Laokoon in Outer Space? Towards a transformative hermeneutics of art

Abstract

When Alan Sokal, professor of physics in New York, in 1996 published an article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”378 in the influential cultural theory journal Social Text, the journal’s editors promoted its publication enthusiastically, taking it as a serious attempt by a representative of the so-called “hard sciences” to enter into a dialogue with the sciences on the other side of the gap between the two cultures of knowledge which Charles P. Snow had so paradigmatically diagnosed in his famous 1959 “Rede Lecture”.379 Instead of aiming at bridging the gap, Sokal’s article was meant as a parody. It sharply denounced the — in the author’s view — infuriatingly incompetent efforts of humanities’ scholars to colonialise the natural sciences while only succeeding to produce an incoherent mishmash of overblown pseudo-theoretical postmodernist terminology and misunderstood miscellaneous fragments of scientific facts. After the prompt unveiling of the article’s parodist intention, a bitter battle ensued. On the one hand some earnestly advocated the necessity of enabling and using interdisciplinary synergies between “soft” and “hard sciences”; on the other side some, like Sokal, viewed the delimitation of disciplinary work as an imposition on the purity of science on the other, as Impostures intellectuelles, as Sokal and his co-author Jean Bricmont put it in their subsequent book publication.380