My perspective is biased since I am in the Humanities and I have seen people bring up the Sokal hoax many times. So, for me, the three most important quotes are:
Social Text is not a refereed journal — if one of the founders was there and wanted it, it was probably going to go in.(...)
The hoax gave people who had never read any postmodernist discourse, and didn’t have the slightest idea of what postmodernists like Derrida or Lyotard or Foucault and others were trying to do, an easy way to dismiss that project. All they thought they had to do was to invoke the Sokal hoax. That would be, in their mind, a totally sufficient put-down.(...)
The hoax was not all particularly about science studies. It was about an academic culture. People in the humanities, especially people who were particularly ambitious, were aware that the fortunes of the sciences were rising in academia, and the fortunes of the humanities were declining. So to have a scientist sign on to poststructuralism was such a coup that they didn’t bother to read his article carefully.(...)
Social Text is not a refereed journal — if one of the founders was there and wanted it, it was probably going to go in.(...)
The hoax gave people who had never read any postmodernist discourse, and didn’t have the slightest idea of what postmodernists like Derrida or Lyotard or Foucault and others were trying to do, an easy way to dismiss that project. All they thought they had to do was to invoke the Sokal hoax. That would be, in their mind, a totally sufficient put-down.(...)
The hoax was not all particularly about science studies. It was about an academic culture. People in the humanities, especially people who were particularly ambitious, were aware that the fortunes of the sciences were rising in academia, and the fortunes of the humanities were declining. So to have a scientist sign on to poststructuralism was such a coup that they didn’t bother to read his article carefully.(...)