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Unit 6: Is There a Text In This Class—Stanley Fish: Analysis

(indeed, in the course of this essay I will be arguing that unintelligibility, in the strict or pure Notes
sense, is an impossibility), but that there are readers and hearers for whom the intelligibility of the
question would have neither of the shapes it had, in a temporal succession, for my colleague. It is
possible, for example, to imagine someone who would hear or intend the question as an inquiry
about the location of an object, that is, "I think I left my text in this class; have you seen it?" We
would then have an "Is there a text in this class?" and the possibility, feared by the defenders of the
normative and determinate, of an endless succession in numbers, that is, of a world in which
every utterance has an infinite plurality of meanings. But that is not what the example, however
it might be extended, suggests at all. In any of the situations I have imagined (and in any that I
might be able to imagine) the meaning of the utterance would be severely constrained, not after it
was heard but in the ways in which it could, in the first place, be heard. An infinite plurality of
meaning would be a fear only if sentences existed in a state in which they were not already
embedded in, and had come into view as a function of some situation or other. That state, if it
could be located, would be the normative one, and it would be disturbing indeed if the norm were
free-floating and indeterminate.
But there is no such state; sentences emerge only in situations, and within those situations, the
normative meaning of an utterance will always be obvious or at least accessible, although within
another situation that same utterance, no longer the same, will have another normative meaning
that will be no less obvious and accessible. (My colleague's experience is precisely an illustration).
This does not mean that there is no way to discriminate between the meanings an utterance ca
have in different situations, but that the discrimination will already have been made by virtue of
our being in a situation (we are never not in one) and that in another situation the discrimination
will also have already been made, but differently. In other words, while at any one point it is
always possible to order and rank "Is there a text in this class?" and "Is there a text in this class?"
(because they will always have already been ranked), it will never be possible to give them an
immutable once-and-for-all ranking, a ranking that is independent of their appearance or
nonappearance in situations (because it is only in situations that they do or do riot appear).
Nevertheless, there is a distinction to he made between the two that allows us to say that, in a
limited sense, one is more normal than the other: for while each is perfectly normal in the context
in which their literalness is immediately obvious (the successive contexts occupied by my colleague),
as things stand now, one of those contexts is surely more available, and therefore more likely to be
the perspective within which the utterance is heard, than the other. Indeed, we seem to have here
an instance of what I would call "institutional nesting": If "Is there a text in this class?", is hearable
only by those who know what is included under the rubric "first day of class," and if "Is there a
text in this class?", is hearable only by those whose categories of understanding include the concerns
of contemporary literary theory, then it is obvious that in a random population presented with the
utterance, more people would "hear" "is there a text in this class?", than "Is there a text in this
class?"; and, moreover, that while "Is there a text in this class?" could be immediately hearable by
someone for whom "Is there a text in this class?" would have to be laboriously explained, it is
difficult to imagine someone capable of hearing "Is there a text in this class?" who was not already
capable of hearing "Is there a text in this class." (One is hearable by anyone in the profession and
by most students and by many workers in the book trade, and the other in the profession who
would not think it peculiar to find, as I did recently, a critic referring to a phrase "made popular
by Lacan."). To admit as much is not to weaken my argument by reinstating the category of the
normal, because the category as it appears in that argument is not transcendental but institutional;
and while no institution is so universally in force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables
will be normal for ever, some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a great
many people the meaning they enable seem "naturally" available and it takes a special effort to see
that they are products of circumstances.
The point is an important one, because it accounts for the success with which an Abrams or an
E. D. Hirsch can appeal to a shared understanding of ordinary language and argue from that
understanding to the availability of a core of determinate meanings. When Hirsch offers "The air
is crisp" as an example of a "verbal meaning" that is accessible to all speakers of the language, and

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