Barbara Epstein is the well-known author of several books, including Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the Seventies and Eighties, Cultural Politics and Social Movements, and most recently, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism. She was for many years a member of the faculty of the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She began teaching at UCSC in 1973, even before receiving her PhD in history at UC Berkeley in 1975. In 1984, Barbara was invited to join the faculty of the History of Consciousness Department and she taught there until her retirement in 2013. Between 1973 and 2013 the world experienced a number of epochal events from the US defeat in Vietnam to the collapse of the Soviet Union to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent "forever wars," punctuated by financial crisis, popular revolt and renewed repression. All played out against a backdrop of environmental catastrophe long predicted, long ignored, and now altering life as we know it on this planet.
In the midst of the tumult, certain ideas came to prominence in the West which were at once the descendants of the revolutionary Sixties and a departure from them. The worldwide revolution of 1968 appeared to many, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, to be bringing with it the overthrow of the US government and the replacement of capitalism by socialism. When these hopes were dashed they left in their wake a great many stranded radicals who sought both to maintain their commitment to social transformation and to explain the failure of analysis that led them to believe revolution was imminent in 1969. A number of theories were advanced that gained widespread and uncritical acceptance loosely grouped under the banner of postmodernism. Francoise Lyotard's 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge was representative of the trend which to a large extent expressed the disillusionment of the French intelligentsia following the events of May 1968 in France. Its local significance notwithstanding, French intellectuals began popping up on US campuses throughout the Eighties to promote their books and theories to fawning audiences of ingenuous and easily impressed Americans.
Now, 40 years later, we have to reckon with the results. Did postmodernism, post-structuralism, identity politics or any of a myriad of different theories emerging in the wake of the revolutionary storms of the Sixties have a positive or negative effect? Did any advance the cause of human emancipation from the horrors of war, poverty, oppression and environmental catastrophe? Did the world become freer, healthier, and more just or did it instead become more deeply scarred by suffering and injustice? Did, moreover, the influence of postmodernism help or hinder the growth of inequality which so characterizes the West today? Have Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates or George Soros suffered or have they benefitted from the proliferation of ideas once touted as "radical" and "transformative?"
To answer these questions from the perspective of direct experience, I asked Barbara Epstein for an interview. Barbara graciously granted my request and the following is the result.
Mat Callahan: Barbara, thank you for joining me for this interview. Can you please tell us how you became involved with the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC?
Barbara Epstein: I was hired at UC Santa Cruz in the History Department. I taught survey courses on US history. There were no graduate students in the department. The History of Consciousness Program already existed at that time; it had been formed and was run by graduate students (there were no undergraduates in it). A few faculty members got leave from their department to teach courses in the History of Consciousness. The department was wild and woolly. Most of the students had been out of school for some time, many involved in movement activity. They weren’t willing to put up with disciplinary boundaries, and they formed a department in which one could write about pretty much whatever one pleased. Their dissertations tended to be broad, philosophical, infused with various forms of radicalism. The administration decided that they had to either clean up the department or get rid of it. They hired Hayden White, a well-known and innovative historian, as head of the department, and he began to hire a faculty. After several faculty members had been added I was invited to join them. This was initiated by a group of graduate students who said they wanted someone in the department who was both a historian and political in the sense of having been actively engaged in left politics. Other faculty were left, or radical, in their outlook, but had little experience of involvement in movements of the left.
Callahan: Where did the name come from? "History of Consciousness?"
Epstein: The students who formed the department had invented the name. When Hayden became the head of the department, he thought the name was cute, so he kept it.
Callahan: Was there no questioning of the relationship between history and philosophy? Since consciousness is often viewed as the domain of philosophy, or...
Epstein: The department was not about history, despite the fact that most of the early members of the department were trained as historians. If there was any subject that was not taught in History of Consciousness, it was history. Hayden used to jokingly threaten to set up a competing program in the Consciousness of History.
Callahan: So what were you doing there?
Epstein: I taught courses that were theoretical, though not exactly philosophical, but historically framed, such as one course on twentieth century Marxism, and another on “Theories of Late Capitalism.” Though this was a graduate department, with no undergraduate majors, we regularly taught undergraduate courses. I taught a course on the history of social movements in the US. I also taught the history of Jewish social movements, through the Jewish Studies program. Once when I offered a strictly historical course for grad students I got only four students. It was a theoretical/philosophical program, and that was what the students were interested in.
The curriculum reflected the interests of faculty: history and theory of science, philosophy, anthropology, art, film, feminist theory, Black studies, Marxism and political economy. Hayden’s conception of the department was that of academic stars teaching whatever they were interested in. I was not, and did not intend to become, a star. I wasn’t at first aware of Hayden’s conception of the department, and didn’t start thinking about the problems of this conception until sometime after I joined the department.
Callahan: So that was determined largely outside the school. In other words, what was getting reviews in various journals are being discussed at conferences or what?
Epstein: To some degree, yes, but I think the focus was on the History of Consciousness, and UCSC. Before I was hired, in 1973, the counter-culture, the avant-garde, and left politics had intertwined to make UCSC a very exciting place for faculty as well as students. I had the sense that faculty as well as students were, in the early years of UCSC, much more interested in what took place at UCSC than in the external academic arena; there was a sense that what was happening at UCSC was more innovative, more important. I think that continued in Hist Con, especially in its early years, but in a more academic mode. There was an assumption that it would have external influence of some kind.
Callahan: But where did that point of view come from? UCSC is a fairly small place. Was it, because it's in the Bay Area? The Bay Area was a center of world politics for awhile.
Epstein: The counter-culture was stronger on the West Coast, especially in the Bay Area, than elsewhere, and I think this was a factor in the development of Hist Con. But what I think was more important was that the Santa Cruz campus was new, and experiments were allowed or even encouraged. The History of Consciousness Department had no disciplinary definition. In more conventional departments faculty are likely to represent different theoretical approaches. In a sociology department, there will be a Weberian, a Marxist, an ethno-methodologist, etc. Hist Con became identified with postmodernism, which shifted into poststructuralism, governed by a similar outlook but more theoretically framed. Over the course of the nineties those who had called themselves postmodernists began calling themselves poststructuralists. This was a great opportunity for those involved in this intellectual world. But it came to be accompanied by a view that this had become the entirety of legitimate intellectual life, and I thought that was a problem.
Most of my colleagues had not been at UCSC in its very early years, when many faculty as well as students identified more with the counter-culture, or the movements of the time, or both, than with academia. The Hist Con faculty were oriented primarily toward trends in the academic world. I had the impression that many other UCSC faculty felt some sense of defeat, or guilt, over the shift away from radical politics and the counterculture that had taken place. But I think for my colleagues radical or progressive politics and the pursuit of academic success were intertwined.
Callahan: How would you define success? You mean being famous or funded?
Epstein: Fame and intellectual influence were much more important than money, though the money followed. But this was not just about individual fame. It was about the ascendance of a perspective that made culture primary and other realms of analysis, especially social structure and economic relations, secondary at best. It evolved into a more extreme challenge to concepts of truth, accuracy, the existence of a realm prior to human perception. Soon after I joined Hist Con ideas took hold that had come mainly from a set of French intellectuals, influenced by the events of May 1968 in Paris, involving a view of reality in which everything was fluid and shifting, nothing was fixed, and in which fluidity was interesting, radical, and good, and structure, anything fixed, was outmoded; an obstacle to change; bad. Excitement about these ideas, along with a lot of hard work and a receptive audience of young academics, led colleagues in Hist Con to become rising stars in this arena. And celebrity is a powerful attraction.
I think the project was also driven by competition with the natural sciences, which were gaining stature, and funding, in the university, in contrast to the humanities, which had less prestige and funding than either the social sciences or the natural sciences. This differential steadily grew.
Callahan: Did that also reflect a shift in their politics?
Epstein: My colleagues had been, and continued to be, progressives. Intellectually they would have been more likely to describe themselves as radicals, referring to a conception of radical thought grounded in discourse. I don’t think there was any shift in their politics in the more mundane sense of the term.
Callahan: But was it simply coincidence that a postmodernist theory imported from France took off at the History of Consciousness department? There were lots of departments that were influenced by Foucault and Derrida. Did the History of Consciousness play a particular role as a focal point for the propagation of certain ideas?
Epstein: My impression was that postmodernism, and later poststructuralism, which was more arcane and inaccessible to the uninitiated, took hold early and became the dominant current in Hist Con, making it possible for the department to exert a national influence, because Hist Con had no departmental definition. No one could say “this is not history” or “this is not sociology” as one could have said in a department of history or sociology. The avant-garde atmosphere at UCSC also helped, and also the presence, at UCSC, of a lot of young faculty who were open to this current.
Also, it was becoming clear that the humanities were losing out. Money, much of it from corporate sources, was going mainly to the natural sciences, then to the “harder” social sciences such as economics. Famous faculty appeared to administrators and others to be a solution: the idea was that they would bring attention, and money, to the humanities. Among the faculty involved, themselves, the obscurity of the jargon was seen as a sign of intellectual superiority. UCSC had a series of lectures in which eminent faculty spoke before audiences of faculty members. Hayden White spoke at one such event. I went to talk to him before his lecture, as people were filing in. He said to me, “There are going to be a lot of scientists in the audience today. They won’t understand anything that I will say, and they will realize how much smarter we are than they are.” I don’t think the jargon had the impact on scientists that Hayden hoped for. But it did intimidate faculty and students in the humanities and to some extent in the social sciences as well. For one thing, not being fluent in the jargon, no one wanted to challenge it.
Callahan: But did it take off because of them, or was it the association with, say, Stanford or other more influential schools?
Epstein: At first faculty in more influential schools, where the faculty was older and more established, resisted it. It took off among young faculty, and grad students, because it pointed to something that intellectually inclined young people, were experiencing or witnessing. The Internet, and cheaper airplane tickets, had made the rest of the world more accessible than earlier. There was a sense that everything was changing, that technology made things possible, within reach, that had never been possible before. There seemed to be no limits, and among those riding the crest, there was a kind of giddy excitement about it. I think that there was also a mostly suppressed sense that things were spinning out of control, a fear of what the future would hold. But the excitement overrode this fear.
Callahan: Is there a shorthand way to describe postmodernism?
Epstein: Postmodernism was, at first, an attack on Marxism, a claim that everything was socially constructed, that culture was primary, social structures and economic forces secondary, if worth considering at all. Essentialism, the claim that things have inherent qualities, based in nature, was the foil, the old, bad, conservative perspective. The aim was to transform culture and language. As this philosophy took off and those leading it gained academic prestige, there was a sense of power: we are creating not just a theory but Theory itself. We are remaking the humanities and intellectual life by emphasizing discourse and how it shapes reality, promoting fluidity, rejecting whatever is fixed. The arcane vocabulary intimidated outsiders and made it difficult for them to participate in the discussion, or to challenge the ideas being promoted. But it was also possible to pick up the new terms and throw them around. One undergraduate told me that she inserted poststructuralist terms into her papers so as to get A’s from TAs who may have not known what the terms meant. The student was not sure she did, either. But they sounded impressive.
This perspective spread rapidly, particularly among young faculty in newly formed departments, and began to take hold in older departments and universities as well. The affirmation of identity politics by those in this arena was also a factor in its appeal. Identity politics was also about culture and its transformation, and it was, for the most part, uninterested in class.
Reality did not cooperate. The economic crises of 1998 and especially that of 2008 made it difficult to sustain the assertion that culture was primary and that economic structure, and class, did not matter. By this time what was now called post-structuralism had become well established, especially in humanities departments in leading universities. The idea that culture is primary, social structure and class at best secondary, continues to hold sway among many intellectuals and other progressives, and to influence movements for social change, with, in my opinion, unfortunate results.
Callahan: Had any of these people actually read Marx or were they only familiar with what they had read about Marx?
Epstein: I don’t know to what extent they read Marx. Probably, at first, not much. Those of us who knew something about Marxism had learned it in the movement, not in academia. I think my colleagues didn’t find Marx very interesting, and were influenced by the then widespread reduction of Marxism to economism. I am speaking here of the early years of the department, when postmodernism was taking hold. In later decades the department became more diverse ideologically, including Marxists, though poststructuralism remained the dominant current.
Callahan: To what extent were they reacting to Marx and Engels and to what extent were they reacting to, say, the practice of the Communist Party?
Epstein: My guess is that like many people, academics and others, their understanding of Marxism was based on familiarity with some of Marx’s writings and also by the Soviet or the Maoist versions of Marxism, and that they knew little at the time of new currents in Marxism. This was not surprising. Most people, including intellectuals, didn’t. Even those of us on the left who were involved in new currents in Marxism would have had a hard time defining them. I think that like most intellectuals they regarded the Communist Party and its history as irrelevant to contemporary politics. This view was widespread among progressives. But I wished that they hadn’t cast Marxism as the inverse of a new, radical perspective.
Callahan: So they didn't know what they were talking about?
Epstein: There were some among those who adopted postmodernism who had been Marxists, and had either abandoned it or managed to combine the two, I think largely by identifying Marxism with Maoism, which also gave primacy to culture – as in the Cultural Revolution, through which ideas were to transform social reality. Academics, including myself, often talk about things we don’t know much about; we are expected to know more than we can possibly know. We can’t have studied everything in depth.
Callahan: I realize it's easy to say these things in hindsight, 40 years after the fact, but it's astonishing to me that people with reputations as visionary thinkers are so ignorant of basic social reality. That's astonishing to me.
Epstein: Well, they weren't ignorant of the intellectual trends that they were interested in. They were, on the whole, much more interested in the transformative power of ideas than in the analysis of social forces, or the history of social movements and the left. Many people adopted a focus on culture and ideology without meaning to deny the importance of social structure, history, or class forces. But in this field as others it was the most extreme statements that had the most impact. The same had been true in the movements of the late sixties: the more extreme one’s statements the more attention one got. The tendency to make extreme statements carried over into intellectual developments in the decades that followed.
Callahan: But, does this just boil down to anti-communism? Was this fuelled by propaganda emanating from the State Department or mass media?
Epstein: I don’t think it was just ant-communism. It reflected facts: the organizations of the 1930s no longer existed, the labor movement was in decline, was no longer militant or even, in most cases, politically progressive. The organizations of the sixties, especially SDS, no longer existed. There were many people on the left who thought that culture was the new terrain of political activity. They wouldn’t have agreed with the poststructuralists that truth didn’t exist, but they thought that the transformation of culture was the key to social change, that building organizations and engaging in a contest for power was no longer where it was at.
Callahan: Let me sharpen this up a bit more. Why Foucault and not Debord? Why did the Situationists, who were just as much part of the Sixties and certainly big in France, not have the cachet Foucault and his ilk did? The Society of the Spectacle was influential and is referred to often enough. But its influence is minimal compared to Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, let alone the Frankfurt School which long preceded postmodernism.
Epstein: Debord, and the Situationists as a whole, were widely admired. But the poststructuralists were engaged in a battle for primacy within the academy, primarily in the humanities but with larger implications. Debord and the Situationists were advocates of a spectacular form of political practice. They were not wide-ranging theorists. Foucault became the patron saint of poststructuralism. He applied a postmodernist perspective to an account of the workings of power in history and in contemporary society. He condemned the intrusion of the state into citizens’ lives, correctly predicting the spread of state surveillance. This was one element of a broader condemnation of the growing role of the state in society, which he saw as an insidious form of control from above, worse, in his view, than medieval tortures. He endorsed protest but did not advocate any alternative form of government, or structure of society. His work reinforced an already existing view of liberal reform as a particularly insidious form of control from above. He highlighted the abuses of government and the problems associated with liberal reform, supported protest but, when challenged by Noam Chomsky to provide the outlines of a better society, refused to do so on principle.
Foucault’s work, it seemed to me, reinforced the widely held view among radicals of all kinds that liberalism was the main problem and liberals the enemy. I thought that he, and they, were forgetting about the greater danger posed by the right, and forgetting that liberals, especially humanist liberals, could under certain circumstances be allies of the left. For Foucault, and for most poststructuralists, humanism was a bad word. I think the poststructuralists turned to Foucault rather than the Situationists because they were academics, not activists, and they needed a theory, not a guide to activism.They considered themselves radicals though they were not interested in dismantling capitalism or in creating a democratic socialist society. They were engaged in a battle for ascendancy within academia, and Foucault was much more useful in that regard than the Situationists would have been. Also, there was the attraction of becoming famous.
Callahan: When we set up this interview you mentioned the damage that's been done. We're going back forty years and it was not all at once. There were periods, for example, Eighties, Nineties, and then the twin towers 2001, Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, 2008, Arab spring 2011, these numbers are markers. So two questions: was postmodernism/post-structuralism, like a snowball, steadily gathering influence, and if so what bearing did it have on these events?
Epstein: Postmodernism/poststructuralism appeared, at least in Hist Con, in the mid-eighties, flourished there and appeared elsewhere over the following years, and by the early nineties had morphed into poststructuralism. At first it was intellectually fairly open (though not in regard to Marxism) and was sympathetic to or maybe even influenced by the nonviolent form of anarchism then taking hold among young activists. I wrote a book on that movement, describing it very favourably, though I did think the movement was too focused on dramatic protests and weak on strategy. My colleagues also liked the politics of this movement, though they might not have agreed with my reservations. At the same time, I was aware of a widening intellectual gap between us. By the early nineties similar rifts were taking place elsewhere in academia as well. I was invited to give the plenary talk for the left section at a political science convention, and was amazed to find my talk boycotted, the boycott organized by some who concluded from my book that I was a poststructuralist. (I was tempted to contact them and ask that they send a letter to my department, complaining about my support of poststructuralism).
Poststructuralism was by this time, in my opinion, becoming a cult, with an elaborate, obscure jargon, a conviction of superiority to those outside it, and a determination to squelch dissent. It flourished, and spread, through the nineties, especially but not only in the humanities, a doomed effort to pit culture against social structure and economics, since these realms are always intertwined. The economic crisis of 1998 put a dent in the claim that culture was primary; the crash of 2008 made it impossible to argue that economics was unimportant. But through the nineties it had retained the character of a crusade. Critics were likely to be attacked (unless they were prominent, in which case, in my experience, they were treated much more gently).
A conference was held at UC Santa Cruz, organized by the Center for Cultural Studies, informally affiliated with my department. The aim of the conference was to denounce a trend it labelled “left conservatism.” The targets were Katha Pollitt, Barbara Ehrenreich, Alan Sokal, and me. It followed and was in part a response to the “Sokal Affair,” the article that Sokal, an NYU physicist, published, in which he claimed to be a convert to poststructuralism, in the process subtly making fun of the genre. The conference consisted of morning and afternoon panels, consisting of the same four speakers, who were expected to denounce critics of what was now called poststructuralism. A group of students, some of them my students, some not, were appalled, wrote a statement describing the proceedings as McCarthyite, and handed the statement out at the conference. One of the panellists was unwilling to go along with the program and pretty much stayed out of the fray. The others, including Judith Butler and Wendy Brown, and one other, attacked. The idea was that anyone who was opposed to postmodernism/post-structuralism was a conservative and should be denounced.
The idea that dissent from post-structuralism equalled conservatism and was intellectually illegitimate took hold among students in my department. The following fall I taught the introductory seminar for entering grad students; I assigned them books by authors they were likely to encounter in their courses. There were eleven students, nine women, two men. The class read and discussed Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble, in which Butler argued that the category “woman” should be questioned since sex as well as gender is socially constructed. Some of the women in the class expressed doubts about this; one said that she found it politically important to describe herself as a woman. I said that I would go further, that there are biological differences between men and women, and that in every culture that we know of, those differences matter. The students were shocked, angry, and upset by what I had said, and began arguing among themselves. One student, a white man, said that he did not want the politics associated with being a white man, so he did not consider himself a white man. One of the women told him that he was exploiting white male privilege by speaking and should be quiet. I interrupted to say that everyone should be allowed to say what they thought without being attacked, that we should listen to each other with respect.
One of the women said that while she agreed with that in general, she felt that there were some things that were so terrible that people should not be allowed to say them. I asked for an example. She responded, “Saying that there are biological differences between men and women.” Other students agreed: this was a terrible thing to say. The woman who had made this remark later reported me to the department chair for having said it. The department chair, who told me about the complaint, and her suggestion to the student, that if she disagreed with me she should talk with me about it.
I was later told that the incoming class had been told by members of this class that I was a neoconservative. Apparently the logic involved was that if I thought that there were biological differences between men and women I was a sexist, and therefore a neoconservative. They informed the incoming class of this, and the two students who had been assigned to me refused to work with me. I was confident that the students who had been in my class were aware that there are biological differences between men and women. It seemed to me that they thought that intellectual discourse required setting aside one’s everyday perceptions of reality and speaking through an ideological filter.
For the rest of the quarter during which this class was held, the women in the class refused to speak to me in public and avoided my office hours. The two men came to my office hours, looking around, one of them told me, before knocking, to make sure their colleagues would not see them. One of the two men, a Hawaiian and the only person of color in the class, told me that he agreed with me but did not dare to say so in class. If he did, he said, the others would make his life miserable for the rest of his time in grad school. At the end of the quarter he dropped out of the graduate program and returned to Hawaii.
Callahan: And, no one realized this leads directly to Auschwitz?
Epstein: No. In the email exchange that followed the conference I described, Judith Butler said that there could be a good discussion if only I could be excluded from it, and she also suggested that I might be psychotic. So that was what the atmosphere was like. And once you have a cult like this, it takes a while for criticism, and the impact of events in the world, to break through.
Callahan: The question arises, what's the difference between poststructuralism and Q Anon? There is no reality, just texts, interpretation and feeling. History does not exist, only competing narratives. Didn't Karl Rove famously say, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Isn't post-truth and Fake News the province of conspiracy theorists and evangelicals? It would appear Judith Butler doesn't make any distinction because they are exactly the same philosophies only they appear to be coming from opposing camps, left or right.
The only difference is that the post-modernist/poststructuralists were policing the left. They had a specific mission, which was to outflank the left from the left since the right was already exposed. Is this what was happening?
Epstein: I certainly saw it as an attack on the left. I think my colleagues thought of it as replacing an outworn left with more radical one, more suited to the times. But it was in fact an attack on the organized left, the ideas and tradition of the left. It was a crusade on behalf of the ascendance of a nihilist philosophy, it seemed to me.
The poststructuralist conception of radicalism was taught to a generation of students, many of whom accepted it without reservations. We see the result in the weakness of left organizations, the focus on culture at the expense of a critique of social structure – toppling statues, for example, or renaming high schools – rather than attacking the growing disparity in wealth and power between those on the top and everyone else, with its consequences not only for human welfare but for environmental collapse and the extinction of species, including, possibly, our own.
Callahan: But they also abandoned the concept of social responsibility. The left has been destroyed and these people and their ideas bear some responsibility for that.
Epstein: I am not sure that they abandoned the concept of social responsibility; certainly not all did. But they were left without vehicles for carrying it out, and in most cases without much sense of how they might be created, what possible models of organization and means of bringing about change there might be.
Callahan: The case can be made that these things were not only linked ideologically and practically through academic channels, but were in many cases funded by the CIA and other governmental agencies. Gabriel Rockhill, who teaches in Philadelphia and Paris, has written extensively about this. His documentation is sufficient to convince me that there's a solid case here, going back to World War II. The necessity for US imperialism to conjure up a left-sounding response to what was a popular, vastly influential socialism of the Third World. It wasn't just the version of socialism discredited to a large extent in the metropolitan countries. it was China, it was Vietnam. It was Cuba, Amilcar Cabral in Africa, and so on. This was a threat unparalleled in history. And it could not simply be crushed because they were losing in Vietnam and they were losing in Algeria and they were losing in Cuba. They had to defeat it from the left. And that's what Foucault and the rest joined forces behind.
Epstein: Revolutionary movements in the Third World had a major impact on the US left, I think at first in positive ways: the concept of imperialism was adopted by the US left during the Vietnam War. There was a large sector of the movement that was also in solidarity with the Vietnamese people. I think this was the first instance of a mass movement in the US in solidarity with a foreign people under attack by the US. By the very late sixties, however, support for revolutionary movements in the Third World were extended into a fantasy that the left could bring about a similar revolution in the US. This led to the collapse of SDS, by far the largest left organization in the country.
In academia, there some parallels to the story of overreach and collapse that took place on the left. There was a sense, inherited in some part from the events of Paris in 1968, that anything was possible, that one could make any claims one wanted to. Meanwhile the humanities were in decline: money, and prestige, was going to the natural sciences first, then to the “hard” social sciences such as economics. It seemed to me that poststructuralism was in large part a strategy to elevate the prestige of the humanities within academia, and that the elaborate jargon was an element in that strategy. It created a sealed-off ingroup, which some referred to as “the club,” and discouraged others from participating and perhaps introducing objections. My impression was that while others in the humanities were intimidated by the arcane language, that those in the natural sciences were, on the whole, neither intimidated nor interested in participating in the discussion.
Callahan: I want to talk briefly about the Sokal Affair, because it's clear that one of the divides that the History of Consciousness characterizes is the opposition to the physical sciences. So, at the same time postmodernism was spreading, you had Richard Lewontin and Richard Levin, and Marxist biologists who were doing path-breaking work and winning Nobel prizes. You had physicists and mathematicians doing their work. So there were parallel things happening even in the same universities that were in contradiction with each other. Is this what motivated physicist Alan Sokal to initiate his hoax? Can you briefly summarize that?
Epstein: Alan Sokal’s article, entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was published in the cultural studies journal, Social Text. He wrote it to promote an open discussion about poststructuralism that would include critics as well as supporters. The article began with the statement, “There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists . . . who cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world . . .. The article affirmed the poststructuralist rejection of this view, quoting the most extreme statements made by leading poststructuralists and praising them to the skies. Some of the jokes could be found in the footnotes, such as a footnote to a statement that humanists are much more open-minded that natural scientists. The footnote quoted Noam Chomsky saying the opposite. A careful reading of the article might have raised some questions about it. But the editors of the journal, presumably including Stanley Aronowitz, were apparently too thrilled to have the support of a physicist to consider that the article might not be exactly what it seemed.
A circle of supporters helped Alan locate the most hilarious quotes. I was brought into the project to help Alan write a letter, for publication, explaining why he had done this, in the event that no one were to figure it out within three months and expose his hoax. Alan was a little concerned that a hoax was not moral. I argued that the poststructuralists had silenced dissent by ridiculing those who disagreed with them, and that it was time for us to ridicule them, publicly. What happened was that a 26-year-old free-lance journalist called Alan, soon before the issue of Social Text was to appear, to question him about it. The journalist had been out drinking with friends who were students of Aronowitz’s, and one of them had said that Social Text would soon have egg on its face. The journalist convinced the editor of Lingua Franca, a gossipy journal concerned with the humanities, to order the page proofs of the coming issue of Social Text. When he read Alan’s article, the journalist said, he became convinced that it was a hoax. Alan affirmed this. The editor of Lingua Franca agreed to time its next issue soon after the appearance of Social Text. The issue of Lingua Franca would include Alan’s statement that his article in Social Text was a hoax and an explanation of why he had done this. The publication of Social Text and then Lingua Franca led the New York Times to publish an op-ed, in the Sunday Review of the Week, entitled “Physicist Makes Pretentious Academics Look Foolish.” Social Text quickly ran out of issues. Around the country arguments were taking place between supporters and opponents of Alan’s article.
So we succeeded in opening debate but not in defeating post-structuralism, which continued to be influential. But I do think that our intervention and the debate that followed encouraged dissidents and helped to weaken its influence.
The main point, in all of this, is the anti humanism of post-structuralism. This wasn't as apparent in the early years. In the early years, it was all about an assertion that what we think is reality doesn't really exist. And it doesn't matter, which was of course silly. But in the later years, they moved away from that and instead focused on anti-humanism. And it seemed to me that became their main point and also their main vulnerability.
There is a book called "For Humanism" that historian Kevin Anderson put together. I have an essay in it in which I defend Marxist and socialist humanism. While I don't defend all versions of humanism, I describe post-structuralism as an attack on humanism. The problem with that line of thinking is that it proclaims the infinite adaptability of humans, that humans can accommodate to any society. You can't criticize a particular social structure on grounds that it's not good for humans because humans can accommodate to anything. So, it undermines the critique of capitalism. Hence, the idea of resistance, but resistance for the hell of it, not for any particular aim, which converges with fascism.
