Just some ramblings in consideration of: “Unidisciplined,” by Louis Menand, in The Wilson Quarterly. [by way of Arts & Letters Daily]
During a recent conference (titled "Have the Humanistic Disciplines Collapsed?") at the Stanford Humanities Center, one of the center's directors, to demonstrate the general dissipation of scholarly focus, read the titles of projects submitted by applicants for fellowships and asked the audience to guess each applicant's field. The audience was right only once--when it guessed that an applicant whose project was about politics must be from an English department.
Heh.
“Distinctions among different types of institutions, so far as the professoriate was concerned, began to be sanded down.” The “professoriate.” Now that is a sinister sounding word if I ever heard one.
Menand traces the transformation from Cold War-era homogeneity from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure to Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) to Stanley Fish. I don’t know much about the Rorty work; apparently it is an attack on analytic philosophy. Checking my Norton AoT&C, he’s listed in the index only as a reference, though the Fish intro small caps his name as if he were a contributor. No dice. Library?
...Fish interpreted the shifts as a succession of "communities of inquiry," whose norms and values set the boundaries for what was professionally acceptable and what was not. Once this interpretation was grasped, the belief that "English" represented any single way of approaching literature came to seem naive. Thus the pragmatic definition: The study of English is whatever people within the community of inquiry known as "the English department" happen to count as the study of English. There is no objective referent, such as "the nature of literary language," to use as an arbiter among approaches. The foundation has not shifted--it has vanished.
The last sentence there reminds me of Gioia’s study of Paul de Man, where he compares postmodernism to cartoons where the character climbs up a tree, goes out onto a branch, saws off the branch, and watches as the rest of the tree falls away.
In other words, the interpretive shifts (I will not not not use the “P” word here) that marked the history of the discipline suddenly were made irrelevant in this new light.
...
I lose the thread of the argument here.
Is it worth noting here that Fish is against abortion (stemming from an incident in his youth) but that he comes to this position from a purely subjective point of view, that his opinion is formed strictly from an inner railing (subjective conviction) against the issue than due to logic, argument, or supporting principle? Probably not. Oh, well, then.
10:59:52 PM 
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