336
PARTISAN REVIEW
Probably nothing was more unsettling to the enterprise of cultural
studies than the hoax that physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the edi–
tors of
Social Text.
It
was mischievous in its conception (would a cut–
ting-edge journal buy the notion that gravity is socially constructed?)
and even more delicious in its deadpan execution. As the chief honcho
at
Social Text,
Andrew Ross (clearly one of Michael's heroes) was
caught with his postmodern pants down when Sokal went public about
his leg pull. A not-amused Stanley Fish promptly raced onto the opin–
ion page of
The New York Times
to do some "damage control," but his
effort to tar Sokal as an unethical fellow only made matters worse.
Indeed, in the months that followed Sokal became something of a
household name as people who didn't give a fig about postmodernism
wrote it off as yet another instance of an emperor parading around the
streets with no clothes .
At this point in what has become a very well-traveled story, Michael
enters the fray, presumably to set the confusions straight:
I don't want to dwell on Sokal's own lack of rigor insofar as it is
symptomatic of more general problems of greater interest, so I will
summarize. First, he offers no sign that he is familiar with, or can
position his argument among, the various philosophical opinions,
epistemological problems, and ontological issues informing what
he calls "social constructivist" or "subjectivist" thinking. For
Sokal, for instance, in a way that would have surprised Bishop
Berkeley or Hegel, idealism and social constructivism are simply
identical.
Second, Sokal offers no argument why these positions must be
considered simply wrong, except for the unsupported question–
begging statement that they are all wrong and no sane person could
possibly disagree.
Anxious Intellects
is filled with solemn interrogations of precisely this
sort. Michael has the sort of mind that flat-out misses what is obvious
(Jump out a twenty-story window and, despite your politics or intellec–
tual posture, you will fall
down.
Period.) and cannot understand what
is complicated.
Plodding through this dreary book I was reminded of the anecdote
about the eager, thickheaded graduate student who once asked the late
Irving Howe to comment on his dissertation-in-progress . He was out to
prove that the New York intellectuals scratched each other's backs and
that's how they got to be influential, rich, and famous. As Howe
