Critical Animal on Sokal

Critical Animal claims that the Social Text editors did ask Sokal to reduce the number of footnotes in the article. I don’t quite remember the story that way, but I’ll post this here, just in case:

“Lastly, Graham Harman has a post on the Sokal Hoax, which gives me an excuse to talk about the Hoax here, briefly. What many people fail to realize is the article wasn’t part of a blind review, the editors knew who Sokal was when they published the article, and knew he was considered an important scientist. They asked him to lower to the number of footnotes, to change much of the way the article was worked and sounded. Sokal refused explaining this scholarly apparatus was expected of him by his scientific peers, and the article remained at the social text offices until they decided to do a special issue on The Science Wars. His article was published not because it was good, or interesting, but because he was a scientist.”

However, I’m afraid the hoax did teach a necessary lesson at the time. The article is complete bullsh*t, but I’m afraid it was so in a manner not very different from many things that were being written with a straight face at the time.

Postmodernism had descended into jargon-laden decadence by the mid-1990’s, and the point that “the editors knew who Sokal was when they published the article, and knew he was considered an important scientist” doesn’t cut much ice with me. As an editor, you just can’t approve a piece of garbage like Sokal’s article without paying a price.

I definitely would have rejected it. I’m not saying I would have known for sure that it was a deliberate hoax, but do know that I would have laughed out loud at the article and rejected it within a few minutes.

[ADDENDUM: The very title “Transgressing the Boundaries” would have had me reaching for the garbage can, if I had been the editor.]