Some thoughts on Stanley Fish...
He is a very funny man, and his idea that theories have no effect whatsoevah!!! is deflationary I suppose in a good -- Jackie Gleason -- and rigorously Freudian way -- didn't Freud write that deflation is the heart of Jewish humor? Maybe not, but I just totally disagree with him about everything he said, even though I found his Socratic performance here at Irvine yesterday completely entertaining...
Take this off the cuff remark -- "There are exactly 1 and a half people on the earth who care about my preferences and that is NOT including my wife."
I was dying to ask him how he can refuse to differentiate between aesthetic objects and non-aesthetic ones, visual objects and arias and melodies. I thought I might bring up the problem for example of the tchotchke....but I am sure he would just make fun of me if I mentioned something as pedestrianly Marxian as the commodity or reification as the dominant form of mediation, but then I would have lapsed into MY New Yawk accent and I would have exposed myself as a wannabe borscht belt comedienne.
Take this off the cuff remark -- "There are exactly 1 and a half people on the earth who care about my preferences and that is NOT including my wife."
I was dying to ask him how he can refuse to differentiate between aesthetic objects and non-aesthetic ones, visual objects and arias and melodies. I thought I might bring up the problem for example of the tchotchke....but I am sure he would just make fun of me if I mentioned something as pedestrianly Marxian as the commodity or reification as the dominant form of mediation, but then I would have lapsed into MY New Yawk accent and I would have exposed myself as a wannabe borscht belt comedienne.
3 Comments:
Quite a show, the man puts on. I wrote about this prior to the lecture, and am only more convinced of it now, what with my again disagreeing with nearly every word he said...all while thinking to myself, if only I could be so entertaining frustrating, maybe I can swing a career...
That should read "entertaingly frustrating."
Dear Scott,
If one (an academic) indeed is to be judged by entertainment value, Fish's performance would be ranked up there with the early Iggy Pop for heart-stopping ability to stop us in our tracks!
In these days of stultifying profundity, Fish's proposal, "no more profound questions whatsoevah!" is fantastic. The man can do more with a sentence than most people can with a V-8 engine. But I've got a little more to say about this -- see further posts....
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