, that's the privilege colonialism has afforded modern social scientists and they won't give up the drug til they die.

There's some interesting stuff in here if you can tolerate the meandering and the way-back-when. Like you'd expect from po-mo wonks, everything's gotta be infinitely subtle and infinitely contextualized. So no big mea-culpa and no big defensive denial either. All of that's been hashed and rehashed many times already I guess. You'll find some self-deprecating humor, some spots with surprising self-awareness, some with a surprising lack of it. The main fresh thing is how they'd like to try and compare/contrast/contextualize it in this moment. For example:

> Being a gatekeeper by maintaining high intellectual standards is not what public opinion would associate with Social Text, to say the least. Yet that is what the journal practiced, mainly. And it is a practice worth defending, however elitist it might look. All the more so because of how the Trump administration has weaponized both the idea of the hoax and the program of anti-elitism. [..] We know what has befallen intellectual standards. [..] Is this ChatGPT, or is it Orwell’s doublethink?

Well ok, there's a conversation to be had about these things! This is not the time to pontificate though, it's the time for sweet revenge. There's never been a better time for po-mo wonks to lean on AI slop and blast physics journals with fake stuff about gravity until someone understaffed falls for the trick. Then you can do a big scandalous reveal about how you can't believe you got away it ;)

Does “po-mo” mean “post modernism”?

yes

Oh, we’ve long since seen that revenge: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s... for many examples, including quite a few in the sciences.

I have come to think of the Sokal hoax as an early warning sign of our current information crisis. There was an era when high production values signaled information hygiene. The real Apple original sin wasn’t the walled garden, it was the LaserWriter.

Sokal was right, of course. He deservedly made fools of a bunch of naked emperors. However, he also influenced a lot of people (myself included) to eschew a whole genre of thinkers for which there was a lot of truly brilliant ideas.

For example, Lacan is given a good spanking by Sokal both in his paper Transgressing the Boundaries and an entire chapter is dedicated to him in Intellectual Impostures. Lacan looks like a complete fool if this is your only exposure to his thought. Again, Sokal is not wrong on his criticisms in these excerpts. Lacan definitely uses mathematical terms incorrectly. He was making an attempt to formalize his field (psychoanalysis) by skimming textbooks/papers on topology, knot theory, and other mathematical subfields and, from the perspective of someone who uses those terms for precise things, rather haphazardly putting them together. His "mathemes" go through many updates throughout his career, getting ever more complex. Later, Lacan almost certainly was suffering from senility (as most of us will by age 80), and got rather obsessed with the fake math side of his own work.

However, if you actually read Lacan, this is a miniscule and often completely ignored side of his work. No Lacanian psychoanalyst is filling their notebooks with fake math formulas and computing what's wrong with your relationship with the objet petit a. They're metaphors, shorthand, or diagrammatic expressions of what he's really saying in the ~10k pages of his massive corpus. Many of us use compsci terms all the time to express things metaphorically (e.g., being out of bandwidth or disk space when we really mean real world time and mental memory). Think about it this way, and Lacan becomes a source of manifest brilliance, as I discovered only way later in life.

All that said, the critical theory and cultural studies space of the 90s was indeed a cesspool, living in the shadow of former intellectual greats. The great flood of mediocre intellects was starting to bear its rotten fruit, but the truly fatal problem was the politicization. Sokal only addressed this some, making surface-level wrongness his focus in some kind of defense of his own field's purity. Politics poisoned critical theory just like it did wherever else a field became subservient to the street-level goals of a political monoculture. Mindless foot soldiers, bleating about race and gender, capable of only bumper-sticker-length thoughts, make poor philosophers, it turns out. That should've been the core of his point, and could've been helpful framing for a countercurrent against it. Leftist intellectuals, or what was left of them, could've cleaned up their own space, and put the people like this article's author in a quiet corner where they belong. (Note how even here, he can't help but get sucked into the immediacy of the left-reactionary political zeitgeist; the spittle being anything but subtextual.) Instead it came to its inevitable, expensive conclusion of having the decolonization of the university from political imperialists done for them by their equally unthinking opponents.

Can you explain a bit what's the reactionary political thing and which parts show that that the author got sucked into it? Thanks!

Say you wanted to teach cultural studies. That necessarily includes politics, so you should talk about it. However, you can teach politics (or even theorize about politics), or you can do politics. I assert you can't do both, at least not in an academic setting.

Note how the author can't help but take sides on every political signifier he references. He supposedly wanted to write about the Sokal affair from his side, but the essay ends up being a polemic deeply in the now, to the degree that the documentary effort is substantively diminished. That's what papers in his field read like in the 1990s, and still do to this day.

ah, thanks!

yes, to me this is not about the Sokal affair, it's absolutely only about Gaza/Palestine, and how even Sokal itself is a hero of the cause, and how he used a way to advocate for higher standards in social science even if some thinks of this way as not ethically spotless, but everything is all right after all because they were doing politics back then (and the whole construct conundrum was already put to rest by Professor Fuss decades ago, basically right after the affair, he-he), and so on and so on, politics on the occasion of the anniversary of the affair.

that said now I'm trying to get a copy (or at least some response to) Fuss' 19 page book (!) about essentialism/anti-essentialism. sounds interesting. (really shows how academia needs to shut up when they cannot even their their own theory promulgated in their own circles, and come to some working conclusion, instead of just playing the forever armchair quarterback and vanguard at the same time.)

I am by no means an expert, or even especially well-read, but I’ve found Zizek’s percolation of Lacan to be much more accessible to myself as a non-domain expert, and I appreciate how Zizek engages with the audience where they are. Lacan, to my intellect, is hard to grok, as I haven’t put in the time and effort to lay hold of his ideas directly. At times, it feels like with Lacan specifically, and with postmodernism generally, that the obscurantism is the point, which smacks of gatekeeping, but I don’t mind. If I don’t get it, I at least know enough about my own understanding or lack thereof to ask questions of my intellectual betters, which is its own reward.

The fact that someone can perform gatekeeping, even if they cover it up with a five syllable word,, is not evidence that they are your intellectual better.

That wasn’t my implication, but I apologize if I was unclear. My point was that those who appear to know something I don’t might be charlatans, but discernment on my part requires effort on my part, even if it turns out to be wasted. The adage that a stopped clock may be right twice a day implies that it might not be right at all, and it’s on me to know what time it is, and to catch where catch can.

I think Lacan's obscurantism, if you want to call it that, can be thought of one of two ways:

1. He claims to not to want to be understood too quickly. If you believe that, you might say he's forcing the reader (or emerging psychoanalyst) to not just take his ideas as a simple list of facts to be memorized. He often rants about other fields being reductive in the face of necessary nuance. You might also justify this by saying precisely that perspective is necessary in psychoanalysis, with the human mind (particularly the suffering one) in all its unexplored complexity being its target. I'm of two minds on this: I see his point, but there are certainly times when such is an obstacle. Of course, that's if you believe him in the first place. He also said he was something of the master, and his audience the acolytes. He was trying to build a new school under his system, after all.

2. Lacan's ideas are indeed complex and extremely tightly interconnected (or polyvalent, as he likes to say). The graph of Lacanian thought has a lot of nodes (ideas), and an extremely high number of edges (relationships between ideas) per node, and thus very high graph density. If you think about it from that perspective, how does one present such a oeuvre in the linear form like essays or speeches? Further complexifying things is that he was building this in situ, his Seminars being akin to live-blogging that development. He often asks his audience if there's an expert on a particular topic and if so, to let him know about some detail. He never wrote a comprehensive final form of Lacanian thought, so any secondary texts you read will be that author's interpretation. All this creates quite the conundrum for anyone getting started.

If you want condensed info and clarity, go for a secondary source (Bruce Fink being my favorite), while noting the above. I'd also say that, like Hegel, Lacan has something of a language of his own, one you can learn. If you find his ideas compelling (I do, and have benefited from them in my personal life greatly) you should still read him as a primary source. Even if you do the actual learning via other sources, I'd assert that Lacan is one of the last of the true Renaissance men, pulling in ideas from everywhere and everywhen, and I also find reading him an expanding experience just from that perspective.

I don’t read German, or French very well for that matter, so going to the sources is a bit of a linguistic barrier to my own self-directed learning, but that’s no excuse not to learn. I also have found both Lacan and Hegel to be a rich source of food for thought, so I appreciate others who have been steeped in their ideas, as you have, so that their knowledge graph can adjoin my own, at least in small ways.

I appreciate the mention of Bruce Fink, as his name is new to me. Any works of his or others you might recommend to me would be duly noted.

I'm not fluent in French or German either, only enough for light reading in both, and certainly not enough for anything complex/dense. For Lacan, Hegel, and other continental thinkers, I read the same translations that most English-speaking readers do. Am I missing something of these text's core essence? Probably. But, it's also not my job and I need that linguistic brain space for programming languages, so I'm okay with getting 90% of it.

Here was my early Lacan workflow: Lots of Freud essays (you need to know Freud's major ideas cold), The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan by McGowan, The Lacanian Subject by Fink, Seminar VII, Seminar XI.

I've read a lot of other stuff since then, but this path into Lacan worked for me. By the time you've read these, you'll know where to go next on your own. You'll also know pretty early in it whether Lacan is for you. Also, if you don't like Freud (and I don't mean disagree with him, but dislike the overall approach), you can safely stop there.

Lacan was also abusive to his students and clients, charged them incredible amounts of money, and eventually his psychiatry sessions devolved into being about five minutes long.

He was basically a cult leader. There seemed to be something going on where people are infinitely forgiving of French intellectuals (and other continental philosophers) because they are the most skilled people in the world at having infinitely complicated writing styles.

Other episodes in this series include "Althusser kills his wife and communists keep admiringly quoting him", "every 70s French intellectual signs an open letter endorsing pedophilia", and "every department at Cambridge endorses giving Derrida an honorary philosophy degree /except/ the philosophers".

This stuff is all true. Lacan also had a habit of permanently "borrowing" people's collectible books, charging Felix Guattari to drive Lacan home, sleeping with his female clients, and many, many other despicable things. He was, by all accounts, a complete scumbag.

I still read him because his ideas are brilliant and helped me in innumerable ways. He's dead now and his books can't hurt me. They're not even ideological, so you can't make the same case as you could for avoiding, say, a certain Austrian political theorist. However, if we somehow resurrect Lacan, I won't be lending him any first editions from my collection.

> He's dead now and his books can't hurt me. They're not even ideological, so you can't make the same case as you could for avoiding, say, a certain Austrian political theorist.

If only you hadn't put "political" there I was going to think of a joke about Wittgenstein. Who was possibly the grumpiest Austrian in the world at the time, even considering the other one.

As we French say, "nul n'est prophète en son pays". I'd never heard of Derrida until I read mention of him in some American academic journal. Writers are the most esteemed of artists in France, but that doesn't mean the French take superficially brilliant nonsense seriously as anything but wordplay.

Someone just posted "Noam Chomsky Slams ŽIžek and Lacan: Empty 'Posturing' (2013)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45708442

I've tried to listen to ŽIžek, but he sounds like nonsense to me. Like exactly what Sokal was taking the Mick out of.

Wow, they really showed the editors of Social Text. Somebody remind me of their names?

All of the readers of Social Text were really embarrassed. Or at least, I'm sure they were. I never actually met one.

Wild that people think this exposes the Arts as not being rigorous enough when there is an ongoing, widespread replication crisis in psychology, economics, medicine. Increasingly universities are paper mills and the pressure to publish absolute dreck is ever higher. And yet the gleeful "rationalists" seem to ignore this. Why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com