Stanley Fish

...The overflow audience at Princeton has sat rapt as Fish, who made his reputation as a critic of Renaissance poetry and a theorist of "self-consuming artifacts," demonstrates the sheer absurdity of the law...

...No," thunders Fish, plainly pleased to see that a sucker has taken the bait...

...Time and again he shows that what is clearly X in a legal text can, by dint of judicial interpretation, become not X. Contemptuous of conservatives like Allan Bloom who search for certainties, Fish has, in the manner of a certain sort of law school radical, described how the law is unpredictable because it "is nothing but manipulation and power...

...The job of the SPRING • 1990 • 259 Notebook law, he says, is simply to re-create its own authority by presenting masterful performances...

...An earnest graduate student, mystified at having seen Fish demolish all certainty only to leave everything exactly as he found it, asks if Fish's "academic leftism" isn't at odds with "real world" leftism...

...I want them," says Fish, who has repeatedly demonstrated the disconnection between academic and "real world" politics, "to do what I tell them to do...

...I'm fascinated by my own will...

...Huh," he responds, clearly unperturbed...

...Confused, indignant, the student, who appears to realize he's been had by Fish, snaps back...

...The student tries to make it clear that he's hip enough to understand that the word "real" has to be surrounded by the inverted commas of incredulity...

...I ask...

...Listen, kid," a gruff older prof grunts at the student, "you got to understand that for this guy there is no real world...

...I guess you might say I'm a maniacal localist...

...As the lecture ends, I walk over to Fish and point out that his argument crumbles at the touch...

...Rhetoric, I suggest, has far less to do with how cases are decided with than which judges are sitting when...

...I think it's terrific...

...260 • DISSENT...

...The audience is awed, uncertain what to make of Fish's perverse charm...

...Stanley Fish, the Duke University Arts and Sciences professor of English, chair of the Duke English Department, distinguished professor of law, and self-described "academic leftist," has just finished a dazzling performance...

...We may not always know what the truth is," he says, echoing Vaclav Havel, "but we needn't be entrapped in lies...

...Later I explain to the student that for Fish, as for other academics these days, there can be no appeal to common principles, no appeal to truth, since truth for Fish is simply "a successfully enacted rhetoric...

...Tell you the truth," he says, "I'm not much concerned with that sort of thing...

...Obviously pleased with himself, Fish explains that while radicals anxious to expose the manipulation of power see this as an indictment, he doesn't...

...Professor Fish has just won another round for pure rhetoric in the ancient yet ongoing war between philosophy and sophistry...

...Don't you want to raise the consciousness of the audience...

...Fish, who once described himself as a longtime Republican, smiles...

...Well," he says, "I want to be able to walk into any first-rate faculty anywhere and dominate it, shape it to my will...

...I point out that California law took a 180 degree turn to the right after the recent judicial elections there replaced liberals with conservatives...

...it's rhetoric all the way down...

...But, here he hesitates for a moment...

...Legal decisions," he concludes, "are but ad hoc rhetorical performances...

...the student concludes plaintively...

...And then he strides out, admirers in tow, a sophist turned academic Napoleon, who has conquered academia, or a part of it, by folding the outside world into the alphabet...

...What's that mean...

...Do you mean the people of Eastern Europe have been just fighting for a different rhetoric...