stanley fish theory hope

8/9/2019 Stanley Fish Theory Hope

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/stanley-fish-theory-hope 1/6

Theory’s HopeAuthor(s): Stanley FishSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 2004), pp. 374-378Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421136 .

Accessed: 10/05/2014 00:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical

Inquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 147.96.1.236 on Sat, 10 May 2014 00:20:08 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421136?origin=JSTOR-pdf






http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421136?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress



Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004)

2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/04/3002–0013$10.00. All rights reserved.

374

1. William Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm,

Painted by Sir George Beaumont,” “Poems, in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800 –1807, ed.

Jared Curtis (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), l. 15, p. 267.

Theory’s Hope

Stanley Fish

The wonderfully varied statements written for the Critical Inquiry sym-

posium contain moments that are elegiac, expansionist, and deflationary.

In the elegiac moments the writer invokes a fairly recent past (often the late

sixties and early to middle seventies) when the practice of theory seemed

to promise great cultural and political advances. In the expansionist mo-

ments (often accompanied by bitter reflections on the political situation inthe United States today) the observation that theory’s political thrust has

been blunted and even smothered by its academic success—that is, by its

professionalization—is followed by a call to breakout of the academy’s con-

fines so that theory can once again speak to a larger audience and offer itself

as a vehicle for large social reforms. In the deflationary moments (often in

tandem with the elegiac moments) the whole thing is declared to have been

a mistake (one remembers Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas” and “the light

that never was”),1 and we are advised to rein in our ambitions and limit our

claims to those that are intelligible and achievable in disciplinary terms.I am with the deflators and especially with Jim Chandler when he tells

us how he initially wrote a “statement [that] addressed everything but the

academic realm” before remembering “the origins of Critical Inquiry inthe

era of Watergate and how it made its difference by not setting out toproduce

a critique of that moment” (p. 360). In his remarks, he said, “I tried to

suggest how we might do it again,” where by “it” he means working “toward

a more rigorous account of what a discipline is” (p. 360). I believe that any







Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004 375

such account must be relentlessly internal and immanent and must attend

not to some comprehensive scheme of all the disciplines but to the partic-

ular history and historically emergent aims of each. As Chandler observes(correctly, I think), the totality of disciplines should be thought of not as “a

set of parallel functions . . . but as a network of relatively autonomous prac-

tices in asymmetrical relation to one each other” (p. 360). This does not

mean that disciplineshavenothing to say to one anotherbut thatthe interest

one discipline might have in what is being said in the precincts of another

will be a function of the first discipline’s already-in-place investments and

goals and not of some ambition or general effectivity all disciplines share

or should share. To a great extent (and this is my observation with which

Chandler may or may not agree) disciplines are linked only by the accidentof their being housed in the same university structures. This cohabitation

has not been the result of design and surely not of any philosophicaldesign;

it just happened as a consequence of the fortuitous success of various in-

terests in securing space, research support, and a piece of the curriculum.

It follows then that any attempt to find in this ramshackle collection an

underlying unity either of practice or purpose is at once misguided and

quixotic. Interdisciplinarity—as a project rather than as the mere fact of

occasional and opportunistic borrowings—is just a nonstarter.

I do not intend this as a merely negative statement, for I believe that itis by focusing narrowly that we have the best chance both of getting it right

and of speaking with power to the constituencies we do not directly address

and, indeed, refrain from addressing. And I am sure that when we expand

our focus and broaden our aims we lose whatever rigor we might becapable

of achieving. This is for me the point of Bill Brown’s wry comment on those

essays “we’ve all read . . . where Freud and Foucault, Baudrillard and Booth

are each and all cited as sources of analytic authority without concern for

the incompatibilities among them” (pp. 455–56). The unconcern these es-

says display is with the claims made by the theorists cited, claims that arisefrom the particular problems they set out to solve, problems that are urgent

and perspicuous in the context of some specific project—psychoanalytic

theory, speech-act theory, political theory, film theory, economic theory,

whatever. As long as you maintain the focus of that specificity, this or that

proposition can be assessed and interrogated: Does Rawls’s political liber-

alism really do justice to the claims of religious sectarians? Does Foucault’s

analysis of power provide a basis for criticizing power’s effects? Is Wayne

S t a n l e y F i s h teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His most recent

books are The Trouble with Principle (1999) and How Milton Works (2001).







376 Stanley Fish / Theory’s Hope

Booth’s account of irony sufficiently straightforward? But if you have your

eye on a larger horizon—a horizon so large that it barely knows boundaries,

never mind laws of entailment—almost anything youcome acrosswillseemrelevant and capable of being plugged in unproblematically. Borrow a little

of the Freudian model there, a little Habermas or Apfel here, and whenever

you need a transition—say from the mirror stage to global capitalism or

terrorism—throw in one of the more elastic bits from Rorty or Zizek or,

better still, go on for a while about performativity. It’s all great fun, easier

than falling off a log (and with the same problem of traction), pertinent to

any point you care to make, and therefore pertinent to no point whatsoever.

This kind of work—massive, encyclopedic, (rhetorically) magisterial—

is as empty as it is ambitious and fails where it most wants to succeed: as apredictor and shaper of the future. The reason is given by Joel Snyder: “Ab-

sent the motivation of having to come to terms with changes taking place

on the ground (or of projecting effective means for bringing off such

change), there is little point to theorizing and few, if any, dividends” (pp.

477–78). That is to say, truly effective theorizing occurs within disciplinary

contexts and in response to the urgent questions those contexts have pre-

cipitated—what Snyder means, I think, by “on the ground.” Truly gaseous

theorizing occurs when those contexts have been left behind and we ascend

to the aery heights of the really big (and stupefyingly dull) questions. Recallthe books that really set you thinking and you will see that for the most part

they were sharp and brilliant considerations of issues narrowly conceived,

in my case Michael Walzer on the revolution of the saints, J. L. Austin on

how to do things with words, William Empson on Milton’s God, Magali

Larson on the rise of professionalism, Roberto Unger on liberalism, H. L. A.

Hart on the concept of law, and, most recently, Jeremy Waldron on Locke

and religion. What characterizes each of these books—and everyone will

have his or her list—is a determination to plow a relatively small patch of

ground, tilling the same furrows over and over until there is, for the timeat least, nothing left to be traced out. Of course, as a reader of such books

you have no obligation to confine your imagination as their authors confine

theirs and every right to think beyond the boundaries they so carefully ad-

here to. The wonder is that your ability to be expansive (and even imperial)

in your thoughts is directly proportional to the measured restraint (some-

times of an exuberant kind) they unfailingly display. Because they stay

small—that is, take something, not everything, for their subject—you are

able to enlarge on the conclusions they have so painstakingly reached; you

can go somewhere because they have not gone everywhere. Harry Haroo-tunian complains that theory has been reduced to furthering “professional

proficiency . . . within the borders of the academy” and by limiting itself to







Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004 377

“interpreting the world . . . has been removed from any possibility of chang-

ing it” (p. 400). No, the possibility of our changing it—or at least furnishing

some of the formulations that might be adopted and adapted by thosewhose business it is to change it—depends on the nearsighted situatedness

of those who remain within the borders of the academy. A “discourse . . .

that speaks to the world outside the academy” will only emerge if we remain

inside and produce the delimited analyses that just might get taken up by

someone with a project a million miles from ours.

This does not mean that there is nothing in general for theory to do or

nothing general to say about it. It is still possible to speak of theory and to

practice it. Sander Gilman gives us the definition: “the self-consciousaware-

ness of the methodological approaches that one uses” (p. 384). This aware-ness, which amounts to the historicization of the routine practices we once

regarded as the inevitable fruits of a teleological progress, can take, and has

taken, two forms. In one of those forms we have a new object of study,

variously called the given, the assumed background, the taken-for-granted,

what goes without saying, and (with quotation marks) the “natural.” The

project is to raise to the level of analytical attention formative structures

that lie beneath the surface of life and give it its shape; and the pleasure

(provided for us by a line of theoreticians from Propp to Weber to Levi-

Strauss to Goffman to Bourdieu) is the pleasure of making visible the work of so many hitherto invisible hands. It is a vast project, and it is without any

natural end because its materials—the sedimented conventions that pro-

duce everyday life—are continually being replenished by history. The turn

(and the second form) occurs when the insight that commonsense norms

rather than guiding human activity are its ever revisable products becomes

the basis of a criticism of just about everything under the rubric of the in-

authentic. Here too there is a project—the demonstration, serially repeated,

that the cultural systems within which we live and moveand haveour beings

are not natural but constructed and therefore imposed. It is this last—“andtherefore imposed”—that is at once incoherent and the source of theory’s

politicization. It is incoherent because the substitution of the constructed

for the natural was supposed to have removed the natural as a baselinecate-

gory; but when constructed becomes an accusation—you say it’s merely con-

structed—the natural is restored to just that position. The advantage of the

incoherence is that it gives theorists an extra-academic assignment all too

readily accepted by many, the assignment of going out into the world and

exposing constructedness—read hegemony, power, illegitimate authority

(there is no other kind)—wherever it is found, and because the initial moveis to replace essence with history it will be found everywhere. No end of

work for theorists to do, or at least pretend to do, and no end to the over-







378 Stanley Fish / Theory’s Hope

blown hopes—we will tell you the truth and the truth we tell you shall set

you free—in whose wreckage the Critical Inquiry symposiumwasmounted.

Does this mean, as Hillis Miller fears, that we should just teach Victoriannovels in an “apolitical way” as the republic burns? No, it means that we

should attend, as most of us always have, to the political (and economic and

social) concerns that find their way into these novels and treat them seri-

ously as components in an aesthetic structure. But taking those concerns

seriously in that sense does not require taking them seriously in the sense

that we proceed immediately to political action and indeed requires that we

resist the temptation to do so. (Bill Brown: “the will to relevance can fore-

close analytical description on behalf of prescription”[p.454].)Politicsdoes

not need our professional help; texts do.

This content downloaded from 147.96.1.236 on Sat, 10 May 2014 00:20:08 AMAll bj t t JSTOR T d C diti




stanley fish theory hope

Documents