According to Fish, "Paradise Lost" operates according to a mechanism of rhetorical indirection that works on all rhetorical levels, from depiction of character to deployment of tropes. Milton wants to show us how our fallen state corrupts and distorts our responses to poetry and instruction; the poem is constructed as a series of interlocking traps for the reader, who is lured into reacting in tempting but "wrong" ways to tropes ("with serpent error wandering") and characters (the apparently admirable Satan and his cohorts, the apparently tyrannical and odious God). The chapter on the poetics of prelapsarian Eden ("In Wandering Mazes Lost," I think it's called) is a masterpiece. Fish backs this all up with plenty of solid research into the theological doctrines Milton was known to endorse or was likely to have been familiar with.

This approach to Milton was regarded as radical when the book first came out, rather oddly, since Milton's tactics of indirection had already been noted by several critics, though not foregrounded as here. What's new is the thoroughness and clarity of the treatment, and Fish's sheer intelligence as a reader. This is criticism at its best: lucid, engaging, responsible, illuminating.

Fish's approach to texts, including statutes and the US Constitution (he is perhaps better known for jurisprudence than for lit crit) moves the text off the page, and into the class -- the interpretive community. But this is always a tricky move, and the way Fish executes it leaves us with no glue to prevent the fissioning of "interpretive community" into factions of one, just so many obstreperous individuals with nothing more to say to each other, because each has his own (mutually contradictory) inward disposition, a self-reinforcing dogmatism in the light of which all evidence is interpreted.

This is not law nor is it literature. This is the chaos of competing autisms.

The way out of this chaos would take us through history. It would involve the realization that history is not simply a collection of texts. The execution of King Charles I was not a sentence in a book, "King Charles was beheaded today," but was a real fleshy neck on a real block, as an axe swung through its downward arc. As a literary theorist, literary critic, and legal theorist, Fish has consistently dismissed the importance of such physical extra-textual events. It is no wonder that the texts become insubstantial if the world in which they are written is rendered insubstantial, too, so all we have is a group of graduate students sitting around in our own day gabbing about their own gabbling.

Stanley Fish takes an extremely hard line in this at-least-twenty-years-in-the-making study. Besides the terrific close readings, what's most amazing here is Fish's suggestion that Milton (as either the most or at least the second-most important writer in the English language) might actually have known what he was doing. The fact that this is today a radical stance is a comment on the bizarre orthodoxy of current critical thinking. One of the most hillarious set pieces of this book is a too-true list of "What Liberals Believe," after which Fish points out that Milton believes exactly none of these things. By the end of the book I was ready -- despite being a committed atheist -- to join the Creator's angelic hordes in a rousing chorus of "Amen!"

The outline of Fish's acerbic standing often eclipses his critical innovations (nearly 35 years ago now) in the invention of reader-response theory in his reputation setting initial study of Milton in Surprised by Sin. Now he returns to study of Milton in this magisterial book. Fish is popularly known for inadvertently setting off the most embarrassing scandal in the science wars when Alan Sokal's hoaxing contribution to Fish's journal, Social Text was denounced by Sokal as a paradoy of postmodernist cant. Fish's own pathetic comeback dampened the brief hegemony of postmodernist political trends. Fish is also a controversial legal theorist (The Trouble with Principle) and a glib combatant in the culture wars (There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too), but it is as a reader of John Milton that he first made his most enduring mark, with 1967's Surprised by Sin.In the wake of the Sokal disaster, Fish has left the demoralized English department of Duke University for the University of Illinois, Chicago where he has returned his attentions to his once-revolutionary reader-response criticism in this surprisingly jargon free study, How Milton Works. This book concentrates on the whole range of Milton's oeuvre in prose and poetry. Fish asserts that the core of Milton's significance is richly theologically, in that "there is only one choice to be or not to be allied with divinity." In various chapters Fish reworks the rich mythic structure of Paradise Lost to show how the Fall that separated Satan from Heaven parallels Adam and Eve loss Eden. So the meaning of human existence is the attempt to find restoration in the Divine image. This is perhaps ironically the single foundation of meaningful action, politics, individuality, and poetry, including Milton's own. It is obvious that not all readers of Milton will so easily agree with Fish's premises or conclusions but it is likely to quicken Milton study as his earlier study did. Also his painstaking close readings and carefully wrought arguments, enough so that perhaps many will be encouraged to return and read anew this most British of our poets. The rich architecture of Milton's epics, it abstract phrasing and taut moral reach and ambivalence that is at once immobile in its traditionalism and radical in it modernism makes Fish's readings and argument another milestone in Milton studies.

Perhaps the most interesting distinction Stanley Fish makes in this book is the one between what he calls "plot-thinking" and "being-thinking," if I remember the terms well enough. The first sort is a kind of tactical thinking--what do I need to do to get my points across right now? The second is a bit slower, it is the sort of thinking that says "what do I need to do for myself, given the sort of person I am?" Essentially, what Fish is saying is a kind of lecture of the "new historicists" and the other radicalisms that have become so important in the academy. A great many of course will hate him for saying this, becauseit means a delay in the sort of confrontation with Power that so many seem to desire these days. The theory operating for these people is that our metaphors are bad, and thus we must change them, which is why we need writers. This, or so it seems to me, is a very American sort of solution, yet it does not appear to bother the new historicists, nor do they appear to care about the destruction of the liberal, reasonably well-read public that used to form the backbone of support for leftist causes--schoolteachers, social workers, etc.--that is proceeding today as those who might have entered into such careers in previous times are relentlessly told that their work simply serves to reinforce "the Anglo-Saxon warrior brotherhood" that apparently runs things around here, at least according to one of these scholars. For all anyone knows, of course, this might be true, but to give young people the choice between being English professor and being a tool of power is not, I don't think anyway, very helpful. Stanley Fish's counsel of moderation, therefore, is I think of great value, which is to say that even if inside the academy he is thought of as someone who does not respect difference, from the outside looking in he looks a lot better than some I could name. Anyway, in the days to come, which are increasingly looking like they will be made up of a vast, illiterate population ruled by an equally illiterate stockbroker class, policed by a group of "discourse specialists" whose job it will be to censor the books and declare their meanings too obscure for the public, which come to think of it is what we have now, Stanley Fish might be remembered by some few of us as, perhaps, the last man to write in English.

Stanley Fish takes advantage of the fact that many people fail to grasp an essential aspect regarding all human communities: censorship is unavoidable and intrinsic. It is inherently impossible to do otherwise. The only legitimate question is how extensive and invasive the censorship of the society will be. We are all censors and somebody will ultimately decide if and when someone has gone too far in violating the values that the overall group considers heretical. It's only a question where one draws the line. Everybody practices censorship. All societies must select and impose the values considered non negotiable. Heretics of either religious or secular dogmas are always punished. The philosophical premises of Logical Positivism are insufficient to underpin our democratic culture. Reasonable certitude is epistemologically the best humans can achieve. "Political correctness" is actually a neutral term. The only real debate is over the situations demanding tacit or explicit prohibition. Language is intrinsically nebulous. The meanings of words mutate endlessly. So what? Deconstructionism is merely the mistaken notion that since words cannot be preserved from inevitable change that logically we cannot oppose the forces of Nihilism. We might, for example, feel yucky about the murder of innocents in a concentration camp, but this is mere sentiment and not the result of rational thinking. Fish is simply taking advantage of our society's preference to indulge in self delusion. Many feel reluctant to admit that our values are rarely absolute and there are indeed times when they must appropriately be abandoned. The occasional exception, it is mistakenly perceived, always precariously places us on the slippery slope leading to Armageddon. The late Sidney Hook was one of the few who even dared to tackle the dilemma surrounding the paradoxes of democracy. An unspoken Taboo prevents many others from even admitting a problem exists. .

Stanley Fish admittedly has half a point to make when claiming that hiring practices are rarely an exercise in total objectivity and meritocracy. Such decisions made by flesh and blood human beings will indeed be flawed. Subconsciously, if not even consciously, factors such as class, race, gender, etc. may play a disturbing and invalid role. Nonetheless, Fish seemingly pushes his argument to the point of absurdity. The real answer, of course, is that human beings must learn to confront their prejudices and develop the virtuous habits to overcome them. Stanley Fish is merely building a career around the fact that prudential judgment, and not a hard-science absolutism, underpins our decision making. He is something of a con man who exaggerates his main points to deceive us regarding their ultimate value. Perhaps others can perceive the debate over Fish as merely an abstract intellectual exercise of no real importance to the real world. I am not one of these people. Deconstructionism asserts that human beings cannot achieve reasonable certitude in their decision making. The underpinnings of this epistemology destroy any hope of building a democratic society. The result is that we must ultimately rely on pure brute force. One possesses power not because of the ability to persuade others---but you can kick the crap out of them!

Free speech does not exist. American democracy is a sham. Our feeling that the holocaust was wrong is merely an irrational emotional reaction. The U.S. constitution allows churches to persecute nonbelievers - and that would be just fine. These - and many other controvertial opinions - are expressed by Stanley Fish, one of the leading postmodernists of today, in this book.

The core of Fish's argument is that *any* discussion, by the mere fact of *being* a discussion that uses words in a certain languages, involves "censorship", because the words, terms, and expressions used in the language have hidden biases in them. Therefore, we are better of without preserving the "illusion" that there is an objective right or wrong, or that democracy is objectively better than fascism, or that the first amendment means anything.

Fish, I think, is pulling an "Andy Kaufman" on us. It is highly unlikely that he actually believes any of this nonsense, despite his articulate defense of it. (Fish is, one must admit, a compelling writer, who can get you convinced - momentarily - of the most absurd nonsense. You only notice the logical lapses, non-sequitors, and stretching of anaolgies *way* past their breaking point - if at all - when you finish the reading.) I think it is much more probably that he just wants to get people angry by taking up a "provocative" position with a seemingly straight face - hence the book's title.

The question is what is Fish's purpose in all this. If his purpose is to get an apathetic public to question and defend their beliefs in freedom of speech and democracy, that is good. But it seems to me more likely that Fish is simply being meritricious for personal gain: he is using his considerable rhetorical and pedagogical talents to defend nonsense, not because he believes it or wants others to object to him, but in order to make a name for himself as academia's "bad boy".

Now, sitting comfortably? Are you a liberal or a conservative? Do you think your views, sane, rational, fair, unbiased or generally decent? Well what if I told you that you are a biased, interested, often irrational and double-dealing individual who rigs debates, fixes the meanings of discourses (and things) and generally configures things to your own advantage and your opponent's disadvantage? OK, you would disagree with me: BUT THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT STANLEY FISH IS SAYING ABOUT YOU!! He does this in a series of extraordinary essays attacking conservatives and liberals alike (though under the post-Enlightenment rubric of "liberalism" in general, that belief system shared by most modern, Western thinkers) for their slipperiness in debate and their use of fake and polemical principles, actually the products of politics (a noble because unavoidable category for Fish). Fish's aim in all this seems to be to drag everyone back to their contextual and historical time and place(s) and to do away with the notion that we can avoid this or retreat into our various cognitive, abstract and universalising hiding places. What is left is what we had before Fish started writing and what, according to Fish, we will always have: political debate, the opportunity to convince your peers that this way is better than that, that this conclusion is better than that one. But, after Fish, we won't be able to do this by appealing to principles anymore since he has exposed them all as partisan and political. So "hoorah" for Stanley Fish's eye opening book, let's build a better world, and watch out, Stanley Fish is after you!

PoSTmodERnFoOL

There's no question but that reading Stanley Fish is always an enjoyable experience. Just as in _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (And It's A Good Thing Too)_, Fish's skills as a polemicist are, as most of the reviewers here have noted, considerable: he possesses wit, insight, a grasp of history, a command of details, clear and incisive logic, and a gift for demolishing bad arguments.

To a certain extent, _The Trouble With Principle_ repeats the arguments of _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech_, particularly Fish's critique of free-speech absolutism and of the conservative critique of affirmative action. Both these books are less sustained arguments than collections of individual pieces dealing with common concerns and taking a common approach.

This approach is, I must add, somewhat less original that Fish seems to think it is. His argument has two basic points:

1. Ethical principles like "fairness" and "equality" are not self-sufficient, but are used in specific contexts in order to gain certain ends, and skillful rhetoricians pick them up and put them down depending on whether or not they will be likely to obtain those desired ends in a given context;

2. What ends one seeks emerge, ultimately, from some desire or motivation that is not subject to rational argument because it is not held for rational reasons.

Now, this is really nothing except consequentialism; if we desire, for example, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, then sometimes treating everybody equally is going to do that and sometimes making special allowances for particular groups is going to do that.

Whether or not one seeks the greatest happiness of the greatest number is not, of course, up for debate, or, if it is - as Fish points out - then it is only up for debate because something else is not. You can't make an argument without at least one premise and at least one procedural rule. This isn't consequentialism but simply a restatement of the is-ought problem - ethical positions have to start, not even with axioms, but with intuitions that are not, themselves, in discourse.

The paradox of Fish is that he makes this argument very clearly, understanding its implications, and also argues that articulating this changes nothing; we will all continue to do our rhetorical work the same way. Yet the thrust of the particular arguments that Fish makes seem to deny this. He argues that the conservative critique of affirmative action as discriminatory elevates "non-discrimination" from a sometimes useful tool to a deontological (my word) principle that prevents desirable consequences from coming about. Yet why make this argument except as a means of convincing readers to fix their attention _on_ consequences rather than on principles? Unless "we should bring about good consequences" is itself an instrumental and only contextually useful principle - and then the question is, in what contexts would it _not_ be useful?

My biggest disappointment was Fish's slight account of moral change, in which he seems to imply that people only change their minds as a result of a total re-orientation of the personality, an event that is unpredictable. Maybe this applies to the absolute fundamental moral intuitions we hold, but people change their minds in discourse - that is, as a result of arguments and evidence - all the time. It would be interesting to have a more thorough account of that sort of change, which, admittedly, might (or might not) only be possible when important emotional interests are not at stake (I am, for example, willing to be talked into supporting this or that tax policy). In fact, Fish's whole project seems to presuppose the idea that people will change their minds as a result of something as ordinary as, say, reading a book. Wayne Booth's _Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent_ is very interesting on this issue.

But you should definitely read Fish's book, mainly because it is a peach. The introduction, in which Fish bemusedly surveys the rhetoric of the modern right (caught, as always, between the assumption that basically everybody agrees and the claiming of underdog status against a fearsome array of college professors and federal judges) is particularly clever.

As always, Fish's gadfly polemic will compel and madden at the same time. Fish is a stringent anti-foundationalist, challenging the ethical presumption that we can base our public policy and discourse on neutral principals upon which every person can agree. No, says Fish, these principles are little more than obfuscations of deeper, unstated agendas. Fish explores his thesis in creative deconstructions of such unquestioned notions as "academic freedom," "freedom of speech," and the "cultural canon."

The book suffers somewhat from the repetitive nature of the study (after all, Fish is basically restating the same thesis over and over again). It is as if Fish is playing a rhetorical fugue, creating new variations in each chapter on the same theme. The song doesn't always sound as compelling from chapter to chapter, but the balance of the book is worthwhile and provocative. The best chapter of the book, chapter 1, explores multi-culturalism and affirmative action in compelling fashion. Fish does well to reorient the debate so as to demonstrate how the very concept of principal robs Fish (and I presume, others who agree with Fish's politics) of the ability to include historical particularity as a factor in public policy. Thus, even Fish's deconstruction of principals is a political act, Fish's way of removing an obstacle to the furtherance of his undeniable agenda.

The implication of Fish's thesis is that western culture consists of a complex mixture of competing agendas, stories, and ethical values that cannot cohere through simple appeals to foundational principles ("freedom of individual self-expression," "speech," "religion," ad nauseaum). Even if we give up the notion that there are neutral principals, this only underlines the communally-conditioned principals that distinguish Christian, secularist, Muslim, and Jew. What we have now is not a principal-less society but a society of competing principals rooted in competing conceptions of reality. Fish is much more descriptive than prescriptive in his assessment. In the end, Fish seems to imply that there is no real prescription, only the mushrooming of rhetoric as agendas clash in the public sphere.

If I recall correctly, Voltaire once suggested that we should cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it. This seems to be Fish's attitude toward "principle." He is not opposed to it, per se. Rather, he opposes what he views to be abuses of "principle" when invoked to validate a given position, especially one to which he is opposed. In the Prologue, he observes that "bad things are now being done in the name of neutral principles, and I hope it is clear by now that it is no paradox to say that bad things are being done by something that doesn't exist." For Fish, a "neutral principle" is one favored by liberal theorists whose claim is that "abstractions like fairness, impartiality, mutual respect, and reasonableness can be defined in ways not hostage to any partisan agenda."

The argument of his book, therefore, is that political realism "can be a resource for politics, not for politics in the rarefied sense named by chimeras like fairness and mutual respect but for politics as it has always been practiced, and practiced honorably, in the wards and boroughs of ancient Rome, seventeenth-century London, and twentieth-century Chicago."

The first section of his book sets out the aforementioned "argument" against neutral principle and for politics. The second section focuses on the "arena" of First Amendment jurisprudence within which neutral principles are most active. In the third section, Fish concentrates on the religion clause of the First Amendment, explaining why " the dream of liberal neutrality" encounters so many difficulties when subjected to a discourse "that refuses to be confined within the precincts of the private." In the fourth and final section, Fish shares a number of "general speculations" and then a few of his personal beliefs. The title of the Epilogue ("How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words") correctly indicates Fish's concern that liberals and progressives have lost control of "the vocabulary of America's civil religion" to their traditional opponents, the conservatives. According to Fish, this is a lamentable but undeniable political reality.

I was curious to know what others have said about this book. Although I have not read all of the reviews, those I have read seem to fall within two predictable categories: readers who share Fish's concerns and convictions praise the book; those who do not tend to dismiss it as misguided polemics. Why do I rate it so highly? There are three basic reasons. First, it is very well written. Second, the power of Fish's assertions has forced me to re-examine my own convictions (eg about "the vocabulary of civil religion" and the larger issue of how any terms are defined). Third, Fish has directed me to a number of other books and articles which were previously unknown to me. He thus helps to broaden and deepen my frame-of-reference. I am eager to explore all of these sources.

Dante reserved the seventh (and worst) ring in Hell for those who, in a moral crisis, maintained their neutrality. Perhaps this is what Fish had in mind when he observes (in the Prologue): "Taking sides, weapon in hand, is not a sign of zealotry or partisanship; it is the sign of morality; and it is the morality of taking sides, of frank and vigorous political action, that is celebrated (not urged; it is inevitable) in the pages that follow." Fish need have no fear of that seventh ring.