Hitchens On The Sokal Hoax.pdf

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Afterword

When, in the summer of 1996, I telephoned the incredulous editor of this

journal with the intelligence that Stanley Aronowitz and Andrew Ross had

been the victim of a literary and theoretical practical joke, it was with a

certain tincture of Schadenfreude. No sooner had the hoax been revealed than

one recognised it as something that had been `bound to happen'. I still relish

two little-mentioned aspects of the case: first, the fact that at least one

member of the Social Text editorial board does not believe that the Sokal

essay was a put-on; second, the fact that a conservative critic, writing in the

Wall Street Journal, used the same essay to demonstrate the sort of rubbish

that ST was inflicting on the `public'.

There are still those who maintain that ST had its reservations about the

Sokal article (`We publish this with an open mind as a contribution to the

debate') but I think the sheer number of Sokal's citations of the work of

Stanley Aronowitz disposes of that wishful hypothesis. The editors were

taken in, and taken in furthermore by reason of a design-fault in their own

world-view.

Pittsburgh was the host of the first formal confrontation between Sokal

and ST, in the person of Stanley Aronowitz himself. There had, however,

been an earlier exchange in New York, where both Sokal and Andrew Ross

happened to be present at a symposium. Sokal had chosen as an instance

the contrast between anthropology and myth. Native Americans are be-

lieved by anthropologists to have reached the North American landmass

by way of the Aleutian Islands `land bridge'. They are held, by their own

shamans and customary laws, to have risen up from the ground in spirit

form and to have `always' been here. Sokal argued that, whichever of these

hypotheses might be true, they could not both be simultaneously correct.

Mr Ross's reply was to the effect that Sokal was singling out a powerless

out-group for his privileging predicates . . .

Our own meeting was more civil: in fact too much so. The time-honoured

American university set-piece, of two papers by two rivals, followed by two

`discussants' and perhaps two and a half questions from the body of

the hall, is hardly a `debate' even in name because it prohibits any direct

contact between the two chief participants. However, Sokal did succeed

in making it plain that his animating motive was the intellectual health of

Afterword

the American left. (Had he gone to Commentary with the disclosure of his

hoax, rather than to Lingua Franca and then Dissent, the result might have

been more than the `dysentery' that Woody Allen once predicted from a

fusion of the first and third of those journals.)

This made it easier than perhaps it should have been for me to introduce

the disagreement between Chomsky and Foucault. Noam Chomsky, the

only living American to have inaugurated a scientific revolution ± and in

the field of linguistics at that ± has said that Foucault's `discovery' of

occluded or special interests at work in supposedly `objective' fields is little

better than a tautology, and that the work of Derrida and most especially

Baudrillard is not even that good. He has accused them of concealing a

poverty of theory in arcane and obscurantist prose. Since no one will accuse

Chomsky or his work of being at the service of power or ideology, I thought

it might be helpful to have the views of both protagonists on this difference

± which was once rehearsed in public during a debate between Foucault

and Chomsky on Dutch TV.

Perhaps the most common employment of a scientific concept by non-

scientists is the vernacular use made of Werner Heisenberg (who

emphatically was operating in the service of power and ideology) and his

`principle of uncertainty'. The term is usually deployed with the most

casual inexactitude and I thought we might make use of the occasion to

see whether it might be clarified for dialectical purposes.

Finally, in general American discourse the word `objectivity' is often

taken to be synonymous with other terms (fairness, even-handedness,

impartiality, disinterest) with which it has almost no kinship. I proposed

that both Sokal and Aronowitz think aloud on this rather than read their

papers at each other.

Those who care most for civility and consensus often grandly say that

confrontation generates `more heat than light', as if light could come from

any other source than heat. I therefore urged our two guests to observe the

principle, both scientific and cultural, of `let there be heat'. The reader now

has all the argument between two covers for the first time, and may judge

whether any of my admonitions made the least difference.

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