Personally I don't disagree with you Mairead but i think it's worth 
attempting to get to grips with Fish-world because it has all sorts of 
direct implications not just for educational establishments but for poetry / 
poetics as discourses:

Mark elegantly puts the case, avoiding Fish's trademark melodrama ("it is 
immoral for academics or for academic institutions to proclaim moral views") 
– Fish is always in search of the statement which will annoy the people he 
would consider as fervent believers of "liberalism", or the curators of the 
"liberal museum" as he likes to put it in his newspaper pieces. His 'Save 
the World on Your Own Time' does start with a reference to student protests 
over Bob Kerrey of New School University calling for regime change in Iraq, 
saying that it's not the sentiment but the location which should be 
protested. (Fish targets are: the idea of free speech ("no-one has ever 
believed in it"), the idea of openness.) If a position is put forward in a 
way which fantasises the existence of an open public conversation, which it 
does if an academic pretends to un-embed themselves to speak out but as an 
academic, that position is trivialised (and so is academia). Also, in 
Fish-world, putting forward a passionate conviction in a spirit which is not 
authoritarian is revealed as an act of callous indifference.

The question for the university which Fish poses is: "Has the decision to do 
this (or not do this) been reached on educational grounds?"

So on the second point of "publication" – this creates a public which, like 
all publics which operate by being imaginary, is autotelic, it is circular 
and performative. These publics have activity and duration, we think, and we 
look for and mark off signs. Fish frequently mentions Hobbes and so a 
Fishite argument might be: that any discourse resounds against everything 
which it isn't and has already been silenced. Principles are perfectly empty 
or rhetorical lead-weights stipulated and determined from the start. To 
really engage would be to try to _win_ and that means, as citizens, 
attempting to stamp out one vision of truth and rationality in favour of 
another. To resile from this obligation is to bend into a position of 
callousness again. A Fish conclusion:

"The advantage of [critical] incoherence is that it gives theorists an 
extra-academic assignment all too readily accepted by many, the assignment 
of going out into the world and exposing constructedness–read hegemony, 
power, illegitimate authority (there is no other kind)–wherever it is found, 
and because the initial move is to replace essence with history it will be 
found everywhere. No end of work for theorists to do, or at least pretend to 
do, and no end to the overblown hopes"

Edmund

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