In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper to the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text. The paper, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was intentionally nonsensical, a parody of what was seen to be the worst of postmodern literature, containing excessive jargon, misuse of scientific terminology and appeals to leftist politics. Sokal wanted to see if such a paper would be published as an experiment in the legitimacy of postmodern academia. It was accepted and published, and Sokal followed up by revealing that the paper was a hoax. This led to a scandal; extensive media coverage used the paper as proof of the dominance of corrupt postmodern academics, denouncing a variety of figures in contemporary continental philosophy, even ones that had nothing to do with the journal.

To this day, it is brought up as proof that postmodernism was “destroyed”. “The One Time Alan Sokal Completely Destroyed Postmodernism”, “Alan Sokal Destroyed Postmodernism”. It is often mentioned in YouTube comments as a counter-argument to anyone defending postmodern theory.

So, how did this happen and what does it actually tell us about postmodern theory? Well, the short answer is: The journal Social Text was not peer reviewed at the time. The journal stated that the paper was not very well written, and asked Sokal to excise some of the philosophical speculation and most of his footnotes. Sokal refused to cooperate, and the paper was published anyway. Undeniably, this is something that the journal was rightly criticized for, but if we want to take away one main lesson from this, it is that peer-reviewing is very important.

What’s striking is that in doing this, Sokal did something that postmodernists are often accused of attempting – instead of directly engaging in discussion with one’s intellectual opponents, he tried to prove his point by a kind of public performance, in which he intentionally deceived a journal.

To Sokal’s credit, he, along with fellow physicist Jean Bricmont later published the book Fashionable Nonsense, in which he did look into specific claims made by postmodern theorists and their use of scientific terminology. Although the book does contain misreadings, it’s an example of why I have a lot more respect for Sokal than someone like Jordan Peterson. Unlike Peterson, Sokal includes actual quotes from the theorists he criticizes in his book, and instead of making sweeping generalizations, he tries be precise, focusing specifically on that which relates to natural science – his criticisms in the book are not so much of the broader philosophical ideas found in the postmodern camp, but its use of scientific terminology. They specifically state:

“We make no claim to analyze postmodernist thought in general; rather, our aim is to draw attention to a relatively little-known aspect, namely the repeated abuse of concepts and terminology coming from mathematics and physics. We shall also analyze certain confusions of thought that are frequent in postmodernist writings and that bear on either the content or the philosophy of the natural sciences.”

And in fact, some of its criticisms are valid and productive – theorists outside of the field of the hard sciences need to be more careful in their use of scientific terminology. The book even has a chapter on misrepresentations of Godel’s theorem, something which I’m guilty of myself, as well as a certain popular critic of postmodernism. But, to say that this book destroyed or debunked postmodernism is silly. It is a book on a single aspect of specific philosophers from a wide and varied field. Its critique of Baudrillard amounts to 7 pages, the first 2 of which simply show examples of Baudrillard using scientific terms metaphorically. The critique of Deleuze and Guattari is 15 pages, and besides one instance where Sokal simply misunderstands that Deleuze was bringing up antiquated mathematical methods intentionally as an example of different forms of thought, the chapter is mostly just long quotations with brief comments about how the text is difficult to understand.

Either way, the book never gained the kind of attention that the publication hoax itself did. Obviously, most people will be a lot more drawn to incidents in academia when they’re portrayed as a kind of drama involving deceit and fraud, rather than dry interdisciplinary criticism. The newspaper coverage in the US used the hoax to discredit a variety of theorists, in particular Derrida, whose pictures were used in coverage of the incident. So what did Derrida have to say about this?

“This is all rather sad, don’t you think? For poor Sokal, to begin with. His name remains linked to a hoax—”the Sokal hoax,” as they say in the United States—and not to scientific work. Sad too because the chance of serious reflection seems to have been ruined, at least in a broad public forum that deserves better.

It would have been interesting to make a scrupulous study of the so-called scientific “metaphors”—their role, their status, their effects in the discourses that are under attack. Not only in the case of “the French”! And not only in the case of these French writers! That would have required that a certain number of difficult discourses be read seriously, in terms of their theoretical effects and strategies. That was not done.”

Here is Derrida, a person who’s often caricatured as some mischievous postmodernist charlatan who discourages reasoned discussion, lamenting the fact that what could have been a fruitful interdisciplinary discussion became a media scandal – a spectacle. He continues:

“In the United States, at the beginning of the imposture, after Sokal had sent his hoax article to Social Text, I was initially one of the favorite targets, particularly in the newspapers (there’s a lot I could say about this). Because they had to do their utmost, at any cost, on the spot, to discredit what is considered the exorbitant and cumbersome “credit” of a foreign professor. And the entire operation was based on the few words of an off-the-cuff response in a conference that took place more than thirty years ago (in 1966!), and in which I was picking up the terms of a question that had been asked by Jean Hyppolite. Nothing else, absolutely nothing!

Plenty of scientists pointed this out to the practical joker in publications that are available in the United States, and Sokal and Bricmont seem to recognize this now in the French version of their book—though what contortions this involves. If this brief remark had been open to question, something I would willingly have agreed to consider, that would still have had to be demonstrated and its consequences for my lecture discussed. This was not done.”

This is not Sokal’s fault either, he was quite honest about what conclusions could be drawn from the hoax, saying:

From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn't prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science -- much less sociology of science -- is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case, but it would have to be established on other grounds.) It proves only that the editors of one rather marginal journal were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because it came from a ``conveniently credentialed ally'' 

Sokal is correct here, and a lot more rigorous than a lot of his fans make him out to be, but the effects and conclusions drawn from the incident were beyond his control, taken hold of and distorted by reporters and sections of the public, and to this day, people on the internet do a disservice to him, attributing the kind of significance to the hoax that Sokal himself never intended. And is this not an example of what some philosophers would call the postmodern condition? Appearances and spectacles becoming more important than substance?

In 2017, a paper was written about midi-chlorians – a made-up microscopic life form from the Star Wars franchise. The paper was a mash-up of a Wikipedia article on the mitochondria with Star Wars fiction, even including the monologue about Darth Plageuis the Wise from “Revenge of the Sith”. This article was published by 4 journals - The American Journal of Medical and Biological Research, the International Journal of Molecular Biology: Open Access, the Austin Journal of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and the American Research Journal of Biosciences. Would anyone use this as proof that molecular biology is a fraud, that biologists are corrupt? I wouldn’t think so and I would hope not, even if certain works on biology can be dense and difficult to understand for people outside the field. This incident tells us more about the institutions in which the paper was published than the state of molecular biology itself.

In fact, it shows us something that post-structuralists like Foucault wanted to point out – that knowledge is not detached from the circulation of power, that institutions through which scientific inquiries are made public can be driven by things other than the thirst for knowledge, it may be a drive to increase a journal’s number of publications to improve its perceived legitimacy, or to simply elicit fees from the people submitting their papers. This does not mean that trustworthy institutions cannot be built, but it does show that to judge an entire field based on the publishing decision of a single institution without peer reviews is completely unwarranted. The fact that the incident is being used as a knock-down argument for a wide range of different philosophers with different ideas, and that this is even talked about in terms of disciplines being “destroyed”, is just an example of the society of the spectacle.