Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally

In the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish
reviews Wendy Brown’s new book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton University Press).

Liberal tolerance—or, in Wendy Brown’s useful phrase, the “regime of tolerance"—has become an instrument of power. As Fish puts it:

“Live and let live won’t work, we are often told, if the other guy is determined to kill you because he believes that his religion or his ethnic history commands him to. Liberal citizens will be tolerant of any group so long as its members subordinate their cultural commitments to the universal dictates of reason, as defined by liberalism. But once a group has rejected tolerance as a guiding principle…it becomes a candidate for intolerance that will be performed in the name of tolerance.”

Clearly this is one of the moral justifications for going into Iraq. It’s also a problem that citizens of Denmark are struggling with after the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy:

“Western commentators are incapable of understanding (except as misguided, crazy, or evil) the motivations of those who passionately protested the Danish cartoons, and you could nevertheless conclude that their incapacity is all to their credit.”

In other words, Fish sees this as an impasse, and he’s here to dope it out for us. Talk to me, Stan:

“[Brown’s] account of how liberal tolerance works is nuanced and bracing. The fact that her analysis does not (and in my view could not) deliver a program for improving the world (or even a set of reasons for rejecting liberal tolerance) makes it no different from any other effort (always doomed) to derive a politics from the discourses of postmodernism, anti-essentialism, and anti-foundationalism.”

Will there be a tomorrow?

And can't my bleeding liberal heart do anything?

“The same difficulties attend Brown's call for a ‘project of connections across differences.’ On what bridge? Built by whom? It’s a little late to be saying (with E.M. Forster), ‘Only connect.’”

What about the transformation of liberalism itself?

“In short, a softer liberalism, a liberalism alert to difference in a way that does not privatize or naturalize it, wouldn’t be liberalism. It would be something, but what that something is Brown does not tell us.”

Translation: we simply cannot think past this impasse from our current situation. We lack political imagination, or the means to articulate a political alternative. But who is this “we”? Fish tips his hand when he begins the review with this anecdote:

“Some years ago, just after Salman Rushdie was made the object of a fatwa, I found myself at an academic conference listening to a panel address the issues raised by his situation. A member of the audience rose and, without a trace of irony, gave voice to this question/accusation: “What’s the matter with those Iranians? Haven’t they ever heard of the First Amendment?” The empirical answer to the question was maybe yes, maybe no. Some individual Iranians and many members of the Iranian legal community would have heard of (and studied) the First Amendment, but even those who had read it could not have been counted on to affirm the assumptions informing it”—for example, the “assumption that contents (ideas, ideologies, opinions, hypotheses) are equal before the law, and none is to be prohibited unless it is put into (dangerous) action.”

And then it hits you: this is not the problem of a cultural dialogue, but of a cultural monologue. Another white intellectual presuming to speak for everyone. Fish answers the audience member’s question without a trace of irony himself, by saying, “Some individual Iranians would have heard of the First Amendment.” Really? Tell me more about these fascinating "Iranians." Were there any of them in the audience who might have been able to field this question better than Fish? Who the hell knows. The subaltern couldn’t even get a word in edgewise over this mighty torrent.

Fish’s arguments are sound, as they stand. He has ample rhetorical gifts. He floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. But when you look outside the particulars of the argument—switch your perspective from the content of the argument to the “conditions of its possibility,” as the Marxists say—you wonder why the Chronicle would have chosen Fish to write such a long, solo article on this topic, without even an invitation to dialogue. Maybe, just maybe there are intellectuals who have a foot in both worlds—Western and non-Western—who might have something to say about this dilemma of liberal tolerance. You know, help find a way forward. Imagine that!