This is definitely ancient news, but thanks to a link from John Ray I stumbled across the Sokal Hoax. Besides being interesting in and of itself, it gives an opportunity to explain what little I know of the theory behind it, and expose some baises in how the hoax itself is covered.

The Sokal Hoax

In the mid-90's, Physics Professor Alan Sokal wrote an article about composed of a lot of technical-sounding (though plainly wrong) goobledygook for the "prestigious" academic journal Social Text, garbage which Sokal contends even a college-level math or physics major would be able to detect as incorrect.

Yet there was also a bit of bait thrown into the article; Sokal said things he believed the editor and audience of Social Text wanted to hear:

In his article, Sokal attacks "the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook" that there is an external world governed by laws of nature which we can understand imperfectly using the scientific method. He also claims that "physical 'reality' ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct."

Here was a physicist using wrong math and spouting nonsensical assertions, but also telling the editor what he wanted to hear: That the scientific method itself was useless -- a mere political/social tool -- and that physics should be subordinated to a political agenda.

Sokal comments:

Throughout the article, I employ scientific and mathematical concepts in ways that few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously. For example, I suggest that the "morphogenetic field'' -- a bizarre New Age idea due to Rupert Sheldrake -- constitutes a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. This connection is pure invention; even Sheldrake makes no such claim. I assert that Lacan's psychoanalytic speculations have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field theory. Even nonscientist readers might well wonder what in heavens' name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis; certainly my article gives no reasoned argument to support such a link.

In sum, I intentionally wrote the article so that any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize that it is a spoof.

Good academic journals peer-review their materials. Would the editor of Social Text take a moment to check any of Sokal's claims before publishing an article which apparently confirmed his prejudices?

You know the answer already: No, of course not.

Sokal, again:

Evidently the editors of Social Text felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject.

And that, indeed, gets to the very heart of the matter: The editor's belief system, "poststructuralism", is a tool which assures those who wield it that it can be applied to every single field; it puts the poststructuralist at the very pinnacle of all knowledge, without having to actually know anything at all, beyond leftist politics.

Because, frankly (it says), there is nothing to know outside of that.

Origins of Poststructuralism

The operative belief in question, that there is no objective reality and that all the world is a huge "socially-constructed text," arose from the dying embers of Marxism in the wake of World War II: As Keith Windschuttle relates, the masses weren't rising up as they ought, and Marxists, with their absolute "scientific" theory of how future was supposed to unfold, had to come up with a way of explaining this little tiny bit of disconfirming data. (Rather than simply, uh, rejecting Marxism as being in error. Unthinkable, that.)

The favored theory became that the poor filthy masses must have been brainwashed by the media and their literature. (Sound familliar?) This being so, many Marxists turned their efforts to literary criticism, in attempts to find the political opiates which must surely reside in each book or play the common man imbibed. Marxism was no longer limited primarily to Political Science or Economics departments; now English departments were a fit habitat as well.

Then, in the 1950s, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss dusted of the theory of "structuralism" to explain human behavior, an idea which caught on quickly among power-hungry leftists in English departments.

Windschuttle observes:

Instead of being confined forever to analysing nothing but particular pieces of literature, literary critics turned to structuralist theory in an attempt to study the forms of literature as a whole.... The ontology of structuralism, that is, its view of what exists, is that the world should be regarded as a 'text'....

You can see why this doctrine became popular in English departments: it elevated the textual analysis of language and culture to the top of the methodological ladder and allowed literary critics to move into not only media studies but psychology, sociology, history, legal studies, and just about any other field in the humanities and social sciences.

Were you an english major before? Since a soft science like psychology can be viewed as nothing more than "literature", you're now an expert on that, too! Congratulations! Instead of dealing with the nuts and bolts of research, you'll be able to "deconstruct" any theories you don't like (those insufficiently flattering to leftists) in the same manner in which you once sought phallic symbols in Moby Dick.

This was a good trick, and it could be pulled repeatedly.

And moreover, according to structuralists, only the annointed were capable of properly "decoding" all the political messages inherant in each field properly, providing a justification for excluding non-leftists:

Stuart Hall resurrected the theory of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to claim that there were a few people-mainly leftist intellectuals and workers who accepted a Marxist theory of history-who could take media messages that had been 'encoded' with capitalist ideology and 'decode' them in ways that overturned their political content. Most academics in media studies failed to recognise this logical subterfuge for what it was and so from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, encoding/decoding theory was fed to a generation of media students.

And thus, the gangrene continued to spread.

In the mid-'80s, Marxist and structuralist prophet Louis Althusser strangled his 74-year-old wife to death and was declared insane. But rather than descrediting structuralism, academics blamed the Marxism aspects of structuralism and removed those, thus making the idea pallatable to an even broader audience.

Structuralism became "postmodernism" and "poststructuralism" and finally, the more innocuous-sounding "cultural studies", and has continued to spead its choking effect like Georgia kudzu.

Today, cultural studies is widely recognised as the fastest growing area in the humanities and social sciences. The American editors of a recent collection of essays on the field talk of its 'unprecedented international boom'. Not only have many of the new universities established in Australia since 1988 set up departments but the occupants of the principal chairs of English at older universities ... say that what they are doing now is not literary criticism but cultural studies.

In retrospect, we can see that the appeal of this theory to academics had lain not in its Marxism, which could be shed without too much loss, but in its linguistic idealism, that is, in the notion that the world is nothing but a text and that the way to study it is by textual analysis. Although some of the earlier French gurus of structuralism were dumped in the mid-1980s, a new breed were quickly taken up. Some of these were themselves former French Marxists like Jean Baudrillard and Jean François Lyotard who now called themselves 'postmodernists'. Others were the French theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida who their American followers called 'poststructuralists'.

Poststructuralism as Projection

Viewed over history, we can see that this whole technique is nothing if not a classic illustration of lefitst "projection" -- where the leftist charges his enemies with an alleged "crime" because he, himself, is actually guilty of it. He makes the charge "they do X" because he himself knows he does X and cannot admit someone else might be superior.

For example, consider the poor psychologist who thought she was doing real research, but makes some discovery which is inconvenient to the Marxist or leftist worldview. The poststructuralist then charges that her writings or even research techniques are merely a product of her political beliefs, not grounded in some kind of objective reality, and that her "discovery" is nothing more than a political tool to advance a political end.

Yet, in doing so, it is the poststructuralist who is using a theory not supported any objective reality, and who is acting merely as product of their political views, and whose charges are really simply a tool meant only to achieve a leftist political end. The crime they charge the psychologist with is, in fact, the crime of which they themselves are guilty.

Covering Sokal

In preparing this article, I was able to only find two working links documenting the Sokal Hoax. And one of them, astoundingly, used postructuralist methods in it's coverage!

As such, I thought it would make an excellent illustration of the above, and a good example of how to identify postructuralism in the wild.

Consider the following summary of the affair:

In this way, the Sokal hoax brought to light the cultural schism that had come to separate the humanities from the sciences in the American university system. Humanities departments had grown progresively more radical and liberal since the 1960s, flirting with and often openly embracing ideas such as socialism and cultural relativity. The sciences, on the other hand, fed by massive Cold War funds funneled to them through the Department of Defense, had remained far more conservative (though only in comparison to their counterparts in the humanities). The two had, for the most part, lived peacefully side by side until the humanities began turning their analytical tools upon the sciences themselves. When this happened, the scientists fought back.

In some senses, this makes a few true points: Sokal was, indeed, "fighting back". But his motives were more likely to root in his direct experience of the utility of science and the scientific method, rather than those given in the summary:

Humanities departments had grown progresively more radical and liberal since the 1960s, flirting with and often openly embracing ideas such as socialism and cultural relativity. The sciences, on the other hand, fed by massive Cold War funds funneled to them through the Department of Defense, had remained far more conservative...

The author, betraying his or her postructuralist influences, cannot see any motivations in the picture besides the political. If scientists disagree with postructuralism, it must be because of funding from the Defense Department! -- not because the core assertions of radical relativism are undermined by the scientist's daily experience.

The story is just depicted as a war between two communities, two sets of political agendas. Niggling questions about whether science or engineering actually work are beneath the author's consideration!

Indeed, postructuralism's greatest barrier in the scientific community is the existance of an objective reality, itself. It's strange enough that poststructuralists, who write articles to an audience they presume is more than a figment of their imagination, who demand a certain salary with appeals to the existance of other peers, and who respond to critics as though they, also, actually existed, claim there is no objective reality at all.

But physicists and engineers (like myself) have even greater barriers to overcome: If we don't do things right, even (and especially) in our professional work, things break, explode, fall down, malfunction, or otherwise kill or inconvenience people.

And we would have a hard time taking serious an attempt to "decontruct" the political motivations the bridge had when it crumbled, or the underlying paternalist or racist oppression the software was manifesting when it lost all of our client's data. Nor similarly dismiss the result whereby the affected client stops giving us money with which we can buy our oh-so-real dinner and pay our very-real bills.

And that's a good thing, as it's one of the last bastions against this insanity. That, and a good sense of humor.

Like that of Alan Sokal.