cultural-studies journal in the country. To point out the decline in
intellectual rigor in certain parts of American academia, he
intentionally filled the article with errors. What do you make of
that?
His article was cleverly done. He quoted—accurately—from
advanced physics journals, then juxtaposed quotes from postmodern
critiques of science, including Social Text, as if the former
somehow supported the latter. No one with any familiarity with the
material could read the article without laughter.
Sokal’s point was that postmodern critiques of science are based
on ignorance—they’re flights of fancy that lack minimal critical
standards. There’s something healthy about this sort of criticism,
but his article is also going to be used as a weapon against attitudes
and work that have merit.
It was immediately interpreted by the New York Times and the
Wall Street Journal as just one more demonstration that some sort
of left-fascist political correctness movement has taken over
academic life—when what’s really going on is a significant right-wing
assault against academic freedom and intellectual independence.
Well, we live in this world, unfortunately. What we do is going to
be used by powerful people and institutions for their purposes, not
for ours.
Postmodernists claim to represent some kind of a subversive
critique. Have you been able to detect that?
Very little of it. I’m not a big expert on postmodern literature; I
don’t read it much, because I find most of it pretty unilluminating,
often complicated truisms or worse. But within it there are
certainly things that are worth saying and doing. It’s very valuable to
study the social, institutional and cultural assumptions within which
scientific work is done, but the best work of that sort isn’t by
postmodernists (at least as far as I can understand their work).
For instance, fascinating work has been done in the last thirty or
forty years on what Isaac Newton, the great hero of science,
actually thought he was doing. His theory of gravity was very
disturbing to him and to everyone else at the time. Because gravity
works at a distance, Newton agreed with other leading scientists of