[In the following review of Is There a Text in This Class?, Strohm provides a summary of Fish's critical arguments and offers a positive assessment of the volume.]

Is There a Text in This Class? is Stanley Fish’s critical autobiography, a collection of twelve essays published over the last decade (Chapters 1–12) and four previously unpublished lectures delivered at Kenyon College in 1979 (Chapters 13–16) held together by an introductory outline of the development of his thought and by prefatory notes at the head of each chapter which identify the circumstances of each essay’s composition, the shortcomings of its findings, and the position it occupies in the narrative of the formation of the viewpoint the book finally espouses. The hero of this chronicle is interpretation, and its villain is “ordinary language,” “a kind of language that ‘merely’ presents or mirrors facts independently of any consideration of value, interest, perspective, purpose, and so on” (p. 97). “Ordinary language” goes by many names, but it always makes the same claim: the world is objectively knowable, and language, at least at some level, transparently represents that world. “It is not too much to say,” Fish remarks, “that everything I write is written against that claim, in all of its consequences and implications” (p. 97). Those consequences and implications are manifold, and their rejection entails a wholesale revision of common conceptions of language, perception, subjectivity, understanding and argumentation which Fish deftly and successfully negotiates in these pages.

Fish argues that perception does not precede interpretation but only takes place through verbal and mental categories which are interpretive since they are conventional and contextual, grounded in the purposes, desires, values and interests of particular communities. To perceive objectively, he reasons, one would have to stand outside all contexts, to perceive from no point of view at all—an option unavailable to human beings. Fish is no solipsist, however. His point is not to deny the existence of the world, merely the existence of a neutral knowledge of it. He seeks to escape the subject/object trap by conceiving of (human) reality as the indissoluble conjunction of the world and conventional modes of organizing it. One produces facts rather than receiving them, but one usually produces them through assumptions so deeply held and so much a part of one’s situation that they seem to be attributes of reality. To some readers this must smack of the rankest subjectivism, and Fish confesses that he too feared that the abandonment of objective standards of knowledge would authorize interpretive anarchy until he realized that objectivity and subjectivity are two sides of the same coin, both embedded in an epistemology that separates subject and object. If objectivity presupposes perception unconstrained by situation and conventional mental categories, subjectivity presupposes interpretation likewise unconstrained, that is, interpretation which an individual freely and acontextually imposes at will. But an individual can no more choose an arbitrary interpretation than he can discover an absolute truth, for both he and the world are structured by the cognitive categories he learns and utilizes in his particular situation. The subject is not autonomous; he possess and is possessed by received notions which construct the world. The apparent stability of reality, which common sense insists is not illusory, proceeds not from an inherent configuration of the world but from the institutions which communities inaugurate and which constitute communities. Within the shared norms, values and interests of a community, individuals may dispute issues, propose arguments and reach conclusions which then may be subjected to verification procedures since they construct the world with, and they are constructed by, the same assumptions inherent in their situation. In other words, they may engage in meaningful debate because they share the same mechanisms for producing the facts under discussion and the same procedures for evaluating them. Thus a certain objectivity prevails within a community, but it is not universal or eternal; instead, it is contextual, and hence subject to change. And since individuals are always members of communities, they are never without standards of judgment. To paraphrase Fish, objectivity always exists, but it is not always the same one.

The consequences of this position for literary criticism are far-reaching. The text can no longer be considered an independent entity which authorizes certain interpretations, but must be seen as the product of an act of reading, as an entity constructed by institutional norms and cognitive categories. Arguments about the meaning of poems, then, are disputes not over interpretations of the verifiable facts of a poem (unless both parties have agreed to the same facts—that is, agreed to produce them in the same way), but over ways of making poems. The resolution of such arguments advances by persuasion rather than demonstration, by one party adopting the other’s perspective rather than both parties submitting to the arbitration of factual evidence. To convince another of one’s interpretation, one first identifies a common ground of assumptions shared with one’s adversary and then argues for the rationality of further assumptions with which one’s opponent differs in hopes that he will be persuaded to adopt them. Such a procedure is possible because one always shares some assumptions with members of one’s community (including assumptions as to what will count as a reasonable argument) and because all conventions, although subject to change, do not change at the same time. Since interpretive disputes are disputes about the perspectives for construing reality, and since group values and interests are inherent in any perspective, all critical arguments are political. Criticism thus surrenders its claims to disinterested objectivity, but it also regains its vitality as a formative social force.

Besides promoting this general theory of criticism, Fish also performs extensive and rigorous critiques of the assumptions of other theorists. He finds invalid, for instance, the stylisticians’ claim to generate interpretations of literary works from objective descriptions of the works’ formal features, not simply because the correlation they make between formal descriptions and interpretations is arbitrary, but also because the formal patterns which they “objectively” isolate are themselves products of interpretation which contain the conclusions that the analysis supposedly generates. Fish also claims that theorists who define literature as a deviation from ordinary language are misguided because they fail to see that literary language is not a stable entity but an open category which is filled by whatever features a particular community deems to be literary. By erecting an opposition between an objective, serious language and a non-serious, but value-laden literary language, they denigrate both the norm and its deviation, for ordinary language in this model is inhuman (because void of value) and literary language is trivial (because unserious). Only by admitting that all language is interested and purposive and that ordinary language is merely one special type of language can literary and non-literary language be restored their proper integrity. Speech-act theorists who seek a formal distinction between fictional and non-fictional discourse likewise err, for they do not recognize that such a distinction is contextual and hence unformalizable. They are similarly mistaken when they claim an objective, absolute difference between direct speech acts, in which sentences have a primary, literal meaning, and indirect speech acts, in which sentences have a secondary, figurative meaning, for the literal meaning of a direct speech act inheres not in the sentence itself, as the speech-act theorists claim, but in the context in which it is customarily delivered and apprehended.

These are but a few of the critical positions Fish dissects in this book, and no bare summary of his conclusions can do justice to the brilliance of his analyses. Rather than pursue further a synopsis of Fish’s critical battles, I would like to indicate two areas which he could possibly have explored more fully. Late in the book Fish raises the issue of “what the poststructuralists would term ‘the status of my own discourse’” (p. 368), admits that his theory proceeds by way of limited, contextual assumptions, and then dismisses the issue as trivial since the same is true of all other theories. But the questions at stake—the value of metacriticism and the possibility of self-knowledge—deserve a more complete response. If one can objectively determine the rules of baseball, can one similarly determine the rules which constitute social institutions of a less openly artificial nature? Can knowledge of an institution arise from within, or must it be grounded in another contextual frame? Is there a hierarchy of contexts which permits a metacritical stance or merely many competing perspectives which, when conjoined, illuminate one another? If one’s community interprets reality in such a way as to oppress other communities, how can one identify one’s oppressive assumptions and change them? Fish argues that a change in one’s views always comes from without, but cannot change also come from within? I also wish that Fish had indicated more fully his relationship to other theorists who express similar views. Would he find congenial the epistemological assumptions of Gregory Bateson’s and Anthony Wilden’s ecosystemic conception of mind? How would he appraise the semiotics of Umberto Eco, who defines the referent of any semiotic system as a cultural unit of signification, yet attempts a formal description of such systems? How would he evaluate the claims of deconstructionists to dismantle texts from within by exposing the complicity of meaning-enabling antitheses? Would he assent to a Kuhnian or a Foucaultian view of history?

Of course one cannot do everything in a single book; thus these questions should not be construed as complaints but as requests for answers in Fish’s future. Is There a Text in This Class? is a substantial achievement which deserves the serious consideration of all students of literature. Its arguments are cogent, forceful and engaging, its style is witty, personable and unpretentious, and its analyses are just, incisive and economical. Most important, the theory it advocates is provocative, comprehensive and, I believe, true.