Someone Ought to Kill Stanley Fish

Oh, MOG (Mother of God. Get used to that, too). Pending after dinner.

...Back. Remember The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover ? I hope you do. As an ostensible allegory for Thatcherism, it is quite apropos of tonight's topic. It also helps me to imagine the (proposed) body in question, large wads of Amartya Sen being unspooled from what must have been its gasping, resistant, throat. Fish's feeble attempt at playing Socrates (to paraphrase: "So I went about, asking others, what is this neo-liberalism that you speak of, and discovered that they themselves had mistaken the one [me] for the other [neo-liberal]. Thus, I was seeming, while not being." Yadda yadda) yields no insight. Instead, it produces another mirror, in which, as is true of all narcissists, Fish is only too happy to see himself: "and it now becomes clear (even to me) why McLennen would see in what I write an implicit support for the neoliberization (sic) of academic life." Still playing (poorly) at his Plato game, Fish is happy to concede resemblances, but not to cop to the thing itself. What he has failed to notice in his quick study of neoliberalism, gadding about and googling and the like, is that real neo-liberalism (not the classic neo-liberalism of Freidman, et al.), the lived neo-liberalism of today, is very much part of a complex of policies and ideals steeped in theories of social justice. One may find one's own footnotes. This is not a lecture. This is also a not uncontroversial claim, granted, but find the references and move on. That is, neo-liberalism was never morally indifferent at its best; one can hardly say the same for Fish's ideal fortress in Academia. Stumbling ever further, as do Socrates' interlocutors (except that SF is at the mercy of himself), Fish yaws into hyperbaton:

By defining academic freedom narrowly, as a concept tied to a guild and responsive only to its interests, I am said to ignore the responsibility academics have to freedom everywhere, not only in the classroom or in the research library but in the society at large and indeed in the entire world.

My, the entire world ! Surely this is wrong: one can feel academia go out of bounds in the building tetracolon of "classroom," "research library," "society," "world," quite a leap in spatial concepts as well as logic. He cannot answer to what he is said to say; he can only misdirect his readers with the promise of a related topic (or the promise that he will relate something provocative to this topic). Alas, one is provoked to respond in kind: what does he think ? Does this guild weave rugs? But that is not helpful, and does not get to the heart of it: SF is unable to define, not only here, but elsewhere, what the "interests" of this guild are, and most seriously, postulates pontificates with no underlying theory or philosophy of what freedom is, of what it consists, how it might be constructed, and how it is expressed, i.e. made real. He evinces no sense at all of academic life, teaching and research, of the arts, sciences, and surrounding disciplines and their products (yes, let's get that out on the table) as engagement with the world (yes, the whole one), leaving the "interests" of academia to be only itself. That Fish's solipsism has been mistaken for economic ideas of self-interest is not surprising --yes, SF, exclaims, as we noted, I see me !-- but pathetic, as he, resembling more a first year economics student babbling about "products" and "expenditures" than a capable public intellectual, meanders through falsehood after falsehood, rewriting the past as he goes: "students... now become consumers and debt-holders rather than beneficiaries of enlightenment." Ah, the golden years, when Buddhist monasteries, free university education for all , elitism (the GI Bill ?) reigned supreme ! Sadly, and doubly so because he does not realize it, Fish's erroneous reconstruction of the past reveals, as he calls upon it to avoid being cut by the shards of logic he tries to assemble, an inarticulated longing for the very freedom that he would deny to his peers to engage ideas and the world , but seems very much at work at himself. To not know oneself is the ultimate crime; to not know what it is one does not know is both a symptom and a result. Someone, go into his cave finish him quietly.

It is late and I am now very cranky.

Footnote: Not that I, to be clear, agree with the social policy makers who see neo-liberalism as the mechanism for bringing their ideas to fruition. The issue where I raised it is that neo-liberalism is not morally indifferent, not whether I or anyone grant it ethical validity. Read on your own.