Once again, while perusing the NY Times op-ed pages this morning I came across Stanley Fish’s column. Surprise of all surprises, he’s defending himself and clarifying his stance on politics and the classroom…Again! Responding to objections of how he defined the political– some readers wanted to define politics in a more partisan way, others suggested teaching is political already, and still others suggested that the choice of texts and course offerings are political–Fish notes the pluralism or different forms of the definitions of the political here:
These points are part of the “everything is political” argument, which, as I have said before, is both true and trivial. It is true because in any form of social activity there are always alternative courses of action — different ways of doing things — and those differences will, more often than not, reflect opposing ideas of what is important and valuable. Even something so small as giving more time to Wallace Stevens than to Robert Frost in a semester could be described as political. One could say, then, that on the most general level the decisions that go into making up a syllabus and the decisions that lead you to vote for one candidate rather than another are equally political. But the Tip O’Neill mantra — all politics is local — should remind us that the content of the general category “political” will vary with the local context of performance. One performs politically in the academy by making curricular and other choices in relation to a (contestable) vision of what is best for the discipline and the students. One performs politically in the partisan landscape by making ballot-box and funding choices in relation to a vision of what it is best for the country as an economic and military player on the world stage. The questions “should we have a course in Third World Literature?” and “should we have a single-payer health plan?” are both political, but saying so doesn’t help us to understand or deal with the challenges in either context; the stakes are different, the strategies are different, the permissible forms of activity are different (attack ads are O.K. in one venue and unheard of in the other). Dissolving these differences in the solvent of a highly abstract notion of the political may be satisfying on the level of theory, but on the level of practice it is the differences, momentarily obscured by a fancy argument, that will always count. Continue reading