JAC Volume 13 Issue 1

Editor:
Thomas Kent

Back to 13.1 ToC

A Response to "Fish Tales: A Conversation with the Contemporary Sophist"

Patricia Bizzell

In short, Fish's prose, like the body of Tiresias', seems to contain both masculine and feminine elements, at least as these genders are traditionally constructed (at one point Fish questions such a construction). His style is hard: it argues quite fiercely. It is soft: it changes its mind quite publicly. Something about this style appeals to me, even though it means courting positions that can be easily misunderstood, adopting labels that seem, as Fish says of he sophist tag, to make one a criminal in the eyes of the theoretically pure.

Fish understands his prose style, too, in a fashion that is congenial to sophistic thinking. He says, "In a world without certain foundations for action you avoid the Scylla of prideful self-assertion, on the one hand, and the Charybdis of paralysis, on the other, by stepping out provisionally, with a sense of limitation, with a sense of style." In other words, one enables oneself to act by rhetorically constructing a basis for action that is admittedly temporary, the product of historical and personal contingencies, and yet firm enough on which to take a stand.

As to the morality of so relying on rhetorical scaffolding, Fish links his view of style to faith. That is, as I understand him, we cannot know that what we do is right, but we can hope so. This strikes me as very close to what Mario Untersteiner identifies as the tragic aspect of human knowledge for the Greek sophists. One must submit to persuasion to avoid quietism, and live with the likelihood that what one has accepted may later have to be changed. I think Fish's views here help to explain his impatience with liberals: he sees them as mounting "a brief against belief and conviction," knocking down foundations, without the nerve to trust in non-foundational, rhetorically constructed bases for action.

Where Fish's thinking most influences me is precisely in his articulation of the powers of rhetoric. Once again in the JAC interview, Fish describes rhetoric as neither "the evil shadow of the real" that foundationalists condemn, nor the "gesture of despair" embraced by total relativists (and many postmodern skeptics?). Rather, for Fish, rhetoric is "the medium in which certainties become established, in which formidable traditions emerge," in short, the medium in which human reality is constructed. The practitioner of rhetoric, then, is one who knows how "to adjust [his or her] verbal register to different registers of social life" and thereby to participate in the construction of reality in a variety of localities. This helps to explain what people are doing in interpretive communities, in discourse communities.

Fish's view of rhetoric has been misconstrued as requiring total conformity and lack of change within the communities rhetoric constructs. Such readings may arise from passages such as the one in which Fish gives what could be taken as another characterization of the practitioner of rhetoric, someone who is "critically reflective within the routines of a practice." Fish's point here is that all critical reflection must be within a practice, that is, within the terms constructed by the rhetoric that helps to constitute the practice. He denies the possibility of "critical self-consciousness," if that means the ability to "step back from, rise above, get to the side of your beliefs and convictions so that they will have less of a hold on you than they would had you not performed this distancing action." There can be no such distance if you believe that all beliefs are constructed by rhetoric, for if you believe this, then there is no way to get outside rhetoric.

If there can be no such meta-discursive distance, however, it still seems to me that Fish's view of rhetoric permits dissensus and change when discursive practices from different communities overlap, compete, and critique one another. Attentiveness to one practice is rarely so total that a person cannot participate in a number of other practices. Indeed, Fish's account of feminism in the JAC interview describes a practice that has interfered with a large number of other practices. Fish suggests that feminist discourse has come to pervade even "the larger society," much like Freudianism. The terminology, assumptions, and so on are employed even by people who would deny they are feminists, or who would hardly have a clear idea of what feminism might be. Feminist discourse, then, is depicted by Fish as a catalyst for change.

The key issue for Fish is that the discourse that causes change—whic he is willing to call "abnormal discourse," after Rorty and Kuhn—cannot be seen as a "special" discourse in the sense of being over or outside the discourses it influences. It is simply different. To be sure, there are many "different" discourses around at any given time, and not all of them get attended to as "abnormal." But the ones that do get attended to owe their influence not to some inherent superiority in their terminology, assumptions, and so on—not to a greater critical incisiveness or a clearer picture of reality or what have you—but rather to the historical, and I would add personal, contingencies that make a discourse salient for practitioners of another discourse at any given time. For example, in literary studies there is a history of attending to literary theory such that changes in theoretical discourse, "theory talk," will affect literary-critical discourse generally. This ability to influence does not come from some inherent superiority of the theoretical discourse.

Hence, then, on change: Fish is not saying that change cannot happen, or that discursive communities, human groups united by rhetoric, must always be univocal and fiercely conformist. That would be a patently absurd position to anyone who has ever been a member of a human group—that is, to anyone. But Fish is saying that change cannot be attributed to the influence of some sort of meta-discourse, because there is no such thing as a meta-discourse. Change happens when discourses that are only different, not superior or inferior, influence one another (and, of course, as Fish points out, change occurs for any number of other reasons as well, many of them non-discursive).

Fish mentions objecting to my "suggestion that the theoretical perspective on situationality itself could do work if transmitted to a group of students." I think what he is referring to here is my advocacy of teaching about academic discourse (the "theoretical perspective on situationality") as a way of demystifying academic discourse and giving students more control over their use or rejection of academic discourse. In other words, Fish sees me as trying to teach a meta-discourse on academic discourse, and to foster a critical self-consciousness, about academic discourse, of the kind he has disallowed. Fish is getting his view of my position here, I think, from my 1982 essay "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty." He is right to suggest that I once advocated teaching about academic discourse as a means to achieving critical self-consciousness, or what I would have called, following Paulo Freire, "critical consciousness." I have come to reject this view of teaching about academic discourse, however, as I have argued, for example, in my 1986 essay "Foundationalism and Anti-Foundationalism in Composition Studies," which draws heavily on Fish's work "against theory." I now agree with Fish that talk about academic discourse cannot be meta-discursive (for a more complete account of the changes in my thinking here, see Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, in press).

What I would now like to say concerning teaching about academic discourse, however, is that it might be a kind of abnormal discourse, functioning in ways similar to the functionings of theory talk in literary studies. Let us say that talk about academic discourse and the social construction of knowledge is only different from, not superior to, talk that stresses the need to learn Standard English as the sine qua non of good writing or talk that treats the construction of knowledge as the heaping of facts. What I would like to say is that it might be different in a way that matters now. It might even empower students in some of the ways I had claimed for it in the past, but again, not because it is superior, but rather because given the history of teaching writing in this country, it is startling, and feels liberating, to hear the teacher talking about ideas instead of correctness.

Another way to put this would be to say that we can still talk about the way we talk, in the academy for example, without having to claim that his talk is "meta" in the sense of being above or outside academic discourse. And I think we can say that talking about academic discourse can help students to understand it better, practice it more fluently, and work to change it more creatively, without having to claim that this kind of perspective on the discourse constitutes critical "distance" of the kind Fish disallows.

When Fish insists near the end of the JAC interview that there is "no yield" from believing his theories, I think he means that he does not regard his own theories as any more "meta" than any others. But I don't think he can mean that Fish talk might not be abnormal discourse for some people, might not interfere with their usual ways of thinking about things and move them toward change. The first time I was exposed to Fish talk was in the summer of 1977, at the School of Criticism and Theory, then at the University of California at Irvine. My husband, Bruce Herzberg, was taking a course from Fish that summer and telling me endlessly about the interesting things he was learning. As I recall, I resisted it all. This was not the way to talk about language or literature. I argued against Bruce, against the others in his class, and against Stanley all summer—and look, by the end of the summer I was talking Fish talk too.

Works Cited