Stanley Fish
In this profession, you are ahead of the game if you have an idea. if you have an idea and a half, you are in rarefied territory; and if you have two ideas, you are Wittgenstein. I am not Wittgenstein; I have had only one idea. It has taken various forms, but basically, the idea is that the binary distinctions within which we ordinarily reason (objective/subjective, true/false, literal/figurative, core/periphery, and the like) do not as we often think mark an opposition between something given and available directly—the bare facts, the minimal linguistic meaning of a text, the bottom line—and something mediated, secondary, derivative, added, suspect. Rather, in each opposition both poles emerge within the medium (mediation) of assumptions, presuppositions, settled practices, long-established institutions, authoritative professions, unchallenged (but not unchallengeable) definitions, culturally privileged histories, deeply in-place goals and values—what Adorno terms the “realm of prevailing purposes.” “Prevailing” means prevailing now, not for all time. The overarching and totalizing narrative within which we are scripted characters can and does change and the routes of possible change are included in its landscape, but for so long as the narrative and its sub-plots are relatively stable, locally or generally, judgments of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, better and worse, to the point and beside the point, real and illusory can confidently be made and supported by reasons. It is just that those reasons are reasons—have the force of reasons—by virtue of the prevailing realm within which they are intelligible and even obvious. That is, they are not just reasons, reasons that would be honored as such no matter what purposes or goals or norms are in place. They therefore have a relative status and force—relative to the status and force reasons would have if they were independent of any culturally delimited normative regime—but in the absence to us (not, presumably to God) of any such free-standing reasons, they are what we have and they are sufficient; not wholly sufficient as they would be if they could resolve matters once and for all, but sufficient to the extent that they enable us to make sense of things, if only for a while. You can always say of something that it is true or false, correct or incorrect, on target or off the map, certainly the case or certainly not the case and you can always support your judgement. What you can’t say when your judgment is challenged that it holds true in all conceivable (and presently inconceivable) alternative worlds. But we don’t live in alternative worlds. We live in this one; or, rather, in the world given to us by whatever realm of purposes currently presides over our thoughts and actions; and in that world we can at once and without contradiction affirm the antifoundationalist insight that nothing we see, say or do is tethered to a bottom-line reality and still perform in normative ways that foundationalists claim are available only if we believe as they do.
So that, in a brief, waiting-to-be-filled-in form is the idea. I am not today going to defend it or elaborate it or respond to the objections that have been brought against it or acknowledge the predecessors and contemporaries from whom I have borrowed. I want, rather, to note as a matter of personal and professional history, the centrality of Critical Inquiry to its emergence and development. Critical Inquiry was and is the perfect venue for my ambitions by virtue of its own ambition—to present arguments that extend beyond analyses of particular texts and address themselves to the largest and most general questions one might ask: What is literature? What is a text? What, if anything, constrains interpretation? In the ordinary course of things, these and related questions have already been answered or, to be more precise, answers to them have been presupposed, and the business of literary description, analysis, and evaluation proceeds without undue theoretical anxiety. But theoretical anxiety and theoretical controversy are what the editors of Critical Inquiry wanted to provoke from the beginning. Every essay published was an invitation to respond and the invitations were almost always accepted with the result that the traditional stand- alone essay was replaced by dialogue and by dialogue that often expanded to include more and more participants. In effect a Critical Inquiry author always entered the fray in medias res, as I did in my initial appearance in the journal’s inaugural year. The piece was titled “Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader,” and, as footnote 1 explains, I was writing in response to Rader’s response, made in Critical Inquiry and in a volume of the English Institute papers, to my first theoretical effort, “Literature in the Reader,” published in New Literary History, the other new “big idea” journal. At the time, Rader was my colleague at Berkeley, someone I played softball with, someone with whom I had a good, if not close, relationship. And yet we went at it as if we had never met and inhabited completely different worlds. We had been transported from a shared local geography to the abstract, realm of scholarship and criticism where we jousted on invisible fields with words.
Two years later I turned on the position for which I fought so strenuously in my debate with Rader and announced my about face in, where else, Critical Inquiry. In “Interpreting the Variorum,” I abandoned the categories of the text and the reader and introduced the concept of “interpretive community” (corresponding more or less to Adorno’s prevailing realm of purposes, Kuhn’s paradigm, Bourdieu’s habitus, Polanyi’s tacit knowledge, MacIntyre’s well developed practice, Wittgenstein’s life world), a solvent in which texts and readers were no longer independent entities with independent shapes but community entities whose shapes were extensions of the communities procedures, protocols, and values. About this time I was moving away from literary studies and towards the law, and, as if on cue, Critical Inquiry invited me to participate in a multi-day conference featuring everyone I had ever heard of where I responded to a paper written by Ronald Dworkin, legal theory’s leading light. That first entry in the Dworkin/Fish exchange soon appeared in Critical Inquiry where readers could enjoy the spectacle (or was it a farce?) of a legal theorist doing literary criticism and a literary critic replying by doing legal theory. Four more exchanges spanning ten years followed and when it was all over I had a new career, courtesy of Critical Inquiry. (A retrospective on the Fish/ Dworkin debate is currently in press.)
With sixteen or so appearances, I took to referring to Critical Inquiry as “my publisher,” although in the past two decades my submissions have slowed. (The most recent substantive essay is “Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter.”) Nevertheless I will always feel that the journal and I have flourished together and given the vigor and excitement its pages still breathe, I have hopes.
Stanley Fish is the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
In the Moment 