Chris Fleming

The Art of the Hoax

‘Why did I do it?’ writes Alan Sokal, a man whose name has become synonymous with a particular kind of critical hoax: ‘While my method was satirical, my motivation was utterly serious’. Sokal’s now famous hoax involved deceiving the editorial board of a prestigious Cultural Studies journal by passing off an essay riddled with jokes and absurdities as scholarship. The success of the hoax lay in the fact of its publication. Sokal is not alone in his orientation, and hoaxes are both an important cultural phenomenon and a surprisingly common one. The combination of serious purpose and comic means pervades many kinds of hoaxes, perhaps most, united as they are in the fact they all involve some kind of artful deception, an aesthetically sophisticated act of trickery, of mimetic artistry. A good hoaxer is a very skilled reader and manipulator of textual genres and often specialized discourses.

Revolution, rupture, rhetoric

This article traces certain rhetorics of knowledge-change as well as a few models of such change. In particular, it focuses on models that emphasize novelty and sudden transformation. To this end, the works of Thomas Kuhn, and the debates surrounding his celebrated modeling of the paradigm, are explored. Having established – at least in an illustrative fashion – the role of novelty in Kuhn’s philosophy of science, we then look more briefly at the mid-career work of Michel Foucault (his Order of Things and the Archaeology of Knowledge), and the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard to find (in Foucault’s case) analogies with the earlier models and debates surrounding Popper and Kuhn, and then (in the Habermas/Lyotard discussion), to see how revolutionary and reactionary status count in assigning value to models of knowledge. In all these inquiries, we seek less to criticize particular theorists (that has already been done) than to understand a dominant strand of understanding of knowledge and knowledge-change in the contemporary academy.

Resurgent Religious Themes in Contemporary Film

The task involved in Girardian approaches to film has‚ thus far, been similar to what has animated Girardian approaches to other texts. This has comprised a double hermeneutic, where interpretation operates in two directions: First, theoretical attention is invested in the object of analysis (the book‚ film, or artwork), to see how and to what extent a Girardian approach may illuminate it‚ hopefully in ways hitherto unknown; and second—and this is integral to Girardian thought—the text is examined with respect to how it reads or interprets us. Girardian film criticism typically focuses on filmic depictions of the mediation of desire (including romantic mediations and love triangles), the dissolution of differences, rivalry, collective violence and scapegoating, and ideas of sacrifice and divinity.