There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing Too by Stanley Fish

by Stanley Fish

In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing (traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship) or reflexive name-calling (the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left), Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed.In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested."In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia.Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Law, Education, Society

Paperback Bunko

First published November 18, 1993

About the author

Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He is often associated with postmodernism, at times to his irritation, as he describes himself as an anti-foundationalist.

He is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a Professor of Law at Florida International University, in Miami, as well as Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of 10 books. Professor Fish has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Duke University.

Reviews

[bARRY · Rating 4 out of 5]

you can't beat essay titles like "the unbearable ugliness of volvos," especially when they are about faux-asceticism and functionalism. anyway, fish if bold, vivid and smart. after reading this book, i realized rhetoric isn't necessarily a bad thing...and tying an antiessentialist view of the world to the apple/the bit/the fall is genius.

[Crito · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find Fish to be an excellent and overlooked pragmatism-adjacent figure. This book catches him at the completion of a fairly interesting trajectory where had expanded from Milton scholarship to rhetoric and subsequently legal theory and jurisprudence and political commentary. His primary centers of concern in this volume happened to have all aged well: the smokescreen of the so called campus culture war (oddly centered around debates with Dinesh D'Souza of all people); the tug of wars concerning free speech; and the question of how political (in the broader not-just-partisan sense) the US court system is, which it seems liberals always memoryhole until the SCotUS hands out a particularly large L. I'm also drawn, not just by these topics, but by Fish's angle of approach from a broad anti-foundationalism (I'll return to this), an implicit and often explicit focus on rhetoric (which in philosophy is underrated by just about everyone except Arthur Danto), and an ongoing critique of liberalism undergirding everything.

I read the titular essay in an anthology some time ago because it was a funny title, and now it is more or less the foundational text for my view of free speech; that is, free speech is predicated on drawn lines excluding forms of expression from a liberal society, naturally violating the most libertarian expressions of free speech doctrines; and therefore free speech is only "free" within its prescribed boundary, which is not free in the sense people want it to be. I like Fish's example of Milton's Aeropagitica, his famous freedom of expression tract championing the rights of English publishers to print everything they damn well please; unless it is Catholic, in that case the obviously objectionable sin of popery can and must be consigned to the flames. So long as people have aims and ends, and discourse features within the life of those aims and ends, discourse will be value laden. We can fight over what we want in and out of the circle, but so long as there are things you would say to your friends but not to your grandma, the circle remains. And meanwhile, first amendment jurisprudence has been plagued with a forlorn distinction between action and "mere" speech, which nonetheless serves as the staging ground for the expected arguments over what goes in and out of the circle. One of Fish's claims I remember as being the most objectionable is that the circle determines whether a sentence is to have meaning at all. To assert that is obviously false; it must have semantic meaning to even begin to be excluded, and even in the weak sense of "does this sentence have cash value" there are undeniably forms of forbidden speech which have uses, and speech even gains certain uses through exclusion. Thankfully Fish never addresses this in any meaningful capacity, which leads me to believe it was simply a careless rhetorical flourish in one or two sentences.

I am often tremendously suspicious of the English Department Theorist; from a fairly narrow kind of field there are those who make what I'll call philosophically brave pronouncements based off extrapolations of textual analysis of fiction and poetry using theoretical frameworks most would not touch with a thousand foot pole. Fish is a figure who I consider at least in dialogue with philosophy, but he doesn't give the barb in the back of my skull I get from other literary figures who do the same, and for that I am tremendously grateful. The main point of contention which comes to mind is related to what he calls his anti-foundationalism. I am a fan of anti-foundationalisms, and I think Fish is fairly good at navigating it. Fish is both contemporaneous with and inspired by Richard Rorty, a figure I also enjoy. The problem only comes in with the essay on pragmatism, which itself discusses Rorty briefly. It is centered around a critique of Richard Posner's pragmatist program for jurisprudence; the contention is that the phrase pragmatist program is a contradiction of terms. While I think some of the individual critiques are sound, this broad claim betrays Fish's misconstrual of pragmatism: he seems to think pragmatism is simply the doctrine of anti-foundationalism. Instead, if we read someone like Dewey, then up through Hegel and Darwin, something like an anti-foundationalism is achieved as the result of a pragmatist program; we don't simply have it from the jump, apart from a inclination this way or that. Fish's view is something which I suspects emerges from a reading of Rorty. I am fairly charitable towards Rorty, I think he has done his homework and while Dewey is Socrates to his Plato in much of his writings, the most unfair criticism is that his Dewey is its own unrelated beast. But that Rorty does not spend much breath on e.g. experience the way Dewey does only indicates that he has his own interests and angles he likes to pursue. One is anti-essentialism. It's not hard to see how someone like Fish could spy on Rorty's writings and then unfairly conclude that anti-foundationalism is simply the foundational bedrock of pragmatism. Given that there seemed to be a number of these minor commentators on pragmatism, I could see how that angle could spin out on its own. Ultimately I don't chalk it up to a major fault with Fish, and he is honest in saying he does not consider himself a pragmatist.

Stanley Fish, the literary theorist, also has a few essays on literary theory. They are largely about the state of discourse of literary studies. I happily report I still don't really care about literary theory. And finally, he rounds things out with a short essay which is an amalgamation of every doompost about academia I have seen from junior academics and grad students on twitter. Glad to be reminded of how relevant most of the papers in this book have remained; though today they may walk in different clothes (out with the conservative gripes about "ethnic studies," and in with the equally braindead CRT panic.) I really only read this book on the good will of the titular essay (again, 5/5 for that alone), and I was consistently happy with what I got. So while There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and The Law Wishes to Have a Formal Existence are worth tracking down on their own, I'd recommend the rest as well.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

An accessible introduction to Fish's (mostly anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist) work, which helped me clarify some of my own thinking on the subjects he addresses. On the minus side, he does come across as indecently smug and self-important at times.

[Alessandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite collections of essays. If you know what anti-foundationalism is, you should read this.

[James Wilson FRHistS · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was quite influential on me as a student, back in the mid-1990s when it first came out and I bought it mainly on the basis of the title. The book is a collection of essays, along with the transcript of an interview with Fish at the end. His writing style is finely crafted but does require concentration, at least until one becomes accustomed to it. The titular essay is a well argued piece against some of the conventional free speech justifications, and along with a second one on free speech forms the best part of the book. Not so impressive is Fish's attack on law and legal reasoning, which he takes much too far (and in which he, as a non-lawyer, makes basic mistakes, such as with contractual interpretation). His advocacy of affirmative action probably belongs in a different book. At times his ego and arrogance test the reader's patience, and the interview at the end rather confirms his inflated view of himself. Yet there remains much intellectual gristle for readers to enjoy.

[Netanel Kleinman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking essays and certainly "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvo's" came to the final conclusions that one would have expected throughout the essays in a concise and precise manner. Not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination but I would suggest a worthwhile one for anyone interested in the academic world and the battles being waged there.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting, if outdated in 2022.

[Nathanael Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5