Consequences, Fish

From monstrouspossibility

"Consequences" was written and published as a response to an essay by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, "Against Theory." The original article (knapp & michaels) and many responses were published in Critical Inquiry.

Here is that instigating article here, in pdf form:media:Against_theory_1.pdf

What's at stake in these theories about theory? What's the proper relation between theory and the practice of criticism / interpretation? Do you agree with the manner in which Fish or others describe what theory is about, what it's for? If you endeavor to read the Knapp / Michaels essay, do you agree with them? What would motivate their problematization of theory?

Curtis White writes about these issues in a very different way, you'll find. He is by no means "against theory" and he may take issue with how the notion of "doing theory" is constructed by his fellow Americans. White is more interested in a European, mostly French, tradition of literary philosophy.

So, we've plopped you down in the middle of some rather arcane controversies that stem from differences in philosophical and literary traditions. You'll see the concept of "pragmatism" thrown around to some end in the American theoretical discourse, a concept that I have yet to encounter in this century's French writers. Meanwhile, Curtis White is as comfortable with Jakobson, Benjamin, and Barthes as he is with Punk Music (of certain age) and pornography.

You may find Curtis White's arguments, on the one hand more accessible and more fun, and on the other hand far less meticulous. Consider carefully how rhetoric and control of terminology plays a part in what and how we can think about the ideas being presented. For instance, Fish and Knapp and Michaels have to construct definitions of "interpretation", "intention", "criticism", and "theory" itself. These are not easy things to define, and you don't need to accept anyone's definition as absolute. Can you come up with ways of sliding their theories around just by adjusting the way these terms work? What other ways of organizing our thoughts about the fundamental problems of meaning might there be?

[edit] Some Thoughts on Definition in The World of Exclusionary Hyper-analyticity (quietism):

--Definition, an analytical definition: x is an x if and only if its complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions (a....n) are met and hold for a given set of operations on x, y.

Fish and terms (fishy terms):

Fish, though a pragmatist, also holds fast to another notion, popularized in the 20th century by Anglo philosophers and other men with beards, that of a realist definition of "intentionality." Intentionality, similar but not the same as "intension," for Fish and many others, is thought to be a real entity, as real as a chair or a box filled with glass. Therefore, regardless of how he lands on theories of reference (whether words pick out things in the world, or just other items in sentences, etc.), "intentions" are "discrete mental states," and real enough to define and pick out.

Compare:

"That's a pear tree."

"That's an intention."

Ergo, for Fish's argument to get off the ground, for him to be able to dismiss theory as something that "does not add" to "practice" (another real item he must define, this time not a mental state, but something presumably in the world and yet discrete enough to define), two things must occur (among others):

1) Intentions, hence intentionality, must be defined so as to make the move from "practice" to theory a null gesture, an overabundance of words and gestures that "do nothing."

2) Once the practice/theory binary, via definition, is set up, it must not be infested by similar "real" things, like: "language" or "commitments" or "consciousness" or "collective unconscious" or "contextual paradigms" or "cultural facts," and etc.

Why? That is, how does Fish hold on to this binary, and why is intentionality as a real entity important to his argument that "theory" has "no consequences"?

Does Fish's theory have consequences? To whom? What might these other terms do to destabilize (or stabilize) Fish's argument?

And what of the relation between "meaning," "intention," and "interpretation" as they relate to:

a) Train Conductor: "Next stop, Jupiter." b) Train Conductor in a story about a Train Conductor: "Next Stop, Jupiter" c) Train Conductor in a story with only this sentence: "Net stop, Jupiter." d) Train Conductor, a poem in a dream I had:

            next stop

                jupiter

Were I to ask: "interpret the meaning of..." a, b, c, and d, am I asking one question that applies to none, one, some, or all? Am I asking more than one question that applies to none, one, some, or all? From a New York Times letter to the editor by Fish:

    Think about it: if interpreting a document is to be a rational act,
    if its exercise is to have a goal and a way of assessing progress
    toward that goal, then it must have an object to aim at, and the
    only candidate for that object is the author's intention. What
    other candidate could there be? 

What is "the goal" of Stories and Texts for Nothing? Is this a question? It must be. It has a question mark. What is the goal of talking about Stories and Texts for Nothing? May I talk about it. Can I?

"A question of what you value."

"A question of whether you are from Jupiter. I am from Neptune, New Jersey."

What is an author? Here is a story I co-authored called "Paragraph, NY Times: Fish 2004":

    Think about it: if interpreting a document is to be a rational act,
    if its exercise is to have a goal and a way of assessing progress
    toward that goal, then it must have an object to aim at, and the
    only candidate for that object is the author's intention. What
    other candidate could there be? 

Finally, hints from the imago of Adorno, Eagleton:

"Much hostility to theory has been little more than a typically Anglo-Saxon uneasiness with ideas as such--a feeling that arid abstractions are out of place when it comes to art. This edginess about ideas is characteristic of those social groups whose own historically specific ideas for the moment won out, and who therefore come to mistake them either for natural feelings or eternal verities." (Afterward, Introduction to Literary Theory, 207)

Finally finally, hints in the underbrush:

What might "free-play" have to do with praxis-oriented literary modes? The non-closural or recursive patterning of monstrosity that White highlights? Here "theory" is taken more broadly, its meta-logical frameworks stripped down until the binaries above are only useful as shorthand category errors, perhaps a way to triangulate at a cocktail party. But what, in White's account of "theory" gets us from the "free-play" and "performativity" of Derridian constructivism to the Marxist backbone of sociopolitically relevant textual gestures? That is, now assuming we shift our definitions such that "theory" and "practice" are, at times, indistinguishable, and "intention" either fiat or composite, where might White, say, avoid Fish's grand old worry that absent these sturdy hooks we have sentences upon sentences that do nothing--that are, in a word, nonsense?

[edit] Steven's Marginalia on "Consequences"

Is the point of theory to throw light on or reform or guide practice?

Distinction between general and local hermeneutics?

What if all theory is local?

What if theory tells us that all criticism is local?

“always yield correct results” —is this from a technical manual? Who are we kidding?

“In a situations like this ………no room for interpretive decisions by the agent” —this seems a dramatically uninteresting and painfully inaccurate description of the goals of criticism and reading.

Does a collection of “rules of thumb” not imply a theory?

Application of Theory generates results “independently of [rule-follower’s] judgment” —did he not choose the theory?

Over simplification of mathematics. He describes problem solving as if it were the work of the discipline. Mathematicians work to discover new rules, new systems, new applications of rules, etc etc…

Theory = a general, disinterested rationality – Fish is describing a science of literature, not theory, which has its roots in philosophy, rhetoric, poetics, and anthropology

Theory is “always already contaminated by the interested judgments they claim to transcend” —what theorist claims to transcend it? Fish has made a straw man of his subject by defining it only by the terms that his argument will use, without justification, to dismiss it.

“Linguistic knowledge is contextual rather than abstract” —is this a theoretical rule that could affect criticism?

There’s no reason that theory should not grow out of practice and, in some sense, employ its terms —this concept of transcendence is replacing ‘outside,’ above, and so on; what does it mean? Theory, as a concept, is being mystified.

Correcting one’s practice based on assumptions one suddenly finds distressing --requires a perceived contradiction in beliefs / knowledge? --the problem of anti-foundationalists changing grounds if they don’t believe in grounds… --Unrealistic description of what a theory must be – a description that does not correspond to but aspires to a science of criticism. (despite the claim that true knowledge is merely belief….)

relation btwn extending a practice (thematics and constructing a theory) – nothing gained and lost the sense that theory is “special”? special = urgent? Theory (its consequences_ are uninteresting if expanded to include the above? If “everything is theory” What if everything is practice? Is practice no longer interesting?

Followed by the theory—> belief switcheroo The trivial consequences of theory touching everything?

The consequences theory seeks are impossible – process over product? Aren’t they interesting because they are impossible? Are the consequences of interpretation also impossible? Would the concept of interpretation fall to exactly the same argument &rhetoric?

Assumptions – theories – beliefs?? What are they??