All in the Game

The Same Old Song

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

It has only recently become clear to me that many of the arguments I have been making in these columns and elsewhere are not, as I had thought them to be, discrete but are, rather, deeply related and finally interchangeable.

The most abstract of these arguments is the one I call "theory minimalism." Like the others it is deflationary. That is, it tends to narrow the scope of an activity or a claim on the way to urging a circumscribed view of what we do as thinkers, critics, teachers, and administrators. As a thesis, "theory minimalism" tilts against the inflation of theory's importance by both its proponents and detractors.

The detractors of theory -- by which they usually mean postmodernism, poststructuralism, cultural relativism, and Rorty-style pragmatism -- fear that if these discourses are taught in our universities and prove to be persuasive to the young, the world will lose its moral compass and we'll all go around lying to each other and saying whatever comes into our heads with no concern that what we say may be false (a category of judgment that will have dropped out).

The proponents of theory believe that the rigorous application of theory's insights will detect and lay bare hegemonic enterprises of all kinds (they are literally innumerable) and prepare the way for a better world populated by better persons.

I say that being persuaded to one theory rather than another means exactly that and no more: You will now give different answers to theoretical questions than you would have before; but those answers will be of no help (or hindrance) to you when the questions are not theoretical. You might now be an entirely different person theory-wise, but when it comes to figuring out what to do next or whom to vote for or how to interpret a poem or solve a mathematical problem, you will, for better or worse, be the same person you were before you saw the theory light or decided to extinguish it.

The short version of this argument is that theory doesn't travel, which doesn't mean that you should abandon it, but that you should find your satisfaction in its local, home-grown pleasures -- like the pleasure of wondering if we are all brains in a vat, now playing at your local movie theater under the title The Matrix: Reloaded -- and not in any vain hopes of altering the world or improving the character of those who read you. Do the work your chosen profession or obsession gives you to do, and don't make the mistake of thinking that it offers the key to salvation, personal or political.

As I now see, this is basically the same argument I made some years ago when I defended disciplines and disciplinary knowledge against the charge -- levied by the apostles of interdisciplinarity -- of hermetic narrowness. It was (and is) my contention that the hallmark of a discipline is its distinctiveness, its not being something else or everything else.

Unless a discipline can plausibly claim to be uniquely qualified to provide a service or a product, there is no reason to accord it a place at the table. And if a discipline widens its claims to include everything under the sun -- if you study with us your mind will be sharpened, your character will be improved, your politics will be purified, and the world will be better -- the task it originally set out to perform will be lost sight of. Those who perform it will no longer be quite sure of what they are doing or why they are doing it, and every conference will be a conference on the crisis of the profession.

It is only by remaining distinct -- by remaining narrow -- that an enterprise can ensure both its survival and its utility.

If this is true of particular disciplines, it is also, I have argued in previous columns, true of the university as a whole. There is always pressure, external and internal, to make the university into a "full service" institution that is answerable to the needs and desires of everyone.

The corporate world looks to the university for its work force. Parents want the university to pick up the baton they may have dropped. Students demand that the university support the political cause of the moment. Conservatives believe that the university should refurbish and preserve the traditions of the past. Liberals and progressives would like to see those same traditions dismantled and replaced by better ones. Alumni wonder why the athletics teams aren't winning more. Politicians and trustees wonder why the professors aren't teaching more.

Each of these lobbies has its point, but it is not the university's point, which is, quite simply to produce and disseminate (through teaching and publication) academic knowledge and to train those who will take up that task in the future.

To the extent that a university falls away from this mission and allows nonacademic constituencies (some of which may be residing in its own buildings) to call its tune, it will compromise its integrity and forfeit the respect even of those who succeed in bending it to their wishes.

In the recent flurry of campus political activity leading up to and during the war in Iraq, the sanest voice I heard came from the provost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison who, in response to a student demand that the university take a stand on the unfolding events, said, "The University of Wisconsin does not have a foreign policy." Right. Neither does it have a policy on parenting, or a position on welfare reform or campaign-finance reform or any reform (except, of course, educational reform).

This does not mean that the university will not do some of the things others ask of it. It will in the end supply a work force. It will contribute (in unpredictable and random ways) to the molding of young men and women. It will, on occasion, provide athletics spectacles for alumni and others. It will (although not by intention) strengthen some traditions, weaken others, and inaugurate still others.

But if it is operating as a university and not as something or everything else, these will not be the things it set out to do, but the accidental, unplanned byproducts of a purpose narrowly conceived and steadfastly adhered to.

In all of these arguments, whether addressed to theorists, disciplines, or universities, my message has been the same. Know what your job is and do it; don't try to do someone else's job (for which you haven't the credentials anyway) and don't let someone else do yours.

And this holds also, as I said in a recent column, for teaching, where the job is to introduce students to a subject matter, put them in possession of the appropriate materials and techniques, and monitor their competence by means of assignments and tests. If you can do that (no small feat), anything else that happens -- a student of yours wins a Nobel Prize while another is convicted of insider-trading) -- will be at best serendipitous and at worst unfortunate, but it will not be, and should not be, what you have in mind when you sit down to prepare the syllabus or walk into the classroom.

Again, if your planning and efforts are not task-specific, the task will simply not get done, although you may be telling yourself that you're doing something higher (saving souls, saving the republic, saving the world).

In the case of composition courses, what won't get done is the teaching of writing, absolutely the only thing an instructor should be interested in. Here is something the world really needs and something an academic with the appropriate training can actually do. But he or she won't ever get around to doing it if the class is given over to multiculturalism or racial injustice or globalization or reproductive rights or third-world novels or any of the other "topics," which, as worthy of study as they might be, take up all the air space and energy in the room, and leave the students full of banal and useless opinions but without the ability to use prepositions or write a clean English sentence.

The irony is that if you limit yourself to matters of composition and ask the students to confront the workings of language at the smallest level, you will have instructed them in something far deeper than all the hot-button issues that are initially so exciting and quickly become so boring.

Nothing that has ever happened to me in a classroom matches the thrill of seeing freshman students who had been forbidden to entertain any ideas or to express any views not directly related to grammar successfully complete this assignment (given to groups of four): Create a language that does what English can do but is not English, write a lexicon and a syntax for it, write a text for it along with rules of translation and teach your colleagues how to read it. Because they were forced to go small, they ended up going big.

I would turn that into a principle: The sharper and the more limited the focus of your labors, the more likely is it that what you produce will be useful to the larger contexts you resolutely ignore. What society needs from academics are not grand schemes and grandiose visions, but precise formulations of intellectual problems and their possible solutions.

If we keep to that fine craftsmanlike work, we might succeed in fashioning tools that could be adapted to purposes never in our contemplation. If we can only content ourselves with doing a particular thing -- interpreting a poem, sequencing a gene, describing a culture, recovering a part of the past -- and withdraw from the ambition to do everything, we might just (and I paraphrase Milton) produce something the world will not willingly let die.