A BRIEF HISTORY OF
LITERARY THEORY VII

By Chris Lang

Comparison: Or Isolated Communities

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. Ludwig Wittgenstein

One of the most serious consequences of Fish's interpretive community theory is that it severs communication across cultural and historical boundaries. This is a result of his anti-essentialist position. Fish claims that "intention and understanding are two ends of a conventional act, each of which necessarily stipulates (includes, defines, specifies) the other."Footnote109 What this means is that without being part of the interpretive community in which the act is done, spoken, uttered we have no access to its "intention" nor do we have "understanding." Thus we are sealed off from the utterances of history, bound to interpret them based on our cultural assumptions and unable to penetrate into the mindset of the past. This is a radical reduction of worldview that Fish would have us confined within. The results of such a theory leave closed the possibility of enlarging one's understanding based on the presuppositions of a foreign culture, with the possible exception of actually being a part of that culture. While his determinism maintains that we can understand only what our culture makes available, any broadened perspective is then by default already encompassed within the assumptions of our interpretive community.

Fish claims that "communication only occurs within a community." The question then becomes how to join that community in order to communicate. In postulating a radical distance between communities Fish writes:

Nor would it be enough to give someone "on the outside" a set of definitions because in order to grasp the meaning of an individual term, you must already have grasped the general activity in relation to which it could be thought to be meaningful. . . . an understanding that operates above or across situations--would have no place in the world even if it were available, because it is only in situations--with their interested specifications as to what counts as a fact, what it is possible to say, what will be heard as an argument--that one is called on to understand.Footnote110

He is in agreement with Wittgenstein as far as using proofs appropriate to the language game being played and in realizing that one must understand the activity of life or context in which the language game is played. In other words, one must understand the form of life, the general activity, in order to understand the language game. However, he stands in contrast to Wittgenstein in positing that it is not possible to understand another form of life. He asks,

. . . how can any one of us know whether or not he is a member of the same interpretive community as any other of us? The answer is that he can't, since any evidence brought forward to support the claim would itself be an interpretation (especially if the "other" were an author long dead). The only "proof" of membership is fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community. . . . I say it to you now, knowing full well that you will agree with me (that is, understand) only if you already agree with me.Footnote111

Thus it is that the critic is sealed off from author, or should I say that Fish is sealed off from the critic.Footnote112 If this doesn't leave him open to the charge of solipsism, I don't know what would. One must be within Fish's paradigm to understand him because for Fish it is impossible to reason one's way in. But are not his critics, many of whom are also professors of literature, within the same interpretive community who share a particular paradigm? Fish's perspective or paradigm is rather a way of seeing. And here Fish's thought is exemplary of post-modernism.

The problem with this theory is that it proves too much. It proves that anyone who is a member of the same interpretive community will not disagree on interpretation. And indeed, if the critic were so constrained by his community that he were unable to have any latitude in interpretation, then all with similar cultures and backgrounds would agree. But as we know they do not. Fish might respond to this by saying that yes there is some freedom to have differing interpretations, but it is freedom sanctioned or doled out by the institution, thus removing himself from criticism once again, proving himself to be the slippery fellow that he is.

Wittgenstein would not agree that two differing communities are separated from communication. As we saw earlier the scientist and the religious adherent are not unable to communicate, they can communicate but the "proofs" for each discipline are inappropriate to the other. This is the point of claiming that language games have family resemblance's as it makes communication possible. Furthermore, his example of why we call something a "number" reminds us that it has a relationship to other things that have been called number and he draws the analogy of a spinning thread in which fibre is twisted upon fibre. We can use this idea to criticize Fish's radical separateness of interpretive communities: just as communities use words and concepts which overlap, so one community can "understand" another by the relatedness of their concepts bearing "family resemblance's" and the similarities of their form of life.

In the real world cultures overlap and few are completely isolated from every other. Even historically speaking our culture is not isolated from the past as our word usage, forms of life, and language games are dependant on those of our ancestors so that there is an overlap between cultures historically. Thus our culture is not completely different from that of Shakespeare, Dante, or even the apostle John. And Fish has not explained how it is that one interpretive community could stop and another begin with complete disjuncture. One of the difficulties with the notion of interpretive community is its ill-defined nature. Fish has not attempted, to my knowledge, to clearly define what such a community is. If meaning is, as Fish maintains in words reminiscent of Wittgenstein, "something acquired in the context of an activity," then why can one not familiarize herself with the context or form of life in order to approximate meaning?

Wittgenstein's idea that language games are founded on forms of life has several implications for Fish's theory. Wittgenstein says, "The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language."Footnote113 So that another language is only understood insofar as another form of life bears commonality with our own. Wittgenstein maintains, as we have seen, that language games are not totally independent, contra Fish. Even a language that had been isolated for centuries could be interpreted or "understood" because there is commonality in forms of life. Wittgenstein implies here that there is something essential about forms of life at the very least, which implies a kind of pragmatic essentialism in humanity. If there were nothing that one culture held in common with another culture or time period, translation, let alone communication, would not be possible. It is for this reason that Wittgenstein says, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."Footnote114 We could not understand him because he does not share our form of life, because its activities are so radically different from ours. Fish maintains contra Wittgenstein that other cultures bear nothing in common with our own, especially those long dead. They are to us as lions. But fortunately distant cultures and time periods are not as radically different as Fish's theory assumes. Wittgenstein is correct in that there is a "common behavior of mankind."

Determined Communities

Fish's thinking about interpretive communities leans toward a strong determinism. Fish as we saw earlier maintained that readers do not have their own strategies, rather they flow from the interpretive community and "at once enable and limit the operations of his consciousness."Footnote115 The individual is determined by his cultural assumptions and unable to step outside "of his own convictions and beliefs."

But that is the one thing a historically conditioned consciousness cannot do--scrutinize its own beliefs, conduct a rational examination of its own convictions--for in order to begin such a scrutiny, it would first have to escape the grounds of its own possibility, and it could only do that if it were not historically conditioned and were instead an acontextual or unsituated entity. . ."Footnote116

The question naturally arises then, "How do you know?" Fish's determinism is self-stultifying. If readers are determined by their cultural contexts to read with certain pre-defined conceptual grids and are unable to scrutinize their own beliefs, how would Fish ever know this? Gerald Graff makes this very point in response to Fish, he "does not see that his present position would leave him without a vantage point for coherently stating that view."Footnote117 In order to perceive that communities are historically conditioned one must have an objective, encompassing perspective--which is exactly what Fish claims we do not and can not have.

This view of the interpretive community is a much too monolithic, reductionist view which does not square with what we know by experience.Footnote118 Members of the same "interpretive community" approach a text with "an indefinite number of incompatible, mutually exclusive, conflicting, or different ways of talking that are consistent with our peculiar background assumptions or with the theoretical and practical constraints on our practice," as Battersby has put it.Footnote 119

The Reader-Response Theory of Stanley Fish

how would new insights be brought into an interpretive community and how would individuals with similar backgrounds ever disagree over textual interpretations?

Fish, I believe, has failed to make his point with any philosophical rigor, nor do his theories stand up to a comparison with those philosophers who have demonstrated such rigor. Fish's theories are certainly creative but they are not internally consistent and this is the ultimate test of any theory, not whether it can stand up to a "foundationalist" critique but whether or not it can succeed on its own terms. This it does not do. This leaves me with the final task in my stated goals: to examine Fish's thinking against the sociological backdrop of post-modernism to which we now turn.

Footnotes:

Footnote109

Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 161.

Footnote110

Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p 304. What is ironic is that Fish often practices this belief in response to his critics. He often makes himself guilty of equivocating on terms and almost appears to deliberately misinterpret his critics to demonstrate his interpretive freedom. See for instance "A Reply to Gerald Graff" in which he appears to equivocate on Graff's use of the word "determined," p. 120ff. Worthen also comments regarding a different point that Fish, ". . . has proved nothing except the perennial ease of trading on an equivocation," p. 339.

Footnote111

Ibid., p. 173

Footnote112

Cf p304 where he says that, "Communication ocurs only within such a system."

Footnote113

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sec. 206.

Footnote114

Ibid., p. 223e.

Footnote115

Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 14.

Footnote116

Fish, "Anti-Professionalism," p. 107.