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

they were, they would dictate the strategy by which she would work to supplant or change them. Notes
It is when such a strategy has been successful that the import of her words will become clear, not
because she has reformulated or refined them but because they will now be read or heard within
the same system of intelligibility from which they issue.
In short, this hypothetical interlocutor will in time he brought to the same point of comprehension
my colleague enjoys when he is able to say to himself, "Ah, there's one of Fish's victims," although
presumably he will say something very different to himself if he says anything at all. The difference,
however, should not obscure the basic similarities between the two experiences, one reported, the
other imagined. In both cases the words that are uttered are immediately heard within a set of
assumptions about the direction from which they could possibly be coming and in both cases what
is required is that the hearing occur within another set of assumptions in relation to which the
same words ("is there a text in this class?") will no longer be the same. It is just that while my
colleague is able to meet that requirement by calling to mind a context of utterance that is already
a part of his repertoire, the repertoire of his hypothetical stand-in must be expanded to include
that context so that should he some day be in all analogous situation. he would be able to call it to
mind.
The distinction, then, is between already having an ability and having to acquire it, but it is not
finally an essential distinction, because the routes by which that ability could be exercised on the
one hand, and learned on the other, are so similar. They are similar first of all because they are
similarly not determined by words. Just as the student's words will not direct my colleague to a
context he already has, so will they fail to direct someone not furnished with that context to its
discovery. And yet in neither case does the absence of such a mechanical determination mean that
the route one travels is randomly found. The change from one structure of understanding to
another is not a rupture but a modification of the interests and concerns that are already in place;
and because they are already in place, they constrain the direction of their own modification. That
is, in both cases the hearer is already in a situation informed by, tacitly known purposes and goals,
and in both cases he ends up in another situation whose purposes and goals stand in somi
elaborated relation (of contrast, opposition, expansion, extension) to those they supplant. (The one
relation in which they could not stand is no relation at all.) It is just that in one case the network
of elaboration (front the text as an obviously physical object to the question of whether or not the
text is a physical object) has already been articulated (although not all of its articulations are in
focus at one time; selection is always occurring), while in the other the articulation of the network
is the business of the teacher (here the student) who begins, necessarily, with what is already
given.
The final similarity between the two cases is that in neither is success assured. It was no more
inevitable that my colleague tumble to the context of his student's utterance than it would be
inevitable that she could introduce that context to someone previously unaware of' it; and, indeed,
had my colleague remained puzzled (had he simply not thought of me), it would have been
necessary for the student to bring him along in a way that was finally indistinguishable from the
way she would bring someone to a new knowledge, that is, by beginning with the shape of his
present understanding.
I have lingered so long over the unpacking of this anecdote that its relationship to the problem of
authority in the classroom and in literary criticism may seem obscure. Let me recall you to it by
recalling the contention of Abrams and others that authority depends upon the existence of a
determinate core of meanings because in the absence of such a core there is no normative or public
way of construing what anyone says or writes, with the result that interpretation becomes a
matter of individual and private construings, none of which is subject to challenge or correction.
In literary criticism this means that no interpretation can be said to be better or worse than any
other, and in the classroom this means that we have no answer to the student who says my
interpretation is as valid as yours. It is only if there is a shared basis of agreement at once guiding
interpretation and providing a mechanism for deciding between interpretations that a total and
debilitating relativism can be avoided.

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