Hoaxing cultural studies: Sokal 2.0

The hoax flew high and far, at least within the corridors of academe and the tutored outlets. It totally convinced and deceived Daniel Soar, an editor at the London Review of Books. Soar, who missed every single matter connected with the deception, wrote in sneering contentment that the ploy did not quite work. What was produced was good, laboured over and decent. How could it really be dismissed out of hand? "This argument only holds… if what they wrote was actually ridiculous. It's worth noting how extraordinarily hard they worked to make their papers suit the journals they we are aiming to get published in." Perhaps it is just as well: an editor is bound to be cautious, defensive and, ultimately, apologetic for those choices that lead to published shams.

The premise, in short, had not been proven in its entirety. "So I'm not persuaded that these hoaxers have proved, through their writing, that cultural studies are a sham. One of the papers that got accepted by that hadn't yet been published before the story of the hoaxing broke was entitled 'When the Joke Is On Your'. I think the joke's on them: the only way the could get away with what they did was obediently produce exactly the kind of work that the field requires." And that is precisely the point: to have obediently replicated the criteria of vacuity, fictive endurance and nonsense, thereby falling for the very mockery intended. Soar duly succumbs.

An underlying note exists to the limp attacks against Sokal 2.0. They betray desperation on the part of the attackers, showing that self-interest is the enemy of fair thinking. Think lazy disposition in the face of needing to publish; think spineless will before the bean counting tyrants of university administration. Academics need to publish, and, just as a writer for a thankless despot needs to fill the pages to an approved narrative to survive, an academic in an institution, to get tenure, needs to become a Stakhanovite production machine. If so, the situation must be seen as a tragedy.

Amidst this crisis, the old problem of scholastic merit and obfuscation never goes away. As Dawkins rightly asks: How to we tell the difference? "What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes?" To sort the bounding, careerist charlatan from the profound, well-expressed idea remains a great challenge. But was it ever different?