This comes from a piece in J. Alterman's Altercation. I'm not sure of the author. I sometimes wonder about things like this. Theory is great, essential, when it meets the road - praxis, I suppose. On the other hand, W.C. Williams' directive - "No ideas but in things" - has served me well, in all aspects of my life. After all, we live in a real, material world, not a theoretical one. The world is a real thing, not a construct. I have sympathy, however, for this author's complaint about Fish, et.al.
The modern university takes the present organization of knowledge into separate disciplines, all those gated communities, as inevitable and natural as the categories of niche-marketing. The blinkered professional who has become the norm is not an intellectual who reads promiscuously in the hope he or she might come upon a book that will change his or her life. In his or her reading and writing, this modern scholar knows it is best as publisher William Germano advised book writers in an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education to “think inside the box.” Curb your enthusiasm! Fifty years ago, even as recently as thirty years ago, scholars thought it a virtue to be widely read outside one’s own field. Not any more. A lot of the innovation that took place then occurred because people tried out the ideas from another field than their own. They made mistakes, of course, but there was then a tolerance for experimentation that is unacceptable in our more professionalized era. Now we accept the idea that each field is separate and that the professional has little to gain by intellectual promiscuity.
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