ROBERT MARKLEY

The conflicts that have erupted since 1994 over the cultural study of science
seemed to have reached the point of self-parody. Several universities in the
United States have staged "debates" between various defenders of cultural
studies and Alan Sokal, the NYU physicist who hoodwinked the editors of
Social Text by publishing an article full of scientific gibberish in their journal
and then revealing his hoax ( Sokal 1996a, 1996b). These debates, and sim-
ilar exchanges in venues ranging from Dissent to the New York Review of
Books, give Sokal and his antagonists opportunity after opportunity to talk
past each other and preach to the converted. At best, they allow the partic-
ipants to describe incommensurate philosophical positions in radically dif-
ferent languages; at worst, they reinforce conventional disciplinary
boundaries by displacing conflicts within fields, such as literary study and
evolutionary biology, into conventional restatements about the "essential"
differences between the sciences and the humanities. The real problem,
though, with the so-called "science wars" is that they are least a decade
behind the times. In setting "realists" against "constructivists," these spec-
tacles obscure the important work of scientists and cultural critics, who have
jettisoned the terms of this debate, and ignore the significant contributions
that the cultural study of science has made to the development of postdis-
ciplinary programs of study. ¹ My purpose in this chapter, then, is to signal
an end to the science wars, at least as they have been staged and perpetuated
by both sides, by suggesting some of the way in which scientists and cultural
critics can work toward finding common idioms to describe the pedagogical,
political, and intellectual problems that now confront researchers and edu-
cators.

Having been drawn into the science wars by Sokal's misreading of my

-47-