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

Here, I suspect, a defender of determinate meaning would cry "solipsist" and argue that a confidence Notes
that had its source in the individual's categories of thought would have no public value. That is,
unconnected to any shared and stable system of meanings, it would not enable one to transact the
verbal business of everyday life; a shared intelligibility would be impossible in a world where
everyone was trapped in the circle of his own assumptions and opinions. The reply to this is that
an individual's assumptions and opinions are not "his own" in any sense that would give body to
the fear of solipsism. That is, he is not their origin (in fact it might be more accurate to say that they
are his); rather, it is their prior availability which delimits in advance the paths that his consciousness
can possibly take. When my colleague is in the act of construing his student's question ("Is there
a text in this class?"), none of the interpretive strategies at his disposal are uniquely his, in the
sense that he thought them up; they follow from his preunderstanding of the interests and goals
that could possibly animate the speech of someone functioning within the institution of academic
America, interests and goals that are the particular property of no one in particular but which link
everyone for whom their assumption is so habitual as to be unthinking. They certainly link my
colleague and his student, who are able to communicate and even to reason about one another's
intentions, not, however, because their interpretive efforts are constrained by the shape of an
independent language but because their shared understanding of what could possibly be at stake
in a classroom situation results in language appearing to them in the same shape (or successions
of shapes). That shared understanding is the basis of the confidence with which they speak and
reason, but its categories are their own only in the sense that as actors within an institution they
automatically fall heir to the institution's way of making sense, its systems of intelligibility. That
is why it is so hard for someone whose very being is defined by his position within an institution
(and if not this one, then some other) to explain to someone outside it a practice or a meaning that
seems to him to require no explanation, because he regards it as natural. Such a person, when
pressed, is likely to say, "but that's just the way it's done" or "but isn't it obvious" and so testify that
the practice or meaning in question is community property, as, in a sense, he is too.
We see then that (1) communication does occur, despite the absence of an independent and context-
free system of meanings, that (2) those who participate in this communication do so confidently
rather than provisionally (they are not relativists), and that (3) while their confidence has its
source in a set of beliefs, those beliefs are not individual-specific or idiosyncratic but communal
and conventional (they are not solipsists). Of course, solipsism and relativism are what Abrams
and Hirsch fear and what lead them to argue for the necessity of determinate meaning. But if,
rather than acting on their own, interpreters act as extensions of an institutional community,
solipsism and relativism are removed as fears because they are not possible modes of being. That
is to say, the condition required for someone to be a solipsist or relativist, the condition of being
independent of institutional assumptions and free to originate one's own purposes and goals,
could never be realized, and therefore there is no point in trying to guard against it. Abrams,
Hirsch, and company spend a great deal of time in a search for the ways to limit and constrain
interpretation, but if the example of my colleague and his student can be generalized (and obviously
I think it can be), what they are searching for is never not already found. In short, my message to
them is finally not challenging, but consoling - not to worry.

6.4 Critical Appreciation

Critics have greeted Fish's writings with a mixture of admiration and opposition. His first major
scholarly work, Surprised by Sin, was praised by reviewers for its consideration of Paradise Lost,
particularly in illustrating how the poem forces a sense of guilt upon the reader to open the reader
to the work's instructive aims. This idea of the "guilty reader," however, was also criticized for
rendering the reader incapable of forming a critical judgment and thus precluding criticism of the
work. Critics began to take serious note of Fish's ideas with Is There a Text In This Class? Fish's
enervating writing style apparently played a significant role in the book's success in winning
critics over to his argument that, even more so than the text itself, the reader's response creates the
meaning of a text. There's No Such Thing as Free Speech generated a considerable debate. Fish
was criticized for what was observed to be an overly strong cynicism concerning liberalism; on the

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