[In the following review, Donoghue offers a positive assessment of Doing What Comes Naturally.]

Stanley Fish states that Doing What Comes Naturally “reduces to an argument in which the troubles and benefits of interpretive theory are made to disappear in the solvent of an enriched notion of practice” (viii). In dismissing the premise, still powerful in mainstream American literary studies, that what we do with any given text must be accountable to some general theory of interpretation, Fish sets himself an extremely ambitious task. In order to succeed, he must identify and account for phenomena and processes that, in every instance, resist general definition (indeed such terms as “phenomena” and “processes” misleadingly formalize the concept of practice employed in this book). In my opinion, he succeeds completely. Drawing from fields as diverse as literary studies, the law, psycho-analysis, baseball (“Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory”), and popular music (“Short People Got No Reason to Live: Reading Irony”), Fish presents one compelling example after another of the “unreflective actions that follow from being embedded in a context of practice” (viii), and has, in this collection of essays, made another major contribution to the study of interpretation.

The premise of Doing What Comes Naturally is that theory, both literary and legal, “comes in two forms: foundationalism and anti-foundationalism,” the second of which might not properly be called theory at all (342). Foundationalism, which Fish associates with the intellectual right, is “any attempt to ground inquiry and communication in something more firm and stable than mere belief or unexamined practice. The foundationalist strategy is first to identify that ground and then to so order our activities that they become anchored to it and are thereby rendered objective and principled” (342). Anti-foundationalism “teaches that questions of fact, truth, correctness, validity, and clarity can neither be posed nor answered in reference to some extracontextual, ahistorical, nonsituational reality, or rule, or law, or value” (344). Fish aligns anti-foundationalism with the intellectual left, since to think of “the world and its facts as not given but made” is to allow the possibility that they may be remade in accordance with the “left-wing goals of reform and revolution” (350). Both positions are most forcefully explicated and historicized in the previously unpublished “Rhetoric,” as “serious man” (foundationalist) and “rhetorical man” (anti-foundationalist). The essay is a tour de force, perhaps the best piece in the collection.

Fish identifies himself as a “card-carrying anti-foundationalist” (347), and states that his conclusion is “finally that we live in a rhetorical world” (25). In doing so he carries forward the attack on essentialism articulated in Is There a Text in This Class? (1980). Wayne Booth reappears as a target, and Fish finds the same foundationalist tendencies in the thinking of legal theorists Richard Posner and Ronald Dworkin that he had once found in the literary theory of M. H. Abrams and John Reichart. But the emphases of his intellectual project have changed in several important ways over the last decade. In Is There a Text, as Ellen Rooney has observed, Fish presented a version of post-structuralism that could be reconciled with the traditional pluralist discourse of American literary studies. Doing What Comes Naturally is also in part concerned with making deconstruction compatible with an American audience: Fish presents Derrida’s “Signature, Event, Context” as “not a critique but a tribute” (67) to J. L. Austin, and the book is dedicated in part to Baltimore, Maryland.

But Fish turns his attention in the most recent essays in the book to what he describes alternately as “anti-foundationalist theory hope” or “the critical self-consciousness fallacy” (466). For theorists on both the left and right, Fish observes, learning “the lesson that we are always and already interpretively situated … becomes a way of escaping [that lesson’s] implications” (437), escaping them by purporting to assume a position that transcends particular situations. The right-wing version of this fallacy aims for an unrealizable neutrality, to be achieved by recognizing one’s biases and (inexplicably) setting them aside. The left-wing version, by contrast, is “a component of a frankly political program … rigorously and relentlessly negative, intent always on exposing or unmasking those arrangements of power that present themselves in reason’s garb” (442). Fish examines this second version in discussion of the Frankfurt School and the work of Roberto Unger (a pioneer of the Critical Legal Studies Movement), demonstrating that adherents of this program repeatedly slip into the fallacy of believing that their critique can eventually arrive at a positive end, whether it be Horkheimer’s “rational determination of goals (444),” Habermas’s “Universal Pragmatics” or “ideal speech situation,” (450, 451), or Unger’s “internal development” (419). In so doing, they fall back on an erroneous understanding of truth as asituational and absolute. Fish eloquently maintains that the failure of critical self-consciousness does not preclude the possibility of change, which, he says, “is already achieved by the ordinary and everyday efforts by which, in innumerable situations, large and small, each of us attempts to alter the beliefs of another” (464). Indeed, this is the book’s central message, that the hopes for and fears about theory are made irrelevant in the face of countless instances of persuasion in which we cannot but participate.

Moreover, Fish’s exploration of the notion of “constraint” and of the constraints that organize interpretation is more specific, sophisticated, and straightforwardly politicized than the relatively abstract notion of “interpretive communities” described in Is There a Text. If, as Peter Hohendahl complained, that concept could not explain “what conditions the authority of the interpreter” or “who grants the interpreter his authority” (New German Critique 28 [1983]: 118–9), Doing What Comes Naturally provides more than adequate answers in the form of several essays that address the workings of professional literary studies. The cumulative effect of pieces on the editorial policy of blind submission, the nature of change in Paradise Lost criticism from 1942–1979, and the phenomenon of literary anti-professionalism, is to bring to life the notion of interpretive communities by showing them in action.

A couple of omissions leave me wishing for a fuller picture of Fish’s project. First, although Doing What Comes Naturally conveniently reprints some nineteen of Fish’s essays, it does not give the dates of initial publication. Since, as I have suggested, Fish’s interests have shifted since 1980, this information would have helped document that change. More substantively, it would have been interesting to see Fish locate himself more specifically in relation to the philosophical traditions in which the book operates, and engage other treatments of the concept of practice, its general subject. Although he works extensively with Austin and Rorty, other key figures such as Quine and Putnam are only mentioned (345), as are the preeminent sociologists of practice, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau (177). Two of the previously unpublished essays, however, “Critical Self-Consciousness” and “Rhetoric,” as well as an essay on psychoanalysis and rhetoric are promising signs that Fish is indeed integrating his work more thoroughly into broader kinds of discourses. But it is to Fish’s credit, I think, that most readers of this 600-page book will very likely still be eager for more.