Thomas HerakovichEnglish 401, Final PaperIt has become increasingly apparent that physical 'reality,' no less than social 'reality,' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific 'knowledge,' far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truthclaims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. (Alan Sokal, The Sokal Hoax, 12)The Sokal Hoax: Consequenses?The 1996 Spring/Summer issue of Social Text contained an article by Alan Sokal, a little known physicist from New York University - "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." From a scientific point of view, the article propounded something to the effect that gravity was simply a state of mind, and from a cultural studies point of view, the article seemed to be recantation, by a scientist, of scientific objectivity and the immutable nature of mathematics. A few days after the publication of the article, Sokal announced in the French journal Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.The reactions to the hoax ranged from outrage over abuse of academic ethical behavior, to endorsement by fellow physicists. Both sides of the issue, culture studies represented as "soft" science on one side and physics as "hard" science on the other, reacted to the hoax as though it threatened the underpinning of academia. The truth is, that less than a few outside of American academia cared one way or the other, for the press inside of America it was a short lived "hot" story, and for the world press it wassimply a small blip on the radar screen. In order to lend credibility to his scheme, Sokal publicly related to Social Text as "a leading North American journal" ("A Physicist…," 50), while the editors of the journal referred to themselves as a 'little magazine' (Robbins and Ross, 55). The press in America tried their best to pound it into a story, with large news papers like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, running multiple articles, essays, and rebuttals. And if there was damage, albeit short lived, it was not to the whole of academia, but rather to the intellectual left. Peter Osborne, a professor of Philosophy, complained that "Sokal has also provided the press with an ideal occasion to prosecute two of its favorite pastimes - disparaging intellectualism, of any kind, and travestying the left - while bolstering the sagging image of the 'scientist' as a figure of authority and a man of reason and good sense" (Osborne, 197). As an ironic aside, it is notable that in 1994, in his article "The Scholar in Society," Gerald Graff wrote these lines:It is true that since academics rarely have direct access to the mass media, they are vulnerable to being caricatured there. But it is also true that the caricatures of the academy nourish when academics fail to explain themselves in terms the public can understand. As long as academic humanists are unable or unwilling to make their debates accessible in the public sphere, it will continue to be their detractors who speak for them. (355)Although Graff's missive brings much to the table by way of academic debate, at least in this instance, the Sokal affair proved Graff to be prophetic. And, whether Sokal chose to polarize the academic community - right and left - humanities and science - he nonetheless accomplished that feat; reading through the various articles, essays, and newspaper pieces, one is immediately struck by the polemic nature of the writing, and itbecomes all to clear that there is very little middle ground from which to assess the material.On the surface, it would seem that Sokal simply wanted to point out "a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities"("A Physicist…," 51). These charges of "nonsense and sloppy thinking" were not being leveled at his brothers in the "hard" sciences, but rather at what he seemed to believe was the heart of the humanities - the left wing of cultural studies. The charge by Sokal that those involved in the studies of culture, whether right, left, or center, deny the existence of objective reality, of a "real world" ("A Physicist…," 51), is debunked by academics in the humanities writing in defense of the discipline. Interestingly, this accusation of disbelief in a real world finds its way into much of the writing by Sokal's fellow physicists, but is always introduced as a sort of "common knowledge," an indisputable fact that, unlike other specific accusations, is aimed at some euphemistic postmodern shade - a sort of humanistic "caricature" (Terry, 100). This idea of a "caricature," a possible common knowledge sent me looking for a source text - a sort of "Q Gospel" (13). Higher Superstition, authored by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, "a biologist and a mathematician who shared [Sokal's] disdain for critiques of science done in the name of postmodernism, cultural studies, and science studies" (Sokal Hoax, 1), was mentioned not only by the editors of The Sokal Hoax (1); but also by Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, editors of Social Text (Robbins and Ross, 57). Further investigation reveals it be a source text (Q Text) for rash generalities and unabashed attacks by Gross and Levitt on the "caricatures" of leftist postmodernism, feminism, cultural studies, and deconstructionism, all grouped conveniently under the umbrella of the "academic left" (Gross and Levitt, 2). Higher Superstion as a Q Text seems to be not only the origins of the "postmodernist" generalities that plague Sokal's work, but also the complaint aboutDerrida and the "Newtonian Constant" that has trickled down from Gross and Levitt to Sokal and hence into the writings of other scientists commenting on Sokal's hoax (Gross and Levitt, 79) (Sokal, 16) (Weinberg, 149, 170). At the least, it seems interesting that Gross, Levitt, Sokal and the rest have found, out of the prodigious amount of Derridian text, only one thing to complain about - evidently leaving the field of "hard" sciences at the lowest end of any department in the university!There is little good to recommend Higher Superstition; the supposed