It’s been 13 delicious years since physicist Alan Sokal hammered the nails into the coffin of literary theory. And, too few people know this tale. This is a bit of history that deserves retelling, because anything that makes snobs look like morons, is, IMNSHO, awesome. The short version goes like this:

Physicist Alan Sokal decided to try an experiment that could expose the pretentiousness of academic journals. His hypothesis was that it was possible to get an article “liberally salted with nonsense” published if “(a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” But what field to turn to? Ah, yes. Literary Theory. He scribbled up a big pile of rubbish called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” filled it with obtuse prattling about how quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and submitted it to Social Text, a journal put out by Duke University. The same day that the article appeared in Lingua Franca announcing that the article was a joke, written deliberately to show that if you made something sound fancy-schmancy and gave it a pretentious title, nobody in academia would notice that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. Red-faced Postmodernists everywhere responded by clenching their buttocks even tighter so the stick inside wouldn’t fall out and saying, “Yeah, well, you just don’t get what critical theory is about, do you?” Which just made them look even sillier.

In short, it’s the most radtacular thing ever written. This document was to the pretentious ivory tower academic establishment what A Modest Proposal was to eighteenth-century British politics. It proved that academia in general and English professors in particular are full of two things: hot air and themselves.

One of the best aspects of this prank was that anybody who jumped to the defense of postmodern intellectualism just looked like an even more out-of-touch snob than ever before. Mathematician Gabriel Stolzenberg took the bait most thoroughly, writing essay after essay attempting to refute the criticisms of Sokal and his veritable army of people Fed Up With Pretentious Bullshitting. The argument went like this:

Sokal: Your philosophy is designed to make you sound fancy and smart but is actually just full of crap.

Stolzenberg: You just didn’t understand what you were reading.

Sokal: With all your education, you should have been able to clearly explain yourself. Or maybe you just write in an obtuse manner so that people who don’t understand you will be intimidated into going along with whatever you say.

Stolzenberg: That’s just the petulant whining of someone who lacks the academic understanding and intellectual capacity to truly understand modern critical theory.

Sokal: Pretentious wanker.

Stolzenberg: You just don’t understand philosophy, so your criticism is meaningless. Just like everything else in the universe.

Sokal: QED. Wanker.

Sokal would go on in 1998 to publish Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, and I hope someday to read the sequel Super-Fabulous Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Intellect.