Some of the flashiest colors in that coalition are sported by Stanley Fish. During an interview with me Fish wore a bold shirt and gold chain; he was deeply tanned, and his silver hair was brushed back from his forehead. In a photograph from several years ago that I saw, Fish was pale and pinstriped - the consummate urban academic. Fish seems to enjoy his new intellectual and social status. His office is at Duke's Law School, where he also holds an appointment. "I am not a lawyer," he explained, "but I am a law professor."
Fish repeatedly referred to the "in crew," the "pathbreakers," the "superstars." He was contemptuous of Lynne Cheney, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, for committing what he called "the error of objectivism." Objectivists, Fish said, believe in enduring intellectual, cultural, and moral standards, not realizing that "history is the crucible in which standards emerge and become sociologically and politically established." Of course, Cheney and others maintain that truths can be enduring and objective, and yet apply differently in different situations. But Fish countered that the "traditional view" misses the crucial point that there are no distinctions between standard and application, between observer and subject matter. "The norms and standards to which our behavior conforms are us." Fish said. "They aren't a set of rules we consult."
Thus philosophers think they are discussing the "real world," Fish said, "but all they are addressing is questions related to philosophy." Outside the field "they have nothing to say to anyone." Similarly, Fish said, his own relativism is a literary position; it has no implications for the way he lives his life. "People like Cheney raise the specter that we don't have any standards," he said. "They worry that there will be young people walking around acting in a random, nihilistic way, or perpetually perplexed about life. But that doesn't follow from my position at all. I'm just saying that our standards are acquired through socialization. My critics assume a world in which persons are not socialized. Actually, it is impossible to live without standards. The only question is, where do standards come from, how are they realized, whose standards prevail?"
Fish was in a metaphysical frame of mind. "Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not," he said. Since all knowledge is historically and socially conditioned, "the best we can hope to do is convert someone from their set of beliefs to ours. This is persuasion. It has nothing to do with transcendent truth or knowledge. It is an art, as the old rhetoricians knew. Fortunately, our belief structures contain, within themselves, the possibility of alteration, of adopting a new opinion. From what I am saying, it obviously follows that persuasion is contingent, probabilistic; it cannot hope for certainty."
Stanley Fish established his reputation with the development of "reader-response criticism," which emphasized the predominance of the audience's critical reaction to the text over the intention of the author or a presumption of inherent meaning. In Surprised by Sin (1967), the book for which he is best known, he wrote ingeniously about a passage from Milton, showing that the circuitous prose, the use of double negative, and the manner of punctuation all conspire repeatedly to alter the reader's natural critical response in the process of reading. The final meaning of the passage is subordinate to this technique and method of reading, according to Fish. Indeed, Milton may even have wanted readers to misconstrue his elaborate phrases in Paradise Lost, Fish suggested, so that in stumbling from line to line, forming premature opinions and then having to revise them we would be constantly reminded of our fallen state.
These contentions amazed many young literary critics with their cleverness and audacity. A few scholars raised the specter of interpretive nihilism, but Fish struck back, this time proclaiming the sovereignty of "interpretive communities" to establish a broad agreement over what tests mean, and thus ensure against utter interpretive chaos and idiocy. Of course, what these communities agree upon has no claim to truth or objectivity, being itself determined by historical circumstance.
To be sure, this approach, no less than Fish's earlier theory, does raise the prospect of radical subjectivity, but Fish maintains that the risk is outweighed by an exhilarating freedom - the freedom that comes from the unaccountable exercise of power. "Does might make right?" Fish asks in his latest book, Doing What Comes Naturally. "In a sense the answer I must give is yes, since in the absence of a perspective independent of interpretation some interpretive perspective will always rule by virtue of having won out over its competitors." Fish goes so far as to assert that "all preferences are principled."
Besides youthful literary iconoclasts, another group has been drawn to Fish's thinking. Although Fish does not consider himself a political partisan, "many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating," he explained. "They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved." In other words, relativism paves the way for a toppling of the old rules, and the establishment of new ones based on political strength. . . .
To understand some of what is going on in the classroom at Duke, it is necessary to understand several developments in humanities scholarship. Traditional literary criticism is perhaps best exemplified by Samuel Johnson, who brought a commonsensical intelligence to bear upon his interpretations of novels, plays, and poems. Johnson believed that, by and large, there is a collective literary judgment that works, over time, to confirm the greatness of particular works. If a work survives the scrutiny of serious minds over generations, it survives Johnson's test of the true classic; its reputation is protected from the charge of provinciality or faddishness. Thus its prestige acquires timeless a quality. In his Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson argued that Shakespeare had survived just such a test.
This view of literature has informed the work of most of the great critics, from William Hazlitt and Matthew Arnold to T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling. These critics were hardly narrow in their interpretive approaches; they did not restrict themselves either to a literal reading or to the stated intentions of the authors. They admitted the utility of external disciplines - history, sociology, psychology, philosophy - as tools to enrich the meaning of the text. Indeed, they often sought multiple meanings, believing that these could enhance the experience of reading. But this hardly means that these critics considered literary value to be totally subjective, or that texts can mean whatever we want them to. Rather, the reader was viewed as secondary, or subordinate, to the text; his function was to illuminate the work, not to supplant it.
Much of modern literary criticism is based on the very different premise that poems and novels do not mean anything in particular; they do not correspond to any specific "reality," either material or metaphysical. Terry Eagleton, the author of a widely used textbook on literary theory, has written that modern interpretation rejects "the commonsensical person-on-the-street belief that objects existed independently of ourselves in the external world, and that our information about them was generally reliable." The genesis of this approach is probably Austin Warren and Rene Wellek's influential book A Theory of Literature (1949), which maintained that the definition of literature was problematic, and posited circumstances under which Shakespeare might be displaced by the Manhattan phone book or by graffiti.
Today there are numerous schools of criticism based on the denial of inherent textual meaning: Formalism, hermeneutics, semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism, deconstructionism. Stanley Fish refused to be identified with any of these, but only in order to embrace all of them - which is not hard, because the various systems are symbiotic, drawing on many of the same sources and pursuing the common end of destroying traditional literary criticism, and indeed the literary text itself. At the risk of offending academic specialists, here is a brief resume of the guiding presumptions of these critical schools. (D'Souza then gives a six paragraph summation of these positions and then concludes this section of the article.). . . . There are disagreements among these various new schools of criticism, but they are united in a general effort to capsize the author and his work in order to hand over semantic authority to what Jeffrey Hart, a professor of English at Dartmouth, has called "imperial readers."
And the implications, of course, go beyond the field of literature. it is the pursuit of truth itself that the modern critics spurn; more precisely, by reducing all truth to the level of opinion, they deny the legitimacy of distinctions between truth and error. Yet what is the goal of liberal education if not the ongoing search for truth? If education cannot help to separate truth from falsehood, beauty from vulgarity, right from wrong, then what can it teach us?
III: WHERE THE LOGIC LEADS
. . . . It is one thing to say that our knowledge of ideas and events is necessarily influenced by a social and historical context, and that in most areas purely objective truth is elusive, even impossible. It does not follow from this view, however, that all theories or interpretations are equally plausible, or that scholarship is incapable of moving . . . toward the idea of truth. The new critics go beyond the assertion of continent knowledge to suggest that they very ideal of objectivity is a mirage, and that therefore it is perfectly legitimate for teachers to cast aside pretensions of impartiality and to impose their politically preferred ideas on students. When the traditional norms of scholarship no longer rein in the instinct for activism, license is given for uninhibited ideological proselytizing.
The radical skepticism cultivated at Duke and elsewhere rejects the possibility that human beings can rise above their circumstances. We are all presumed to be entirely products of our race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. All principles and standards are subordinate to political and social pressure and expediency. When these forces drive a culture in an undesirable direction, however, it is impossible, under the terms now fashionable, to develop nonarbitrary reasons for resistance. If Germans during the 1920s and 1930s were mere "products of their time," on what grounds of principle could they be expected to oppose the rising tide of fascism? . . . . In a recent debate on deconstructionism in The New York Review of Books, Charles L. Griswold, Jr. of Howard University, alleged, and his opponent Denis Donoghue of New York University, admitted, that "nothing in the deconstruction provides an ethical criticism of Nazism." One might add that nothing in deconstructionism even permits such a criticism. Griswold maintained that "deconstruction dissolves notions of personal accountability and responsibility"; indeed, it "renders theoretically unintelligible basic moral terms such as good and evil." The Duke critics must confront the question of the opening that relativist theories create for totalitarian ideologies, the potential for cognitive skepticism to accompany, and accentuate, malignant political fanaticism. The rejection of authority can sometimes result, paradoxically, in an embrace of authoritarianism.
Indeed, it can happen with insidious ease. Last fall a group of forty-six professors at Duke decided to mobilize against the new thinking by setting up a local chapter of the National Association of Scholars, a group based in Princeton, New Jersey, and dedicated to "rational discourse as the foundation of academic life in a free and democratic society." Duke's chapter includes professors from all segments of the political spectrum; its founder, the political scientist James David Barber, describes himself as a liberal Democrat. No sooner did Barber announce a date for a meeting than a violent reaction ensued. Stanley Fish accused the new group of "racism, sexism, and homophobia," and he wrote the university provost demanding that members be barred from serving on academic committees that have any say on matters affecting the curriculum. The Duke faculty rejected the demand. On this point, at least, the old standard of academic freedom seems for the time being to have prevailed.