>First, I doubt that Sokal relishes his place as a "star" or did what
>he has done to become one --- Butler tried this swipe at Sokal in her
>NLR piece and it was a totally bogus ad hominem attack. Second,
>saying his satire was merely a "schoolboy prank" sounds a bit too
>Puritan to me, and overlooks that it is just the sort of thing
>progressives have done from time to time with the mainstream media ---
>cooking up a bogus story and watching the credulous swallow it hook,
>line, and sinker without bothering to verify the facts.
You ever meet the guy? I'd barely thought of the schoolboy prank angle until I did.
Now what about these progressive hoaxes? There was that great trick that the Sub Pop person played on the lamestains at the New York Times, the invented glossary of grunge, but 1) the NYT deserved it, 2) it did no political or intellectual harm to those that didn't deserve harm, and 3) it was clever, original, and funny. Social Text may publish some silly stuff, but it's not the New York Times, it did more intellectual/political harm than good, and it wasn't at all original.
>Third, how
>can you say they are "writing on subjects they simply do not
>understand" when they explicitly say they are writing about the use
>and abuse of logic, evidence, etc. in a variety of works? They
>explicitly state that they are not making judgments about other
>aspects of the work.
They're being coy. The point of Sokal's initial prank was to discredit a whole kind of thought, most of which he was ignorant of - and still is. To retreat now to saying they're just cataloguing the abuse of scientific metaphor, without commenting on the rest, is either silly or dishonest. Silly in that the enterprise is trivial if you're not going to engage the rest of the thought, and dishonest if they really are trying to discredit it all the easy way.
Doug