[A shortened version of this post appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education on October 9, 2018]
A rather ambitious campaign of academic hoaxing has been in the news over the past week. The hoaxers claim to be “liberals.” The online nonacademic right is gleeful in its celebration of the hoaxers' purported accomplishments, and in its denunciation of what they call “postmodernism” (I prefer the alternative term “grievance studies,” as I take it that this relatively new sort of agenda-driven “me-search” holds to a naive and basically premodern realism about its categories; the proliferation of new pseudospecies and the tracking of their “intersections” looks much more like the “analogism” that characterises Italian Renaissance cosmology than it looks like, say, Baudrillard's theory of simulacra or Lyotard's critique of metanarratives). The academic left has taken its familiar posture of preening defensiveness, denying that there's any distinct problem at all in the scholarly standards governing the publication of articles in the various “theory” fields that do not also show up in, say, psychology or political science.
Whatever. Everyone's playing their assigned roles. But what I wanted to speak to here is the question of hoaxes in general. Quite apart from whether I think “Sokal Squared” has accomplished what its authors claim, I confess I am astounded, though I really should not be by now, by the moralism and the piety about rules and procedures that so many academics are expressing, as if hoaxing were always unethical and lacking in any potential salutary effects. These academics seem entirely unaware of the distinguished history of hoaxing, and to assume that it dates back no earlier than Sokal. They seem never to have read, e.g., Anthony Grafton on the importance of playful deception in the learned culture of Italian humanism. They seem unaware of the rich and fascinating 19th-century genre of the “mystification.” They seem unaware of the often high-minded theoretical ambitions of documentary metafiction and of the vague gradations between this broad genre of writing and outright fraud. They do not know about the French fraudster Denis Vrain-Lucas, who was eventually arrested, in 1869, for having passed off numerous falsified letters as authentic documents. Vrain-Lucas continued to defend himself, from prison, on the grounds that he had breathed new life into the carcass of history by making past characters, including Newton, Galileo, Vercingétorix, and Jesus Christ, more interesting than they actually were. They do not know about Ken Alder's ingenious piece in Critical Inquiry in 2004, which was a purported translation from the French of a prison letter by Vrain-Lucas. I learned more about the history and historiography of science from Alder's piece than from any other single text I could cite.
They do not know about Paul Coleman-Norton's equally ingenious “Amusing Agraphon,” published in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly in 1950, claiming to be the description of a newly discovered saying of Jesus that the author had happened upon in a Greek manuscript while serving in World War II in Morocco. According to Coleman-Norton, the agraphon has Jesus warning his disciples: “In the furnace of fire there will be moaning and gnashing of teeth.” One of the disciples asks: “But Lord, what if we have lost our teeth?” To which the Lord answers: “Teeth will be provided.” It was twenty years before one of Coleman-Norton's students informed the world that this had all been a joke. The author had produced a rigorous scholarly apparatus, had himself composed the agraphon and the relevant paratexts in Greek: had, in short, displayed his scholarly expertise. His hoax, I would contend, counts as great scholarship, and I would much rather read it, to learn both about Biblical philology and about the potentials of creative metafiction, than I would read just about any “real” article ever published in any of the journals lately punked in the Sokal Squared hoax.
I myself have written no small amount of documentary metafiction (see, e.g., here or here), in which la règle du jeu is a strict poker-faced silence about the truth-value and the purpose of the undertaking. Is it hoaxing? Is it dishonest? Is it bad practice for an academic? I don't care.
Any academic who thinks hoaxing as such is unethical or nugatory is a dull and petty functionary, and evidently has no interest in participating, or revelling, in the ongoing life of ideas.
