“The conclusion is that while literature is still a category, it is an open category, not definable by fictionality, or by a disregard of propositional truth, or by a predominance of tropes and figures, but simply by what we decide to put into it. And the conclusion to that conclusion is that it is the reader who “makes” literature. This sounds like the rankest subjectivism, but it is qualified almost immediately when the reader is identified not as a free agent, making literature in any old way, but as a member of a community whose assumptions about literature determine the kind of attention he pays and thus the kind of literature “he” makes.”
“Once the subject-object dichotomy was eliminated as the only framework within which critical debate could occur, problems that had once seemed so troublesome did not seem to be problems at all.” -both from the intro to Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text In This Class…
Here we see how the more esoteric theory of Deleuze and Guatarri (their rhizomatic model of machinic production (as well as the postmodern “death of the subject” (has managed to bleed into (or trickle down even (the more practical affair of literary criticism or even Rorty’s pragmatic emphasis on discourse. I would start with the second point:
“Once the subject-object dichotomy was eliminated as the only framework within which critical debate could occur, problems that had once seemed so troublesome did not seem to be problems at all.”
The problem Fish sees for the subject-object dichotomy is that it lies at the heart of more classicist approaches to interpretation that put too much emphasis on the text as a fixed object. This, consequently, leads to an assumption that the text has a fixed meaning that can be extracted if one has “the right tools”: tools, of course, that can only be had if one finds the “right expert”. And it isn’t hard to extract the meaning from the text of this particular argument: that understanding is vertical and hierarchal in nature. And we can see the overlap here with the general concerns of postmodern philosophy (within which I include poststructuralist theory). The subject-object dichotomy assumes some hierarchal subject that stands above the objects of the world with full authority to pass judgment upon them. The catch, however, is that we (as bodies (are all basically objects occupying space. This is the new sensibility’s primary grudge with such neo-classicist sensibilities such as scientism or the analytic. Their tendency to smugly dismiss more continental approaches only exacerbates the situation.
And one of the ways that the neo-classicists tend to dismiss more continental approaches is by pointing to subjectivism. But Fish sidesteps this by pointing to the role the interpretive community plays in it. He basically creates a model (that is if I am reading him right (in which there is a kind of de-centered feedback loop between the fixed nature of the text itself, the writer behind it, the reader (with all their psychological baggage), and the community within which they reach their conclusions or extract their meanings. This is why most of the meaning we extract from a work of art (much like our dreams (comes from the discourse that goes on around it. It’s why we, as readers, must see ourselves as nodes in a system of exchange very much like D & G’s rhizomatic matrix of machinic production and exchanges of energy (as well as Rorty’s pragmatic emphasis on unfettered discourse): it allows for a free flowing and creative exchange (in our finite capacity (with the infinite.