Einherjar86
Active Member
Clune is saying that Sokal squared only attacked the politics/practice non-divide, and that in doing so missed the more grievous (pun intended) intellectual oversight: namely, that the push for interdisciplinary scholarship cultivated an unearned sense of expertise in humanities scholars in disciplines not their own.
His critique of Sokal squared lies specifically in its emphasis on the political motivations of humanities journals. Their argument was that politics interferes with intellectual rigor, and that journals will overlook lack of said rigor for the right political motivations; but we can plainly see this isn't the case when we can identify many well-researched and well-argued essays in numerous humanities journals that still do exhibit a political stance. Alternatively, we can also identify plenty of poorly researched and poorly argued articles that have no discernible political motivation.
His claim is that the problem lies not with politics, but with an ideological turn--in the 1980s and '90s--toward interdisciplinarity and the unwarranted belief that literature scholars were experts in every field (since every field employs representation).
