Curses, hoaxed again

I probably would have been more exercised by Sokal Part Deux about a dozen years ago or so, but perhaps because it's Sokal Part Deux I'm not sure what, if anything, will be accomplished by this exercise.  Did Sokal's experiment produce any demonstrable effect on its targets, and if so, where?  Ironically, I became relatively disinterested in theory per se as part of going to a "theory school" as an undergraduate, as it seemed to me that while theory was certainly helpful in formulating questions, "doing" a certain type of reading was a mechanical exercise at best (pedagogically useful--the best way of learning a new approach is to do it, after all--but not as a scholarly life goal).  And some theoretical approaches don't actually seem to be applicable: there's a certain kind of essay that starts off with a complex theoretical framework and then promptly collapses into a close reading or very traditional historical analysis.  Eboo Patel's essay, I think, sums up my response: at some point, your theory will fail, and it's your job to figure out what to do about that.  (That is, at base, what Book One is about; Book Two, for that matter, involved a process of realizing that a historical theory about anti-Catholic rhetoric did not, in fact, account for the evidence.) But that requires a certain detachment from one's theory.    

Because I was a somewhat odd undergraduate, I read things like the National Association of Scholars journal, and I was more puzzled and uninspired by them than anything else.  I could see what they didn't like, but there was no positive program for what they did.  There was nothing, that is, to emulate.  So, after academic-ing for several years, I finally arrived at the position that the only thing to do was my work, and if I had something to complain about, then I needed to complain about it by actively doing something different.  Of course, sometimes nobody listens.  (My polite suggestion that if one is going to talk about John Stuart Mill in respect to universities, then one should talk about John Stuart Mill's writing on university education, and not about John Stuart Mill on free speech more generally--as it is not clear that they are the same thing--seems not to have gone anywhere.)  Still, I became interested in literary history because I take delight in figuring out how books work together, and because I think that that's useful to know, whatever books I happen to be writing about at the time.  And so I read a lot of books that, taken individually, are not always delightful (sometimes resulting in the "distant reading" effect--as in, "why am I not one hundred miles distant from this novel by E. H. Dering?"), along with whatever helps me figure out the best ways to understand them.  But I'd prefer not to talk about it, I suppose.  (Even this post might qualify as too much talking.) 

Comments

[Bill Benzon]

You know, Miriam, I got rather deeply interested in the Ronell affair and became curious about her work. I looked for something short to read. I found it in a 2005 collection of Derrida tributes in PMLA. Some very good stuff there and some, well... Ronell's piece was very well written, very witty. And utterly self-absorbed. In her two opening paragraphs she anoints herself as the new ruler of the Duchy of Deconstruction. And the editors of that august journal let her get away with it.

But the real piece of work was Houston Baker's little star turn. It's mostly about how he became of deconstruction and then began deconstruction. At the climax he has dinner with Derrida and other at the School for Criticism and Theory. Here's his opening sentence about the man hisownbadself: "He was unpretentious, yet scintillating." In five words, only five words, he's transformed the Master into a bottle of wine. It goes downhill from there.

Theory, meh.

[Bill Benzon]

Whoops! "...became of aware deconstruction and then began deconstructing."