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Stanley Fish, "Rhetoric"

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Stanley Fish, 1d way," my brother says. Stanley Fish nd small and big farmers ·ountry last year. Six years b. 1938 1 was $8.oo per hundred "This year it is $3.90 per l, I think to myself, after Stanley Eugene Fish was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up in ccount, not planting any- Philadelphia. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his Ph.D. in 1962 at Yale. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley and subsequently at Johns Hopkins University and at Duke University, where he was :k yard, stare at Los rosales professor of both English and law, chair of the English Department, and director of me to help her prune the the university press. He left Duke in 1998 to become dean of arts and sciences at the : carpet grass that is chok­ University of Illinois at Chicago. 'e Ramona tambien tenia Fish's earliest scholarly work focused on the Renaissance (with a book based on lexican grows flowers. If his dissertation on John Skelton's poetry in 1965) and on the work of Milton and of dirt, they use car tires, George Herbert. His first major work, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Roses are the Mexican' s :, how symbolic-thorns Lost" ( 1967), applies an early version of reader-response theory, arguing that Milton uses literary strategies to lead his readers to a sense of the sinfulness of pride, only nd Chicana have always to then "surprise" them by showing how they themselves have been prideful in their hings and the land. Again very reading of the poem. This approach shifts the critical focus from the idea that ds getting off the school meaning is in the text itself to the idea that meaning occurs as a result of the opera­ vork clothes, walking into tion of the text upon the reader. Fish's scholarly writing from this time forward is Marni, all six of us bend­ distinguished by his careful attention to literary theories, particularly those based on Iv our feet, under the earth language theories, such as reader-response, speech acts, and, later, deconstruction. ds. We cover them with In Surprised by Sin, Fish maintains that the "surprise" works in Paradise Lost erremotes on top of the because of Milton's goal of bringing the reader to self-consciousness about sin. But ,m being blown away by tes keep the freeze away. soon, in several articles later collected in Is there a Text in this Class?, The Authority e remove the plates, bare of Interpretive Communities (1980) and in a book, Self Consuming Artifacts: The , the elements. They sur- Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972), Fish generalizes his theory 1it hundreds of times the and shows that it applies to other works, indeed to all works of literature. The "arti­ ater them and hoe them. fact" of the literary work does not, he argues, contain its own meaning. The mean­ 1ines dry, rot, are plowed ing emerges as a result of the act of reading, which therefore ought to be the focus ecay, birth. The soil pre­ of the critic's attention. impregnated, worked on. Fish is himself one of the severest critics of the theory he put forward at this forms, renacimientos de time. In the introduction to Is there a Text in this Class?, he points out the flaw of his method and of much reader-response criticism, namely, that of presuming to know once how reading works in some universal sense (at least for all educated readers) and to be able to describe it. Moreover, he notes, in a book like Surprised by Sin, the critic assumes that the effects achieved are the effects intended by the author, which sim­ be again. ply returns the meaning or the responsibility for the meaning to the text itself. In the essays collected in Is there a Text in this Class?, Fish argues that the reader "cre­ ates" the text by deciding which of its features are relevant or significant. But how does the reader decide? Fish was not content (as were other reader-response critics) to allow mere individual preference to rule. Instead, he puts forward the enormously influential idea of the interpretive community (later to appear as "discourse commu­ nity" in rhetoric scholarship) that maintains the values and conventions that "always STANLEY FISH 1605 already" constrain its members as they come to the text. In answering the question principles of law e of whether there is a text in the class, Fish answers "no," if by "text" one means an be based on ultim1 object with a fixed and determinate meaning. Rather, the text is a creation of the and not absent. Fis community, for what is there is what a particular community agrees or is con­ we should adopt rar strained to see there. This means that any interpretation that makes sense or is per­ sition is just as unte suasive is so only because it arises within and is directed to a community that sees Interpretive systc or is willing to see the text through the same lens of assumptions about what counts occurs. They do no as literature, or even about what words and phrases may mean. This analysis im­ set of rules or princ plies, in its turn, that the proper business of criticism is to address and argue about but is of sufficient g the way the lens is or ought to be shaped-that is, the interpretive assumptions that ot) all fields of act one does or ought to apply. It also implies that the very definition of "literature" is though it may not t communally bound, and therefore that there is no such thing as a quintessentially way of thinking abo literary text. All texts, indeed, are "always already" under interpretation. by circumstances ar Fish's work during the succeeding decade elaborates these insights, examining Thomas Kuhn to a c the sources and criticizing the implications of "foundationalist" theory-namely, idea or way of seei "theory that promises to put our calculations and determinations on a firmer footing being argued for. Th than can be provided by mere belief or unjustified practice."' He sees the founda­ In his subsequent tionalist assumption operating widely, almost universally, as a belief that interpreta­ al)• Studies and Po tion must seek some underlying truth that is "really" there or at least some objective Speech, and It's a G basis for assessing our beliefs. Fish also takes up the question of what an antifoun­ print and electronic dational view of language and interpretation might be. The essays in Doing What quences of his basic : Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theo,)' in Literal)' and ious areas of public 1 Legal Studies ( 1989) address these issues. Here is what Fish says this title means: erary criticism is a hi I intend it to refer to the unreflective actions that follow from being embedded in a context effect political chang of practice. This kind of action-and in my argument there is no other-is anything but will occur because of natural in the sense of proceeding independently of historical and social formations; but use. This, Fish says, i once those formations are in place (and they always are), what you think to do will not be Fish has won aw calculated in relation to a higher law or an overarching theory but will issue from you as naturally as breathing? judging by the respon Thing as Free Speech Meaning, then, follows from the set of presuppositions that constitute or character­ philosophy should re.: ize the social formation (or the particular moment and its context) rather than from of them transcripts anything inherent in the words or sentences or other symbols that are used for com­ D'Souza) concern pt munication. Most importantly for Fish, there is no place to stand that is outside again, multiculturalis, some context and set of presuppositions. It is not possible, that is, to assess a given of the argument that a interpretation in an absolute way. Nor is it possible to articulate a theory that ac­ vironment of a colleg( counts for all of the features of context and thereby become completely self­ accomplish something conscious about the way one's interpretive acts are bound. This last point leads Fish are "of course" some to assert that theory (as in literary theory or philosophical method) has no con­ course" is determined sequences. ated, there will alway A further consequence of the antifoundationalist position is to recognize that al­ '>peech could really be though the set of interpretive principles in force at any time (Fish is thinking of offered for no reason. 1Fish, p. 14. •Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Nafllrally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Them)' in Liter· •Lief Carter, "There's Nr a,y and Legal St11dies(Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), p.321. (March 1994): p. 33. 2 Fish, p. ix. <www.unt.edu/lpbr/subpage i 1606 MODERN AND POSTMODERN RHETORIC 1 answering the question principles of law especially) may be arbitrary in some sense-that is, they cannot · by "text" one means an be based on ultimate reality or transcendent truth-they are nonetheless in force text is a creation of the and not absent. Fish insists that he is not arguing that there aren;t constraints, that 1unity agrees or is con­ we should adopt rampant relativism, or that all interpretations are personal. That po­ tt makes sense or is per­ sition is just as untenable, he argues, as the foundationalist position.
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