SF Writers Sting Supposedly Traditional Publisher

deeptrace writes "A group of SF writers all submitted purposely awful stories to a publisher that purported to publish only selected high quality works. They created the worst story they could come up with, and it was accepted for publication." Their press release is pretty funny -- and if you'd like a sample of their insane prose, it's available through the book's Lulu site. (Where, Yes, you could also buy the whole thing.)

Comments

You have mischaracterised the situation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true that LitCrit professor are not physicists. Nor do/did they claim to be. They deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, and put it in a context of postmodernist theory.

The postmodernist literary criticism school of thought held that all forms of human understanding were best understood through the microscope of literary criticism. That is, literary symbols and imagery were supposedly a valuable way to study sociology (especially gender and race relations), politics, and even the 'hard' sciences such as physics.

So you had Jacques Lacan writing:

"Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of enjoyment, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image. [...] That is why it is equivalent to the square root of minus one of the signification produced above, of the enjoyment that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of the lack of signifier -1."

Or, from Katherine Hayles, a proponent of the philosopher Luce Irigaray:

"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."

In short, you mischaracterising Sokal's complaint and the whole point of his hoax.

For more details, please see this book review by Richard Dawkins.

Re:Nothing new...

[Ohreally_factor]

You've bitten the apologia hook, line, and sinker. The point is not that they deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, but that they didn't bother to check this "knowledge" because it conformed to their prejudices.

It's true that Sokal doesn't really understand modern science studies and postmodernism.

He apparently understood enough to fool the editorial collective at Social Text and demonstrate their intellectual dishonesty. They were the real frauds in this case, which was proven not so much by the publishing of the parody, but by their responses afterwards. And by supporting and repeating the accusation that Sokal is the fraudster, you've brought your own intellectual honesty into question. You're buying into ideological fundamentalism that is just as corrupt as the Christian or Islamic equivalents.

Social Text was hoisted on it's own (Lacanian) absence of the Father, if you will.

I am a legitimate expert in a number of things, for example. I could certainly get journals or magazines concerned with other subjects to publish my deliberately misleading characterizations of those subjects I know, particularly if they were journals in other areas that had an interest in cross-discipline discussion. So what?

So maybe those journals lack integrity? Besides which, Sokal didn't write "misleading characterizations", he wrote things which were blatantly and obviously and absurdly (to even an undergraduate) false as part of his parody.

Perhaps you are so blinded by the text that you cannot read the words.