FROM BROOKS TO DERRIDA2.docx

FROM BROOKS TO FOUCAULT: WHY AMERICA ABANDONED A POSITIVE HERMENEUTIC FOR A NEGATIVE ONE

Leon Surette

Sept., 2016

A major crisis of artistic form – let's say the shift from realism to modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – is almost always bound up with an historical upheaval. . . . a deep enough crisis of cultural form is usually an historical crisis as well. (Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem. London: John Wiley & Sons 2011 p.8)

. . . for Hegel as for Marx, Reason was not a transcendental observer of the world with its own rules independent of the course of history, but was itself a factor, aspect, or expression of history. (Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism. Trans. P. S. Falla. New York: W. W. Norton 2005 p. 929)

The "crisis" that I examine in the following discussion is not in "artistic form," but the shift from the "positive hermeneutic" that characterized Anglo-American critical practice from, say, Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Science" (1882) and Wilhelm Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), through New Criticism, to the advent in the 1970s of a "negative hermeneutic" characterized by "Theory," Deconstruction, New Historicism, and LGTBQ criticism, which I shall lump together under the label "Postmodern" in the following discussion.
Most postmodern criticism is a negative hermeneutic, that adopts the interpretive skills and procedures of Hermeneutics and New Criticism, but employs them to expose the basically capitalist, moralist, chauvinist, racist, etc. content of the literary canon. The term "negative hermeneutics" was coined by the eminent French hermeneutic critic, Paul Ricouer, who contrasted it to the "positive hermeneutics" of theological interpretation. Fredric Jameson brought the distinction into Anglo- American critical discourse in his 1971 study, Marxism and Form. Positive hermeneutics fits mainstream Anglo American criticism from the late 19th century to circa 1970.
Jameson, the pre-eminent American Marxist critic, endorsed negative hermeneutics as the proper mode for those following Nietzsche, Marx and Freud: "Negative hermeneutic . . . is at one with modern philosophy itself, with those critiques of ideology and illusory consciousness which we find in Nietzsche and in Marx, in Freud . . ." (120. Quoted in Lopes 72). ("Ideology" and "illusory consciousness" are alternative expressions for Marxist false consciousness.) Ten years later, Jameson conceded that a positive hermeneutic also has a place in literary culture, even from a Marxist perspective:

[A] Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper, must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same still ideological cultural texts (The Political Unconscious 296. Cited in Lopes 72).

A somewhat unsophisticated characterization of negative hermeneutic practice is found in the notion that it is the critic's duty to "interrogate" a text. For example, Heather Coffey, in the "Critical Literacy" entry on the online site "Learn NC" (off line as of 2016) defines critical literacy as "the ability to read texts in an active, reflective manner in order to better understand power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships." And she explains that the purpose of literacy skills is to enable "people to interpret messages in the modern world through a critical lens and challenge the power relations within those messages. Teachers who facilitate the development of critical literacy encourage students to interrogate societal issues and institutions like family, poverty, education, equity, and equality in order to critique the structures that serve as norms as well as to demonstrate how these norms are not experienced by all members of society" ("Critical Literacy" http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4437. My emphasis)
The notion that literary discourse is determined by "power relations" is straight out of Foucault, whose central role in the shift to a negative hermeneutic was celebrated in Frank Lentricchia's 1980 study, After the New Criticism, "an exposition and an evaluation of the course of critical theory in the United States for roughly the past two decades." He characterized the years 1960-1980 as "the richest and most confusing in our [that is, American] critical history" (xi). He cautions (quite accurately, I think) that New Criticism, whose hegemony he says ended circa 1960, was a rather polyglot collection of critical principles and practices – "an inconsistent and sometimes confused movement" (xii-xiii). And observes (again correctly, I think) that all varieties were characterized by, on the one hand, "a continuing urge to essentialize [sic] literary discourse by making it a unique kind of language – a vast, enclosed textual and semantic preserve – and, on the other hand, by an urge to make literary language 'relevant' by locating it in larger contexts of discourse and history" (xiii). Lentricchia's thesis is that those, rather contradictory, "urges" led to a crisis in literary criticism that his book is designed to expose and repair.
He lumps together New Criticism, Frye's Archetypalism, and even de Manian/Derridian deconstruction as attempts to "essentialize" literature, that is, to render it autonomous of other forms of discourse, of society, of events and of ideology. Against this tendency he invokes the Marxist inflected new historicism of Michel Foucault, whose works, The History of Madness (1961 Trans 1964 {abridged}), The Order of Things (1966 trans. 1970), and The Archeology of Knowledge (1969 trans. 1972), he says embed discourse in power relationships (Lentricchia, "Afterword" 351).
Lentricchia's characterization of all discourse as "an act of power" (Foucault's fundamental insight) is a view that has dominated literary critical discourse in the post-New Critical period, giving an inquisitorial bent to literary commentary, in stark contrast to the more friendly "positive" hermeneutic goal of Diltheyan and New Critical hermeneutics . The former's objective is to elucidate author's meaning, and the latter's is to model reading strategies so as to draw out the richest possible meaning from a text. Instead of celebrating the alternate or alien Weltanschauung of archaic or alien literary works as Diltheyan hermeneutics does; or the ambiguities, ironies, paradoxes and polyvalency of a poem, as New Criticism does; Foucault-inspired critical attention seeks to unveil the inevitably reprehensible or at least false attitudes (aka ideology) of the author or his/her cultural ambience. In short, it is a negative hermeneutic.
Although Lentricchia's characterization of the critical shift from "essentializing" literature to the task of exposing power relationships, is somewhat at odds with my view that it is a shift from a positive to a negative hermeneutics, the disagreement is primarily a difference in emphasis. As the list above makes clear, Lentricchia's concern is with the critical practice of the mid to late twentieth century, a period when the epithet, "essentialize" catches the tendency of the positive hermeneutic of that period. However, if we take a longer view and include Arnold and Dilthey, that label is less apt. Ditlhey's project was to methodize the study of literature so as to make it a proper member of a Wissenschaft, along with the physical and social sciences. Arnold, on the other hand sought to reform literary criticism from an exercise in evaluating works of literature into one of informing literature. That is, the Arnoldian critic is a polymath, familiar with"the best that has been thought and uttered in the world" ("Literature and Science"), who would serve to educate authors of imaginative literature. The idea was to render imaginative literature of sufficient intellectual weight to replace the ethical and cultural role that Christianity had played in Europe for the two previous millennia, but could do no longer. In neither case was there any effort to render literature a special form of knowledge as Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom (who labelled the movement "New Criticism") did, and which Lentricchia calls "essentializing" literature). As John Crowe Ransom put it: "the differentia of poetry as discourse is an ontological one. It treats an order of existence, a grade of objectivity, which cannot be treated in scientific discourse. (The New Criticism 280-1 My emphasis).
It is, however, difficult to accept Lentricchia's lumping together of Frye, Derrida and de Man as all similarly essentializing literature. For Frye secular literature is just an inferior and opaque version of sacred literature, which it dimly reflects (see The Great Code: The Bible and Literature). To characterize the Pyrrhonist project of Derrida and de Man to render all discourse problematic as the essentializing of literature is, to say the least, idiosyncratic. However, it is perfectly appropriate to see their project as a negative hermeneutic, but in a more radical sense than either Ricoeur or Jameson had in mind. Perhaps it would be more apt to characterize it as an "anti-hermeneutic." In any case there can be no question but that it is hermeneutic in some sense. In a late rambling attempt to define deconstruction, Derrida explained that "since there is no outside-the-text, right – exhibiting institutional, economic, political, pulsive [and so on] 'realities' . . . deconstructive interpretation and writing would come along, without any soteriological mission, to 'save,' in some sense, lost heritages. This is not done without a counter-revaluation, in particular a political one."
"Deconstructive interpretation, then IS interpretation, IS an hermeneutic practice, but one "without a soteriological mission." "Soteriology," as normally understood, is the study of religious doctrines of salvation. Since it is hardly necessary to point out that deconstruction has no such objective, Derrida must mean something like "without the goal of articulating the true or incorrigible sense of a discourse." In short, deconstruction is an anti-hermeneutic, an interpretive procedure whose objective is to demonstrate that "since there is no outside-the-text" interpretation is without constraint. Derrida's remarks here are an almost explicit rejection of the Foucauldian project that underpins New Historicism: to articulate the inarticulate ideology, or tacit assumptions of discourse:

Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation. (The Archeology of Knowledge 38. Original emphasis)

For Derrida no such "soteriological" project is possible.




If the foregoing discussion is adequate to persuade my readers that, insofar as postmodernist criticism has functioned within the theoretical ambience of either Foucault or Derrida, it is either a negative hermeneutic or an anti-hermeneutic, then I can turn to the question that most interests me: "Why has the American literary critical community been so eager to abandon the positive hermeneutic that had dominated literary critical discourse from the 1880s to the 1970s?" To find the answer it is necessary to step outside the magic circle of literary discourse and inquire into those events taking place "outside of the text."
The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton's observation in the epigraph, that "a major crisis of artistic form . . . is almost always bound up with an historical upheaval" offers a starting point for such an inquiry. A plausible year for the onset of negative and anti-hermeneutics in America is 1970. It is the year of the publication of The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, in which Derrida's paper, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" first appeared in English translation. The conference (held at Johns Hopkins in October, 1966) was intended to introduce literary structuralism to an American audience. Instead it marked the demise of literary structuralism. Derrida's paper was shortly followed by Paul de Man's Blindness & Insight in 1971. As we have seen, Foucault's New Historical negative hermeneutic became available in translation at about the same time, and was shortly championed by Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism (1980). Less than a decade later Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1989) inaugurated New Historicism as a mainstream critical mode in the USA.
In the spirit of Eaglteon's neo-Marxism, it is fair to ask if there were "historical upheavals" impacting American scholars in the three decades 1960 to 1990. Certainly the late 60s and early 70s were years of exceptional turmoil in the USA. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1962; the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968; followed shortly by Bobby Kennedy's assassination on June 6 of the same year. These assassinations regenerated fears of internal subversion – fears that had first peaked with Senator McCarthy's "witch hunts" for Communist sympathizers of 1953-4. Official policy remained resolutely anti-Soviet, exemplified most dramatically by the American involvement to counter the aggression of the Communist Democratic Republic of Viet Nam ("North Viet Nam") against the Republic of South Viet Nam. That war led to many anti-war demonstrations, the most notorious of which was at Kent State University on March 4, 1970, when National Guard troops fired on student demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine. Richard Nixon, elected president in 1968, presided over the American withdrawal from Viet Nam, as well as of the first Moon landing on July 20, 1969. However, this turn to better news was disrupted by the revelation of a White House approved break-in at the Watergate complex, ultimately leading to Nixon's resignation on August 8, 1974.
By the late seventies and early eighties the generation of Americans who had been students in the Viet Nam years (1964-73) were entering the professorial ranks. Whatever their political or ideological bent, they had grown up in a politically fraught environment. In contrast, the generation that articulated and/or adopted the New Critical practice of a positive hermeneutic tended toward a politically conservative ideology, often anti-technological, though seldom engaged in any sort of political activism. (T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks are exceptions, being more politically engaged than most "New Critics." They both identified with the anti-technological Southern Agrarian movement.) New Critical theory and practice allowed literary critics to evade any tendency to arouse political or ideological tensions. As the Librarian of Congress, Archibald Macleish put it in "Ars Poetica" (written in 1925!): "A poem should not mean / But be."
In September of the year of the Johns Hopkins conference (1969), Timothy Leary famously enjoined the youth of America to "turn on, tune, in and drop out." He repeated the injunction to 30,000 youth gathered for the "Human Be In" at Golden Gate park in San Francisco in January of the following year. Just three years later (August, 1969), the rock festival at Woodstock, New York marked a highlight of the "Hippie" generation, taking the quietism characteristic of New Criticism to a new politically disengaged level.
These events dominated the headlines and newscasts in the United States, and around the world. Although far less severe, they can be compared to the trauma the French experienced after their defeat and occupation by the German Nazis in 1940 that gave rise to deconstruction. At least so Richard Mehlman, an early adopter of Derridean deconstruction, claimed in "Derrida: Notes toward a Memoir." He argued that there "were speculative grounds for regarding the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of resistance and collaboration during World War II" (SubStance, 30-1). Mehlman did not go on to consider if the adoption of deconstruction in the USA had an analogous motivation. Certainly Americans would have had little reason to feel guilt for the conduct of their fellow citizens during World War II, but the postwar events surveyed above created deep rifts in the American body politic; rifts that might be seen as enabling the rise of Foucault's negative hermeneutic, and Derrida's anti-hermeneutic among American literary critics in the seventies. It offered them a mode of political engagement without actually adopting any particular political posture – a "negative politics."
Mehlman's argument is that French Marxist intellectuals retreated to an anti-essentialist posture in the wake of the Gaullist triumph of 1958. He does not list names, but the list of French intellectuals most cited by Anglo-American literary critics in the post war and beyond – J.-P. Sartre, M. Merlau-Ponty, Claude Lévis-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and J-F. Leotard, are all – except for Claude Lévis-Strauss – Marxist inflected thinkers. They represent the losing faction in the political struggles of post war France.
However, they were not successful in capturing intellectual fashion in France. Instead – improbably – they found their intellectual home in America and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. Tony Judt is caustic on the Marxist provenance of postmodernism in his 1992 study, Past Imperfect : "In Britain and the United States there are to be found persons not only calling themselves Marxists (this phenomenon, though rare, is still not unknown in France itself) but grimly clinging to their faith in Althusser and his science. Deconstruction, postmodernity, post-structuralism, and their progeny thrive, however implausibly, from London to Los Angelese. The late-lamented French intellectual is alive and well and living everywhere . . . except Paris" (Past Imperfect 299).
From his Marxist perspective, Terry Eagleton, disagrees. In After Theory he calls the Marxism of Foucault, Derrida et al into question – though conceding: "it seems fair to say that much of the new cultural theory was born out of an extraordinarily creative dialogue with Marxism" (35). Anxious to distance his own Marxism from the theorists he is attacking, Eagleton adds" "it was sometimes hard to say whether these theorists were repudiating Marxism or renewing it" (36). What they adopt from Marxism, of course, is what Kolakowski identities in the second epigraph: "for Marx, Reason is not "a transcendental observer of the world . . . but was itself an aspect, or expression of history."
Both Englishmen – Judt, who is hostile to Marxism, and Eaglteon, who is a self-declared Marxist – dismiss the Marxism of the American literary critics as what is sometimes called a "boutique" or "cultural" Marxism – that is, a Marxism purged of its real world political bite, retaining only the ideological hypothesis. That hypothesis is articulated in The German Ideology as "ruling ideas": "The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance" ("Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas" Translated: Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow, 1965). The boutique Marxism dominating American literary criticism tends to substitute gender, sexual orientation and race for Marx's "material relationships," by which he meant primarily property relations, and roles (owners and workers) in the means of production of goods and services. Gender, understood as an idea, produces male chauvinism; race, understood as an idea, produces racism, and so forth. (Of course, to regard gender and race as ideas rather than material conditions, is a variety of anti-essentialism, a foundational posture for neo-Marxism and Postmodernism.)



The adoption of Postmodernism by American literary critics, then, coincided with the tensions created by the war in Viet Nam, the Hippie revolution, and the Civil Rights movement. It is plausible to see the enthusiasm for the fundamentally anti-essentialist nature of Postmodernism as a symptom of American disillusionment with the political and cultural establishment represented by the alliance of Wall Street, Washington and the Pentagon – the "military industrial complex" famously outed by President Eisenhower in his 1961 "Farewell Address."
New Criticism had enabled the literary critic to evade the complexities of a culture apparently in crisis in the twenties and thrities, by an appeal to an alternate intellectual realm where all views were tolerated and none endorsed. Similarly Postmodern criticism permits the scholar/critic to take the high moral ground in exposing Western technological culture as oppressive, hegemonic, phallocentric, and so forth while continuing to enjoy the fruits of that very technological culture.
New Critics called their detachment from belief "irony," (long before Richard Rorty discovered it), permitting an avoidance of any specific belief, faith or ideology while ostensibly tolerating any belief. T. S. Eliot, for example, had claimed in 1923 that the"mythological method" made it possible to write poetry in an age he saw as an "immense panorama of futility and anarchy," that is, in a post-belief age. Similarly Postmodernist negative or anti-hermeneutic practice makes it possible to write criticism in an age in which disbelief has in effect become an orthodoxy. The objective of deconstructive anti-hermeneutics is to expose the set of beliefs embedded in the works under study on the assumption that – as beliefs – they are necessarily false. For Pyrrhonists, like Derrida and his followers, all beliefs are ex hypothesi false, so it is enough to uncover a belief – any belief – in a text, to discredit it. Deconstruction, then, has moved criticism from the programmatic toleration of alternate belief systems espoused by New Criticism, to a condemnation of all belief systems. Although New Historicism remains primarily a negative hermeneutic, the LGBTQ sub group mixes negative (phallocentrism, etc.) and positive (feminism, etc.) hermeneutics so as to carry out canon reformation.
All three varieties of Postmodern criticism reflect a disillusionment with the dominant trends in American political and cultural life, as well as a powerful anti-intellectualism. The latter tendency would seem to be a consequence of the perception that the amazing scientific and technological achievements of Western culture have only served to bring pollution, war and climate change to the world.
But Postmodern anti-intellectualism has taken a strange form, given that Postmodern critical literature is replete with allusions to a rogues gallery of (mostly Francophone) deep thinkers (Saussure, Foucault, de Man, and Derrida being the most prominent), and the even deeper, German speaking thinkers, that stand behind them: Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger. The apparent dependence of Postmodern commentary on such heavy-weight European avatars does not look like anti-intellectualism.
But the larding of Postmodern commentary with allusions to those deep thinkers bespeaks an amateurism that Alan Sokal, a physicist then at NYU, exposed in 1996. Sokal submitted a paper entitled, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to a Special edition of Social Text devoted to what the editors called the "Science Wars." After the paper was accepted, Sokal, a self-confessed "Old Marxist," revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax " liberally salted with nonsense." The Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, responded with outrage, claiming that they published the paper without external referees as a kindness to a non-literary scholar; but the damage was done. The fact that they regarded Sokal's lofty sounding gibberish as serious academic discourse remained unchallenged.



WORKS CONSULTED


Bateson, F. W., "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" Essays in Criticism III (January 1953) 1-27.
Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP 2006.
Derrida, Jacques."Biodegradables Seven Diary Fragments" Peggy Kamuf (trans). Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Summer, 1989) 812-873.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: an Introduction. [1983] Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P 1996.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . After Theory. New York: Basic Books 2003.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), London: Routledge, 1972.
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press Canada 1982.
Judt, Tony. Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-56. Berkeley: U of Cal P 1992.
Kolakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism. Trans. P. S. Falla. New York: W. W. Norton 2005.
Lehman, David. Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. New York: Poseidon Press 1992.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P 1980.
Lopes, Francisco Serra. "Negative Hermeneutics and the Notion of Literary Science." www.dlib.si/stream/URN:NBN:SI:doc-U9L9PUYK/c7c06ed7-f1fb-4d02.../PDF
Mehlman, Richard. "Writing and Deference: The Politics of Literary Adulation," Representations 15 (Summer 1986) 1-14.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "Derrida: Notes toward a Memoir," SubStance 34 (2005), 25-31
Ransom, John Crow. The New Criticism. Norfolk: New Directions 1941.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1989.
Sokal, Alan. Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. Oxford: OUP 2008. Kindle Edition.


END NOTES






. See Francisco Serra Lopes, "Negative Hermeneutics and the Notion of Literary Science."

. Perhaps it is only because I was educated and live in the northern fastness of Ontario, Canada, but 1960 seems a tad early for the disappearance of New Criticism. My teachers still regarded it as a parvenu critical mode in my undergraduate years, 1957-61. See René Wellek, "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra." Critical Inquiry (Vol. 4 Summer, 1978 611-624) for a spirited defence of New Criticism, 18 years after its alleged demise.
. It is true that New Criticism, Archetypal and Derridean criticism all tend to "essentialize" literature – that is to make literary discourse distinct from scientific and philosophical discourse. However, archetypal criticism – whether Frygean or Jungian – is a variety of "distant reading" as opposed to the "close reading" that characterizes both New Criticism and Derridean deconstruction.
. Jacques Derrida, Peggy Kamuf (trans). "Biodegradables Seven Diary Fragments" 812-873 in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Summer, 1989), pp. 812-873. The insertion "[and so on"] is Derrida's – or Peggy Kamuf's – not mine.).
. See the recent Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul by Clara Bingham (New York: Random House 2016).
. It should be noted that Mehlman is not asserting that deconstruction arose from collaborators,, but rather from their post-war triumph over the (mostly Marxist) heirs of the resistance. David Lehman seriously misrepresents Mehlman's remark in Signs of the Times, where he cites the relevant passage (p. 213), omitting "resistance,' thereby making Mehlman say that Deconstruction arose from the spirit of collaboration. On the contrary, Mehlman sees Deconstruction as arising from the political defeat of the resistance in post-war France.
. Of course, Eliot later declared himself to be "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion" in the preface to For Lancelot Andrews: Essays on Style and Order. (London: Faber & Gwyer 1928).
. "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies" Lingua Franca (6.4 May/June 1996) 93-99. Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins, the co-editor of Social Studies replied to the embarrassing revelations, and Sokal subsequently responded to their defense in "The Sokal Hoax: A Forum" (Lingua Franca July 1996).
Sokal explained that the article was cobbled together with "direct quotes from the postmodern Masters, upon whom I lavish feigned adoration. In fact, the article is structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics (and the philosophy of mathematics and physics) from some of the most prominent French and American intellectuals; my only contribution was to invent a nonsensical argument linking these quotations together and praising them." (Sokal, Alan. Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition p. 153)
See also Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (New York: Picador 1998), which reprints "Transgressing the Boundaries." There is also The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy by the editors of Lingua Franca (Lnicoln: U of Nebraska P 2000). And numerous discussion on the web. Incidentally, Lingua Franca ceased publication in 2001, but Sokal's article can be found at http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9605/sokal.html