Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
The Politics of Truth
(on Stanley Fish's Save the World on Your Own Time [New York: Oxford UP, 2008])
by Robin J. Sowards | ns 71-72
The title of Stanley Fish's newest book—Save the World on Your Own Time—is a shamelessly hectoring apostrophe that seems least likely to appeal to the very people it addresses. Fish, fresh from his adventures in the adminisphere, here seems to feed the Horowitzers' bonfire, fueling the fantasy of a faculty hell-bent on "liberal indoctrination." But his reasoning is that "it is precisely when teachers offer themselves as moralists, therapists, political counselors, and agents of global change rather than as pedagogues that those who are on the lookout for ways to discredit higher education (often as a preliminary to taking it over) see their chance" (14). So the rebuke to the left aims to defend us against the right, and Fish thus occupies what has become his familiar role as the anti-foundationalist antagonist of all sides. His main line of attack follows, as he says, in the footsteps of "Aristotle, Kant, [and] Cardinal Newman," arguing that universities are in "the pursuit-of-truth business" and should not be subject to any constraints foreign to that business (15, 20). But Aristotle, Kant, and Newman are very strange bedfellows for Fish, given that they are foundationalism incarnate. Passing panegyrics to Rorty aside, Save the World seems in this way often to roam very far from the ideas for which Fish is best known, and one is left wondering whether the arch-skeptic has suddenly found Enlightenment.
Save the World makes it difficult to say. The book is mostly culled from pieces previously published in venues like the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it has both the periodic pithiness and the intellectual shagginess characteristic of such pieces. Fish's bluntness is sometimes put to compelling use, as in his claim that "All composition courses should teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else," a suggestion whose viability he substantiates with ingenious practical teaching suggestions (40-9). But the book is also full of inconsistencies and equivocations. For example, a principal aim of the book is to pry the academic away from the political, and to show that the distinction holds even in tricky cases. So, early in the book, he argues:
I'm not saying that there is no connection at all between the successful practice of ethical, social, and political virtues and the course of instruction listed in the college catalogue; it's always possible that something you come across or something a teacher says may strike a chord that sets you on a life path you might not otherwise have chosen. But these are contingent effects, and as contingent effects they cannot be designed and shouldn't be aimed at. (It's not a good use of your time to aim at results you have only a random chance of producing.) (13)
It's true enough that moral improvement would be a contingent effect of teaching, not a necessary one, in the sense that it won't necessarily happen in every case that a given act of teaching will result in the moral improvement of a given student. But, unless you have the good fortune to be omnipotent, this is equally true of everything else you do; so moral improvement isn't uniquely hampered in this respect. No amount of ingenious teaching will absolutely guarantee that a student learns, but Fish rightly thinks that it's part of our job to aim for that contingent effect (18-19). The contingency of learning is a salutary reminder that it is ultimately the student's responsibility, not the teacher's, to learn something—a task that the teacher can assist the student in performing but cannot perform on his or her behalf. But that doesn't mean that teaching is not worth doing.
Fish follows up this dubious argument several pages later by flatly contradicting it with an even more dubious argument, claiming that there is "no relationship whatsoever" between "academic questions" about John Kerry and "political questions" about John Kerry (25). Since both sets of questions are questions about John Kerry, there's obviously some relationship between them, so Fish's claim here is patently false. Such inconsistencies and equivocations make it difficult to extract a consistent argumentative core from Save the World. Ultimately, the book advocates a variant of Kant's and Newman's arguments about the university: that it should pursue knowledge as an end in itself and not be subordinated to any practical aim, including moral improvement (Kant, Conflict 7:19-20, Newman, Idea 106-108 and "Tamworth," passim). Fish's contribution, on this reading, largely lies with his applying these arguments to recent controversies, such as Larry Summers being fired for saying girls can't do math (he deserved it, since a president's job is to make the institution look good [92-3]), Ward Churchill being fired for saying that when you hit people they sometimes hit you back (his private opinions are none of the university's business [84-6]), and David Horowitz hoping to get everyone fired who doesn't think private vice can be aggregated into public virtue (he must be prevented from meddling so [120-2]). But to align Fish with Kant and Newman seems to put him suddenly at odds with the anti-foundationalism of almost everything else he's ever written: for Kant, the nature of the university is founded on the nature of human reason, and for Newman, the nature of the university is founded on the nature of God's creation. Perhaps by retracing his steps we can discover how he ended up with such unlikely allies.
Fish's most influential views began to emerge in his second book, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967). The basic interpretive problem the poem poses is that Milton's narrator announces at the beginning that its aim is to "justify the ways of God to men" (I.26), but the poem proceeds straightaway to a description of Satan that readers have long found appealing—much more so than either the stern theology of Milton's God or milquetoast Adam's conclusion that "to obey is best, / And love with fear the only God" (XII.561-2). Such considerations led William Blake to declare in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it" (71). Fish ingeniously eludes this Romantic sympathy for the devil by arguing that Satan is supposed to draw our sympathy at first only so that we can later recognize its sinfulness and repent of it, thereby "re-creat[ing] in the mind of the reader...the drama of the Fall" (Surprised 1). The meaning of the poem is thus neither in a hidden heresy nor in a declared orthodoxy, but in the reader's movement from the one to the other. Fish's reading of Milton directs our attention away from the text as an autonomous object and towards what that text does to a reader.
He extends this approach in his next book, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (1972). The book's explicit project is an historical study of works that aim to disturb and to transform their readers (3). Artifacts also puts into practice "a general principle of literary criticism [that] the proper object of analysis is not the work, but the reader" (4). But who exactly is "the reader"? Fish wants to avoid the conclusion that "the reader" is just an inflationary label for Fish himself. If his reading were just an account of his own "personal and idiosyncratic" response (407), then he would be vulnerable to the charge of "relativism" from Wimsatt and Beardsley: criticism would simply be replaced by navel-gazing autobiography (Verbal Icon 21). Fish thus finds himself in a position analogous to Kant's in his first Critique: he wants to make a "Copernican turn" towards the subject, but without going over into skepticism or solipsism (Bxvi-xviii). And his solution bears a family resemblance to Kant's account of the conditions of possibility of experience since Fish's conception of "the reader" tries to capture what is objective in the subject by characterizing the responses that all "informed" readers will share (Artifacts 406). The truly Kantian solution would be to follow Chomsky's "Copernican turn" towards language as a mental capacity: since this mental capacity, the "knowledge of language" that underlies any particular use of language, is universal, Chomskyan linguistics would permit Fish to make claims about the language of a text that are mind-internal but still true of all readers. But Fish finds such an approach too restrictive. He wants to expand the knowledge the reader must have to include the relevant knowledge of literature and its conventions (406).
Everything Fish has written subsequently (except perhaps for this book) unfolds the consequences of his turn away from the Kantian option. He commits himself to this path in Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), where he rejects Chomskyan linguistics entirely, arguing that the project of modern linguistics is wrong-headed because there are no descriptive facts about language that are prior to interpretation (267). Fish's refutation of the discipline of linguistics ends up missing the mark both because he misunderstands Chomsky's views and because he shows no acquaintance whatsoever with scholarly literature in linguistics beyond one book of Chomsky's. It's a bit like someone thinking they've demolished all of literary study by raising a few objections to The Mirror and the Lamp. Fish overplays his hand in part because his "informed reader" can only become informed through pre-existing social institutions, entities that he refers to as "interpretive communities." Once he's committed himself to the idea that social facts are conditions of possibility of interpretive acts, he has to deny the Kantian and Chomskyan claims to universality. Fish still doesn't want to adopt a total subjectivism or skepticism in which there are no grounds for arguing that one interpretation is wrong and another is right. But whereas Kant and Chomsky remain in the orbit of objectivity, Fish veers toward subjectivity, seeking all the while to avoid a crash-landing into outright relativism.
His main bulwark against relativism in later books such as Doing What Comes Naturally (1989) is to maintain that what counts as objectivity is constrained by the interpretive community (25-6). This does not mean that there are no standards at all, only that all standards are local rather than universal and immutable. But it does mean that there is nothing that all interpretive communities will have in common. Something like the principle of non-contradiction would seem like a good candidate for a shared principle, and one can find many arguments in the philosophical tradition to support such a view. But as Fish puts it in Professional Correctness (1995), "An analysis of contract law that foregrounded its contradictions would be embarrassing to its project only if the goal of that project were to be philosophically consistent. But that is not the goal of any project except for the project of philosophy itself" (103). One would hope that philosophers aren't the only ones who aspire to consistency. But Fish's point is just that some kinds of practices are subject to conflicting demands, and it is perfectly possible that the best way to meet conflicting demands is with a practice that is logically inconsistent, now satisfying one side, now the other. Such an account of the law, for example, will not appeal to anyone who imagines that the legal system is absolutely rational and fair. But the fact that the conclusion is disappointing doesn't make it false.
Fish's account of interpretive communities does, however, face some serious problems. One is the problem of change: if our actions are always conditioned by existing practices, then it's not clear how those practices could ever change, since we'd have to presuppose them even to act against them. An appealing solution is to say that the overlap between interpretive communities allows us to question one from the standpoint of another. But Fish denies that this is possible: either you must adopt the assumptions of the practice you claim to critique, or, being outside of those assumptions, you will be unintelligible to the practitioners you seek to persuade (PC 106). The best solution Fish has produced is that practices somehow involve constant change, that "an interpretive community is an engine of change," always both grounding and revising itself (Doing 156). His point seems to be that it is possible to adopt a set of assumptions in order to undertake a particular task whose outcome requires one (afterwards) to revise those assumptions (150-1). But this is only possible if the task is not entirely conditioned by existing practices, and even the tiniest sliver of unconditioned practice makes Fish's account crumble, since it opens the possibility of action outside of conditions or of interpretive communities affecting one another, both of which Fish denies. Moreover, if interpretive communities are themselves engines of change, then it's not clear in what sense they maintain a stable identity. In order for us to say that a practice changed, rather than one practice being replaced by a different practice, we would have to be able to identify something that persists between its initial state and its changed state. But if it is the essential nature of practices to be constantly in flux, then successive states will have nothing in common with which to identify them.
The change problem is particularly interesting because Fish's recent work aims precisely to change our existing practices. In PC Fish argues that literary study would cease to exist in the unlikely event that it actually became interdisciplinary (19, 139-40). But why wouldn't we just count whatever we happened to be doing as "literary study"? The very same problem arises with the account Fish gives of the university in Save the World. If it's true that some professors spend class time trying to indoctrinate students into their political views (Fish provides no real evidence that this actually happens), then indoctrination is clearly part of current practices. And if it is part of current practices, how can it be something foreign intruding on what ought to be academic? Shouldn't what counts as academic, on Fish's view, just be whatever we're in the habit of doing when we're on the clock? Beyond the appeal to "the pursuit-of-truth business" (20), Fish specifies that:
You know you are being academic (rather than therapeutic or political or hortatory) when the questions raised in your classroom have the goal of achieving a more accurate description or of testing a thesis; you know that you are being (or trying to be) something else when the descriptions you put forward are really stepping stones to an ideological conclusion (even one so apparently innocuous as "we should respect the voices of others"). (169, emphasis added)
In other words, the academic is inner-directed: it does not subordinate itself to any external end, however virtuous. Such a position works just fine for Kant and Newman, but for Fish it causes real problems. If no enterprise has an essential nature (if its only warrant is the fact of "interpretive communities," or if it is an "engine of change"), then it cannot be essentially inner-directed—it isn't essentially anything. It just is whatever people who do it do.
This puts Fish in a sticky position. He either has to convert to foundationalism of some sort, or he has to argue that we should pretend to be foundationalist when talking to outsiders, even if we aren't. The foundationalist turn in Save the World does enable Fish to give some good advice for how to handle legislators, parents, and others who might seek to interfere with (or refuse to support) the academic enterprise:
[S]tand up for [academic] values—for intellectual analysis of questions that may never have a definitive or even a useful answer, for research conducted just because researchers find certain problems interesting, for wrestling with puzzles only five hundred people in the whole world are eager to solve—and when those values are dismissed or scorned, challenge the scorner to exhibit even the slightest knowledge of what really goes on in the classroom or the laboratory; and when he or she is unable to do so, ask, "Is that the way you run your business, by pronouncing on matters of which you are wholly ignorant?" (104)
In other words, the most pragmatic strategy is to not be a pragmatist. Kant is surely right that what we should ultimately want, especially in the name of liberatory politics, is to encourage our students' autonomy, from us as much as from anything else. "Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding!" should still be our motto (PP 8:35). If we loudly, persistently, and unrepentantly declare ourselves for Reason and Truth, then we will have framed the debate in such a way that our opponents will appear to be what they actually are: not people who want to reform rational inquiry, but people who are opposed to rational inquiry. And the more we put them in the position of explicitly defending ignorance and evil, the harder they'll find it to hawk their wares to ordinary people, who are rational by nature.
Works Cited
Aristotle. Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. 1984. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Bollingen Ser. 71.2. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.
Blake, William. Blake's Poetry and Designs. Ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: Norton, 2008.
Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT P, 1965.
Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 1967. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
---. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature. 1972. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1994.
---. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.
---. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.
---. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. 1787. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
---. Practical Philosophy. Ed. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
---. The Conflict of the Faculties. 1798. Trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1674. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey P, 1962.
Newman, John Henry. "The Tamworth Reading Room." 1841. Discussions and Arguments of Various Subjects. 8th ed. London: Longman Green, 1891.
---. The Idea of a University. 1852. Ed. Charles Frederick Harrold. New York: Longman Green, 1947.
Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Affective Fallacy." The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1947.
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