Jim Devine wrote:
> to my mind, it wasn't Sokal's prank that was important as much as the
fact
> that ST (Aronowitz) fell for it.
Not as well-known, but perhaps even more significant, is that
the editors of "Social Text" continued to cite Sokal's article as
proof of certain postmodernist views AFTER Sokal revealed it was a hoax.
As footnote #1 of my article on Sokal and Bricmont's book pointed
out:
"1) Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross responded on behalf of the editorial
board of Social Text to Sokal's revelation that his article was a hoax
in a statement published in the July/August 1996 issue of the journal
Lingua Franca. They pointed out that one of the editors "suspected that
Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission
represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual
resolve." Bruce Robbins, writing in the September/October 1996 issue of
Tikkun, went still further and approvingly cited someone who wrote that
Sokal's article had "proposed that superstring theory [a speculative new
theory in physics--JG] might help liberate science from 'dependence on
the concept of objective truth'." In reference to this, Robbins claimed
that the editors of Social Text had thought that Sokal had a good point
in this interpretation, "*and we still do*." (emphasis added)"
- - - Joseph Green
