French philosophers just don't get the joke

Yet the parody he penned nearly two years ago for the American journal Social Text, entitled Transgressing the Boundaries - Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, has provoked an enormous row.

Sokal submitted the entirely nonsensical paper for publication as a way of exposing the lack of intellectual rigour behind fashionable "relativist" philosophy. The furore says as much about the relations between the political left and academia as it does about weaknesses in contemporary thinking. His target is that diverse school of French-speaking post-war intellectuals. "There is an exaggerated concern with perceptions of reality at the expense of reality and with language at the expense of meaning," he says.

Sokal renewed his critique in a book published a few weeks ago. While he has no problem with "aesthetic" relativism in architecture and literary criticism, its passage into natural sciences as an attempt to discredit the existence of objective rules is more worrying. He is, for example, scathing of Paul Feyerabend, the philosopher who has called science a "superstition".

"I challenge anyone who believes Newton's theory of gravity is relative to test their views by jumping out of my 21st-floor apartment," he says.

With degrees from Harvard and Princeton, and settled in a career as a physicist, Sokal says he felt ill-equipped to contribute to the debate until the publication in 1994 of Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. He shared the authors' horror of "sloppy and illogical" writings, often from left-wing academics, that attacked the notion of objectivity in science.

Working back through a "footnote trail" of detailed references, he was able to identify the source materials on which the left-wing academics had based their critiques. The result was a huge master file of elementary errors in their manipulations of terms in physics and maths.

What most provoked his ire was the misuse of terms from quantum physics, topology and other areas of mathematics, to name-drop, mystify and impress the reader.

Sokal decided it would be boring simply to write a straight article on the subject that would "fall into a black hole". Instead he set to work on his parody, designed to attack "prominent intellectuals getting away with nonsense". The writing of Transgressing the Boundaries was rapid. "It was easily done because there are no standards of logic," he says. "I built it around quotes from others."

His biggest challenge was to write sufficiently incomprehensibly. "I had to revise and revise to achieve the desired level of unclarity."

Playing in character to the end, Sokal held out against the only big demand for changes made by the editors of Social Text: to reduce the length and cut down the footnotes. Almost unmodified, the paper was published in a special edition devoted to attacking the Higher Superstition book. Soon after, Sokal published a second article revealing the hoax.

He was unprepared for the reaction. "I thought it would be a significant scandal in a small academic circle." But it was picked up by a columnist in a newspaper and then by national radio.

The next day the maths department in Minnesota, where he was at a conference, was inundated with calls. Before long, details of his parody - and the indignant reaction from the editors of Social Text - were consuming huge quantities of newsprint and airtime, initially in America but also in Britain, Canada and elsewhere around the world.

If he was surprised, he also soon became embarrassed. For he was championed by the populist right as a new stick to beat left-wing academics and a means to dismiss as worthless all postmodern and relativist thought.

In his new book he praises such figures as Eric Hobsbawm and Noam Chomsky. What he objects to is the growing tendency, emanating from the intellectual left, to associate science and objectivity with the right: a strong contrast with the "progressive", anti-Establishment status of science since the Enlightenment.

If he is embarrassed by his appropriation by the right, the other sore point is the way he has been used for French-bashing. Many of the targets in his parody - and nearly all in his book - are French intellectuals. The result is that the "Sokal hoax" was used to justify ridiculing all Gallic post-war thinking. It has to be said the French did not help themselves. As the Sokal debate reverberated around the world, one country remained strangely mute. It was only nine months after the publication of his original paper that Le Monde covered the story.

Few of those targeted have bothered to reply. Jacques Derrida wrote a piece in Le Monde in November pointing out that "the poor Sokal" is better known for his hoax than for his scientific work. A broader criticism has been that he attacks the intellectuals largely for their misunderstanding of science but never gets to grips with the more significant debate about relativism.

Sokal is perhaps playing a little too innocent when he says he simply wanted to "drop a small bomb, to open up a small space for discussion". But he has probably done the cause of academia a service.

In a strikingly insular defence in Le Nouvel Observateur, the academic Pascal Bruckner recently contrasted an Anglo-Saxon culture based on fact and information with a French culture of interpretation and style. Unfortunately, many of the writers he is defending owe less to style than incomprehensibility. For Sokal to have taken them down a peg can be no bad thing.

Andrew Jack

A longer version of this article first appeared in the New Statesman

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