Debates over Postmodernism's Legacy in Contemporary Thought

Postmodern and poststructuralist theory faced sustained criticism from multiple directions almost as soon as it achieved wide academic influence. The most publicized episode was the 1996 "Sokal affair," in which the physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," larded with misapplied scientific and mathematical terminology in service of fashionable postmodern claims, to the cultural-studies journal Social Text; the journal published it, without peer review, in a special Spring/Summer 1996 issue on the "Science Wars," and Sokal simultaneously revealed the hoax in the magazine Lingua Franca, arguing that the episode exposed a willingness among some humanities scholars to accept intellectually vacuous invocations of scientific concepts so long as they served a fashionable theoretical agenda. Sokal followed this in 1997 with a book co-authored with the physicist Jean Bricmont, published in French as Impostures intellectuelles and in English as Fashionable Nonsense, cataloguing what the authors argued were systematic misuses of mathematical and physical concepts, from chaos theory to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, by Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard, and Deleuze.