Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair

Summary

Social Text still exists. In the spring of 1996, when the journal was the object of an enthusiastically publicized hoax by the physicist Alan Sokal, its survival seemed a bad bet. You published an essay arguing that gravity is a “social and linguistic construct?” Really? The mainstream media, hitherto unaware of the existence of this very little, very marginal magazine, were uncertain what exactly they were mocking. Was Social Text’s foolishness postmodern? Left wing? Cultural? Academic? They were certain, however, that what they smelled in the water was blood. On their side, and for a not insignificant portion of the left, jubilation. On the other side, humiliation. (I should know: I was the journal’s coeditor at the time.) We seemed like the stupidest people in the world, or the stupidest people who had been pretending to speak on behalf of the most avant-garde sociopolitical views. One friend of the journal suggested that we fall on our swords. If we owned no swords, swords could be made available. The journal did not fold. One reason was that it had published a lot of good work, none of it remotely resembling Sokal’s gravity-is-a-construct nonsense, and those who cared about such things knew it. Edward Said’s “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” had come out in the first issue in 1979; for U.S.-based critiques of Zionism, 1979 was early. Other issues contained Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and Aijaz Ahmad’s Marxist critique of Marxist (and Social Text cofounder) Fredric Jameson. Another reason why the journal didn’t fold was that, with that era’s culture wars in full swing, the pressure to be loyal to what you saw as your side was stronger than embarrassment at a dumb mistake: accepting an awkwardly written, citation-heavy article in which a physicist seemed to embrace an antirealist epistemology. Yes, errors had been made, and there had been innocent casualties (vulnerable students and junior faculty doing serious research in c...