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Peter Berger argues that "reality is socially constructed, and therefore that truth over and beyond these social constructions cannot easily be attained."Footnote68 The last half of the statement is what separates Berger from Fish and post-modern thought. While he holds to a "metanarrative", a belief that there is a truth that makes sense of reality, post-modern thought is characterized by the belief that our experience of reality is a function of our language which is socially determined. Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed that our "language games" are a reflection of our "forms of life." By this he means that a language rests on the way we do things in the world. Wittgenstein said, "You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean; it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there--like our life."Footnote69 Wittgenstein would contend that the center of language, far from being an eternal logoV, is the constantly shifting and dynamic "forms of life," the activities, purpose, and context in which language games are played.
For Wittgenstein there is no essence of language, it is not a logocentric, metalinguistic idea. The thought here is similar to Derrida's concept of "de-centering" language.Footnote70 There is no ontological reality, no presence to language. It is not grounded in a metaphysical reality but in the context and function of life. Derrida argues that Western thought has functioned from a belief in a "presence" or ontology that is beyond or above.
It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence--eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia. . . aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth."Footnote71
His purpose is to "de-center" language from the idea of "being" to that of "function." In other words, language is a pragmatic, ungrounded web of signifiers which constantly points not to any reality beyond but only to itself. The refusal to recognize these facts Derrida calls logocentrism.Footnote72
In postmodern thought logocentric discourse is considered totalizing, authoritarian discourse. It is at this point that Nietzsche's idea of the "will to power" enters the discussion in that as much as any one perspective claims knowledge, there exists a will to power. Jane P. Tompkins states,
The insistence that language is constitutive of reality rather than merely reflective of it suggests that contemporary critical theory has come to occupy a position very similar to, if not the same as, that of the Greek rhetoricians for whom mastery of language meant mastery of the state. . . . The similarity lies rather in the common perception of language as a form of power.Footnote73
From this perspective reason itself is seen to be an ideology that is Western and totalitarian.
For literary theorists and philosophers the conclusion is clear: the one who controls the language controls the world. For Marxist, African-American, and feminist critics this means the white middle class bourgeoisie and represents an order which must be challenged. Julia Kristeva, a Freudian feminist critic and philosopher, "looks to this 'language' of the semiotic as a means of undermining the symbolic order," in Eagleton's words. Referring to her language, he continues,
It is opposed to all fixed, transcendental signification's; and since the ideologies of modern male-dominated class-society rely on such fixed signs for their power (God, father, state, order, property and so on), such literature becomes a kind of equivalent in the realm of language to revolution in the sphere of politics.Footnote74
From this perspective, it is not surprising that the "Great Books" tradition has fallen out of favor in university curricula.
So the question becomes, not whether language holds power, but who will control language.Footnote75 It is to this end that we find competing ideologies in literature, theory, and philosophy. Jane Tompkins comments, "When discourse is responsible for reality and not merely a reflection of it, then whose discourse prevails makes all the difference."Footnote76 Thus we find in the academy today what has been termed a "culture war" as each element in a pluralistic society struggles to win strategic points of the landscape on which to plant their educational flag.Footnote77
While the existentialists took up where Descartes began with a focus on truth as a subjective phenomenon, modern literary theory has taken the idea one step further. Because language is not a reflection of a transcendent "word", but a completely immanent, functional medium, the very idea of truth collapses. Eagleton says it well,
The work of Derrida and others had cast grave doubt upon the classical notions of truth, reality, meaning and knowledge, all of which could be exposed as resting on a naively representational theory of language. If meaning, the signified, was a passing product of words or signifiers, always shifting and unstable, part-present and part-absent, how could there be any determinate truth or meaning at all?Footnote78
The rejection of any kind of metanarrative, as we have seen with Derrida, places reason itself in jeopardy because rational systems, and especially those with which we are familiar in the West, produce yet another kind of totalizing discourse that merely serves to justify the society in which it operates. "The hermeneutics of suspicion sees every text as a political creation, usually designed to function as propaganda for the status quo," according to Veith.Footnote79
Fish reflects this anti-rationalism in his writing first by denying literature any special status, as we have seen in his work, and also by propounding a "controlled subjectivity" as opposed to an objectivity. Nietzsche claimed that, "truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions." And, "he speaks most truthfully who recognizes the illusory nature of his speech."Footnote80 Fish echoes this sentiment when he writes, "I would rather have an acknowledged and controlled subjectivity than an objectivity which is finally an illusion."Footnote81 It is worth asking how one can have any control over subjectivity, either in the individual or the interpretive community, where objectivity is impossible. We will take this point up again in the next chapter, but for now let us underscore Fish's unwillingness to endorse reason as anything other than an historically conditioned ideology.
That is to say, unless one argues (as I shall finally argue) that the rational is itself a historical category. . . fashioned and refashioned by. . . causal forces. . . the rational will inevitably be seen as a category that is transhistorical and therefore as a category that is finally independent of the "causal" forces that either nourish it or threaten it.Footnote82
I think it safe to say that Fish's theory is intended to threaten rationality as his theoretical claim holds that literature, language, and rational categories are conventional and not foundational.
At this point it might be helpful to back up and examine more carefully one of the philosophers responsible for the linguistic turn in current theory, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Stanley Fish's thought shows familiarity with Wittgenstein's writing. He references Wittgenstein's terms such as form of life, language games, the conventional nature of language, and stresses the importance of meaning being associated with the context of an activity.Footnote83 The latter of these concepts is certainly not exclusive to Wittgenstein, but I believe that Fish's concept of an interpretive community is derived, at least partially, from a misappropriated concept of this Austrian philosopher.Footnote84 I will attempt to flesh out Wittgenstein's thought, compare it with Fish's and examine the differences.
Berger, A Far Glory, p.18.
Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sec. 559, p. 73e
Cf. Derrida, Jacques, Structure, "Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", The Structuralist Controversy, eds. Macksey and Donato, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, pp. 247-265.
Ibid., p. 249.
I am indebted here to Alan Jacobs fine article "Deconstruction" in Contemporary Literary Theory, eds. Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1991, pp. 172-198.
Tompkins, p. 226
Eagleton, p. 188-198.
The parallels with George Orwell's 1984 are frightening. What is worse, however, is the deterministic attitude this language theory produces. One might well reason, "someone has to control the language ergo it might as well be us."
Tompkins, p. xxv.
It is also interesting to note that academic language and writing today is often self-referential, self-conscious meta-discourse which makes obvious the writer as writer and perspective as perspective. In this way it attempts to avoid the concealed totalitarianism of writing that assumes its author who remains hidden.
Eagleton, p. 143.
Veith, Postmodern Times, p. 54.
Quoted in Vanhoozer, "Aesthetic Theology," p.35.
Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 49
Fish, "Anti-Professionalism," p. 95.
Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 89, 97, 310.
See "Anti-Professionalism" where Fish labels Wittgenstein a member of the 'intellectual left" defined as those thinkers who view categories of knowledge as "not natural or given but is conventional and has been instituted by the operation of historical and political forces," pp. 97-98.
Anthony Thiselton compares Wittgenstein with the latter two in The Two Horizons. "Wittgenstein's notion of "language game" has striking parallels with Heidegger's understanding of "world" and even with Gadamer's notion of the interpreter's horizons," p.33.
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