The willows and the hazel copses greenShall now no more be seenFanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.[Milton, Lycidas, Ll. 42-44] It is my thesis that the reader is always making sense , and in the case of these lines the sense he makes will involve the assumption of a completed assertion after the word "seen," to wit, the death of Lycidas has so affected the willows and the hazel copses green that, in sympathy, they will wither and die (...) . In other words at the end of line 43 the reader will have hazarded an interpretation, or performed an act of perpetual closure, or made a decision as to what is being asserted. I do not mean that he has done four things, but that he has done one thing the description of which might take any one of four forms—making sense, interpreting, performing perpetual closure, deciding about what is intended. Whatever he has done he will undo it in the act of reading the next line; for here he discovers that his closure, or making of sense, was premature and that he must make a new one in which the relationship between man and nature is exactly the reverse of what was first assumed. The willows and the hazel copses green will in fact be seen, but they will not be seen by Lycidas. It is he who will be no more, while they go on as before, fanning their joyous leaves to someone else's soft lays . Nature is not sympathetic, but indifferent, and the notion of her sympathy is one of those "false surmises" that the poem is continually encouraging and then disallowing. Stanley E. Fish, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of John Skelton's Poetry, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. His other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time" . See also: "Professor Fish on the Milton Variorum" by Douglas Bush in Vol. 3, No. 1; "Stanley Fish's 'Interpreting the Variorum': Advance or Retreat?" by Steven Mailloux in Vol. 3, No. 1; "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" by Stanley E. Fish in Vol. 3, No. 1. (shrink)

Nothing I wrote in Is There a Text in This Class? has provoked more opposition or consternation than my claim that the argument of the book has no consequences for the practice of literary criticism.1 To many it seemed counterintuitive to maintain that an argument in theory could leave untouched the practice it considers: After all, isn’t the very point of theory to throw light on or reform or guide practice? In answer to this question, I want to say, first, (...) that this claim is unsupportable. Here, I am in agreement with Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, who are almost alone in agreeing with me and who fault me not for making the “no consequences” argument but for occasionally falling away from it. Those dislike Is There a Text in This Class? tend to dislike “Against Theory” even more, and it is part of my purpose here to account for the hostility to both pieces. But since the issues at stake are fundamental, it is incumbent to begin at the beginning with a discussion of what theory is and is not. 1. See my Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities , p. 370. For a response to the “no consequences” claim, see Mary Louise Pratt, “Interpretive Strategies/Strategic Interpretations: on Anglo-American Reader Response Criticism,” Boundary 2 11 : 222. Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies” and “Fear of Fish:”A Reply to Walter Davis” . The present essay is the concluding chapter of Change. (shrink)

Ralph Rader's model of literary activity is built up from a theory of intention. A literary work, he believes, embodies a "cognitive act,"1 an act variously characterized as a "positive constructive intention" , "an overall creative intention" . To read a literary work is to perform an answering "act of cognition" , which is in effect the comprehension of this comprehensive intention, the assigning to the work of a "single coherent meaning" . Both acts—the embodying and the assigning —are one-time, (...) single-shot performances. They are "ends" in two senses; the overall intention is the end to which everything in the work must be contributory, and its comprehension is something the reader does at the end . Rader offers this model as if it were descriptive, as if it made explicit rules of behavior we unerringly follow, rules which underlie our "tacit or intuitive capacity" of intention producing and intention retrieving; but the model is, in fact, prescriptive since it quite arbitrarily limits this same capacity: authors are limited to no more than one positive constructive intention per unit, while readers or interpreters are limited to its discovery; whatever cannot be related to that discovery or interferes with it will either be declared not to exist or, if its existence cannot be denied, it will be labeled a defect, an "unintended and unavoidable negative consequence of the artist's positive constructive intention" . · 1. My argument will engage two of Rader's articles. They are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation," Critical Inquiry 1, no.2 : 245-72, and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies," in New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature: Selected Papers from the English Institute , pp. 79-115. In what follows they will be referred to as Fact and Concept along with the appropriate page number. Stanley E. Fish, professor of English at John Hopkins University, responds in this essay to Ralph W. Rader's "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" . Professor Fish is the author of John Skelton's Poetry, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. His other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Interpreting the Variorum" , "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" , "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" , "CRITICAL RESPONSE: A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time". (shrink)

When the chorus at the end of Samson Agonistes declares that “all is best,” what it means is that the best of all possible things, the thing everyone in the play most desires, has finally happened: Samson is dead. This is, of course, not quite fair. What the chorus most wants is that things once more be as they were, and its moment of highest joy in the play involves the speculation that a revived Hebrew hero may “now be dealing (...) dole among his foes / And over heaps of slaughtered walk his way” .1 “That were a joy presumptuous to be through” , responds Manoa, indicating that he too wishes for nothing more than the return of the days when his son “walked about … / On hostile ground” “like a petty god” . This is also what Harapha wants for different reasons when he says of Samson’s change of fortune, I “wish it had not been, / Though for no friendly intent” ; and it is what Dalila wants for more reasons than Samson can shake a stick at when she laments an event more “perverse … than I foresaw” and attempts to mitigate if she cannot cancel the effects of her “rash but more unfortunate misdeed” . Everyone, in short, wants to turn back the clock, and this, of course, includes Samson, who is obsessed with the disparity between his present and his past states: “Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed / … / … if I must die / Betrayed, captive[?]” ; “Promise was that I / Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; / Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless in Gaza” ; “The base degree to which I now am fall’n” ; “I was his nursling once and choice delight” . 1. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler ; hereafter cited by line number. Stanley Fish is Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law and chairman of the English department at Duke University. His most recent book is Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Legal and Literary Studies. (shrink)

In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic (...) of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values, and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza, Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars. (shrink)

In the eyes of some of its critics, disjunctivism fails to support adequately the key claim that a particular hallucination might be indistinguishable from a certain kind of veridical perception despite the two states having nothing other than this in common. Scott Sturgeon, for example, has complained that disjunctivism ‘‘offers no positive story about hallucination at all’’ (2000: 11) and therefore ‘‘simply takes [indistinguishability] for granted’’ (2000: 12). So according to Sturgeon, what the disjunctivist needs to provide is a plausible (...) explanation of just how two mental states which have no common component might be indistinguishable for their subject and this in turn will require the telling of a positive story about hallucination. This is the goal of the present essay. (shrink)

In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those ...

It may seem that I am simply confirming Davis’ assertion that in my view of the critical process “different interpretive strategies create completely different texts with no point of comparison” ; but the differences are not all that complete. While many readers now see a God who is more dramatically effective than Pope’s “school divine,” they still see a God who exists in a defining relationship with the figure of Satan, a Satan who is himself significantly changed from the energy-bearing (...) Byronic antihero who was for so long a “given” in the interpretive landscape. The point is, again, that changes do not occur in isolation, because the facts that have undergone change did not exist in isolation either. In the history of Milton criticism, any judgment against God is always and simultaneously a judgment for Satan ; and it follows that a reversal in one pole of the judgment cannot occur without a corresponding—that is, related—reversal in the other. Any increase in the literary “cash value” of Milton’s God will be registered at the expense of his Satan.In short, since literary judgments or observations are not made piecemeal, the process of challenging and changing them is not piecemeal either. That is why it is not “contradictory,” as Davis asserts, “to talk about recalcitrant features of a text” in the context of a thesis that makes the text’s features a function of interpretation . The source of recalcitrance or resistance is not the text as it exists independently of interpretation, but the text as an authoritative and elaborated interpretation has given it to us. I stress “elaborated” because the interpretation is not a single assertion but a complex of assertions; and when a challenge is made to the interpreted text at one point, its other points constitute a reservoir from which objections and “counterchallenges” can emerge. Thus, when someone offers a revisionist account of Milton’s God, a skeptical or unpersuaded reader will respond by observing that this account is incompatible with what we know to be true about other parts of the poem: the characterization of Satan, or of the War in Heaven, or of books 11 and 12. It is then the obligation of the revisionist critic either to demonstrate there is no incompatibility or to extend his new reading in such a way as to recharacterize those parts of the poem that seem to stand as refutations of the revisionist’s reading. He will then be working against resistance, but it will not be the resistance of something that stands outside interpretation; rather it will be the resistance offered by one interpretively produced shape to the production of another. Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism” and “Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies”. (shrink)

A sentence is never not in a context. We are never not in a situation. A statute is never not read in the light on some purpose. A set of interpretative assumptions is always in force. A sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one...No sentence is ever apprehended independently of some or other illocutionary force. Illocutionary force is the key term in speech-act theory. It refers to the way an utterance is taken—as an order, (...) a warning, a promise, a proposal, a request, etc.—and the theory's strongest assertion is that no utterance is ever taken purely, that is, without already having been understood as the performance of some illocutionary act. Consider, as an example, the sentence "I will go." Depending on the context in which it is uttered, "I will go" can be understood as a promise, a threat, a warning, a report, a prediction, etc., but it will always be understood as one of these, and it will never be an unsituated kernel of pure semantic value. In other words, "I will go" does not have a basic or primary meaning which is then put to various illocutionary uses; rather, "I will go" is known only in its illocutionary lives, and in each of them its meaning will be different. Moreover, if the meaning of a sentence is a function of its illocutionary force , and if illocutionary force varies with the circumstances, then illocutionary force is not a property of sentences, but of situations. That is, while a sentence will always have an illocutionary force , the illocutionary force it has will not always be the same. Stanley E. Fish is the author of, among many other works, Is There a Text in This Class? Interpretative Authority in the Classroom and in Literary Criticism, and The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Interpreting the Variorum" , "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time". (shrink)

Together Professor Bush and Mr. Mailloux present a problem in interpretation not unlike those that were the occasion of the paper they criticize: Professor Bush takes the first section of the paper more seriously than I do, and Mr. Mailloux complains that I do not take it seriously enough. In their different ways they seem to miss or slight the playfulness of my performance, the degree to which it is an attempt to be faithful to my admitted unwillingness to come (...) to, or rest on, a point. Professor Bush seems to think that I am mounting an attack on the Variorum. Let me say at the outset that I intended no such attack, that I am sorry if anything I wrote gave that impression, and that I regret any offense that may have been taken. Professor Bush and I view the Variorum from different perspectives, both of which seem to me to be perfectly legitimate. He views it as a document, while I view it as a text. As a document, as a record and history of research and interpretation, it is a model of its kind, full, judicious, and above all, honest. The editors pay us the compliment of not pretending to an impossible objectivity. They leave us the valuable record of their own occasional disagreements, and thus suggest that they know very well that theirs is an interim report. My inquiry is into the significance of that report; it is not a brief against the compiling of its materials but an attempt to put to them a question the editors quite properly do not ask: what does the history of the effort to determine the meaning of Milton's poems mean? In short, I am extending the scope of interpretation to include the interpreters themselves and, rather than attacking the Variorum, taking one step further the task it has so well begun. Stanley E. Fish's "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism" was published in the Special Centennial Issue of Modern Language Notes, Summer 1976. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Interpreting the Variorum" , "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time". (shrink)

It might seem at this point that I am courting a contradiction: If antiprofessionalism is a form of professional behavior and if professional behavior covers the field , then how can I fault Bate for using antiprofessionalism to further a professional project? By collapsing the distinction between activity that is professionally motivated and activity motivated by a commitment to abstract and general values, have I not deprived myself of a basis for making judgments, since one form of activity would seem (...) to be no different from or better than any other? The answer is no, because the consequence of turning everything into professionalism is not to deny value but to redistribute it. One deconstructs an opposition not by reversing the hierarchy of its poles but by denying to either pole the independence that makes the opposition possible in the first place. If my argument that there can be no literary criticism or pedagogy that is not a form of professionalism, it is also that there can be no form of professionalism that is not an extension of some value or set of values. Whereas before one was asked to choose between professionalism and some category of pure value , the choice can now be seen as a choice between different versions of professionalism, each with its attendant values. To say that antiprofessionalism is a form of professional behavior is not to have closed the discussion but to have identified the basis on which it can continue by identifying the questions that should now be asked: What kind of professional behavior is antiprofessionalism? and What are its consequences? The answer is that, at least in its literary form, it urges impossible goals and therefore has the consequence of making people ashamed of what they are doing. The psychological distress that marks this profession, the fact that so many of its members exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that enables their labors, is in part attributable, I think, to literary antiprofessionalism, which is, as a form of professional behavior, almost always damaging. Stanley Fish’s most recent work is “Wrong Again: A Reply to Ronald Dworking,” Texas Law Review . His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida”. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Eusociality is the form of animal social organization with a reproductive division of labor, most prominently known from ants and bees. Here I ask the question why this enormously successful form of social organization is missing in the largest and most diverse group of vertebrates, the teleost fishes. I first briefly review the phylogenetic distribution and likely evolutionary origins of eusociality. Then, after an equally very brief review of the diverse life history strategies of teleosts, I conclude that it is (...) not the lack of evolutionary pre-adaptations which is keeping teleosts from becoming eusocial. Rather, I argue, that the absence of eusocial fish is caused by a number of differences between aquatic (chiefly marine) and terrestrial ecosystems: (1) Greater offspring dispersal in aquatic ecosystems reduces the role of kin-selection. (2) Lesser predictability of the environment at larger timescales in marine ecosystems disfavors eusociality. (3) A briefer impact of resource pulses in aquatic ecosystems will cause less evolutionary pressure towards cooperation, and eventually eusociality. Finally, I conclude by predicting that the most likely places to find eusocial fishes will be the deep-water regions of the ocean and the African rift lakes. (shrink)