>Sokal, of course, has an implicit
>understanding I'm sure of the way things work in academics, and he
>knew he'd get published on his name, so he was being quite a bit more
>of a jerk than people are giving him credit for. But, like I said,
>it opens the door to a really important debate about how academics
>conduct the busines and the art of academics. Anybody have any other
>takes on this whole thing?
I'm not sure it was the case that the reviewers of Sokal's pastiche article
were so much dazzled by his prominence, as they were taken in by the
skillfull way in which he appropriated the language of that particular
discourse community in his paper. I have seen some samples of the article
(the reference BTW is: Sokol, A. (1996). Transgressing the boundaries:
Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. _Social Text_,
46/47, 217.) and he did a remarkable job of taking up the language of
critical theory. I'm sure the fact that he was able to knowledgeably cite
so many major works of the field also helped his cause.
In one sense, I think his prank demonstrates a point that I don't think
Sokol intended, namely that Science really *is* a social construction.
To the extent that _Social Text_ represents scholarly literature in
general, he showed that publishability has less to do with "the validity
and interest of ideas" (as he says in his _Lingua Franca_ article) and more
to do with this ability to appropriate a discourse. I suppose to prove
this thesis, however, we would have to get a critical theorist to write a
bogus piece on quantum physics and publish it in _Science_ or _Nature_.
---Tim