fish-y logic

Stanley Fish is an intelligent man, don’t get me wrong.  So imagine how delighted I was when I found his lengthy review of Francois Cusset’s forthcoming French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (say that five times fast!).  An alarmingly erudite piece for the Times’ standards, even Fish’s, the author does a remarkable job of summing up (one of) the projects of deconstructionist theory.  Going on a furious ride through philosophy (Bacon through Descartes, jump to Rorty and Kuhn, to our francophone friends) and pop culture (Clint Eastwood “deconstructing” his Dirty Harry image, Fish rightfully places the theory in a historical context and the dangers of absolutism and pop acculturation (though, curiously, no mention of Marcuse in his discussion of dominant discourse swallowing any rhetoric of dissent).  Fish even makes the claim that many stand against in opposition to the deconstructionist mode: that without meaning, well, what’s the point of anything?: “That’s a loss, but it’s not a loss of anything in particular. It doesn’t take anything away from us. We can still do all the things we have always done.”

Go, Stan, go!

So imagine my dismay in the very next paragraph: “For both what was important about French theory in America was its political implications, and one of Cusset’s main contentions — and here I completely agree with him — is that it doesn’t have any.”

I just threw up a little in my mouth.

I’m not going to be nit-picky and engage Fish with how he feels it’s possible to “completely agree” with something (naughty, naughty absolutes!).  What I will take up with him, and any other person who carelessly makes this assertion, is that the very gesture of the deconstructionist critique is political.  The basic tenet that there is nothing outside the text is hard to swallow because it debases and reveals language for what it is: a mode of communication wrapped in a discourse and history of dominance, oppression (things that Fish holds very dear, whether he knows it or not).

And perhaps the funniest moment comes at the end of the piece, where Fish derails his (and, allegedly, Cusset’s) most important thesis: “A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep.”

No production?  No results?  No politics?  Fish hides behind the veil of essentialism, whilst purporting to Enlighten the public, while simultaneously keeping the threat at bay.  And if he really wants to go there, why only mention Derrida, yet not take up the projects of Deleuze and Guattari, or my man Baudrillard?  It’s selective attention at its best, only reinforced by the (at the time of writing this) the 607 comments in response to the piece.  I laughed when I thought of some advice to offer Fish, a deconstructionist take on F.D.R.:

“Stanley, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”