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L'homme n'est qu'une passion inutile. Jean-Paul Sartre
Many views have been postulated regarding the nature of man. What kind of being is he and how does he fit into the universe. So it is interesting to note this arose at about the time of the industrial revolution. It is also this view which dominated literary criticism, with its mechanistic view of interpretation, until recently. It was this notion that the Romantics rebelled against, positing an alternative of man as organism or part of nature, and it is this notion also that the post-moderns seek to replace with another view. Stanley Fish astutely observes that the difference between Stylistics or formalism and his own reader-response analysis is ". . . more that an procedural distinction; for at its heart are different notions of what it is to read which are finally different notions of what it is to be human."Footnote149
What kind of notion would the post-moderns assert for the "essence" of man? It has been long recognized that man bears the unique faculty of language bearer. Past notions often viewed language as reflective of a transcendent realm. Thus man's language bore a "real presence," a presence which gave intimations of his connection with the divine. Current notions, however, regard language as conventional and in turn regard man as ultimately ungrounded and free-floating. His being is not connected to a divine reality or any reality at all other than that which he is able to create. Thus man is uniquely able to create meaning in his world as he is able to create language. Fish comments, "The ability to interpret is not acquired; it is constitutive of being human."Footnote150 In other words, man has the unique capacity to create meaning as Fish has said elsewhere.
The modern worldview brought with it a view of truth that centered around rationality and the scientific method. The widespread and undeniable practical success of the sciences effected a change in most other disciplines to meet the challenge of scientific truth. Thus humanities as well as theology, at one time called the "Queen of the sciences,"Footnote151 felt the need to appropriate this method in their own disciplines in order to make their "professions" legitimate. In literary studies this gave rise to a more objective New Critical approach to textual interpretation. Tompkins provides critical analysis of this,
Literary studies, consequently, whose subject matter is not quantifiable, whose methods are not formalized, and whose results are not able to be objectively verified, cannot compete with science for an equal share of prestige and economic support in a society where positivist values prevail. This line of argument suggests that the only way to defend the literary enterprise would be to challenge the positivist conceptual framework on which science depends for its prestige. And in fact, this is what reader-response criticism, in its later phase, has done.Footnote152
Stanley Fish, who is married to Jane Tompkins, similarly regards his predecessors in critical theory as fawning over the sciences. "Stylistics, in short, is an attempt to put criticism on a scientific basis," he says. And as Tompkins points out, this is exactly what he seeks to undermine by challenging the possibility of objectivity, the empirical method and by cutting himself off from any "evidentiary procedures" which might lend support to his theory.Footnote153
It might be argued however that the positivistic conceptual framework has fallen on hard times apart from literary criticism and that the reason New Criticism gave way was not because it failed but because "post-modernism" has ushered in a new paradigm by which all disciplines should be measured.
Let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and make a name for ourselves. . . Genesis
I hope that it can be seen from the preceding analysis that the values of modern literary theory have not come about without sociological and philosophical influences. I have attempted to examine one post-modern or post-structuralist critical theory in light of some of the factors that have contributed to the rise of what is now called post-modernism. Contemporary critical theory and specifically that of Stanley Fish can be understood in terms of changes that have occurred in philosophical thought going back at least to the Enlightenment. Current thinking in the literary field, as well as others, is also influenced by sociological changes such as the rise of the modern state and an increasingly pluralistic society.
The changes that I have attempted to examine in brief have brought about a revolution in thought, one that is commonly compared with the revolution that took place during the Enlightenment. Our generation is witnessing the demise of the Enlightenment project's relentless pursuit of objectivity. The demise of this hope has ushered in a reevaluation of Western rationality which is often labeled ideological and no more reflective of reality than any other system of thought. Existence or "Being" having gained ascendancy over essence has found itself without the nobility of purpose with which it was endowed by those same essentialist theories. Truth is therefore considered conventional instead of foundational. And man is no longer certain of who he is.
These conventional notions of truth are encouraged by a pluralistic, democratic society that is oriented around the consumer. As governmental authority has ceased to reside in a supposed divine prerogative, so to have notions of truth. Truth is no longer seen as a reflection of a transcendent realm but as that which is immanent and conventionally determined. It is public opinion that determines what is right and the group with the most purchasing power in the system is the group in control. Again, public opinion is what is important because in a pluralistic society the loss of certainly does not stop with religious issues, moral issues and the very idea of truth are called into question and it is only public opinion that is left to determine between competing views.
It is amidst this confusing cacophony of voices that Stanley Fish's reader-response hermeneutic finds a receptive audience. But I believe that it is apparent that Fish's critical method does not stand up to close examination. And by this I do not mean that it fails in a world of foundationalist presuppositions. Any truth claim, to borrow an idea from Francis Schaeffer, must be both internally consistent and livable. Fish's theory is neither. For although he claims that his is only a theoretical construct without implications, his theory does have implications.
I have criticized Fish on a number of different levels. Hermeneutically, one of Fish's first moves is to locate meaning in the reading community a move which, while it coheres nicely with post-modern thought, lends itself to subjectivity in interpretive theory. In this model the hermeneutical circle is a vicious circle in which no progress or new insight can be had that is not simply an explication of the individual or the group's mindset.
But Fish has also failed to define carefully enough exactly what constitutes a interpretive community. Because he has failed to do this, his theory enables him to assume a radical disjuncture between interpretive communities that does not reflect the world in which we live. To apply Wittgenstein's analogy of the relatedness of words, communities are interrelated phenomena in which a single individual may have membership within numerous differing communities. If interpretive communities were as "monolithic" as Fish seems to purport, there would then be no basis for differing interpretations within the same interpretive community. But fortunately, there are differences.
Another implication of Fish's theory is that which arises from his loose theory of conventionalism. He appears to reason, following after philosophers and linguists such as Wittgenstein, that language is conventional and because language is conventional and not transcendent that what it refers to is conventional and not transcendent, a mistake that Wittgenstein and others do not make. Were this the case, that communities construct their own realities without reference to any "transhistorical" or transparadigmatic categories, philosophical relativism would be the logical result. Because Fish's theory tends toward this kind of view of conventionalism, his thinking lends itself to a subjective view of truth and an evaluation of reason as ideological.
Finally, his theory in its implications severs the critical enterprise from the moorings of "false" notions of truth and allows each interpretive community to be an isolated enterprise without the need to justify its theory to any other community as each group constitutes its own world. Indeed, with belief in reason as transparadigmatic, it is senseless to attempt to justify one form of life to another.
Fish's conventionalism has returned critical theory to Babel. Each group speaks its own language in isolation and without the ability to understand any other group. But there is one important difference between Fish's thinking and the story of ancient Babel: in Fish's Babel each group is under the mistaken notion that they understand the others. However, for Fish to be able to enlighten us regarding topography of Babel would require him to have a perspective that is transparadigmatic, it would require Fish to be able to scale Babel's tower and survey the landscape. Unfortunately, the tower Fish has attempted to scale has proven to be notoriously difficult to complete. Thus Fish comes under the same criticism he himself launched, by proclaiming the community dependent nature of all truth-claims he has torn down any possible perspective from which he could make this claim. Fish has kicked the tower out from beneath himself.
Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 94.
Ibid., p. 172.
While this expression belongs to Aquinas who clearly predates the scientific revolution, it has since been used by theologians to justify their existence in an increasingly scientific age.
Tompkins, p. 222.
Fish's position in this regard is not unlike much Reformed epistemology. Were he arguing in Christian circles he may be labeled a fideist.
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