The Unbearable Lightness of Being Stanley Fish
In this review essay, Kathryn Abrams examines Stanley Fish's There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and it's a Good Thing, Too, a compilation of essays in which Fish exposes all forms of interpretive practice, be they legal, literary, or historical, as undeniably rhetorical: that is, without foundation in any transcendent, universal norms. Professor Abrams explores Fish's use of antifoundationalism in a range of academic arenas to attack misleadingly valorizing terms such as "objectivity," "tradition," and "merit"; such terms, Fish reveals, have always been contingent on time and place, and thus are always contestable. While she shares Fish's antifoundationalist insight, Professor Abrams disputes his ultimate conclusion, that there is absolutely no normative value to be derived from this insight. To the contrary, Professor Abrams identifies a variety of contexts (the reasonable woman standard in sexual harassment claims, for example) in which prescriptive programs are indeed rooted in an antifoundationalist insight. Moreover, Professor Abrams argues that by intervening in debates to expose the rhetoric of opponents of multiculturalism and affirmative action, Fish himself is engaging in a practice inspired by the very theory he describes as devoid of normative content.