Fishean Pomo

Stanley Fish is again getting criticized for some of his recent comments on the relationship between postmodern theory and 9-11.

In the NY Times, Edward Rothstein suggests that Fish's "crucial point is that he believes that there is no reliable standard for proving it to an opponent." Not quite. While I think this is just a slight of rhetoric on Rothstein’s part, Fish's point would be that there is no universal standard of proof. In the July Harper’s essay I previously mentioned, Fish put it this way:

Historians draw conclusions about the meaning of events, astronomers present models of planetary movements, psychologists offer accounts of the reading process, consumers make decisions about which product is best, parents choose schools for their children – all of these things and many more are done with varying degrees of confidence, and in no case is the confidence rooted in a conviction that the actor is in possession of some independent standard of objectivity. Rather, the actor, you or I or anyone, begins in some context of practice, with its received authorities, sacred texts, exemplary achievements, and generally accepted benchmarks, and from within the perspective of that context – thick, interpersonal, densely elaborated – judges something to be true or inaccurate, reasonable or irrational, and so on.

It seems, then, that the unavailability of absolutely objective standards…doesn’t take anything away from us. If, as postmodernists assert, objective standards of a publicly verifiable kind are unavailable, they are so only in the sense that they have always been unavailable…and we have always managed to get along without them, doing a great many things despite the fact that we might be unable to shore them up in accordance with the most rigorous philosophical demands

So, there are many reliable standards of proof; but such reliability is, by its very nature, contingent on one’s own ability or affinity for contextualization.

Rothstein also writes, disapprovingly, that "In Fishean pomo, all we have are competing claims, whether the issue is the numerical value of pi or the assertion that the Mossad destroyed the World Trade Center." This, of course, isn't a terribly relevant point, in terms of the argument Fish is trying to make. At a strict level, there are only competing claims, but pomo theory does not presuppose that humans will prescribe equal amounts of weight to each “claim”. People draw conclusions based on what is real, tangible, and convincing for them - where the evidence seems to lead. Nobody is disputing or hoping to deny that fact. The assertion pomo theorists would insist upon, however, is that people invariably do not draw the same conclusions, nor do they do so in precisely the same manner.

In another article critical of Fish from TNR, Peter Berkowitz invokes the Sokal affair and tries to pin Fish to the wall with these two paragraphs:

According to Fish, the new critics didn't grasp postmodernism's true meaning. They were under the mistaken impression that "since postmodernists deny the possibility of describing matters of fact objectively, they leave us with no firm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back." In fact, claimed Fish, "Postmodernism maintains only that there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one."

These two passages may have left some readers puzzled. Had not Fish, in the span of two sentences, just reaffirmed the notion he said he was knocking down? The lack of independent standards for determining the truth among competing accounts is what most people mean by the impossibility of describing the facts objectively.

Here it seems Berkowitz, like Rothstein, is reading Fish wrong or, perhaps, just arguing against a point that Fish does not bother to make. There's no contradiction in arguing that objectivity is unattainable and yet still maintain that conclusions, based on some defined criteria, can be drawn (see the Harper’s excerpt, above). Conclusions can always be drawn - some more tenable than others, of course - but the important point to acknowledge is that they may not be readily persuasive or attributable to multiple readings of text, especially when viewed from divergent perspectives. In plainer language: a circle of people can arrive at similar conclusions, but do so usually by approaching the evidence with similar methods and assumptions. That does not mean that they are abiding by a universally defined notion of "truth"; instead, "truth" is actually created by the referencing of textual and cultural markers congruent with others in the community.

Further down, Berkowitz writes:

...the guiding theme of postmodernism is that objectivity, especially in morals, is a sham--in other words, precisely the definition Fish was disavowing in the Times. Postmodernists take their lead from Nietzsche's famous aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil, "There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena." They draw inspiration and sustenance from the many books of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who held that the quest for truth in the study of history is wrongheaded--that, instead, one should seek to grasp "how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false." And they (the postmodernists) consider as one of their outstanding contemporaries Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who asserts that "power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic"; that "there is no ontologically intact reflexivity to the subject which is then placed within a cultural context"; and that "agency is always and only a political prerogative."

I don't see what Berkowitz is criticizing here. He may not like the contention that objectivity is a sham, or the idea that knowledge is inherently politicized, but both points seem generally uncontroversial to me. Perhaps he would draw comfort from the fact that admitting either doesn't destroy the entire project of Western civilization. Paradigms and inquiry are still useful in arriving at practical solutions to debates; indeed, the one very good thing that pomo theory postulates is that the truth is not inert, but rather defined through continual activity and process.

To me, it seems that Fish is being unfairly criticized for pointing out rather obvious, but nevertheless crucial, points about living in a world where the denseness and breadth of textuality, coupled with the reality of nearly infinite situational viewpoints, make truth less an ideal that we all arrive at in the same way - i.e. something that is already defined and awaiting us "out there" - than an ideal we continually create and strive for, with the best evidence available, as members of differing (but often overlapping) communities.

As in this case, postmodern theorists are usually condemned for what their arguments may imply, not necessarily what they say. Contending that people will base their interpretation of reality on their own perceptions and contexts, and that there may be widely varying ways of interpreting that reality due to inevitable disparities in textual references, is not a terribly radical proposition. And that, ultimately, is the premise Fish and his postmodern friends are trying to unravel.