A Bad Day Fishing Beats a Good Day Working

Stanley Fish gave a talk at Penn last week sponsored by the Philomathean Society. It was one of the few events I’ve attended at Penn that seemed to have a relatively even mix of undergrads, grad students, and faculty present. I’ve been reading Fish’s columns for the New York Times for a while now. Love him or hate him, he certainly is quite an interesting writer, and the talk showed him to be an engaging speaker as well.

He seems to have changed his ideas quite drastically over the course of the nearly 30 years since his book Is There a Text in This Class? I don’t know if he has formally renounced that work, but his concern in the title essay of that book with “the authority of interpretive communities” over and against authorial or textual authority (authorial authority—hilarious!) doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the kind of intense formalism (one could say nihilism) that he seems to practice and preach nowadays. The Penn talk was devoted to themes covered in his most recent book Save the World On Your Own Time, which argues that professors should teach their subject and not seek to indoctrinate their students in a particular political ideology. Sounds fine on the surface, right? Because who wants to hear some gasbag professor expounding on how wonderful Obama is or on how the Iraq war was necessary to keep the United States free from terror?

But at the basis of Fish’s arguments is a persistent belief that “academic” or “intellectual” work or thinking is somehow different (read: “above”—though he said that “academic exceptionalism was one of the worst sins committed by academics, it’s hard not to see him as also partaking in this vice) from other kinds of more pedestrian pursuits and shouldn’t be justified or judged based on these more earthly standards. While he acknowledges that the very act of creating a syllabus that includes or doesn’t include white/black/male/female/straight/gay writers (or musicians!) is in fact a political move, he doesn’t believe that this kind of political act is akin to the more banal acts of advocating for a particular candidate or policy.

In his vision of the ideal university, professors do not aim to make their students appreciative of diversity or more engaged citizens or to develop their students’ characters. According to Fish, these are not the things they are trained or paid to do. (Though, here was a logical inconsistency in his work, since he started his talk by—disapprovingly—reading mission statements from universities that in fact do state that they are trying to foster an appreciation of diversity, prepare students to function in democracies, etc. Whether Fish likes it or not, in fact universities do hire professors to do exactly these things, at least according to their mission statements.)

And when asked to justify the work that they do to their state legislatures or funding agencies, scholars (particularly those in the humanities) should not offer any justification for what they do, since none exists outside of the world of the “exhilarating pleasure” they get from the texts they are studying.

Perhaps it is clear by now that I disagree profoundly with Professor Fish. I don’t believe that the admission that “everything is political,” is, as Fish said, “trivial.” The kind of neutral, apolitical reading of a text that Fish argues for is, in fact, a political move itself. As the historian Howard Zinn put it best, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” The world is moving: wars are started or ended, policies are enacted or rejected, people are cured of disease or they die. We can’t pretend that our actions or nonactions—academic or otherwise—have nothing to do with the events around us. If nothing else, our presumed neutrality at least perpetuates the status quo.

This talk was an interesting counterpoint to another earlier panel sponsored by the Philomathean Society on the future of the humanities within the academy. That panel was organized around the questions:

1. Does the academic analysis of works of literature, philosophy and history
have instrumental value?

2. Should they be funded?

Putting aside the fact that the referent of the second question is unclear (if the pronoun is meant to refer to the analysis, why is it “they” instead of “it?”), the answers given by 2 of the 3 Penn faculty members on the panel addressing this question were rather disappointing. Basically, the answers were “yes” and “yes.” Not terribly surprising stuff. Fish himself offers “no” and “yes” to these questions. This set of answers is perhaps more interesting, though Fish doesn’t offer any reason why a “yes” would follow from the first “no.” But I really wanted to see someone (preferably a well-funded member of the academy) make a strong argument for a “no” to the second question. The devil’s advocate in me says, “Hey, so why should we as a society spend so much money on Stanley Fish so that he can obsess over Milton for nearly 50 years?” I am not one of those people who believe that art and culture will save us. Or, if they will save us, I believe they will be far less effective at doing so than an HIV vaccine, a cure for cancer, or an end to poverty.

I will say, however, that the music department’s own Gary Tomlinson said some very on-point things about what sort of responsibilities the humanities can have. In particularly, he talked about how one of the deconstructive movement’s failures has been its inability to counter the popular portrayal of itself as a painted-in-a-corner fringe practice using an arcane jargon to pore over the minutiae of texts. Instead, Tomlinson argues for a deconstruction that has a sharp ethical edge to it, a deconstruction that is about denaturalizing accepted notions and providing alternative examples of human difference. This, for me, is really the only reason to teach: to be able to encourage critical questioning in one’s students so that, when they are the ones holding the levers of power, they will be able to make more informed decisions about what policies and practices should be followed or discarded. Otherwise, what are they doing in my class when they should be learning more about how to dress wounds or design more efficient transportation systems?

Fish, obviously, disagrees. And so I disagree with him. But he certainly presents his arguments in an interesting manner, and there’s no denying that he is an engaging speaker and writer. It is definitely quite the privilege to be able to think about and discuss such important topics. As someone once said, though, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” As for Fish, I’m not sure he believes there is a “point,” period. Or at least not one that we as academics can get to.