Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change

Perhaps the most interesting distinction Stanley Fish makes in this book is the one between what he calls "plot-thinking" and "being-thinking," if I remember the terms well enough. The first sort is a kind of tactical thinking--what do I need to do to get my points across right now? The second is a bit slower, it is the sort of thinking that says "what do I need to do for myself, given the sort of person I am?" Essentially, what Fish is saying is a kind of lecture of the "new historicists" and the other radicalisms that have become so important in the academy. A great many of course will hate him for saying this, becauseit means a delay in the sort of confrontation with Power that so many seem to desire these days. The theory operating for these people is that our metaphors are bad, and thus we must change them, which is why we need writers. This, or so it seems to me, is a very American sort of solution, yet it does not appear to bother the new historicists, nor do they appear to care about the destruction of the liberal, reasonably well-read public that used to form the backbone of support for leftist causes--schoolteachers, social workers, etc.--that is proceeding today as those who might have entered into such careers in previous times are relentlessly told that their work simply serves to reinforce "the Anglo-Saxon warrior brotherhood" that apparently runs things around here, at least according to one of these scholars. For all anyone knows, of course, this might be true, but to give young people the choice between being English professor and being a tool of power is not, I don't think anyway, very helpful. Stanley Fish's counsel of moderation, therefore, is I think of great value, which is to say that even if inside the academy he is thought of as someone who does not respect difference, from the outside looking in he looks a lot better than some I could name. Anyway, in the days to come, which are increasingly looking like they will be made up of a vast, illiterate population ruled by an equally illiterate stockbroker class, policed by a group of "discourse specialists" whose job it will be to censor the books and declare their meanings too obscure for the public, which come to think of it is what we have now, Stanley Fish might be remembered by some few of us as, perhaps, the last man to write in English.