Response to Stanley Fish

Author(s): Edward W. Said

Source: Critical Inquiry , Dec., 1983, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Dec., 1983), pp. 371-373
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/1343356

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Response to Stanley Fish

Edward W. Said

Most of what Stanley Fish writes is interesting, lively, and persuas

"Profession Despise Thyself" has a good deal of that in it, althou
feel that Fish tends to collapse the important distinction between c
cizing the profession and wishing it didn't exist (something I for on
don't feel). The real question being begged throughout his scintillat
attack on antiprofessionalism, however, is what it is that he is defend
Let's assume for a moment that both Walter Jackson Bate and I der
the profession per se and not (as is the case with my essay, "Oppon
Audiences, Constituencies, and Community," that Fish in some mea
quite seriously misunderstands) because of what the profession has bec
Let us also assume that whereas Bate wants the profession to be
apolitical and more humanistic, I want it either to be more political
less unworldly. By way of rejoinder, Fish simply says that he wants
profession to be, although both Bate and I actually say nothing to t
contrary. In the only relatively extended reference to the object of
defense, Fish speaks of "the profession of letters itself, with all its atten
machinery, periods, journals, newsletters, articles, monographs, pan
symposia, conventions, textbooks, bibliographies, departments, committee
recruiting, placement, promotion, prizes, and the like" (p. 351).
and the like is marvelous. Does it also include mothers and fathers, an
colleagues, and cars, and parking spaces, and hierarchies? Of course
does, as well as a whole host of other miscellanies, none of them re
adding up to a definition of the "profession of letters itself."
But what, in fact, distinguishes Fish's vague catchall "the profess
of letters itself" from the vague humanism he attacks in Bate and
Critical Inquiry 10 (December 1983)
? 1983 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/83/1002-0008$01.00. All rights reserved.

371

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372 Edward W. Said Response to Stanley Fish

suggested extra-institutionalism he finds in me? Very little

course, the assertion that there is a profession, which Fish h
find congenial. It doesn't at all go without saying that every
what "the profession of letters" is, as witness, for instance, o
own points against Peter Jay of the Baltimore Sun when he sp
vagueness of Jay's preferred alternative" (p. 351). Jay is no
than Fish, whose historical and philosophical grounds for
professionalism are, alas, just too cavalier for someone who
taking a tough-minded position.
At one point Fish says that a profession produces no "real"
but offers only a service. But surely the increasing reification
and even of knowledge has made them a commodity as well.
the logical extension of Fish's position on professionalism is
is something done or lived but something produced and r
albeit with redistributed and redeployed values. What tho
doesn't say. Then again he makes the rather telling remark
"turning everything into professionalism" (p. 361)-an instan
stating and overinsisting at a moment when what he is reall
for can neither be formulated nor defended clearly. To turn "
into professionalism is to strip professionalism of any meanin
until one can define professionalism-and the particular value
with it-there is very little value in going on about the incoh
antiprofessionalism. Fish resorts to the reductionist attitude
that professionalism is what is, and whatever is, is more or le
right, which by only the slightest extension of its logic is a
applicable to antiprofessionalism.
On the other hand, Fish does say that the profession has
that new ways of doing things have emerged, that values ar
within and without the profession. Those kinds of observation
have to be pursued, made more concrete, put in specific historical
one of which is the fact that professions are not natural
concrete political, economic, and social formations playing ve
although sometimes barely visible, roles. Unfortunately, Fis
the lobbyist's error by obscuring and being blind to the soc
actualities of what he lobbies for even as he defends its existence. Thus
when Fish alleges that the reason most literary professionals "exist in
shamefaced relationship with the machinery that enables their labors" i
because of their damaging antiprofessionalism (pp. 361-62), he is making
an observation whose form is assertive but whose sense is tautological
since he neither defines the profession and professionalism nor specifies

Edward W. Said's most recent work is The World, the Text, and the
Critic. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Problem o
Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions" (Summer 1978) and "Opponents,
Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" (September 1982).

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 Critical Inquiry December 1983 373

"machinery" and "labors" with any precision at all. For if you take the
extraordinary step of reducing everything to professionalism and insti-
tutionalism as Fish does, then the very possibility of talking about the
profession with any intelligibility is negated. Few would dispute Fish's
important point, that all interpretive and social situations are in fact
already grounded in a context, in institutions, communities, and so forth.
But there is a very great difference between making that claim and going
on to say that so far as the literary profession is concerned, "the profession"
is the context to which "everything" can be related.
I don't particularly want to go through the arguments of the essay
that I wrote and which, in its intention, Fish sometimes misconstrues,
although a few points can be reiterated here. First of all, I don't have
anything to say about professionalism but rather about the division and
specialization of knowledge: this fact probably renders irrelevant some
of what Fish says about me, but let us move on in any case. There is a
distinction to be drawn between professionalism, on the one hand, and,
on the other, a cult of professionalism, which is what I spoke of. Burton
Bledstein's Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development
of Higher Education in America chronicles a regime in which professional
authority "emphasized the complexity of a subject, its forbidding nature
to the layman" and how 'jargon and formalities" characterize the ritual
procedures of "experts." I drew attention to parallels between technical
theoretical criticism and "professional" abuses in such fields as foreign
policy because I considered them to be aspects of a cult of often phony
corporate-guild expertise. This, I argued, is connected to a particular
form of ahistorical formalism and self-protectiveness that has culminated
in what we have today. I never said anything about a "political awakening"
(to which Fish amusingly counterposes his good natured "I'm-all-right-
Jack" professional contentment).
I'm less interested in a kind of jovially affirmed professionalism than
I am in critical consciousness, and that, as I've said many times, cannot
exclude the social and historical status of professionals. But until Fish
sets about saying concretely what he defends as "professionalism" in the
very here and now in which he himself is to be found, we can be certain
that his arguments will remain as innocent of content as they are at
present. Certainly a display of attitudes about professionalism is no sub-
stitute for either doing or defining the profession as something worth
doing and defining rigorously, and here I'm very much in agreement
with the gist of Fish's notions about the importance of professionalism.
It still isn't true, however, that Fish has actually defended "the profession"
from its critics. All he's done is to have defended a pretty amorphous
status quo. Since I know he is going to go on to produce a study of the
profession, I'm sure we'll get a sustained description then. In the meantime,
anti-antiprofessionalism can't be made to bear as heavy a burden as he
has placed on it.

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