Belittled Magazine

By Bruce Robbins

In our new issue, Bruce Robbins writes on the Sokal affair, the academic left, and so-called elitism.

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 cultural studies) and not so innocent ones (I was briefly denied a promotion). But war was war. No one seemed ready to concede defeat. Some ingenious and some desperately unconvincing things were said in the journal’s defense.

“The journal’s origins were unapologetically Marxist. For Marxists, imagination is a force, yes, but it’s not imagined constructs all the way down.”

Standing firm was arguably the preferable option. What was at stake was not a giddy worldview that denied the existence of physical reality. Considered sociologically and politically rather than philosophically, the “X is a construct” platform, thirty years ago, stood for solidarity with the political energies of the 1960s—above all, liberation movements in the name of race and gender. To say that gender was a construct was to make a political point. Ditto for maintaining that race was a construct. Stereotypes (that’s what they were called back then) that kept women and people of color in their place were not the verifiable truth about the world.

Depictions of the non-Europeans to whom the imperial metropolis denied independence or whom it excluded from its borders were not the results of objective empirical observation; they were fictive generalizations that served unsavory interests. Circulating them perpetuated injustice. Behind constructionism, a project of denaturalizing categories of thought that were taken to be natural, there were large groups of people who had been trying to rectify how they were described and thus also their unjustifiable situation in the world, which the false descriptions enabled. Imagine the world differently, and you can make it better. Constructionism’s slogan was crude but politically mobilizing. Imagination is a form of politics.

Social science had put much of its authority behind the contrary assumption: “That’s their nature. We have studied the matter impartially. We know.” It was probably inevitable, especially in a moment when the shameful indifference of medical institutions to the HIV/AIDS crisis was still fresh in everyone’s mind, that constructionism would get hyperextended, that some would be willing to identify scientific knowledge, as such, with hegemonic power. That was not a position Social Text embraced—it’s not the argument of the other essays in the ill-fated “Science Wars” issue that included Sokal’s. By 1996, constructionism was already seen by many of the journal’s writers and readers as more of a problem than a solution. Diana Fuss had made the argument decisively seven years prior in her book Essentially Speaking. After all, who or what does the constructing? Patriarchy, racism, and capitalism are real historical agents, no? The journal’s origins were unapologetically Marxist. For Marxists, imagination is a force, yes, but it’s not imagined constructs all the way down.

Three decades later, an essay identifying science with power would probably fail to get the required votes. (Sokal’s essay got only four readings, but they were positive, and that, alas, was enough.) With the federal government aligning itself with anti-vaxxers and drill-baby-drill climate change deniers and exerting a heretofore unimaginable authority to defund ongoing research and push an antiscience agenda, you would have to be more foolish than Social Text’s collective to take science simply as an antagonist. And this is true even if you have your doubts about what has come to permeate common sense as constructionism has faded, like the body as a determining site of unquestioned truth and genetic and biochemical accounts of identity, which are easier to turn into someone’s tidy profits than sociohistorical ones.

Continue reading “Belittled Magazine,” an essay by Bruce Robbins, on our site.

Subscribe

You received this email because you signed up for The Baffler’s newsletter mailing list, have a Baffler subscription, donated to our foundation, or contributed to the magazine. Want to change how you receive these emails? Update your preferences, or unsubscribe from this list. For questions about your subscription, contact Customer Care.

To ensure our email updates reach your inbox, please add newsletter@thebaffler.com to your email Address Book.