I wrote this essay intending to get it published somewhere as an op-ed shortly after the so-called "Grievance Studies Affair," in which a series of published academic papers were revealed by their authors to be hoaxes, in the tradition of Alan Sokal. I never found a place to get it published, so I'm adding it here.
October, 2018
Last week three academics revealed that they had been writing "hoax" papers and successfully getting those papers published in niche, peer-reviewed journals that support research in postmodern disciplines focused on the politics of identity. This hoax follows in the tradition of the infamous 1996 hoax by Alan Sokal, who likewise managed to get a paper whose argument was basically gibberish published in an important postmodern journal. These hoaxes have received mixed reaction, with supporters of the hoaxers pointing out that the project reveals something rotten at the core of the postmodern humanities, and critics crying foul, castigating the effort as mere mean-spirited trolling that offers no constructive or useful purpose.
I would argue that both critics and supporters, and even the hoaxers themselves, have largely missed the underlying issue that this kind of hoax actually reveals about postmodern disciplines such as cultural and identity-based studies. The problem does not lie in expectations for political orthodoxy, as the hoaxers in the recent case suggest, but rather in the philosophy that informs these disciplines. No matter their shifting political stance, as long as these disciplines cling to postmodern philosophy, their scholarship will always remain open to hoaxes because it has no ground on which to stand.
Postmodern philosophy, which took hold in American universities in the 1960s and 70s and gave rise to the political criticism that now dominates so many humanities disciplines, is meant to address the historical problems of underprivileged communities that have been largely oppressed by a dominant culture. Postmodern philosophy determined that cultural oppression stems from narrative oppression. The rich narrative tradition of minority groups is overridden by the "grand" narrative of the dominant group, and members of the minority group are required by cultural domination to adopt these narratives as fundamental truths, setting aside their own minority identity. Such a disjointed existence feeds their oppression.
There is an immense amount of truth in this story, but postmodern philosophy goes further. Not only are dominant narratives oppressive of minority narratives, but they are also not true. In fact, there is no sense of truth that can ground our knowledge of the world. The human capacity for understanding, for the creation of knowledge, is strictly context-specific, dependent upon shifting social norms. Truth expresses a sense of self, a personal narrative. The common political encouragement to "share your truth," to empower yourself as the determiner of your own understanding, stems from this philosophy.
In denying the possibility of truth, postmodern philosophy sought to undermine dominant narratives and open up space for minority narratives. Quite a bit of good came out of this pursuit, including such things as bringing underrepresented cultural literature into university classrooms. Gone was the dominating Western literary canon, and in its place arose a cornucopia of literary samples representing the enormous and amazing diversity of human experience.
The problem, however, arises when literary and cultural scholars try to pursue scholarship in a discipline that has undermined the concept of truth as an evaluation. Ordinarily, we evaluate our understanding of the world according to whether we can be assured that what we understand is really true. I can know the sky is blue only if I think that my understanding of the sky’s blueness is actually true. But when the possibility of evaluation is denied because there is no objective truth, there is no way to know whether or not we really understand the world.
All academic disciplines are programs of investigation that seek to understand some aspect of the world. The work of a scholar is to seek new knowledge in their domain of inquiry. But in a postmodern discipline, the absence of a mechanism to evaluate accrued understanding, to know whether or not something is really true, opens up scholarship in that discipline to endless speculation. Research becomes a creative endeavor, a competition among academics over who can develop the most creative interpretation of whatever phenomenon is under investigation. No one can be told they are wrong in their conclusions because there is no methodology for detecting inappropriate assumptions or invalid arguments.
This is the weakness that the hoaxers have taken advantage of. Editors and reviewers had no way to determine whether or not the papers under review were representative of good-faith scholarship other than by application of their political expectations. No one could legitimately recognize the hoax arguments as being simply false because the philosophical backing of the discipline offers nothing for the evaluation of honesty or truth except personal narrative.
Postmodern disciplines have come to rely upon novelty as a metric by which to judge scholarship. The worst thing one can do is repeat someone else’s work. So, the more far-fetched an outcome, the better. Because the hoaxers sought to make their arguments as outlandish as possible in order to assure themselves that they were indeed creating gibberish, reviewers and editors, who prefer novelty in the discipline and who assume that the papers were a good-faith effort, found the outlandish papers to be the most compelling, the most forward-looking. This criteria also led to special recognition for at least one of the hoax papers.
In the end, postmodern disciplines will always be susceptible to these kinds of hoaxes simply because they have no way to determine whether or not academic scholarship within the discipline is simply wrong. The way I would suggest that these disciplines make themselves immune to dishonest attempts at trolling their scholarship is to re-adopt the concept of truth as an evaluative principle. Although the underlying postmodern philosophy would have to be abandoned, the political stance need not be. We can still fight for the rights of the underprivileged and nevertheless acknowledge that any academic discipline seeking to understand a phenomenon in the world must have a mechanism by which invalid conclusions or bad scholarship can be detected. Certainly much disciplinary knowledge would have to be left behind as invalid, but the disciplines will be far more robust and rigorous for it. The most successful approach yet invented by human beings for understanding the world seems to be the scientific method of disconfirmation. Although science is incapable of irrefutably proving its hypotheses, its strength arises from its capacity to disprove alternate explanations, leaving only the most parsimonious. On the other hand, if disciplinary knowledge is unrestricted, if anything at all can be said about the object under inquiry, then nothing at all will ever be known.
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Author: J. C. Bronsted earned his PhD at Florida Atlantic University in the interdisciplinary Comparative Studies program, where he studied postmodern philosophy for several years before rejecting it in his dissertation. His book seeking to scientifically explain literary cognition and criticism is in need of a publisher.