It Should Go Without Saying, But It Needs Be Said

Ten years have passed since New York University physicist Alan Sokal famously hoaxed North America’s leading academic journal on cultural studies, Social Text, with a dense and deliberately ridiculous paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.

Sokal’s essay was all properly tarted up in the typically incomprehensible and impenetrable jargon of the self-proclaimed academic left, so the journal’s editors published it. They did so even though, or perhaps because, Sokal purported to make the case, more or less, that the real world doesn’t even exist.

The uproar Sokal set off was all very amusing, but, sadly, the absurd and ultimately reactionary forms of postmodernism and relativism that Sokal so effectively hoaxed and exposed in 1996 remain deeply entrenched in the humanities, in literary theory, and, perhaps most noticeably, in the ideas of certain sections of the Euro-American “left” elites. . .

That's from my wee review of Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (Continuum Books, 196 pp, $30.95, hardcover), a copy of which I extorted from my comrade Will, who sent it all the way from in Edinburgh. Benson and Stangroom run this show.

Related matters are here and here, but if it's an argument you want, there's a ringside seat for Norm and Nick in a scrap with a couple of deadend neo-cons waiting for you right here.