Social Text still exists. In the spring of 1996, when the journal was the object of an enthusiastically publicized hoax by the physicist Alan Sokal, its survival seemed a bad bet. You published an essay arguing that gravity is a “social and linguistic construct?” Really? The mainstream media, hitherto unaware of the existence of this very little, very marginal magazine, were uncertain what exactly they were mocking. Was Social Text’s foolishness postmodern? Left wing? Cultural? Academic? They were certain, however, that what they smelled in the water was blood. On their side, and for a not insignificant portion of the left, jubilation. On the other side, humiliation. (I should know: I was the journal’s coeditor at the time.) We seemed like the stupidest people in the world, or the stupidest people who had been pretending to speak on behalf of the most avant-garde sociopolitical views. One friend of the journal suggested that we fall on our swords. If we owned no swords, swords could be made available.
The journal did not fold. One reason was that it had published a lot of good work, none of it remotely resembling Sokal’s gravity-is-a-construct nonsense, and those who cared about such things knew it. Edward Said’s “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” had come out in the first issue in 1979; for U.S.-based critiques of Zionism, 1979 was early. Other issues contained Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and Aijaz Ahmad’s Marxist critique of Marxist (and Social Text cofounder) Fredric Jameson.
Another reason why the journal didn’t fold was that, with that era’s culture wars in full swing, the pressure to be loyal to what you saw as your side was stronger than embarrassment at a dumb mistake: accepting an awkwardly written, citation-heavy article in which a physicist seemed to embrace an antirealist epistemology. Yes, errors had been made, and there had been innocent casualties (vulnerable students and junior faculty doing serious research in cultural studies) and not so innocent ones (I was briefly denied a promotion). But war was war. No one seemed ready to concede defeat. Some ingenious and some desperately unconvincing things were said in the journal’s defense.
Standing firm was arguably the preferable option. What was at stake was not a giddy worldview that denied the existence of physical reality. Considered sociologically and politically rather than philosophically, the “X is a construct” platform, thirty years ago, stood for solidarity with the political energies of the 1960s—above all, liberation movements in the name of race and gender. To say that gender was a construct was to make a political point. Ditto for maintaining that race was a construct. Stereotypes (that’s what they were called back then) that kept women and people of color in their place were not the verifiable truth about the world. Depictions of the non-Europeans to whom the imperial metropolis denied independence or whom it excluded from its borders were not the results of objective empirical observation; they were fictive generalizations that served unsavory interests. Circulating them perpetuated injustice. Behind constructionism, a project of denaturalizing categories of thought that were taken to be natural, there were large groups of people who had been trying to rectify how they were described and thus also their unjustifiable situation in the world, which the false descriptions enabled. Imagine the world differently, and you can make it better. Constructionism’s slogan was crude but politically mobilizing. Imagination is a form of politics.
Social science had put much of its authority behind the contrary assumption: “That’s their nature. We have studied the matter impartially. We know.” It was probably inevitable, especially in a moment when the shameful indifference of medical institutions to the HIV/AIDS crisis was still fresh in everyone’s mind, that constructionism would get hyperextended, that some would be willing to identify scientific knowledge, as such, with hegemonic power. That was not a position Social Text embraced—it’s not the argument of the other essays in the ill-fated “Science Wars” issue that included Sokal’s. By 1996, constructionism was already seen by many of the journal’s writers and readers as more of a problem than a solution. Diana Fuss had made the argument decisively seven years prior in her book Essentially Speaking. After all, who or what does the constructing? Patriarchy, racism, and capitalism are real historical agents, no? The journal’s origins were unapologetically Marxist. For Marxists, imagination is a force, yes, but it’s not imagined constructs all the way down.
Three decades later, an essay identifying science with power would probably fail to get the required votes. (Sokal’s essay got only four readings, but they were positive, and that, alas, was enough.) With the federal government aligning itself with anti-vaxxers and drill-baby-drill climate change deniers and exerting a heretofore unimaginable authority to defund ongoing research and push an antiscience agenda, you would have to be more foolish than Social Text’s collective to take science simply as an antagonist. And this is true even if you have your doubts about what has come to permeate common sense as constructionism has faded, like the body as a determining site of unquestioned truth and genetic and biochemical accounts of identity, which are easier to turn into someone’s tidy profits than sociohistorical ones.
Painting the Gown Red
A third and perhaps more important reason why Social Text did not disappear is that it was a little magazine. By the 1990s, it probably looked to many like just another academic journal, but it was never peer-reviewed (that issue came up of course apropos of the Sokal disaster), and it had started out thinking of itself as an organ of the left. Cofounder Stanley Aronowitz, who was born into the working class and came to the role of intellectual through the labor movement, was looking back over his shoulder at the littleness of Partisan Review, which seemed to define its newfound independence from the Communist Party. (John Brenkman, another founder, was thinking of Tel Quel, an even littler magazine.) Littleness was complicated: it could give the magazine a higher vocation, but it could also serve as self-protection, an excuse for not trying to be too political.
Littleness could give the magazine a higher vocation, but it could also serve as self-protection.
In “The Function of the Little Magazine,” first published as the introduction to a 1946 collection of pieces from Partisan Review, Lionel Trilling laments that, although politics had not been good for literature, little magazines had saved the day, managing to keep literature from being lowered by politics. Trilling begins by declaring that Partisan Review’s survival for ten years (with a readership of six thousand!) is a victory. It’s a victory because the journal has succeeded in refusing to give its readers what they want, which is a crude literature of political protest. For Trilling, other journals had mendaciously jacked up the excitement level with misplaced metaphors of weaponry and war (implicitly, class war). Partisan Review, however, does not pretend, most of the time, to write for “the many,” “the working masses.” In other publications, quality literature, which for Trilling means modernism, has been losing out both to politics and to the competition of radio and movies. Thus there has been a “general lowering of the status of literature,” a loss of literature’s social power. The little magazines have recognized, correctly, that literature needs a “cultivated” public. Partisan Review in particular has unashamedly addressed “the self-appointed few,” yet has somehow squared the circle: it has done so without surrendering its hold on politics. Perhaps a bit half-heartedly, he affirms that the magazine has been doing what needs to be done: showing how politics benefits from being mixed with “imagination and mind.” Trilling does not use the term, but what he is championing, in “imagination and mind,” is elitism.
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