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

that is precisely what he heard. He has not misread the text (this is not an error in calculation) but Notes
mis-pre-read the text, and if he is to correct himself he must make another (pre) determination of
the structure of interests from which her question issues. This, of course, is exactly what he does
and the question of how he does it is a crucial one, which can best be answered by first considering
the ways in which he didn't do it.
He didn't do it by attending to the literal meaning of her response. That is, this is not a case in
which someone who has been misunderstood clarifies her meaning by making more explicit, by
varying or adding to her words in such a way as to render their sense inescapable. Within the
circumstances of utterance as he has assumed them her words are perfectly clear, and what she is
doing is asking him to imagine other circumstances in which the same words will be equally, but
differently, clear. Nor is it that the words she does add ("No, No, I mean …") direct him to those
other circumstances by picking them out from an inventory of all possible ones. For this to be the
case there would have to be an inherent relationship between the words she speaks and a particular
set of circumstances (this would be a higher level literalism) such that any competent speaker of
the language hearing those words would immediately be referred to that set. But I have told the
story to several competent speakers of the language who simply didn't get it, and one friend-a
professor of philosophy-reported to me that in the interval between his hearing the story and my
explaining it to him (and just how I was able to do that Is another crucial question) he found
himself asking "What kind of joke is this and have I missed it?" For a time at least he remained able
only to hear "Is there a text in this class" as my colleague first heard it; the student's additional
words, far from leading him to another hearing, only made him aware of his distance from it. In
contrast, there are those who not only get the story but get it before I tell it: that is, they know in
advance what is coming as soon as I say that a colleague of mine was recently asked, "is there a
text in this class?" Who are these people and what is it that makes their comprehension of the story
so immediate and easy? Well, one could say, without being the least bit facetious, that they are the
people who come to hear me speak because they are the people who already know my position on
certain matters (or know that I will have a position). That is, they hear, "Is there a text in this
class?" even as it appears at the beginning of the anecdote (or for that matter as a title of an essay)
in the light of their knowledge of what I am likely to do with it. They hear it coming from me, in
circumstances which have committed me to declaring myself on a range of issues that are sharply
delimited. My colleague was finally able to hear it in just that way, as coming from me, not
because I was there in his classroom, nor because the words of the student's question pointed to
me in a way that would have been obvious to any hearer, but because he was able to think of me
in an office three doors down from his telling students that there are no determinate meanings
and that the stability of the text is an illusion. Indeed, as he reports it, the moment of recognition
and comprehension consisted of saying to himself. "Ah, there's one of Fish's victims!" he did not
say this because her words identified her as such but because his ability to see her as such informed
his perception of her words. The answer to the question "How did he get from her words to the
circumstances within which she intended him to hear them?" is that he must already be thinking
within those circumstances in order to he able to hear her words as referring to them. The question,
then, must be rejected, because it assumes that the construing of sense leads to the identification
of the context of utterance rather than the other way around. This does not mean that the context
comes first and that once it has been identified the construing of sense can begin. This would be
only to reverse the order of precedence, whereas precedence is beside the point because the two
actions it would order (the identification of context and the making of sense) occur simultaneously.
One does not say "Here I am in a situation: now I can begin to determine what these words mean."
To be in a situation is to see the words, these or any other, as already meaningful. For my
colleague to realize that he may be confronting one of my victims is at the same time to hear what
she says as a question about his theoretical beliefs.
But to dispose of one "how" question is only to raise another: if her words do not lead him to the
context of her utterance, how does he get there? Why did he think of me telling students that there
were no determinate meanings and not think of someone or something else? First of all, he might
well have. That is, he might well have guessed that she was coming from another direction

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