“Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the 21st floor.)”
– Alan Sokal
Don’t worry, this isn’t actually an attempt to do transformative hermeneutics, that was just a joke. Ha ha, got you good, didn’t I? On second thought, maybe it sort of is. After all, I am going to offer you a particular interpretation of a well-known historical event, and I am aiming to have some kind of impact on your beliefs and opinions about it. Why else would anyone write anything?
In 1996 NYU physicist Alan Sokal submitted a hoax paper to the journal Social Text. His goal was to make a point about the low standards of a certain type of humanities journal and call attention to how some parts of academia had been captured by the cult of postmodernism. The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was a hodgepodge of trendy critical-theory jargon and technical concepts from theoretical physics thrown together to make the argument that reality itself was a social construct. The editors of Social Text asked for some rewrites, Sokal refused, they published it as submitted, and a few weeks later Sokal revealed the hoax, which generated a huge amount of public attention and discussion.
At the time, the general consensus was that the hoax was a slam dunk. Stories about it appeared in newspapers and magazines all over the world, including the front pages of The New York Times and Le Monde. A handful defended the journal, but most articles subtly or explicitly celebrated Sokal’s successful efforts at mocking the impenetrable jargon and obtuse pretentiousness of cultural studies. The editors of Social Text made things worse by responding with peevish defensiveness. Instead of admitting that they had screwed up and promising to do better, they claimed they knew the article was “a little hokey” but decided to publish it anyway. Stanley Aronowitz, one of the journal’s founders, was haughtily dismissive, saying, of Sokal’s underlying critique, “He got it wrong. One of the reasons he got it wrong is he’s ill-read and half-educated.”
Many stories about the hoax referenced the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, painting Sokal as the innocent child who dared to point out the naked truth. “Sokal’s spoof exposed the hypocrisy practiced by these so-called revolutionaries” wrote Ruth Rosen in the Los Angeles Times. “Their pretensions obscure their nakedness.” In the view of most commentators, Sokal had made the silly pomos look foolish and struck a blow for science, logic and good old common sense.
But I didn’t feel that way. I had no direct stake in the conflict, I was neither a scientist nor a cultural theorist, but I was an avid observer of science and cultural theory, and when it all went down I remember feeling sad. Like something fragile had been broken or something important had been lost.
I remember thinking – don’t these people see the similarities between these ostensibly opposing worldviews? Don’t they realize they are after the same thing? And then realizing, no, they don’t. No one saw this thing that I thought was so obvious, this thread connecting science and math and logic with the convoluted theorizing of postmodern philosophy. The whole point of Sokal’s fake paper was to make fun of this nonexistent thread by demonstrating how stupid it was, how impossible. Imagine someone leaning in, uncomfortably close, and then pushing you off a ledge.
What was it I saw, or thought I saw, the image of which had been so abruptly snatched away? Why on earth would I think that hard-nosed scientists and fancypants circumlocutionary post-structuralists had anything in common in the first place? Wasn’t it obvious that these two tribes were natural enemies? Wasn’t Sokal’s gesture, the pretend handshake turned middle finger, a natural expression of the inherent incommensurability of these two ways of seeing the world? Well, it wasn’t obvious to me.
Somehow, as a casual observer, I had imagined a deep congruence between the ideas of the trendiest, most abstruse continental philosophers and the ideas of the world’s most serious, logical, scientific thinkers. This congruence had to do with systems and their limits, with the puzzles of logical recursion and the surprisingly complicated terrain that one encounters at the frontier of what can be known, said and thought about the world.
In my defense, allow me to point out two related historical facts. It was the 20th century and it was the ’90s. We were just about to make it out of a century in which the scientific worldview, the one Sokal was defending against the effete barbarians of Social Text, had really spread its wings and soared, taking us higher and farther than anyone could have imagined. It had also, in the process, brought us to the very edge of the comprehensible. What does common sense have to tell us about the atomic bomb? What does common decency have to tell us about Auschwitz?
On the one hand, however you tell the story of humanity, almost nothing can compare to the importance of the thing Sokal is fighting for – rationality, the scientific method, pragmatic materialism, whatever you call this way of interacting with the world. Over the last few hundred years it has transformed us more profoundly than any way of life we’d ever tried, any philosophy, religion or political system. And let’s just admit it – mostly for the good. No matter how you slice it we are better off in a world shaped by logic, evidence, trial and error, conjecture and refutation. A world less beholden to authority, tradition and superstition. And yet, on the other hand, let’s also admit that the 20th century was hardly a trouble-free victory lap for this way of interacting with the world.
But that wasn’t it for me. That’s not the explanation for why I hallucinated a thread connecting science and postmodernism. I wasn’t a critic lamenting the tragic outcomes of scientific hubris, far from it. I was an enthusiast, a fan. But being a fan of 20th-century science means being into the weird, late-period, complicated stuff. We’re not talking about Newton’s greatest hits, we’re not talking about cheerful mutton-chopped engineers in white smocks jerkily rearranging billiard balls on an infinite felt plane. We’re talking about the hard stuff – Einstein, Heisenberg, Gödel, Turing.
It’s not a bad theory that reality bottoms out in the cheerful rearrangement of billiard balls according to well-defined rules. It’s a very plausible assumption. It’s a miracle that we even got to a place where we can make such a good guess. I would even say that this reasonable, commonsense worldview, which Sokal is defending, and which he finds so obvious as to need no arguments other than a tongue-in-cheek invitation to come into his home and challenge it if you dare, is the one that I myself, and everyone I know, uses most of the time. But it isn’t actually true. As science itself tells us.
In the mid-1920s Albert Einstein debated with Niels Bohr about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Einstein thought something had to be wrong or missing because of two of the theory’s central features – indeterminacy (the idea that outcomes were probabilistic), and complementarity (the idea that there were some features of the world that you couldn’t observe or measure at the same time).
Around the same time, mathematician David Hilbert asked a question about what it is possible to prove with logic. Is there a method for evaluating statements that will reliably tell us whether they are true or false? Within 10 years, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing had given us a definitive answer, and the answer was “No.”
It’s important to recognize that quantum indeterminacy and logical incompleteness do not represent some kind of catastrophic failure state of the scientific project. They are not an invitation to say whatever you want, to go wild with radical skepticism or relativism or nihilism, even if they have sometimes been taken as such. Scientists continued to observe and measure and learn things about the world; mathematicians continued to prove theorems and discover true facts about numbers; and mathematical models continued to be a valuable way of understanding the universe.
At the same time, it’s also important to acknowledge that these encounters with the limits of formal systems of knowledge and proof were not just marginal issues or minor details. These encounters with the limits of what can be known with certainty and what can be said with confidence are, arguably, the most important strands of 20th-century science.
Alan Turing’s world-changing ideas – the work that laid the foundation for computer science and transformed computation from useful calculation to a powerful new way of understanding the world – these ideas were developed in order to answer Hilbert’s question. A question so fundamental that it is almost philosophical. What can calculation do? What can it not do?
Well, what can philosophy do? What can it not do? This parallel question seemed to me, at the time, to be the one at the heart of postmodernism.
Let’s take Jacques Derrida as emblematic of the thing Sokal was attacking. When I encountered the ideas of Jacques Derrida, I thought: How cool is it, that these fancy French philosophers are struggling, in their own way, with the same kinds of problems that were at the center of 20th-century mathematics and physics.
Derrida’s work investigates the process of writing and thinking and communication. It is downstream from the approach of structuralism, which itself was an attempt to understand human communication systematically, by studying the mechanics of how it operated. Structuralism can be seen as a relatively sober, pragmatic attempt to understand how words and symbols and signs and signals functioned technically. But Derrida wants to do more. He wants to do philosophy. He wants to talk about big ideas – life, meaning, beauty, history. But he wants to talk about these things in a way that acknowledges the fact that all such talking is, itself, a result of the functional operations that enable language. Rather than sweeping all of that contextual stuff under the rug, he wants to foreground it. To remind us that when we talk about life, meaning, beauty and history, we are also, inevitably, talking about this other stuff.
Derrida’s most famous maneuver, deconstruction, works like this: Any text contains within itself a primal flaw. This flaw is a loose thread which, when pulled, will cause the text to unravel, revealing the binary logic that the text was secretly relying on. This hidden logic will appear as a hierarchical pair of concepts, one of which is seen as primary, fundamental, necessary, and therefore implicitly good, while the other one is secondary, invasive, arbitrary, and suspicious. The reason this hierarchical binary is hidden is that it is part of the underlying protocols that create the overall context of the text and the channel across which it is being sent as a message – whether that context is a scientific paper or a novel – because this is how messages work. Pulling this thread and unraveling the text in this way reveals the arbitrary nature of this binary logic. First we see that the hierarchy can be reversed, that the subordinate concept can be seen as primary. Then we see that neither concept is truly dominant, that the relationship between them is always unsettled.
In a way, deconstruction is a bit like Gödelian numbering. Gödelian numbering is the process by which Gödel demonstrated that you can translate any statement about a formal mathematical system into an object in that system, an object on which the functions of that system could be applied. And he used this to show that no formal system, no matter how complicated or clever, could ever be entirely consistent and complete. Derridean deconstruction is by no means a simple recapitulation of this idea, but it isn’t a million miles away, either. In both cases we are confronted with an unsettling fact. Whether we are in the laboratory or the seminar room, no formal system will ever suffice to grant us absolute certainty on every question we might put to it. No system can justify itself, and none can ever provide the final word on every important problem.
Is Derrida difficult to read? Yes. Elliptical, ambiguous, full of oblique references and nebulous asides. But to be fair, physics papers are also hard to read. So are math papers. So is, as far as I can tell, all of philosophy going back to the dawn of time.
I’m not saying Sokal was wrong to complain about postmodernism as an academic fad, full of derivative, formulaic, jargon-besotted mediocrity. It definitely was. (Although this point can be exaggerated. If, for example, you go back and look at Social Text 46/47, the issue in which Sokal’s hoax paper was published, the other articles don’t look like the gibberish he was mocking. Most of them make straightforward arguments using sensible language and ordinary logic.) I’m not even saying Derrida was a great philosopher, or Foucault, or Deleuze, or Lyotard, or any of the others. I am in no position to make that kind of judgment. I’m just saying that for a while, in the early ’90s, I felt like I had a glimpse of something that helped me make sense of the world. I knew that scientists and philosophers were weirdos from different tribes, that they didn’t read the same books, didn’t go to the same parties. But it seemed to me that they were independently circling around a similar set of weirdo problems and ideas and issues: the power of formal systems and the limits of that power; information as a material process made out of symbols, signals and noise; the mysterious and dangerous dynamics of recursion and self-reference; the fact that a certain kind of imperfection was a necessary and unavoidable feature of the universe, and the fact that we nevertheless continue to prove theorems and interpret novels, solve problems and discover facts and build bridges and try to better understand each other and the world.
Another word we might use for this set of issues is “computers.” And in the first half of the 1990s it seemed like computers might be a key ingredient of the secret weirdo tribe I had constructed in my imagination, the one that might be capable of continuing to work on the most urgent projects of the 20th-century avant garde – making sense and finding beauty in a world gone mad from hyperrationality. I was reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Neuromancer and listening to Kraftwerk and reading Baudrillard’s Precession of Simulacra and dreaming of computer games that would help unravel the convoluted puzzle of instrumental reason.
Well, it didn’t turn out that way. We live in a fully computerized world now, and I guess it’s plenty weird, but not really in the way I had hoped. It seems we are farther away than ever from having a shared sense of how to think about science and facts and knowledge and proof. Farther away from having working methods for successfully operating in a world made out of systems that are partial, imperfect, incomplete, and always secretly dismantling themselves and each other.
All systems for thinking and doing, including science, philosophy and politics, are embedded in the world, objects in an external environment that shapes them. This embedding is obvious, despite being impossible to see clearly from within the system, and affects that system in ways it cannot explain or control. Philosophy doesn’t bottom out in science and science doesn’t bottom out in philosophy, and neither one of them bottoms out in “ordinary life.” Nothing ever bottoms out anywhere. Despite this, we can and must continue to think and do things, including using systems, inhabiting them, comparing them, modifying them and inventing new ones, without slipping backward into superstition or sideways into nihilism. The ability to see and think clearly about this messy state of affairs, to recognize the puzzles and paradoxes that complicate our ability to understand the world and yet continue to act skillfully, wisely and justly, this is the dream of cheerful postmodernism I imagined.
That dream was interrupted when I learned in the wake of Sokal’s hoax that there was more territorial animosity between these tribes than I had thought. But it isn’t completely gone. Recently I’ve started to see a few examples of STEM folks who are interested in how science actually works, and who aren’t satisfied with the simplistic stories science tells about itself, rediscovering the usefulness of some of the postmodern ideas they had always assumed were junk.
Another reason the dream survives is because it’s so obviously true. Despite the ridiculous things we say and do and claim to believe, we all know it’s true. I’m sure if I went to Sokal’s apartment on the 21st floor and told him I wanted to take him up on his invitation, that I thought the laws of physics were social conventions and wanted to test them, he would look at me like I was crazy. “I didn’t mean it literally,” he would say, “it was rhetorical.” If I pushed past him and started to run towards the window he would be terrified. He would grab me and desperately try to hold me back. That’s the difference between reality and some made-up bullshit you say to try to prove a point.
