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Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities

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Fish provides an originally shocking, but now almost taken-for-granted, argument: there is no such thing as meaning sitting around in a book waiting to be mined like a physical object. Rather, everyone who comes to a book finds exactly what they were looking for in the first place. And the rules for what they find, and what is considered "acceptable" interpretation, comes not from some magic rule for all time but from particular groups of readers at particular times and places. Using Milton, Shakespeare, the students from his history as a literature professor at Johns Hopkins, and various other texts of all kinds, Fish makes a remarkable and witty argument for the stable but temporary interpretation of literature. There is no literature except what you call literature.

So, the text doesn't tell you what it means. The reader doesn't decide what it means. The meaning in reading anything comes from the act of reading itself, shaped by the rules of the interpretive community.

SF is a pragmatist and basically follows John Searle, J.L. Austin, and P.F. Strawson regarding philosophy of language. One aspect of this is to move away from an interpretive stance to the view that there is a clear effect of the reading of a passage on fluent speakers of the language and secondarily an interpretive effect dependent on each speakers (readers) point of view. (There is a nice Paul Ricoeur quote.) SF critiques relativism using it in the sense that is untenable. What makes an interpretation acceptable? "Interpretation is the only game in town." "There are no moves that are not moves in the game, and this includes even the move by which one claims no longer to be a player."

I am amused to read reviews of this book which praise Fish's brilliance, sensitivity, nuanced critical abilities, etc., given that Fish does not believe in authorial intention and thinks the meaning of the text is co-created by the reader. Perhaps, though, these reviewers are praising their own genius, brilliance, etc. Or that is my reading of their texts ...

The notion of "interpretive communities" has always seemed to me derivative of Kuhn's "disciplinary matrix," among other things (Iser's reception theory), though this isn't necessarily a fault. Fish brings much originality to bear on on the matter of interpretation, and despite major problems with his context-relative framework of meaning, his manner of writing and thinking saves it from general dismissal. Fish is insightful, lighthearted, and tempers his stronger claims with well-placed caveats. More problematic than Fish's theory, from my standpoint, is what has happened to the Academy under its sway. The theoretical assumptions common to Fish, Barthes, and Derrida have become overly institutionalized, forming a type of self-fulfilling 'interpretive community' of its own internal design, sealing itself off from criticisms. That this community has grown unnecessarily hostile to students appealing to scientific, classical, or analytic philosophical research to inform their theoretical backdrops demonstrates the point. Recent trends in the literary humanities, in my experience, has made it difficult for such students to break into the field (or what's left of it), even when they sympathize with the spirit behind reader-response criticism. I suppose, though, that if my views here are accurate, then they inadvertently support the main thrust of Fish's theory--namely, that what's wrong with the Academy--or what gives it life, depending on your perspective--is the never-ending "clash of interpretive communities." I would like to hope nevertheless that some common ground exists beneath the play of interpretive communities and texts so we can get back to the business of analyzing literature, inspiring students, sensitizing them to the philosophy of literature, etc., without feeling ideologically committed to a particular 'side.' Fish would likely respond to this hope of mine by saying, as he has recently, that "common ground is what emerges when you assume the normative status of your own judgment and fix the label 'unreasonable' or 'inhuman' or 'monstrous' to the judgment of your opponents." So it goes.

The price was great and delivery was fast enough, but the cover is bent and badly marked up, and there are handwritten notations in the text,

Rhetoric effaces who we
Were, and from these spires and courts,
Purges traces of our Jewy
Uncles in Bermuda shorts.