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 kids 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.