Stanley Fish Source Fish S 1980 Interpretive Communities

Stanley Fish Source: Fish, S. (1980) “Interpretive Communities” pp 167 -173 in Chapter 6 “Interpreting the Variorum” pp 147173 in Fish, Stanley (1980) Is There a Text in this Class? , Massachusetts: Harvard University Press PPT Created by E. A. Venz

Variorum: An edition of a text which contains notes and commentaries by various editors and commentators. This essay was relating to the publication of a Milton variorum. (Milton was a very famous English poet)

Question • “If interpretive acts are the source of forms rather than the other way round, why isn’t it the case that readers are always performing the same acts or sequence of random acts, and therefore creating the same forms or random succession of forms? ” (p 167)

How do we explain these two ‘facts’ of reading? • “The same reader will perform differently when reading two ‘different’ … texts” • “different readers will perform similarly when reading the ‘same’ text” (p 167)

“Both the stability of interpretation among readers and the variety of interpretation in the career of a single reader would seem to argue for the existence of something independent of and prior to interpretive acts, something which produces them. ” (pp 167 -268)

“[the reader’s] disposition to perform these acts … constitutes a set of interpretive strategies, which, when they are put into execution, become the large act of reading” (p 168)

“the notions of ‘same’ or ‘different’ texts are fictions … [it is] my predisposition to execute different interpretive strategies [which] will produce different formal structures” (p 169)

Q: “Why will different readers execute the same interpretive strategy when faced with the ‘same’ text? (p 170) A: “they don’t have to … the notion ‘same text’ is the product of the possession of two or more readers of similar interpretive strategies” (pp 170 -171)

“Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading … but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions” “These strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read” (p 171)

This explains “the stability of interpretation among different readers” and “the regularity with which a single reader will employ different interpretive strategies and thus make different texts” (p 171)

“interpretive communities are no more stable than texts because interpretive strategies are not natural or universal, but learned” (p 172)

“interpretive strategies are always being deployed and this means that communication is a much more chancy affair than we are accustomed to think it” (p 172)

“meanings are not extracted but made, not by encoded forms but by interpretive strategies that call forms into being” (p 173)

“what utterers do is give hearers and readers the opportunity to make meanings (and texts) by inviting them to put into execution a set of strategies” “they will only be directions to those who already have the interpretive strategies in the first place” (p 173)

Q: “If everyone is continually executing interpretive strategies and in that act constituting texts, intentions, speakers, and authors, how can any one of us know whether or not he is a member of the same interpretive community as any other one of us? ” A: He “can’t, since any evidence brought forward to support the claim would itself be an interpretation”. (p 173)

Consider the interpretive strategies you are using when you ‘interpret’ the following:

What previous knowledge and/or experience do you have that assists you to be able to interpret this sign?

E. G. • Where would you find this sign? • To whom or what does it refer? • What does ‘give way’ mean? • What/who has to give way? • What is likely to happen if you don’t ‘give way’? You need to know that this relates to vehicles on a roadway; that it means that you in your vehicle must let other vehicles go first before advancing; that failing to do so may result in an accident and/or a fine. Would it mean anything to my mythical lost Amazonian tribe?

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