Steve Grossi
27 April 2006

WHY NO ONE’S A FAN OF STANLEY FISH

“Such is the language of all fish,” saidst thou;
“What they do not fathom is unfathomable.”
                                ZARATHUSTRA

Stanley Fish won the debate but “lacked the skill of a gentleman.” So goes a Kenyon College student paper’s assessment of the professor’s visit. But I haven’t been digging in back issues of the Kenyon Collegian. Fish himself found the article and published it in his second book.1 No one can fault him for lacking a sense of humor, but what may make some of his critics uncomfortable is how nonchalant Fish can seem while demolishing much of contemporary literary theory. In Is There a Text in this Class?, he dismantles the theoretical notion of an objective text and then audaciously claims that his argument cannot possibly have any consequences for the practice of literary criticism. He makes similar deconstructions in the realms of legal studies and university politics, crushing the pieties of both the Left and the Right. For these reasons, Geoffrey Harpham calls Fish, in the Times Literary Supplement, “the most quoted, the most controversial, most in-demand, and most feared English teacher in the world.”2 To be sure, “most feared English teacher” sounds like an oxymoron, but only to those on the outside. Fish’s work has implications on how we think about and practice reading, not just of books but of the law and the world. Fish himself talks of “theory fear,” the idea that if he is right and theory indeed has no consequences, then man is utterly adrift in the cosmos with no means of orienting himself. Of course, Fish is the first to point out that such a result may be reached only through a grave, if not perverse, misreading of his work. With a fatherly tone just short of credible, he assures us we have got nothing to worry about, while at the same time shifting the field dizzyingly.

In the pages that follow, I will examine the style embraced and fundamental arguments  made by Stanley Fish over the course of his careerif Terry Eagleton is right and Fish “has written the same book several times over,”3 it shouldn’t take long—paying attention to why he is considered so controversial. Then I will turn to two very different critical responses to Fish’s work alongside his defenses. Ultimately, I will have to leave my analysis rather open-ended—Fish is still very much alive and kicking, after all—though I will make some closing speculations on what the fact of Fish’s status as “controversial” and “dangerous” says about his literary community of which he is a part.

- FISH’S STYLE AND SUBSTANCE -

First and foremost, Fish has a penchant for taking hard line positions on controversial issues. More often than not, however, instead of making a case for one of the accepted stances on an issue, he will argue against the issue itself, alienating all of the established “sides.” The simplest example comes from his book There’s No Such thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too (1994), in which he debunks wholesale the arguments for and against restrictions on speech, arguing alternatively that neutral principles like Free Speech are always loaded in favor of whoever invokes them (more on this later). More fuss erupts when Fish applies this strategy to university issues such as campus speech codes and professionalism. He has more recently taken up the cause of the latter, enjoining his colleagues in several New York Times op-ed articles to “do your job,” which, for Fish, means teaching the discipline in question without concern for political activism or even the students’ own opinions. It isn’t hard to imagine the reactions of many professors being told what their  jobs are (despite the humorous titles Fish uses to deflate professorial political self-righteousness).4 Likewise for students hearing from Fish that “I couldn’t care less what my students think.”5 But part of what Fish does involves being a gadfly, a task for which he dramatically employs admittedly ironic and provocative slogans and titles. And one thing I find pleasurable (and difficult) about Fish’s writing is distinguishing between his levels of discourse. On an ironic level he will claim flat out that “neutral principles do not exist.” He will then clarify that, while plenty of people certainly talk at length of neutral principles, such principles are unsubstantiated; they gain substance only when we set boundaries (“We want Free Speech, but we don’t mean child pornography”) and in doing so we are engaging in politics and our principle is no longer neutral. Then he will stake his being in favor of a principle like Academic Freedom while at the same time he deconstructs it. But like his influence Thomas Hobbes, Fish has a strong distrust of abstraction, and many of his hyperbolic claims seem aimed at urging his targets to clarify what they mean by poem, genre, tolerance, or academic freedom. And in his typical (and sometimes frustrating) style of anticipating objections, Fish goes right ahead and shows how these principles will break down before the desired degree of specificity is reached.

There is some truth to Eagleton’s claim about Fish having written the same book several times, a fact which he readily admits in the brave afterword to a volume of critical essays on his work (Postmodern Sophistry). Fish’s strategy for reading—be it Paradise Lost or the Bill of Rights—launches from an epistemological perspectivism denying all claims to foundational or “first principles.” We can trace the story of Fish’s journey from Milton studies to legal scholarship along a coherent plot. His early work on Milton (Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 1967) comes out of a reader-response framework. Previous critics had challenged the reader-response style, arguing that some interpretations are not only better than others, but more correct. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley,6 for example, made such a claim negatively, arguing that certain styles of interpretations were born of “fallacies” and thus wrong. To defend reader-response, Fish dramatically turned the tables on the formalists by arguing in Interpreting the Variorum (1976) that there is nothing inside the text. That is, every form or structure supposedly “in” a text that could support an interpretation, from simple punctuation marks to aggregate motifs, depend for their significance upon the reader’s experience. A text is simply a collection of signs which are meaningless out of context—and we bring the context with us when we read (indeed, write) a text. A baseball fan, Fish mentions the following story as an analogy. Bill Klem, a famous umpire, took a long time to call this one pitch. The batter asked him “Well, was it a ball or a strike?”, to which Klem replied, “Sonny, it ain’t nothin’ till I call it.” “What the batter is assuming,” Fish explains, “is that balls and strikes are facts in the world and that the umpire's job is to accurately say which one each pitch is. But in fact balls and strikes come into being only on the call of an umpire.”7 Faced with the burden of explaining how it is that many “standard” interpretations have come about if not because they are the true, Fish postulated the idea of interpretive communities. What we are looking for will deeply influence what we find in a text, but what we look for is an extension of our experiences and education: in short, our community. Oftentimes the facts of our community are unconscious, so that we may come to see as natural or necessary the quite contingent links between structure and significance. Of course, critics have asked the obvious questions: “Where are these communities?”, “Who are members?”, and “How can we classify them?” But Fish qualifies (albeit 28 years later, though there are seeds in Interpreting the Variorum) that “the interpretive community is a device of interrogation, and what it promises and delivers is a method.”8 Much like the sociologist Max Weber’s “ideal types,” interpretive communities are idealizations, useful for explaining why it is that, to use an example of Fish’s, books XI and XII of Paradise Lost went from being considered odd men out to central texts of Milton’s epic in a short period following the second world war. Interpretive communities are not in the world in any sense that would lend itself to a taxonomy. I should mention also, in light of his claim that “theory has no consequences” that Fish’s thinking about interpretive communities is more sociology of literary criticism than literary theory proper. We may quarrel about his intentions, but Fish’s assertion that his work in Is There a Text in this Class? has no implications for the practice of criticism is accurate. After all, because our membership in any interpretive community is a contingent matter, we have no choice. Fish delimits his critical and theoretical work: “I may now be convinced that what I think about Paradise Lost is a function of my education, professional training, the history of Milton studies, and so on, but that conviction does not lead me to think something else about Paradise Lost or to lose confidence in what I think.”9

And just as tropes in poetry and calls in baseball come into existence only through the act of interpretation, so do legal principles like equality and fairness. Fish’s objection to so-called “neutral principles” is similar to his objection to anything “in the text.” They don’t mean anything, precisely because they are neutral. He offers the example of “tolerance,” an oft-invoked principle whose public detractors, if any, would be hard to find. Principles like tolerance, he contends, are defined by, and thus require, their opposites. Universal tolerance would require tolerating not only those who will oppose tolerance to the death, but those who, on the forum floor, will interrupt you to expound upon the virtues of, say, figgy pudding. Fish seems to suggest, perhaps taking a page from Foucault, that principles arise from discourse and discourses have boundaries that are defined politically. A discourse without boundaries (i.e. universal tolerance, free speech, etc.), in which everything was allowed, would be indistinguishable from noise.  He mentions an interesting moment in the Areopagetica in which Milton, having celebrated the merits of open publication and tolerance, qualifies: “Of course, I mean not tolerated popery, which as itself extirpates all religious and civil supremacies, and so itself should be extirpate.”10 Free speech must be preserved, but of course not for Catholics. In valuing faith over reason, they aren’t qualified to participate in our discourse, and should be extirpated. For Fish, Milton’s amendment serves as a model for all talk of principles. Of course, people invoke principles all the time, often to powerful rhetorical effect. “And that’s just it,” Fish would say, coming close to Hobbes’ fear of “war of all against all”: it is because principles are precisely not well-defined (as they claim to be), that we must mobilize them before our enemies do. In a Times article and epilogue to Trouble with Principle (1999) entitled “How The Right Hijacked the Magic Words,” Fish points out that social conservatives have taken command of the Left’s rhetorical principles like “equality” and “fairness” to argue against progressive policies like affirmative action. But elsewhere Fish, often himself accused of rhetoric, proposes an alternative to the rhetoric of principle: good ol’-fashioned justification. In the debate over affirmative action (which Fish supports), we should drop all talk of fairness and equality—thus hopefully denying our opponents that recourse—and argue instead that something is wrong in America (underrepresentation of minorities) and we need to fix it. Now the argument is about whether affirmative action works to solve our problem (something we can figure out through research), rather than about whether it is right (something we can debate until the homecoming of the proverbial cows.)

- WHY NO ONE’S A FAN -

As one might expect, it isn’t true that no one is a fan of Stanley Fish. H. Aram Veeser, the editor of The Stanley Fish Reader, along with many of its headnote contributors have plenty of praise for Fish. And even his critics must admit that Fish has certainly gotten the world of criticism talking. Of course, there are also those who possess what Veeser calls “Fish-hate”: mostly foundationalists who find Fish’s perspectivism a threat to (Fish would say “explanation of”) to their guiding principles.

And then there’s Terry Eagleton. Eagleton launches the most comprehensive single critique of Fish’s work, though he takes as his occasion a review of Fish’s Trouble With Principle (1999). In “The Estate Agent,” it can sometimes be hard to see the forest for the row of axes Eagleton has to grind,11 but he also makes some strong points which force us to rethink—and Fish to later clarify—some of his positions. The one to which Fish cedes the least ground is that “Fish cannot for the life of him understand how someone can be tolerant and committed at the same time.”12 One of the grounds on which Fish criticizes the rhetoric of tolerance is that universal tolerance would mean allowing arguments even against tolerance. Such an allowance, he contends, is a sign of weak conviction. But Eagleton sees middle-ground where Fish does not: between, for instance, consenting to racism and fighting to extirpate it. Fish would respond first by assuming Eagleton’s subscription to the “marketplace of ideas” theory that by allowing all arguments a voice, the best ones will inevitably win out. Fish denies such a theory outright by recognizing the contingency of history and the possibility that racism could very well win out under certain market conditions, to extend the metaphor. And while Fish does not go so far as to suggest anything like fines or imprisonment for members of racist organizations like the KKK, he does argue, again with a Hobbesian view of politics, that if the Klan is committed to harassing people by burning crosses on lawns, the courts should consider harassing the Klan perhaps by denying them rights to public demonstration. Fish’s argument seems to lend itself to the “slippery slope” rebuttal, but he demands that we see that this is how we have been doing justice all along. We deny pedophiles the pursuit of their happiness, we deny traitors the right to free speech (sharing secrets with our enemies), and we do this because it is necessary for the preservation of order, the state, and the people.

Eagleton also takes on Fish’s early work on the priority of belief (I have earlier called it context) in interpretation. Eagleton claims that Fish denies that we can inquire into the origin of our beliefs,13 but said claim falls flat in light of Fish’s doing just that.14 But Eagleton also accuses Fish of maintaining that “nothing in the world counts as evidence for your beliefs, since what we gullibly call the world is simply a construct of them.”15 Eagleton is on the right track here, but he misses the point. Beliefs, because they are contingent, beliefs can have explanations but not evidence. He is right to point out Fish’s emphasis on the primacy of belief, but that emphasis Fish will claim has no consequences. It isn’t our beliefs (about how the world should be) but rather our convictions (about which course of action to take) that matter because they are what can be tested. Moreover, as I alluded earlier, Eagleton also levels several unusual and unfair arguments against Fish. His diction curiously tends to label Fish as a kind of hyper-masculine figure.16 Perhaps this is in line with Eagleton’s painting of Fish as an imperialist, a critic who does not criticize the “actions of his own country,” and “who does not think a great deal of abroad and would be quite happy to see it abolished.”17 In his reply to Eagleton in the afterword for Postmodern Sophistry, Fish admits to being an isolationist, but unless he said something at a party I’ve not heard about, Eagleton’s latter claim is absurd. Fish may not get riled up about the same pressing issues as Eagleton, but neither should we expect him to, especially in light of his commitment to important social justice issues in the U.S.

Another notable criticism of Fish’s literary and theoretical work comes from Michael Bérubé in a moving essay entitled “There is Nothing Inside the Text, or Why No One’s Heard of Wolfgang Iser” (in Postmodern Sophistry). Bérubé recounts the Fish-Iser debate, claiming that Fish’s essay “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser” and the ensuing argument in the pages of critical journals contributed to Iser’s relative fading from the theory scene. But that’s not where the sentimentality lies. Bérubé largely agrees with Fish and concedes the utility of “interpretive communities,” but he asks a funny question: does Fish regret his theory? Bérubé points out how after Interpreting the Variorum, in which Fish deconstructed his own reader-response theory, he never seriously returned to literary criticism. In a paragraph from Professional Correctness, which Fish wrote fifteen years after Is There a Text in this Class?, Fish seems to wax nostalgic:
If no one any longer asks “What is the structure of this poem?” or “What is the intention of the author and has it been realized?” or “In what tradition does the poet enroll himself and with what consequences for that tradition?”, something will have passed from the earth and we shall read the words of what was once literary criticism as if they were the remnants of a lost language spoken by alien beings. (70)

Early Fish had argued against the merits of each of the questions he poses here, but Bérubé wonders if Fish realized here that he had “all along been of the devil’s party without knowing it (and remember, for Miltonists, unlike Blakeans, this cannot be a good thing.)”18 In light of Fish’s often sociological accounts of interpretation, I immediately think of Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life whose sociological explanation of religion’s power to captivate, without debunking religion seriously hampered its impulse in anyone who took him seriously.

- CLOSING -

As I hope to have showed, Stanley Fish indeed has his fans, though some like myself are more reluctant. His arguments are powerful, though we might see his oeuvre as a series of iterations, in different fields, of the same basic point: if interpretation is a party, then we bring the beer. That is to say, interpretation requires reference to a context in which signs have meaning; and it is each reader, rather than the text, who brings such a context to the act of interpretation. In retrospect, what makes Fish so controversial in the field of literary studies may be his refusal to stick within the field. His notion of “interpretive communities” is one of the first and finest formulations in what it is surely too early to call the sociology of criticism. But, as Bérubé suggests Fish eventually came to realize, perhaps his unique brand of deconstruction can do more good in the spheres of legal studies and university politics. His readings of Milton shine, and in that light we must wonder why Fish never returned to criticism. (Was the barrier between his theoretical and critical personae too thin to hold?) Yet, overriding any suggestion of an uncertain nostalgia, we have Fish’s exuberance. He is above all a strong theorist, strong enough to take on theory itself without tumbling into paradox.

WORKS CITED

Eagleton, Terry. “Stanley Fish.” Figures of Dissent. Verso, 2003. p. 171-9.
Fish, Stanley.
            —“Interpreting the Variorum.” Critical Inquiry. (1976)
            —Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press, 1980.
            —There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s A Good Thing, Too. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
            —Trouble with Principle. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
            —“Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser.” Diacritics11.1 (1981): 2-13.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Constraints, Not Consequences.” Times Literary Supplement. 9-15 March 1990.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago UP Journals, June 15, 1985.
Olson, Gary and Lynn Worshan. Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise. State University of New York Press, 2004.
Paumgarten, Nick. “Dept. of Super Slo-Mo: No Flag on the Play,” The New Yorker, 20 Jan. 2003, p. 32.
Veeser, H. Aram. The Stanley Fish Reader. Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Fish, Stanley.” Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. <http://litguide.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/view.cgi?eid=101&query=stanley%20fish>
Fish, Stanley. “Affirmative Action and the SAT.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 2. (Winter, 1993-1994), p. 83.
Olson, Gary. Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric. State University Press of New York, 2002.
Roskill, Mark. “A Reply to John Reichert and Stanley Fish.” (in Critical Response) Critical Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 2. (Winter, 1979), pp. 355-357.
Said, Edward. “Response to Stanley Fish.” (in On Professionalism) Critical Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 2. (Dec., 1983), pp. 371-373.
“Stanley Fish Reels in a School of Black Scholars.” (in News and Views) The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 30. (Winter, 2000-2001), pp. 44-46.