Mina Kumar wrote:
>
> and why is he on one hand calling postmodernism a "rarified kind of academic
> talk" i.e. something removed from the public sphere, and then saying, oh,
> no, actually, it's got something very useful to say to the general public
> about how to think about these things.
>
Which I guess brings us back to Ted Winslow's point that the essay was a mass of contradictions. If you want to see Fish's pragmatism (pomo pragmatism?) in its full glory, look up Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, "Against Theory" in _Critical Inquiry_, 8 (Summer 1982), 723-742. And then a cascade of replies and replies to replies in CI 9 (September 1982), CI 9 (June 1983), and CI 11 (March 1985). Fish appears once or twice.
I first encountered Fish in his book on Milton, before I had ever heard of what came to be called post-modernism. His tone is established there: the tone of the voice of God. He is undoubtedly extremely brilliant and, I think, a perfect jackass.
Carrol