In his preface, Stanley Fish tells us that he can imagine at least two objections to this massive collection of essays [Doing What Comes Naturally]. A first charge might be made against the extraordinary diversity of a collection that offers essays on Austin’s speech-act theory, on the work of Wolfgang Iser, on the (supposed) idiosyncrasies of legal interpretation, on the blind submission of articles to professional journals, on professionalism and anti-professionalism within academic criticism, on the reception of Paradise Lost (from 1942 to 1979), on change, on rhetoric, on the theoretical impossibility of theory, and so on. Paradoxically, the other objection that Fish has in mind comes down to the complaint that all these essays are essentially the same, a proposition to which he readily agrees, and he is right, as usual: his essays address related, if not actually identical, issues, and a number of them repeat the same argument in different terms or within a different context. There is, then, an undeniable element of repetition in these pieces, but the brisk pace at which they move and their provocative character make up for everything.

Fish is a committed anti-formalist, anti-foundationalist, and anti-essentialist, terms which are practically interchangeable in the way he uses them. Rejecting the notion that formalistic approaches to language might yield meaning, that meaning is, in other words, a property of language, he argues that ‘once you start down the anti-formalist road, there is no place to stop’. Since formalism cannot lead to meaning, meaning can never be ‘literal’ or ‘natural’. Meaning can only be the product of interpretive acts, even if we theoretically allow an author’s (or speaker’s) intention to govern meaning: intentions, too, must be interpreted. Human communication—in fact, any kind of understanding—is bound up with ‘the necessity of interpretive work’ and ‘the unavoidability of perspective’. As a consequence, literary works and legal texts are the products as well as the objects of our interpretive activities. However, in Fish’s view such a state of affairs will not lead to the total subjectivism and anarchy that one might easily envisage. After all, interpretations are subject to constraints: ‘There is no subjectivist element of reading because the observer is never individual in the sense of unique or private, but is always the product of the categories of understanding that are his by virtue of his membership in a community of interpretation. It follows, then, that what experience in turn produces is not open or free, but determinate, constrained by the possibilities that are built into a conventional system of intelligibility.’ There is simply no escape from such constraints. Fish repeatedly (and not without a certain avuncular glee) emphasizes the fact that even an awareness of such constraints cannot bring the freedom that might lead to anarchy. The realization that one is part of a ‘system of intelligibility’, an ‘interpretive community’, does not change one’s views, and will at best temporarily temper one’s propensity to assign universal validity to those views. It is, as Fish notes, ‘a condition of human life always to be operating as an extension of beliefs and assumptions that are historically contingent, and yet to be holding those beliefs and assumptions with an absoluteness that is the necessary consequence of the absoluteness with which they hold—inform, shape, constitute—us’. (Needless to say, his own absolutist category, as he readily admits, is that of the rational.)

Building upon this militantly anti-essentialist position, Fish treks through literary theory and the philosophy of law, leaving in his wake what amounts to intellectual scorched earth. Ronald Dworkin and Wayne Booth (both of whom make several appearances) are taken to task for believing that texts are at some level ‘available in uninterpreted shape’, Dworkin’s Law as Interpretation is the product of ‘a general failure to understand the nature of interpretation’ and Booth’s study of irony is shown to rest on his assumption that literal (and thus unvarying) meaning is simply there for the reader to discover. The ‘disciplining rules’ with which Owen Fiss would want to put constraints upon interpretation are shown to be texts that themselves stand in need of interpretation. Wolfgang Iser’s The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading present a theory that is ‘finally nothing more than a loosely constructed network of pasted-together contradictions’. Both the academic right (the foundationalists who still believe in essences) and the academic left (the anti-foundationalists) are firmly castigated. The right irrationally clings to the conviction that the self is a free agent to whom language and the world (can) reveal their meaning. Its ahistorical essentialism leads to such confused notions as ‘intrinsic merit’—upon which the policy of blind submission is based—which is, in fact, a historical and thus extrinsic, political category. The left mistakenly assumes that clearing the air of essences paves the way for a truly new beginning. Richard Ohmann, Frank Lentricchia, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and others stand accused of falling for the same myth of the free self, forgetting, even while they subscribe to anti-foundationalist arguments, that they, too, are already historically situated, that the subject is ‘always and already tethered to the contextual setting that constitutes him and enables his “rational” acts’. Not afraid of healthy controversy, Stanley Fish offers us his ‘general rule that a left-wing anti-professional is always a right-wing intellectual in disguise’.

Doing What Comes Naturally is an irreverent, important book that addresses highly interesting issues with force and clarity.