Cultural Studies and Its Discontents

A Comment on the Sokal Affair

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11638792
AutoresKen Hirschkop (0000-0003-1683-7967, autor de correspondencia)
Año1997
Número50
Páginas131-131
Fecha de publicación1997-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial Text (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/466821
OpenAlexW2327728764
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6

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