Theory FAIL

[In a certain type of literary criticism] there is simply the conviction that the facts exist in their own self-evident shape and that disagreements are to be resolved by referring the respective parties to the facts as they really are. In the view that I have been urging, however, disagreements cannot be resolved by reference to the facts, because the facts emerge only in the context of some point of view. It follows, then, that disagreements must occur between those who hold (or are held by) different points of view, and what is at stake in a disagreement is the right to specify what the facts can hereafter be said to be. Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled...
-"What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?" in Is There a Text in This Class?, 338.

What's wrong with these assertions by Stanley Fish? Disagreements are indeed not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled--I have no problem with that. But is this the same thing as saying that what is at stake in a disagreement is the right to specify what the facts can hereafter be said to be?
I don't think so. Why? Disagreements in critical activity concerning the facts of a text may be the means by which we actually produce the facts that we are referring to in our disagreement. All this outlines is a process by which the facts--indeed the texts themselves that are under consideration--are produced or constructed by the effort of referring to them as evidence for one's criticism, rather than just pre-existing elements that are simply taken up. Facts, in other words, are not cited or pointed to from the outside, from a position that is not also complicit in setting them up, in construing them, in arranging them--in short, in producing them themselves.
But this does not mean that what a disagreement is about in being a disagreement about the facts is the right to produce these facts. Facts can be produced, rather than be pre-existing things, but this claim alone does not prove that any contestation about the facts can't still be about those facts themselves. And even if it isn't about the facts themselves, but about the process by which the production of a fact goes about its business, this again does not prove that the contestation contests the right of the process to proceed as it does. The process of producing a fact--of citing it as evidence, in the sense we've elaborated alongside (and in agreement with) Fish--is not the same thing as the assertion of a right or an authority to produce. In fact, this process could even produce an assertion of the authority of this process itself, and it still would not mean that the process itself was an assertion of its right.
It is the slippage between these two things that will allow Fish to appear (if you take him seriously) to take apart countless numbers of critics, groups, institutions, or basically just anyone or anything he wants to appear to destroy over his long career (he still does it). If he kept to himself, as he does in his best work, that would be fine, but it is the need to force the slippage here onto others that is wrong, because it is done so easily and can sound legitimate if it is voiced with enough authority (and Fish doesn't lack that). All Fish has to do is claim that your reference to a text is also an assertion of your right to refer to that text--and then treat this claim as if it means that your reference to a text is precisely the same thing as your assertion of your right. So he can move on two levels, grabbing people who are merely referring to a text or pointing out a fact, and then, by saying that they are claiming something more than this (to which they will probably admit merely because they are trying to account for unforeseen possibilities of what they say--though it doesn't really matter for Fish either way), and then gobble them up by proceeding as if this act of claiming more is precisely that of asserting a right to claim something more.
And asserting this right is, for Fish, always a question that can be settled by referring to whether these people (whoever they are) do have this right or not--that is, by referring to what their "job" stipulates, such that they are either "doing their job" or "doing something other than their job" (claiming a right that actually is the right of someone else). In the case of critics, asserting this right will be a question of whether a critic is demonstrating "competence"--that horribly vague term--such that she or he can be considered the member of a community of people who are supposed to possess the right she or he is claiming: a particular community of critics.
And what exactly is the "competence" of this community? Nothing other than the way that they claim the right that they appear to possess. The "competence," then, of an interpretive community is really a non-concept, or (what is better) a tautology, even if, as Fish will always claim, it is composed of a "set of practices," and--what's more--this is so even if we can indeed enumerate various practices that critics actually engage in. For in reality, this "set of practices" can really mean anything (any collection of practices), so long as they together are seen by Fish as demonstrating this "competence;" in other words, so long as they constitute the precise ways in which a community, appearing to possess a right, claims the right it appears to possess--or, put more simply and more accurately, the way a community, appearing to possess a right, appears to possess a right.
Notice, then, that this way that a certain community of critics will claim a right--their demonstration of "competence"--is not at all the same thing as their all having a similar way of producing or referring to the text (put differently, their way of having this similarity is precisely the practice that Fish can't account for). They can produce the text or refer to it in a particular way, but have a way of asserting their rights (if we really think that rights are asserted) that is different than this process of production. If Fish blurs the distinction between producing a text and claiming the right to produce a text, he also blurs the distinction in the opposite way: that is, between claiming the right to produce a text and producing the text. As we can see, the entire concept of an "interpretive community," with its insistence on "competence" and "practices," is constructed to do this work in the opposite direction.
This all occurs, though, because of that first move: taking the act of producing the text or facts that one is referring to--that is, taking these facts not as pre-existent before this reference--as the assertion of a right to produce those facts. In other words, it is seeing the act of not taking facts as pre-existent as a something that is (and this is the crucial part) "irreducibly interpretive," as Fish in the essay we are considering (but it is wherever he talks of "right") will go on to say ("text, context and interpretation all emerge together, as a consequence of a gesture (the declaration of belief) that is irreducibly interpretive," 340). In other words, the assertion of a right to (or--they are the same for Fish--the declaration of belief that one can) construe or produce a text in a certain way is the very same thing as the act of construal itself because this assertion (or belief) itself is interpretive. Claiming a right and what one does in the act or gesture are both interpretive acts.
But, I would object, this remains a really, really impoverished concept of what the assertion of a right or the declaration of a belief actually is, or in what they consist. "Irreducibly interpretive" here means that at some point, all that this assertion of a right or a belief consists in is in being the same as the procedures by which we refer to a fact. But wouldn't admitting the reference itself to a fact is distinguished from the assertion of a right be precisely that which allows for a rich assertion of right or belief? Indeed, Fish is claiming that insofar as we maintain that there is anything there to which we are pointing or referencing, we have a belief or are asserting a right. But isn't this belief--the belief that we are indeed pointing to something--a different sort of belief than a belief about something, or a claim to a right concerning something? To deny this difference is to say that something more like the expectation of the success of an action is the same thing as a profession of faith. All that a belief like this would be about would be that it is a belief about something. And this is just absurd, because if this were the case it would precisely require the revaluation both of belief (or the assertion of right) and the act of reference not merely in terms of each other, which would still presuppose their difference. And this Fish adamantly refuses to do (in precisely making them both merely the display of "competence," or an "interpretive community" at work). It seems clear to me that we can and probably must distinguish the procedure of interpretation from the assertion of a right to interpret, rather than, like, Fish, trick people into thinking we are using their sense of these words by entertaining their difference and then trying to expose them as fools by suddenly using them interchangeably.

Best of... Derrida and Heidegger

I have a quite a few posts on Derrida and Heidegger here: I thought that I might want to highlight some of the more important ones for anyone who wants to understand what the two are up to. I don't mean to sound like an expert, but I do want to provide material for anyone who might find some particular formulation here helpful.

First, Heidegger:
"Negativity, Repetition, and das Geschehen das Daseins:" what was for me (in writing it) an enlightening analysis of what Heidegger means by historicity and that enigmatic word in Being and Time, "repetition." I try to show that repetition here differs from the operation of the Aufhebung of Hegel.
"Building, dwelling, thinking...:" a close analysis of what is going on in "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," so we can understand the sort of linguistic work that is going on in Heidegger--what drives him to compose the way he does.

Then, three between Heidegger and Derrida:
"Time and Derrida:" a pretty clear distinction between time in Derrida and time in Heidegger (which can be calculated only non-properly or inauthentically). In Derrida we have a time that is to be calculated, but also flows confusedly (backwards as well, which, I maintain, is an unthinkable thought). This makes history seem very different.
"Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sex," which looks at Heidegger and Derrida and their very different Nietzsches.
"Derrida on Heidegger and technics:" I read a little piece Derrida wrote on Heidegger, outlining one of his reservations in terms of Heidegger's conception of technics: Derrida thinks there need to be some changes in order for the technical and for the machine to be thought--despite the power and innovation behind one of Heidegger's most unique analyses.

Last, Derrida:
"'By specifying 'If there is one,' recurrently:'" where I relate what Derrida is saying to Heidegger's economy of the same and Ereignis (enowning)--I recommend to anyone wanting to connect the two this way, by the way, that they read the little essay "Identity and Difference," in the small volume of the same name. Much will become clear. (One word of warning, though: this is not the only way to read Derrida.)
"Reading like Derrida, continued:" useful for the list at the bottom on what the text "is." I was trying to resist the notion that Derrida just close reads texts of philosophy.
"A few thoughts on 'Circumfession:'" I outline pretty clearly the problem of testimony in Derrida, illuminating perhaps how he conceives topics we would subsume under the name "ethical."
"Hesitancies:" My criticisms of Spivak's Derrida. I'd let up now a bit on the use of phase "desire for presence:" I do think Spivak misunderstands this phase, but I now see more of the necessity behind Derrida's use of it.
"Derridian dialectic:" I attempt to show that Derrida doesn't strictly oppose the dialectic. I would say now that he precisely tries to make it possible (which means making it impossible as such).

(I might also note that in "Criticizing (unlike) Derrida," I have what I think is a helpful formulation regarding Derrida and Foucault: it might be possible to see Derrida, not Foucault, as a thinker of institutions, and Foucault as a thinker of writing and texts. I don't really believe that wholly, but I think it's a neat way to begin to articulate reservations about Derrida, as well as begin to appreciate the strategic quality of his work: most notably the immense privileges that he bestows upon certain institutions and the immense criticisms that he levies upon others--though they are often also the same institution. Examples: psychoanalysis on the one hand, Marxism on the other. Derrida truly believes that psychoanalysis as an institution has a huge potential. Why? Because it is, as an institution, one of those that most tries to account for the violence involved in institution in the first place. This is why he will be fed up with those who take the institution of psychoanalysis--the notion that it exists or everybody knows what they mean by it and, most significantly, by its concepts--for granted: these people are erasing the instability, the ambiguity of its work of institution--what makes it, as an institution, radically resist being done with the problems of instituting or establishing itself. Marxism: here is an institution that also has a similar potential for radical resistance. However, it is also, more than psychoanalysis, taken for granted. The difference between how Derrida treats psychoanalysis--which, make no mistake, is very congenial--and Marxism--which is more reserved, more critical--indicates what are strategic decisions on his part and constitute his effort to be a thinker of institutions.)

Writing together

A central topic of my dissertation:

I've wondered whether one general reason for some of the hostility toward the book is simply the fact that there are two writers, because people want you to disagree about things, and take different positions. So they try to disentangle inseparable elements and identify who did what. But since each of us, like anyone else, is already various people, it gets rather crowded.
-Gilles Deleuze, "Letter to a Harsh Critic," in Negotiations

Together, Felix and I would have made a good Sumo wrestler.
-Deleuze again, "Letter to Uno: How Félix and I Worked Together," in Two Regimes of Madness

What is a text that has been written together? In other words, neither a text that has been joint-authored, nor a text that has is a communal text, authored by the community? The status of this object seems elusive, at least from the way that we normally go about citing things. Witness even Derrida, in the video of his course that I posted a while ago, who is always as scrupulous as possible about names when there are any out there (a fact that, by the way, contradicts much that is stupidly said about him being the author of the death of the author--he in fact questions this complacent notion very thoroughly throughout his career, in particular in Dissemination). Here cites Deleuze within the joint texts (and I know of perhaps no better examples) of Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus. That is, he cites Deleuze alone within a work that is written together with Félix Guattari. Obviously, this makes sense: he wants to link what is said in those texts with what Deleuze alone writes in Difference and Repetition. He wants to look at Deleuze's share in this text. But of course the question remains (and I think the comment on the sumo wrestler above also shows it remains for Deleuze as well, though differently) whether these texts are shared out in this particular manner, taking place as they do more than one author (or rather, writer-function, emission), and whether in fact they can ever be linked with the texts of a single or singular name. (Derrida risks saying yes, and for good reasons, I think [but what were they exactly?]. But these reasons are specific and inadequate in the area that they perhaps make possible: the area we are interrogating here.)
The task then is to account for a text that is more than one, that is joint-authored and yet, also, at the same time, disjoins any act of joining (any togetherness) that is related to authorship, to the emitting source.