Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1999/02/03/social_text_fishs_other_flop.php
Wednesday, February 3, 1999
In his recently published A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe's hero, real estate developer Charlie Croker, is broken financially when he develops a sprawling, opulent, and too-ambitious office complex, Croker Concourse, meant as a testament and monument to his own business acumen and social prominence — to Charlie Croker himself — that he cannot rent. Croker Concourse becomes the key to Charlie's downfall, and provides Wolfe with a ready symbol for the perils of excessive egotism and self-promotion and pride.
Another Southeasterner, Duke University post-structuralist literary scholar Stanley Fish, has provided a real life example of Wolfe's parable. In Fish's case, though, his excessive ambition was for his brand of post-structuralist, deconstructionist theory, and his Croker's Concourse was the journal to which he became closely linked, Social Text.
The English Department at Duke, built during the 1980s on the reputations of a handful of post-structural theorists (queer theorists, deconstructionists, reader-response gurus) it hijacked from other universities, needed a publication to solidify the reputations of their brand of social-literary theory and thus to lend credence to the Department. So Stanley Fish got together with a few like-minded scholars around the country and founded Social Text, a bound quarterly that generally runs about 150 pages, includes about 7 essays, and costs $12.00.
Duke was desperate enough to land Stanley Fish (their first literary-critic superstar, see facing page) that they granted him all sorts of perks: they hired his wife, they paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, they let him rework the Duke English Department in his own image and gave him millions of dollars to dole out in salary, they gave him a joint appointment at the Duke Law School (Fish himself concedes he knows nothing about law) — and they promised to print his journal. Social Text, still published today by Duke University Press, was launched.
Deconstruction claims, most centrally, that what is most important about a text is not anything the author had in mind when he wrote it but what you have in mind when you read it — what is called 'reader-response' criticism. What this means, in practice, is that deconstructionist literary scholars are free to write all their works as forms of autobiography — as Maya Angelou famously said of Hamlet, 'Of course he wrote it for me. That is a condition of the black woman. Nobody else understands it, but I know William Shakespeare was a black woman.'
Social Text took this theory a step further. As it's title implies, its articles do not concern literary texts but rather employ the 'reader-response' ethic and post-structuralist jargon to deconstruct American culture — Oprah Winfrey, Rudolph Giuliani, JonBenet Ramsey. It's an absurd bit of literary egotism, since it assumes that these academic superstars of voguish theories are qualified to make sweeping generalizations on the scope and direction of all aspects of American life.
This leads to some ridiculous bits of essay. In the current (Winter 1999) issue, for example, there are articles on things like 'Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the Politics of Innocence,' by Henry Giroux, an Education professor at Penn State. This article does little more than rehash conventional wisdom ('It's more than a little perverse to strut six-year olds on stage and give them thousand-dollar prizes for how they look') and couch it in the accepted jargon.
Not only did Social Text raise a group of scholars and their narrow, jargoned ideology to absurd intellectual prominence, it also reduced literary criticism and social criticism to a pair of backward variables. In Social Text's construct, those writers with the best command of the jargon and with the best ability to write autobiography are the successful writers, the published scholars, the ones who can command hundred-thousand dollar salaries from the Duke English Department.
By the mid-1990s, scholars around the country were questioning the reader-response ethic, but it took an obscure left-wing physicist from NYU to bring down Social Text, and, ultimately, Stanley Fish and the Duke English Department.
In 1996, Alan Sokal was just another academic, a professor of physics at New York University whose work in quantum gravity was known by only a handful of scientific specialists in the field. Yet over the years, Sokal, radically left-wing in his politics, became increasingly disturbed about the rise of post-sructuralism, deconstruction, queer theory, and other trendy literary disciplines. While nearly all deconstructionists claimed themselves to be radically left wing, Sokal found those declarations empty.
With its fundamental tenet that all things were relative and that anything could mean anything one wanted it to mean, post√Ãstructuralism, for Sokal, subverts more traditional leftist means of social protest. Sokal became even more disatisfied with post-structuralism when many of those prominent in the field, such as Luce Iriguary and Giles Deluze, began using scientific concepts in their work, ostensibly to lend their claims an air of credibility. As a scientist himself, Sokal was in a position to evaluate the post-structuralist use of science that those who acclaimed such efforts were not: he had a more than trivial understanding of science.
Unlike all the other academics who merely griped in private about the post-modern takeover of literature, Sokal devised a plan to demonstrate that deconstructionist jargon was not obscure in the same sense that his field of theoretical physics is obscure. Quantum physics is necessarily opaque to all but a handful of the world's best minds because of the staggering complexity of its ideas. Sokal believed that deconstructionism was willfully opaque because its ideas, such as hopeless relativism, are impossible to defend in sustained argument. Deconstructionism could only compensate for this deficiency by cloaking its claims with pretentious words for basic concepts, 'hermeneutics' instead of simply 'interpretations,' for example.
To demonstrate his theory, Sokal submitted a fake article to SocialText. The article essentially claimed that even core scientific concepts were culturally determined, that (for example) the speed of light in China is different from that in the U.S. Though its premise was absurd, Sokal wrote the paper in all the right jargon, studding his prose with phrases like 'hermeneutics.' Sokal also 'knew the idea would hold appeal to Social Text's editors, who followed deconstuction in believing that everything depends on the observer, not the observed.' He was right.
Social Text published Sokal's article, entitled 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Progressive Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' in its spring/ summer 1996 issue. After the issue's appearance, Sokal subsequently exposed his hoax, setting off a wave of publicity and controversy over post-structuralism. How could a journal with any merit, observers wondered, have published an article of such blatant nonsense laced with big words unless all of its articles were the same gibberish?
Today, Social Text continues to publish, despite its public embarrassment two and a half years ago. Yet, like the imploding Duke English department with which it is affiliated, the journal is in a steep and rapid decline. Its articles are largely ignored, even within the narrow confines of the literary critic establishment. It has ceased to be a cutting-edge journal presided over by academic superstars like Stanley Fish. Now it boasts an editorial collective that lacks the major names in the field.
The current issue boasts of such pieces as Sujata Moorti of Old Dominion University's 'Cathartic Confessions or Emancipatory Texts? Rape Narrative and the Oprah Winfrey Show.' Moorti condemns the high-brow chauvisinim that considers daytime talk-shows as so much mindless blather. Rather, for Moorti, talk shows can be vehicles for women's empowerment, an outlet for females to vent natural emotions that society suppresses. Moorti explains, 'The multiplicity of perspectives offered and the emphasis on discussion make it possible to conceptualize daytime talk-shows as sites of an emancipatory public sphere that highlights marginalized women's voices.'
Other articles in the issue include an attack on evangelist Dr. James Dobson's child rearing strategies and a post-structuralist investigation of the dynamics of child beauty pageants. The alter-piece, the afore-mentioned 'Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the End of Innocence,' blames child beauty pageants and their sexaulization of little girls as the cause of the death of JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty queen in Colorado allegedly murdered by her parents. It is more than mildly ironic that Social Text, once so consumed with noting the phallo-centricities of nearly every object imaginable and the prospects for the sexual revolution to extend to unimaginable spheres, now frets over child beauty pageants.
Social Text's distribution has now dipped in its paid circulation to 1,360, a substantial decline from its peak. Of some journals it is claimed that its subscribers base is small but that each one of them is influential. Perhaps Social Text is one of them. But its influence has clearly waned. The Sokal controversy severely weakened the post-structuralist movement and its flagship journal. As post-structuralism had risen to prominence, it attracted its fair share of critics. Yet the discipline's practitioners had been able to ward off most dissent by alleging that their critics just didn't understand what post-structuralism actually entailed.
And with the endless spins that could be put on deconstruction, or in their terminology, 'multivocalities,' it was hard to dispute. Sokal's hoax gave deconstruction and Social Text critics a powerful riposte: 'You publish articles that the author himself claims to be nonsense. Perhaps it is now you who don't know what you are talking about.'