Beyond parody?

While I think of it, I'd like to draw your attention to something that I find it useful to dip into now and again when confronted by particularly egregious lit theory gibberish. It's the story of Alan Sokal, who managed to get a completely fraudulent paper published in the journal Social Text. Sokal thought that he could get a piece of complete nonsense published if it sounded good and if it flattered the editor's ideological preconceptions. In the piece, he argued among other things that the uncertainty in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (a construct in quantum physics) is a result of the unease felt by former colonial powers after they lost their colonies, and that gravity is essentially a racist Western invention. None of this transparent nonsense stopped it from being published, much to everyone's amusement. As Sokal himself later remarked:

"In the second paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence or argument, that "physical 'reality' [note the scare quotes] ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.'' Not our theoriesof physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough: anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)"

Well, if you're interested (which most of you won't be) you can read more here.