The Hoaxers Who Accidentally Made Art

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From: The Fires of History

Ern Malley. Sokal. Grievance Studies. Three hoaxes designed to prove that something was fake. In each case, the hoaxers accidentally produced something real. What does it mean when the troll can't help being good?
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In 1944, two Australian poets sat down to write the worst poetry they could manage. In 1996, an American physicist sat down to write the most meaningless academic paper he could construct. In 2017, three academics sat down to write the most absurd scholarly articles they could imagine. All three projects were designed to prove that their targets could not distinguish real work from deliberate garbage.

All three succeeded in their stated aim. And all three failed in a way that is far more interesting: the garbage turned out to be good.

This is the recurring paradox of the intellectual hoax. You set out to prove that a field cannot tell real from fake. You produce fake work. The field accepts it. You reveal the hoax. You declare victory. And then someone points out that the fake work is, by any reasonable standard, not actually fake. It is real work produced under false pretenses. And in some cases, it is better than the real work it was designed to parody.

The troll cannot help being good. This is a problem.

Ern Malley (1944)

James McAuley and Harold Stewart were conservative Australian poets who despised modernism. They believed that modernist poetry was pretentious, meaningless, and could not be distinguished from random nonsense. To prove it, they invented a poet.

Ernest Lalor “Ern” Malley was, according to the fiction, a self-taught insurance salesman and mechanic who had died of Graves’ disease at twenty-five, leaving behind a small collection of poems discovered by his sister Ethel. McAuley and Stewart composed the entire body of work – sixteen poems titled The Darkening Ecliptic – in a single afternoon. They worked quickly and deliberately, pulling lines from whatever was at hand: a dictionary, a collected Shakespeare, reports on mosquito control, an American military manual. The goal was to produce poetry that sounded impressive but meant nothing.

They sent the poems to Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins, the leading journal of the Australian modernist movement. Harris was electrified. He devoted the entire autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins to Malley, writing a rapturous introduction hailing an unknown genius.

McAuley and Stewart revealed the hoax. It was a sensation. Harris was humiliated. The conservative press crowed. Modernism, they declared, had been exposed as an emperor with no clothes. The Australian government, displaying the instinct for cultural engagement that would become its hallmark, prosecuted Harris for publishing obscene material. He was convicted and fined.

The hoaxers won. Except they did not.

Here is what happened next. Literary scholars began reading the Malley poems on their own terms. Frank Kermode, one of the most respected critics of the twentieth century, observed: “The hoaxers may have worked fast, but they were so talented and so habituated to poetry that they failed to produce the total garbage that they intended.” The American poet John Ashbery – hardly a marginal figure – used to give students one Malley poem and one poem by a distinguished contemporary and ask them to identify the hoax. Students could do so only 50% of the time. Coin flip accuracy. The fake was indistinguishable from the real not because the real was bad but because the fake was good.

The final indignity: McAuley and Stewart’s serious, non-hoax poetry never achieved the fame of their Malley poems. The work they wrote to be bad is better remembered than the work they wrote to be good. The Australian literary canon contains Ern Malley. It barely contains McAuley and Stewart.

The troll’s greatest work was the one he did not mean.

Sokal (1996)

Alan Sokal was a physics professor at New York University who was irritated by what he perceived as the encroachment of postmodernist philosophy onto scientific territory. Specifically, he objected to humanities scholars making claims about physics and mathematics that were, from a physicist’s perspective, nonsensical.

So he wrote a paper. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The title alone should have been a warning. Sokal submitted it to Social Text, a prominent cultural studies journal whose editorial board included Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross, two of the most influential figures in the field. The paper argued, with extensive citations of real theorists, that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct and that physical reality was fundamentally a social construct as well.

The paper was, by Sokal’s own admission, deliberate nonsense. He had “liberally salted” it with absurdities, non sequiturs, and flattering references to the editors’ own work. Social Text published it in their Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue without sending it for peer review. (The journal did not practice formal peer review at the time, a detail that would become relevant.)

Three weeks later, Sokal revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca. The resulting firestorm – the “Science Wars” – consumed academia for years. Sokal had proven his point: a journal of cultural studies would publish physics nonsense if it sounded good and flattered the editors’ ideological priors.

But.

The editors of Social Text offered a defense that was more interesting than it was given credit for at the time. They said they had read the paper as “the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some kind of affirmation from postmodern philosophy for developments in his field.” They were not wrong that such attempts were being made by real scientists. The paper mimicked a real genre of interdisciplinary work that existed then and exists now. The boundary between “physicist engages clumsily with philosophy” and “physicist writes deliberate parody of engaging clumsily with philosophy” is not as obvious from the humanities side as it appears from the physics side.

More importantly: Sokal, in order to write convincing nonsense about the social construction of physical reality, had to engage seriously with the literature he was parodying. He had to read Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray, Latour. He had to understand their arguments well enough to caricature them. And in the process, he produced something that – stripped of its parodic intent – functioned as a real piece of interdisciplinary scholarship. Not a good piece. But a real one. It engaged real sources, made real citations, and addressed real questions about the relationship between scientific knowledge and social context.

The hoax proved that Social Text’s editorial standards were poor. It did not prove that the questions the paper raised were meaningless. The baby and the bathwater turned out to be harder to separate than the plumber expected.

Grievance Studies (2018)

Twenty-two years later, three academics – Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian – attempted a more systematic version of the Sokal experiment. Between 2017 and 2018, they wrote twenty papers and submitted them to peer-reviewed journals in what they called “grievance studies” fields: gender studies, queer studies, race studies, fat studies, and related disciplines.

The papers were designed to be absurd. One argued that dog parks are spaces of canine rape culture. Another proposed that men could reduce their transphobia by penetrating themselves with sex toys. A third was a section of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf rewritten in the vocabulary of contemporary critical theory.

By the time the hoax was revealed in October 2018, four papers had been published, three had been accepted but not yet published, six had been rejected, and seven were still under review. The hoaxers claimed vindication: peer-reviewed journals in these fields would publish anything that confirmed their ideological priors.

The counterarguments were immediate and, again, more interesting than the hoaxers expected. A 20% publication rate (four of twenty) is actually a fairly normal acceptance rate for academic journals. The journals that rejected six papers were doing exactly what the peer review system is supposed to do. The papers that were still under review were, by definition, still being reviewed. The hoax demonstrated that some journals in some fields have weak peer review – a claim that applies equally to many fields the hoaxers would not consider “grievance studies,” including medicine, psychology, and computer science.

But the deeper problem is the same one that plagued McAuley and Stewart. The hoaxers were smart. Pluckrose held a master’s in early modern studies. Lindsay had a PhD in mathematics. Boghossian was a philosophy professor at Portland State University. When they set out to write fake scholarship, they could not help writing competent fake scholarship. The dog park paper was absurd in its conclusions, but its methodology – field observation, qualitative coding, theoretical framing – was indistinguishable from legitimate qualitative research because the hoaxers knew how to do legitimate qualitative research.

They wanted to prove the game was rigged. What they also proved was that they were good at the game.

The Pattern

Three hoaxes. Three different fields. Three different decades. The same result every time.

The pattern is: a skilled practitioner, attempting to demonstrate that a field cannot distinguish quality from garbage, produces work that falls in the uncanny valley between the two. The work is fake in intent but real in execution. The hoaxer cannot make themselves incompetent enough to produce truly worthless work, because competence is a habit that does not switch off on command.

This is a genuine problem for the hoaxers, and none of them have adequately reckoned with it.

McAuley and Stewart wanted to prove that modernist poetry was meaningless. They proved that two talented poets, even working in bad faith, produce recognizable poetry. The medium resisted their contempt. Language, assembled by people who understand its rhythms, generates meaning whether the assembler intends it to or not.

Sokal wanted to prove that postmodernist philosophy was nonsense. He proved that a physicist engaging seriously with humanistic texts – even in parody – produces work that humanists recognize as engagement. The interdisciplinary conversation he mocked was real, even if his contribution to it was fraudulent.

Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian wanted to prove that grievance studies would publish anything. They proved that peer review is imperfect, which everyone already knew, and that talented writers can game imperfect systems, which is less a revelation about the systems than about the writers.

In each case, the hoax succeeded on its own terms. And in each case, the hoax also revealed something the hoaxers did not intend to reveal: that the distinction between “real” and “fake” intellectual work is not as stable as the hoaxers assumed.

What The Troll Reveals

In The Fires of History, I argue that the troll is an epistemological stress test. The troll probes the boundary between what a system claims to value and what it actually values. The result of the probe is always informative, but the information is rarely what the troll expected.

The intellectual hoax is the highest form of this practice. The hoaxer says: I will demonstrate that this field has no standards. And then, in the act of demonstration, the hoaxer reveals that the standards are real but porous, that the field’s knowledge-production mechanisms are imperfect but not empty, and that the hoaxer’s own expertise – the expertise required to construct a convincing fake – is evidence of the very competence the hoax was designed to deny.

Ern Malley is in the Australian literary canon. The Sokal affair is taught in philosophy of science courses. The Grievance Studies papers are cited in meta-scientific literature about peer review quality. The hoaxes became the thing they were meant to destroy.

There is a lesson here, and it is not the one the hoaxers wanted to teach. The lesson is: if you are skilled enough to fake something convincingly, you are skilled enough to have made it for real. The distinction between the two is intent, not quality. And intent is invisible in the finished product.

The troll cannot help being good. The art does not care why you made it.

This essay draws from The Fires of History, coming fall 2026.

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