Cultural Studies and Its Discontents

Alan Sokal's hoax was a childish gesture, but his motivations cannot be Ken Hirschkop dismissed as trivial. His parody was unmistakably aimed not at studies in general but at those who would install cultural studies as the new queen of the sciences. Over the past few years the very idea of has served as a Trojan horse for cultural studies, providing it with an access to other intellectual territories that it has consistently abused. The admission that the subject matter of one's discipline is part of human has been interpreted by cultural studies' devotees as an invitation to call the shots, and they have not been shy or reticent about calling them. In this situation a justified, if messy, rebellion was always in the cards. Sokal may not have been aware of these incursions into neighboring disciplines, but he clearly had a sense of what would follow once it was agreed, as George Levine has put it, that science is culture (114).1 For however much cultural studies has urged us to pursue a provisional, positional, or local form of knowledge, it has always displayed a disturbing confidence when it comes to knowledge of the working of itself. Those who do cultural studies write as if it were self-evidently the case that cultural institutions and forms confine and constrain the discourse

Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

• Ciencias inexactas y literaturas exactas. Lo que va del affaire Sokal a la poética de la materia de Bachelard

  Open Access•José Antonio González Alcantud•Arbor•2018

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• The Culture Concept as Theory, in Context

  James P Boggs, James Boggs•Current Anthropology•2004

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• Misreading Science in the Twentieth Century

  Open Access•John M Budd•Science Communication•2001

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• In Praise of Theoretical Noise

  Open Access•David Glover•Victorian Literature and Culture•1999

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• Profile of Lawrence Grossberg

  Lara E Dieckmann•Text and Performance Quarterly•1998

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• The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism

  John Guillory•Critical Inquiry•2002

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