“I must say, I think I could have submitted this very essay in most of my humanities and social science classes at Brown and received a passing grade—possibly even an A for my ‘subversive dialectical critique.'”
Ellsberg contends that bad writing nowadays is not sloth or ignorance – it’s a deliberately aped style from legalese, DMV bureaucrats, and most of all university professors. He writes that “despite the amount of writing you do in college, you’re about as likely to leave there having learned to write clear, compelling prose as you’re likely to leave a kegger with clear mental faculties.”
Then he tells another story:
Indeed, a NYU physics professor named Alan Sokal, so fed up with this kind of bullshit writing in academia, did something of the sort. He submitted a paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to Social Text, a major scholarly journal of postmodernist critical theory.
The journal published the paper, which contained lines such as the following:
[A]s Lacan suspected, there is an intimate connection between the external structure of the physical world and its inner psychological representation qua knot theory: this hypothesis has recently been confirmed by Witten’s derivation of knot invariants (in particular the Jones polynomial) from three-dimensional Chern-Simons quantum field theory.
What Sokal didn’t tell the editors of Social Text right away, but later revealed to the public, was that the article was a deliberate hoax, liberally and intentionally peppered with absurdities, and baldy false or meaningless statements. He wrote it simply to see if they would publish such gibberish.
And publish it they did. Because the editors of Social Text—like most humanities professors—are in the business of writing and publishing bullshit. Sokal merely offered them more of their preferred substance, and they were drawn to it, like flies.
[A]s Lacan suspected, there is an intimate connection between the external structure of the physical world and its inner psychological representation qua knot theory: this hypothesis has recently been confirmed by Witten’s derivation of knot invariants (in particular the Jones polynomial) from three-dimensional Chern-Simons quantum field theory.”
Read the whole rant here. It’s fun.
Postscript on August 5: More fun! This from John Lawler: “Don’t forget the Chomskybot, http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl, which has been performing this service for linguists for decades. What, you though [Noam] Chomsky wrote all that stuff himself?”
Tags: Alan Sokal, Andrew C. Bulhak, Catherine R.D. La Tournier, Dada, Jacques Derrida, John Lawler, Josh Larios, Lacan, Madonna, Michael Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky
August 2nd, 2011 at 6:20 am
Wow! It’s been a while since I was in grad school–but, yes, I do love this. Even the story of this is something worthy of Borges.
August 2nd, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Rather serendipitously, my copy of Helen Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith arrived today, and the first poem I opened it to was this:
Literary Theorist
Abusing its otherness, its soul and wit,
He rapes the text, claiming its benefit —
And that, inscrutable, it asked for it
August 2nd, 2011 at 7:50 pm
Despite what Ellsberg claims, I’m not sure undergraduates actually learn jargonic bureaucratese from professors–because how many college students read their professors’ writing? I taught for 11 years and found that many undergrads were already fluent in the murky, Latinate, passive, imprecise language of bureaucracy long before they got to my classroom. It’s true that from grade school to college (and especially grad school–ugh), teachers deserve blame for failing to point out the depressing awfulness of this sort of writing, but I think there’s room to debate whether most teachers actively inculcate it. (The materials written by university administrators, on the other hand…)
August 2nd, 2011 at 9:55 pm
I knew a graduate student who used to have to read his texts standing up, for obvious reasons.
August 5th, 2011 at 10:47 am
Don’t forget the Chomskybot, http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl, which has been performing this service for linguists for decades. What, you though Chomsky wrote all that stuff himself?
August 5th, 2011 at 11:05 am
You’ve been added as a postscript, John. You’re a star!