More Fashionable Nonsense

BY ALAN SOKAL

Academic hoaxes are nothing new. In 1768, the Baron d’Holbach published the Portable Theology, or Brief Dictionary of the Christian Religion—slyly attributing authorship to the Abbé Bernier—in which he stoutly defended the prevailing Christian dogmas with entries like

Doctrine: What every good Christian must believe or else be burned, be it in this world or the next. The dogmas of the Christian religion are immutable decrees of God, who cannot change His mind except when the Church does.1

Probably not very many people were taken in by the hoax. But d’Holbach’s mordant satire was brilliant nonetheless, and it circulated clandestinely for decades.

In 1931, the physicist Hans Bethe and two colleagues published—while they were still postdoctoral fellows—a short article entitled “On the quantum theory of the temperature of absolute zero,” parodying speculative attempts to determine the fundamental constants of nature by numerology, in the journal Die Naturwissenschaften.2 Senior physicists were not amused, and the authors were forced to apologize.3

In 1943, the young Australian writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart hoaxed the modernist literary journal Angry Penguins into publishing 16 poems allegedly found among the papers of a recently deceased—but, alas, fictitious—poet, Ern Malley:

We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them into nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from a Ripman’s Rhyming Dictionary.4

The hoax was quickly outed in the Australian press, and the editor of Angry Penguins held up to ridicule. But some critics nowadays claim that “Crazy as it seems, the Malley poems do have merit.”5

So there were precedents—most of which I was unaware of at the time—for my parody article, “Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity,” which was published in the spring/summer 1996 issue of the cultural-studies journal Social Text.6

But in the past few years, academic hoaxes seem to have proliferated. In 2014, the French sociologists Manuel Quinon and Arnaud Saint-Martin hoaxed the journal Sociétés—edited at the time by the very media-savvy French sociologist Michel Maffesoli—into publishing a hilarious article gushing over the Parisian rental car Autolib’ as