Fish's explanation of "self" in terms of interpreting texts just really rubbed me the wrong way. I want to know, what did everyone else think?
Fish basically argues that there is no independent self, because the self is a social construct that "does not exist apart from the communal or conventional categories of thought that enable its operations..." (Fish, 1029). He goes on to say that consequently, any meaning that an individual derives from a text is really just a result of the community, not the individual.
Now, I can't fault Fish for saying that people are greatly influenced by the society and/or communities that they are a part of. I think it would be hard to argue that everyone is completely independent. However, there is just something about his claims that really bugs me. Does that imply that there is no real self? That there is no individuality and everyone within a larger community will extract the same meaning from a particular text? How does he account for the differences in interpretations between fairly similar people- to the point that sometimes its hard to keep in mind that everyone even read the same thing?
I could keep going with questions, but I want to hear what everyone thinks, and if someone has a way to explain Fish in a way that doesn't bother me so much!
5 comments:
I have very mixed feelings about Fish's article and concept of the self, but part of me does agree with him that the person we think of as the "self" is a result of the interpretive community or category we're a part of. after all, we are all socialized to believe different things and feel different things, and our personalities come from the environment we've been raised in. In this way i do agree with Fish as far as the self in terms of interpretation goes. Megan suggested that the flaw arises in that people of the same interpretive community don't ALWAYS have the same view. i explain this based on the idea my group presented in class wednesday--that the different views within a community come from the fact that we're all a part of many, many interpretive communities, and these overlaps lead us to different interpretations.
Megan, I think you're right, which means, basically, that Fish will bug you (and me) indefinitely. What I've taken from Fish's article and world view is that he does believe that everything is a social construct and the self does not exist. I tried to argue against Fish in the last class when our group presented through his idea that everything is socially constructed, and Prof. Chapman agreed that indeed, Fish would say that everything is a social construct. If we've all been socially constructed and all our knowledge comes from social construction, the self as individual or anything original would not actually exist as it has been constructed by our predecessors. If that is the case, however, I have another question. Who created these social constructs in the first place? Surely, someone must have been original, right? However, Fish does not really tackle the origins of social construction in his article, at least from what I read. Perhaps this is the origin of the problem that is Stanley Fish.
Michelle! Thank you so much for bringing that up! I spent most of the article wondering how these giant, seemingly immovable forces of society came to be. Somewhere, at somepoint, there must have been one person free of societal influence, so where did that get lost? I wish I had an answer... but I'm glad someone else is asking the question. It seems like at this point we might never escape societal influences, but there must have been a time before these influences were created. I hope....
Actually, I don't see why one would have to say that someone must have been original, at least in any way that is meaningful for this discussion. Language itself is a "constructing" force, surely, so by the time you could trace constructions back to an origin you'd be in a time before language...that is to say, to humans so different from us as to be more or less irrelevant.
I think if we're going to find a way out of the box Fish puts us in, we might want to look in the other direction, to the future. Here's something that Fish doesn't explain, so far as I can see: how do ideas *change*?
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