on the Sokal hoax

Jan 16, 2009 6:56 PM
Sokal and Beyond
by doctorzamalek

LEVI MAKES A POST about the scientific fraud case of Schön, and relates it to the famous 1996 “Social Text” hoax of Alan Sokal, when a slew of postmodern gibberish about physics was unthinkingly published by a postmodernist journal. “N Pepperell,” in a comment on Levi’s post, steers us toward A RECENT HOAX IN AUSTRALIA that seems to turn the table on the sciences.

My attitude toward Sokal was somewhat more amused than Levi’s, even though Bruno Latour (one of the most powerful thinkers I’ve ever met) was one of Sokal’s targets, and later his debate opponent on the issue at the LSE.

Unlike many or even most of my friends, I thought Sokal’s hoax was quite funny, though I was unimpressed by his smug self-congratulation for years thereafter (and perhaps it has still not ceased). He’s one of the many people who is regularly “right in what he denies, but wrong in what he affirms” (much like Jacques Derrida, ironically). Sokal’s running post-hoax defense of scientific rationality against the arbitrary fictions of postmodernism struck me as a series of mediocre textbook clichés that undermined the humorous effect of the hoax.

Here’s how I see it… ANY school of thought can be hoaxed. And it won’t surprise readers of this blog when I say that a hoax amounts to a mere repetition of accepted content.

Allow me to explain. While many of Sokal’s hoax-statements about science were manifest nonsense, this seems inessential to the hoax. It was a deliberately bad article. Sokal took this to mean that all postmodernism is of low intellectual quality, but I don’t agree. While I’m no great fan of Derrida, much of his work is undeniably of high intellectual quality, miles beyond the sort of pap Sokal stuck into his article on purpose.

Let’s say that Sokal had managed to write a good postmodernist article (not by his own standards, which do not allow such a thing, but by the standards of those of us who are not 100% dismissive of the postmodernist culture).

*The real Sokal hoax was obvious garbage accepted by an unwitting journal. (Even those angry about the hoax have never defended the quality of the paper; no one could.)

*But my imagined hoax would be a good paper accepted by the journal, with Sokal mocking it anyway in the belief that it wasn’t very good. An accidental masterpiece in the postmodern genre by someone who had no respect for his own creation, but still a masterpiece in the field.

How do the two cases differ? I’m thinking this through on the fly, just after reading the exchange on Levi’s blog, so I hope I don’t ramble…

Parody works when it simulates the underlying spirit of a thing– like a convincing wax figure of Barack Obama, soon to be unveiled at Madame Tussaud’s. Now, I think a parody is different from a caricature. A newspaper cartoon would exaggerate some of Obama’s facial features for comic effect, but it would be pointless for a wax museum to do that. You go to the museum to see a stunning likeness of Obama himself, not a wax dummy of Obama with deliberately caricatured features.

As for the present topic, Sokal’s 1996 article was a caricature. But the alternative hoax I’m imagining would be a parody (like my Lovecraft story about the Nile Hilton, which I proudly regard as good Lovecraftian prose, not a caricature of it… and by the way, and I’m not joking about this, a filmmaker responded to that post, and we are going to make a film of my Lovecraft parody at the Nile Hilton itself– he will be coming to Egypt to do this in the fall, and I am thrilled about it). The only real “caricature” aspects of my Lovecraft piece are its very un-Lovecraftian setting in present-day Cairo, and the fact (known only to those who live here) that the soon-to-be-closed Nile Hilton is really just a decent, run-of-the-mill urban hotel with no trace of anything ominous.

So, we now have a distinction between PARODY (a good, convincing simulacrum) and CARICATURE (a low-quality translation meant to poke fun with bits of excess). If Social Text had merely published a good-quality parody by mistake, I don’t think they would need to be embarrassed by it, even if Sokal laughed anyway. The embarrassment comes from the fact that most of the article was utterly inane.

An android is a parody of a human, not a caricature. If you were tricked (in Blade Runner fashion) into believing that an android was a real person, it might be disturbing or uncanny, but it wouldn’t be embarrassing.

But I see something else even while typing… a successful parody is not a mere bundle of qualities, but somehow captures the style of the thing. You do this by a certain gut “feel,” and once you’ve gotten at someone or something’s essence, you can continue to generate further parody-content at will.

Several of us once went to the Chicago suburbs to hear a highly skilled Led Zeppelin tribute band. The musical identity was so uncanny that my friend Paul Schafer remarked: “for all intents and purposes, that music was Led Zeppelin.” And he was right; I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference if I couldn’t see the musicians. It wasn’t a comic caricature, but an attempt at actual mimicry, and one that happened to work. We may have laughed a few times that evening, but the effect was less of comedy than of a kind of superstitious awe.

Let me try to tie these themes together in closing, before the length of this post gets out of control.

ANY genre of art, science, literature, and perhaps even love, can become the object of either caricature or parody.

*Parody is probably neutral as to quality. A convincing parody can be done of anything, no matter how good the original. Instead of Lovecraft, I could have parodied a hack horror writer instead.

*But caricature is, most likely, easier when the thing is of lower quality. Why? Because a caricature is possible when the wires are already showing in the original thing. The person who is easily caricatured is already, in some sense, a bundle of qualities with certain excesses not easily integrated into a unified underlying style.

If you imagine a perfectly beautiful face, for instance, it would be pretty hard to caricature, though quite possible to parody if technology had reached that level (with an android double of the person, for instance). It would give rise not so much to comedy, but to the sort of superstitious awe that we felt when hearing that Zep tribute band. But no face is perfectly beautiful– there are always large earlobes or a mole or a Blagojevich hairdo. And even personalities tend to have caricaturable excesses– there are always excessive quirks of movement or speech that can be pushed even further, as with Tina Fey’s rendering of Sarah Palin.

There is often a tendency to confuse parody and caricature in a way that can ruin good acting with mixed messages, shifting from parody to caricature in midstream. Saturday Night Live once had an actor doing a good Mario Cuomo, nailing the vowels and the logic and the facial expression almost perfectly. But then it was ruined with a punch line: “I… have… mob… ties,” something that was always rumored as the reason for Cuomo not running for President, but obviously not something that Cuomo would ever say in public. The simulacrum was thereby ruined.

I also happen to know a couple of ambitious careerists who work in a highly politically charged environment that leaves no room for dissent. They’ve learned to play the game, despite the utter insincerity of their commitment to the cause. The effect of this is sadly comical precisely because their colleagues don’t see it. All they do is ape a few slogans, and even though I find it transparently faked, the mere repetition of acceptable political content is enough to see them through and earn them advancement within the group. They get away with it.

In a sense, then, I come back to a certain agreement with Sokal in the end. (I wasn’t planning this when I started.) Any school of thought can be hoaxed in the sense of a parody. But caricatures are more easily done once a school has turned into a dried-out husk of its former self. (And I’m afraid it would be quite easy for a good comic actor to caricature Alan Sokal, who is every bit as much a cardboard “type” as those he attacked, just a different type.)

The reason postmodernism was so perfectly caricaturable by 1996 is that the spirit of the thing was dead. Postmodernism had degenerated into a bundle of surface qualities, a kind of professional word salad, and Sokal simply strung a few pieces of acceptable content together, and it worked for him as well as it does for my two careerist acquaintances with their faked political views. Sokal simply had the bad manners to announce in public what he had done.

The moral of the story: if you’re being parodied, take it as a compliment. Bad stuff can be parodied too, but one is less likely to do this. If you’re being caricatured, however, it probably means that something is a bit amiss, and that you’re verging on a bundle of external qualities without an underlying style.

However, no one is immune from caricature. Not even the greats. Recall the parody/caricature of Rilke, which doesn’t prevent me from liking him still…

You are the mouth
but we are only nose.
We are thumbs only;
you are hand.