Stanley Fish: 'Intentional Neglect'

Just came across this op-ed piece by Stanley Fish which explains why different labels for interpreters of the Constitution such as "originalist," "strict constructionalist," "textualist" and "judicial activist" are misleading. Fish's claim is that anyone who is in the business of "intepreting the Constitution - as opposed to rewriting it" is an "interntionalist." Fish proceeds to use his piece to articulate his "intentionalist" position regarding textual meaning.

If you've followed Fish's work at all, you've heard his arguments about why all meaning is necessarily intentional before. The following passage encapsulates the core of Fish's position: "if you're not looking for what is meant, the notion of something being said or written is incoherent. Intention is not something added to language; it is what must already be assumed if what are otherwise mere physical phenomena (rocks or scratch marks) are to be experienced as language. Intention comes first; language, and with it the possibility of meaning, second. And this means that there can be no "textualist" method, because there is no object - no text without writerly intention - to which would-be textualists could be faithful."

Whatever you think of Fish's claims, and I will admit to being convinced by his argument and the need to distinguish between a text's meaning and it's effects, you have to admire his prose. I've had Fish as a professor, and he has a real knack for unpacking (and knocking down) the claims made in dense and difficult texts.

Here is how Fish is identified at the end of his essay: "Stanley Fish, former head of the English department at Duke University, is a university professor of law at Florida International University." Did Fish intentionally neglect to mention that he recently stepped down as the Dean of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago? Whatever the case may be, I bet that position at Florida International U. is a phat one.