The below represents an experiment for us. This is the first portion of about a half-hour conversation Ari and I had with Michael Bérubé this week. In this portion Michael talks about the Sokal Hoax and why it’s still important. Later parts of the interview include why you should be an antifoundationalist, ruminations on blogging and books, and three middle-aged heterosexual white guys (with tenure, no less!) talking about “privilege.”
Please comment on form or substance, as the mood strikes you.
48 comments
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May 9, 2008 at 5:36 pm
ben wolfson
Pulsating!
May 9, 2008 at 5:37 pm
ben wolfson
No, I take it back.
Throbbing.
May 9, 2008 at 5:42 pm
eric
It’s supposed to be squiggling.
May 9, 2008 at 6:15 pm
LizardBreath
I am a luddite. It would have taken me about forty seconds to read a transcript of that, and I could have watched other things of my own choosing wiggle in the remaining five minutes. Nonetheless, I’ll probably listen to the remaining portions of the interview because this was interesting, and there isn’t a transcript to read. But I’ll resent it bitterly.
May 9, 2008 at 6:17 pm
eric
It takes more time to transcribe than to make things wiggle.
May 9, 2008 at 6:20 pm
LizardBreath
Clearly true — I can sit here at my desk causing various things to wiggle almost effortlessly. The dog rarely stops wiggling.
May 9, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Sean Carroll
Not fond of the wiggling. But the substance was great! I completely agree with Michael that the Sokal hoax did more harm than good, even if perhaps there was some good that could have been done.
May 9, 2008 at 6:56 pm
LizardBreath
And I’m being difficult. It’s just that when material I’m interested in is presented as audio/video instead of text, I get very resentful about how slow it is.
(Also, Sean Carroll! You know, you sold a book for a Sean Carroll who’s a biologist? I saw it on a table in a bookstore of new non-fiction, and picked it up without looking at it closely. And then got very confused reading it: Why is this pop-evolutionary biology? Sean Carroll the blogger is a physicist. Took me a couple of minutes to come with the possibility that there were two of you.)
May 9, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Snerd
The form is like Dr. Katz. The substance is less humorous.
May 9, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Giblets
Where is the rest of it? Giblets wants more Sokal-bashing!
May 9, 2008 at 7:52 pm
bitchphd
I just wish I’d been able to be there. NO FAIR.
May 9, 2008 at 8:08 pm
bitchphd
Love the cartoon, could lose the pulsing, the Dino comix are distracting because you can either *barely* read them or not read them at all (but clever!). Wanna hear the rest of the talk. The audio’s a little quiet.
On the Sokal thing, thank goodness Michael pretty much says “well, we’re not physicists” (aka “yes, Ala, you got us”) as well as saying why the conclusions people draw from it are kinda stupid and self-serving. Though the inevitable problem with talking about Sokal is that it can’t help sounding defensive, especially to people who don’t really get why writing fake academic articles is a shitty thing to do, as an academic.
May 9, 2008 at 8:31 pm
eric
Okay, okay.
(1) I bow down before Giblets. The rest of it is on its way.
(2) I’m hearing a “no” on the mock-Doctor Katzivision. Well, the second segment is almost finished so you’re just going to have to accept it in that part, anyway. But I guess I’ll come up with something else for the third part.
May 9, 2008 at 8:33 pm
ari
The lurkers *all* like the flickering; they told me so in a mass e-mail. So ignore these cretins. Except for LB. Well, ignore LB also.
May 9, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Giblets
I’m hearing a “no” on the mock-Doctor Katzivision.
NOOOOOOOOO! Giblets demands more Wiggly Bérubé!
May 9, 2008 at 8:44 pm
ari
See, Giblets is with the lurkers in this grand battle against creeping cretinism. Listen to Gibilets! And the lurkers! More flicker!
May 9, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Snerd
I’m for enhanced Katzivision. Perhaps, Berube could be shown lying on a psychiatrist’s couch, imagining people interpreting Sokal’s essay for their own nefarious ends. Meanwhile, Eric and Ari wander off to play with their puppies.
May 9, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Sean Carroll
I think that biologist guy owes me big time.
And, although I am anti-squiggle, Dinosaur Comics is a brilliant touch.
May 9, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Michael Bérubé
“Perhaps, Berube could be shown lying on a psychiatrist’s couch, imagining people interpreting Sokal’s essay for their own nefarious ends.”
Whatsis “perhaps”? That’s exactly how Eric and Ari set up this interview — and they insisted, moreover, that they would not record my remarks unlessl I spoke as frenetically and as unintelligibly as possible while still forming something recognizable as “English” “words.” They said that was the only way I could be positively ID’s by Internets Voice Identification.
May 9, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Michael Bérubé
Or ID’d. In fact, that is central to my point.
May 9, 2008 at 10:51 pm
bitchphd
I think Bérubé should wiggle, but nothing else.
May 10, 2008 at 12:35 am
ben wolfson
I promise a substantive comment later.
May 10, 2008 at 7:31 am
ari
Ben opposes the flickering. So it’s settled: the flickering stays!
May 10, 2008 at 10:08 am
Scott
Just discovered your blog, and enjoyed this timely video, since I was very disappointed to miss Berube’s talk this week (I live/work in Davis, but was out of town).
I’ll agree with the previous comments about the throbbing, but otherwise found the audio/video format engaging.
Thanks for giving me the chance to hear at least a bit of Berube that I missed the other night!
Scott
May 10, 2008 at 10:56 am
Michael Bérubé on antifoundationalism « The Edge of the American West
[...] 10, 2008 in our thing by eric This is part two of this interview, in which Michael talks about why he is an antifoundationalist in matters of social justice, and [...]
May 10, 2008 at 11:19 am
student
re: “why writing fake academic articles is a shitty thing to do, as an academic.”
This happens once in a blue moon. When it’s a hoax and has an instructive purpose, don’t criticize the satirist, but the gullible editors. For all of its contributions, post-modernism had developed in ways, e.g., the more extreme varieties of social constructivism, that made it eminently worthy of being parodied.
May 10, 2008 at 1:45 pm
grackle
Hate the wiggling. Enjoyed the original Sokal hoax. I thought Sokal’s argument in Fashionable Nonsense was more interesting than the hoax itself. I don’t see any defense on Bérubé’s part of those arguments(?) which were, IIRC, that Sokal was parodying egregious misuse of technical scientific language, misuse that rendered the results nonsensical. Did I say I hate the wiggling? Still, its a worthy effort.
May 10, 2008 at 2:12 pm
eric
grackle, Berube’s point here and in Rhetorical Occasions is that said egregious misuse doesn’t derive, exclusively or originally, from cultural studies, and that Sokal himself in the paper quotes physicists doing it. Which is to say that 1. The editors blew it but 2. Sokal proved less, or other, than he claimed.
Also, Berube points out that a denial of the real world is not an essential feature of antifoundationalist social thought.
Which is itself not derived from postmodernism.
In other words, as he says here, the hoax let a lot of people write off a lot of things without thinking too carefully about what they were writing off and why.
May 10, 2008 at 4:11 pm
ben wolfson
I don’t see the force of Bérubé’s mention that scientists, especially physicists, are expected to say stuff that seems counterintuitive and loony to the person in the street, and popular science writing, etc. (& the C.P. Snow in the video seems out of place for the same reason.) As when he says, regarding Ross’s (I think, lost track of pronoun referents for a bit) protestation that he just assumed Sokal was writing in good faith.
Of course you assume, when you get a submission at a scholarly journal, that the submittor isn’t trying to put one over on you. But that isn’t the criterion of publishability; neither is your shocked delight that this submittor submat. You still send it off to people who know the particulars of the paper’s subject matter better than you. This is one of the distinctions between the popular and scholarly presses. It wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy to pull a prank on the NY Times Science section; for one thing, their reporting is (I am led to understand) at times indistinguishable from the results of a prank anyway, but mostly because it’s not a scholarly outlet.
To the extent that the Sokal hoax demonstrated that at least this organ felt qualified to adjudicate about claims in physics without even an undergraduate understanding of the field, that seems like a fairly good reason for its being discredited. At least in my limited exposure, via my peers, to philosophy and social science of the sciences around here, if one wants to make a claim about physics, or biology, or philosophical understandings of statistics, or what have you, you’re expected to learn the material at a fairly high level. (This also leaves me uncertain as to what Bérubé means by “science studies”.)
May 10, 2008 at 4:31 pm
ben wolfson
Also, I’m a fan of Dr. Katz, but I don’t think that throbbing is really its distinguishing feature.
May 10, 2008 at 4:49 pm
eric
Ben, maybe MB will speak for himself, but as I understand him be’s not defending ST–the part about “just assuming” is his recommended PR strategy, not a defense. But I do understand MB to say, Sokal’s actual essay doesn’t work as a parody of what Sokal claims it does (though its acceptance does constitute a condemnation of academic coterie culture).
Inasmuch as CP Snow seems inapt that’s my fault though I meant it only as an illustration of the phrase “my end of campus.”
May 10, 2008 at 5:03 pm
urbino
Liked the squiggling, but found the Sokal discussion rather inside baseball.
Moving on to social justice, which is more my speed.
May 10, 2008 at 6:09 pm
bitchphd
Also I agree with Ben, and thought about saying that (in way, way fewer words), but it seemed tactless.
May 10, 2008 at 10:09 pm
ben wolfson
inapt
“inept”. It’s called umlaut.
May 11, 2008 at 5:20 am
Michael Bérubé
Hey, Ben and Dr. B., here’s what I say about the hoax in the non-jiggly version of Rhetorical Occasions. This is from the opening pages of the opening essay:
NYU physicist Alan Sokal submitted his essay, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to Social Text, a leading journal of the academic left, after reading Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s free-swinging critique of science studies, cultural studies, feminism, academic jargon, Afrocentrism, Bruno Latour, pretentiousness, New Age medicine, postmodernism, environmentalism, psychoanalysis, and Jeremy Rifkin. Sokal’s essay itself is a very strange beast, as I’ll show in the course of this discussion, and though as a parody it has many targets, its general object is to demonstrate that some well-respected humanists have published some extraordinarily silly things about the sciences, in some cases presuming to speak critically about subjects they do not adequately understand. And though there are doubtless many reasons why Sokal chose to submit it to Social Text, a desire to embarrass editors Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz possibly among them (for Ross and Aronowitz were among the figures approvingly cited in the essay), it is safe to say that the essay’s publication by a leading journal of the academic left would serve– if the hoax were successful– to demonstrate that a leading journal of the academic left was unable to recognize the work of certain well-respected humanists as scientifically illiterate or obtuse.
The hoax, of course, was successful, and Sokal made at least his two primary points: that some well-respected humanists have published some extraordinarily silly things about the sciences, and that a leading journal of the academic left was unable to recognize the work of certain well-respected humanists as scientifically illiterate or obtuse. When the essay appeared in Social Text, over a year and a half after Sokal first submitted it in November 1994, Sokal revealed that his article was a spoof. In the May-June 1996 issue of Lingua Franca under the title, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Sokal not only named “cultural studies” as the object of his ridicule but insisted that his real goal was to oppose “postmodernist literary theory” on behalf of the Left: “the results of my little experiment,” he wrote, as if summing up a wily lab report, “demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy” (52). At the very least, indeed: for Sokal claimed that his hoax proved much more.
“Social Text’s acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory– postmodernist literary theory, that is– 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; even physics becomes just another branch of cultural studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and language games, then internal logical consistency is superfluous too: 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.” (52)
The passage not only indicates what Sokal himself thought he had done; it also suggests why the controversy he sparked was so strong, and why the counter-Sokal critiques came not just from Social Text editors and readers but from academic humanists who “do” (or simply know something about) theory. For it is one thing, a plausible thing, to fault the editors of Social Text for exercising a kind of interdisciplinary hubris– of failing to consult a physicist, above all, but perhaps also for treating physics as just a branch of “cultural studies.” (Or to fault them, at bare minimum, for publishing the work of a physicist who argued that physics should be so treated. I will leave aside the question of whether Sokal’s conception of “cultural studies” was accurate.) It is quite another thing to follow this with the illogical claim that “if all is rhetoric and language games, then internal logical consistency is superfluous.” Human “language games”– and Sokal seems not to know that the term is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, not the happy-hour invention of some jejune anything-goes pomos– work partly by means of internal logical consistency, which is why most readers would blink if I finished this sentence with ten igneous rocks that rotate voluptuous velvet ocelots with friendly tomato juice. In other (more internally logical) words, if Social Text demonstrated that its editors didn’t know enough about science to publish a special issue on “Science Wars,” Sokal’s explanation of his hoax demonstrated that he didn’t know very much about theories of rhetoric and language, none of which requires a suspension of belief in the “real,” or phenomenal, world. To many humanists, Sokal’s cry, “if everything is language, then everything is permitted” sounded as strange as the cry, “if everything is atoms and chemicals, then everything is meaningless” might sound to a scientist.
But when the Sokal Wars began, the anti-Sokal forces didn’t have much of a chance to point out to journalists, colleagues, and interested onlookers that the study of rhetoric and language doesn’t entail the denial of the world, because they were regrettably pre-empted by the initial responses from Social Text editors Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, the latter of whom called Sokal “ill-read and half-educated” (76) and the former of whom called the essay “a little hokey” and “not really our cup of tea” (55). Together with Bruce Robbins, Ross wrote a reply to Sokal for the July/August 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, titled “Mystery Science Theater.” But Ross’s initial (solo) response, which circulated widely on the Internet in May 1996 (at Ross’s request), was far worse than the Lingua Franca version written with Robbins.
–The essay then goes over Ross’s response in some detail. One last note: I admit that I was thinking of Giblets when I wrote the bit about the velvet ocelots.
May 11, 2008 at 6:53 am
Cecily
posting transcripts or captions would let deaf people think you’re smart and interesting, too
May 11, 2008 at 7:14 am
Giblets
Giblets used to play keyboards and bass for the Velvet Ocelots before he left to form his post-rock experimental side project …And They Who Walk With Giblets. Their first full-length, Giblets! Giblets! Giblets!, is due out this fall.
May 11, 2008 at 9:58 am
bitchphd
I guess I have to read the book, huh?
May 11, 2008 at 10:01 am
eric
Often that is the point of such exercises as this.
May 11, 2008 at 7:15 pm
RobinMarie
I have a (well, two really) question(s) then, which stems from my ignorance about any analytical treatment of the postmodern vs. science debate — if most cultural and language studies do not deny the real objective world (as to my experience indeed almost none of them do), then how, firstly, are educated people in the sciences under the impression that they do, and secondly, even if this is not their impression, why are they nonetheless often exasperated with cultural and language studies?
May 11, 2008 at 8:56 pm
andrew
If Michael Berube can transcribe passages from a book for a comment thread, then surely the youtube audio can be transcribed for a post.
May 12, 2008 at 2:08 am
RobinMarie
I realize, by the way, that my questions prompt a book-length response and that’s it is long and complicated and so on and so forth. But if we *had* to condense it, anyone willing to go out on a limb about what this all boils down to?
May 12, 2008 at 6:21 am
The Constructivist
On the Dr. Katz thing, what you really need is an episode in between the in-the-couch sessions. But I’m thinking a dose of Home Movies wouldn’t hurt, either. Maybe with some garage band theatrics. Maybe next time BitchPhD can play Melissa.
May 12, 2008 at 7:54 am
eric
Cecily and andrew—I agree transcripts would be great. But they’re time-consuming and, honestly, tedious to produce.
If you know of some software that would get even a roughly accurate transcription from which one could work, I’d try that.
Or if some public-spirited person wants to volunteer, they should.
May 12, 2008 at 10:22 am
andrew
I was actually joking; I thought the description of Berube as “transcribing” from his own book - which I assume he already has in a copy-and-pastable form - was a tip-off. Transcriptions are a real pain to do.
Voice-to-text software is supposed to have improved quite a bit in recent years, but I’m not familiar with any of it, so I’m not a good person to ask.
May 12, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Michael Bérubé
It was actually quite difficult to write that long comment above, because the damn book kept wiggling while I was trying to transcribe from it.
May 12, 2008 at 3:16 pm
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