How to Recognize a Poem When You See One

--Stanley Fish
[1] Last time I sketched out an argument by which meanings are the property neit
her of fixed and stable texts nor of free and independent readers but of interpr
etive communities that are responsible both for the shape of a reader's activiti
es and for the texts those activities produce. In this lecture I propose to exte
nd that argument so as to account not only for the meanings a poem might be said
to have but for the fact of its being recognized as a poem in the first place.
And once again I would like to begin with an anecdote.
[2] In the summer of 1971 I was teaching two courses under the joint auspices of
the Linguistic Institute of America and the English Department of the State Uni
versity of New York at Buffalo. I taught these courses in the morning and in the
same room. At 9:30 I would meet a group of students who were interested in the
relationship between linguistics and literary criticism. Our nominal subject was
stylistics but our concerns were finally theoretical and extended to the presup
positions and assumptions which underlie both linguistic and literary practice.
At 11:00 these students were replaced by another group whose concerns were exclu
sively literary and were in fact confined to English religious poetry of the sev
enteenth century. These students had been learning how to identify Christian sym
bols and how to recognize typological patterns and how to move from the observat
ion of these symbols and patterns to the specification of a poetic intention tha
t was usually didactic or homiletic. On the day I am thinking about, the only co
nnection between the two classes was an assignment given to the first which was
still on the blackboard at the beginning of the second. It read:
Jacobs-Rosenbaum
Levin
Thorne
Hayes
Ohman (?)
[3] I am sure that many of you will already have recognized the names on this li
st, but for the sake of the record, allow me to identify them. Roderick Jacobs a
nd Peter Rosenbaum are two linguists who have coauthored a number of textbooks a
nd coedited a number of anthologies. Samuel Levin is a linguist who was one of t
he first to apply the operations of transformational grammar to literary texts.
J. P. Thorne is a linguist at Edinburgh who, like Levin, was attempting to exten
d the rules of transformational grammar to the notorious ir-regularities of poet
ic language. Curtis Hayes is a linguist who was then using transformational gram
mar in order to establish an objective basis for his intuitive impression that t
he language of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is more complex tha
n the language of Hemingway's novels. And Richard Ohmann is the literary critic
who, more than any other, was responsible for introducing the vocabulary of tran
sformational grammar to the literary community. Ohmann's name was spelled as you
see it here because I could not remember whether it contained one or two n's. I
n other words, the question mark in parenthesis signified nothing more than a fa
ulty memory and a desire on my part to appear scrupulous. The fact that the name
s appeared in a list that was arranged vertically, and that Levin, Thorne, and H
ayes formed a column that was more or less centered in relation to the paired na
mes of Jacobs and Rosenbaum, was similarly accidental and was evidence only of a
certain compulsiveness if, indeed, it was evidence of anything at all.
[4] In the time between the two classes I made only one change. I drew a frame a
round the assignment and wrote on the top of that frame "p. 43." When the member
s of the second class filed in I told them that what they saw on the blackboard

was a religious poem of the kind they had been studying and I asked them to inte
rpret it. Immediately they began to perform in a manner that, for reasons which
will become clear, was more or less predictable. The first student to speak poin
ted out that the poem was probably a hieroglyph, although he was not sure whethe
r it was in the shape of a cross or an altar. This question was set aside as the
other students, following his lead, began to concentrate on individual words, i
nterrupting each other with suggestions that came so quickly that they seemed sp
ontaneous. The first line of the poem (the very order of events assumed the alre
ady constituted status of the object) received the most attention: Jacobs was ex
plicated as a reference to Jacob's ladder, traditionally allegorized as a figure
for the Christian ascent to heaven. In this poem, however, or so my students to
ld me, the means of ascent is not a ladder but a tree, a rose tree or rosenbaum.
This was seen to be an obvious reference to the Virgin Mary who was often chara
cterized as a rose without thorns, itself an emblem of the immaculate conception
. At this point the poem appeared to the students to be operating in the familia
r manner of an iconographic riddle. It at once posed the question, "How is it th
at a man can climb to heaven by means of a rose tree?" and directed the reader t
o the inevitable answer: by the fruit of that tree, the fruit of Mary's womb, Je
sus. Once this interpretation was established it received support from, and conf
erred significance on, the word "thorne," which could only be an allusion to the
crown of thorns, a symbol of the trial suffered by Jesus and of the price he pa
id to save us all. It was only a short step (really no step at all) from this in
sight to the recognition of Levin as a double reference, first to the tribe of L
evi, of whose priestly function Christ was the fulfillment, and second to the un
leavened bread carried by the children of Israel on their exodus from Egypt, the
place of sin, and in response to the call of Moses, perhaps the most familiar o
f the old testament types of Christ. The final word of the poem was given at lea
st three complementary readings: it could be "omen," especially since so much of
the poem is concerned with foreshadowing and prophecy; it could be Oh Man, sinc
e it is mans story as it intersects with the divine plan that is the poem's subj
ect; and it could, of course, be simply "amen," the proper conclusion to a poem
celebrating the love and mercy shown by a God who gave his only begotten son so
that we may live.
[5] In addition to specifying significances for the words of the poem and relati
ng those significances to one another, the students began to discern larger stru
ctural patterns. It was noted that of the six names in the poem three--Jacobs, R
osenbaum, and Levin--are Hebrew, two--Thorne and Hayes--are Christian, and one-Ohman--is ambiguous, the ambiguity being marked in the poem itself (as the phras
e goes) by the question mark in parenthesis. This division was seen as a reflect
ion of the basic distinction between the old dis-pensation and the new, the law
of sin and the law of love. That distinction, however, is blurred and finally di
ssolved by the typological perspective which invests the old testament events an
d heroes with new testament meanings. The structure of the poem, my students con
cluded, is therefore a double one, establishing and undermining its basic patter
n (Hebrew vs. Christian) at the same time. In this context there is finally no p
ressure to resolve the ambiguity of Ohman since the two possible readings--the n
ame is Hebrew, the name is Christian--are both authorized by the reconciling pre
sence in the poem of Jesus Christ. Finally, I must report that one student took
to counting letters and found, to no one's surprise, that the most prominent let
ters in the poem were S, O, N.
[6] Some of you will have noticed that I have not yet said anything about Hayes.
This is because of all the words in the poem it proved the most recalcitrant to
interpretation, a fact not without consequence, but one which I will set aside
for the moment since I am less interested in the details of the exercise than in
the ability of my students to perform it. What is the source of that ability? H
ow is it that they were able to do what they did? What is it that they did? Thes
e questions are important because they bear directly on a question often asked i
n literary theory. What are the distinguishing features of literary language? Or

, to put the matter more colloquially, How do you recognize a poem when you see
one? The commonsense answer, to which many literary critics and linguists are co
mmitted, is that the act of recognition is triggered by the observable presence
of dis-tinguishing features. That is, you know a poem when you see one because i
ts language displays the characteristics that you know to be proper to poems. Th
is, however, is a model that quite obviously does not fit the present example. M
y students did not proceed from the noting of distinguishing features to the rec
ognition that they were confronted by a poem; rather, it was the act of recognit
ion that came first--they knew in advance that they were dealing with a poem-- a
nd the distinguishing features then followed.
[7] In other words, acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal c
haracteristics, are their source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualitie
s compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of a
ttention results in the emergence of poetic qualities. As soon as my students we
re aware that it was poetry they were seeing, they began to look with poetry-see
ing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties t
hey knew poems to possess. They knew, for example (because they were told by the
ir teachers), that poems are (or are supposed to be) more densely and intricatel
y organized than ordinary communications; and that knowledge translated itself i
nto a willingness--one might even say a determi-nation--to see connections betwe
en one word and another and between every word and the poem's central insight. M
oreover, the assumption that there is a central insight is itself poetry-specifi
c, and presided over its own realization. Having assumed that the collection of
words before them was unified by an informing purpose (because unifying purposes
are what poems have), my students proceeded to find one and to formulate it. It
was in the light of that purpose (now assumed) that significances for the indiv
idual words began to suggest themselves, significances which then fleshed out th
e assumption that had generated them in the first place. Thus the meanings of th
e words and the interpretation in which those words were seen to be embedded eme
rged together, as a consequence of the operations my students began to perform o
nce they were told that this was a poem.
[8] It was almost as if they were following a recipe--if it's a poem do this, if
it's a poem, see it that way--and indeed definitions of poetry are recipes, for
by directing readers as to what to look for in a poem, they instruct them in wa
ys of looking that will produce what they expect to see. If your definition of p
oetry tells you that the language of poetry is complex, you will scrutinize the
language of something identified as a poem in such a way as to bring out the com
plexity you know to be "there." You will, for example, be on the look-out for la
tent ambiguities; you will attend to the presence of alliterative and consonanta
l patterns (there will always be some), and you will try to make something of th
em (you will always succeed); you will search for meanings that subvert, or exis
t in a tension with the meanings that first present themselves; and if these ope
rations fail to produce the anticipated complexity, you will even propose a sign
ificance for the words that are not there, because, as everyone knows, everythin
g about a poem, including its omissions, is significant. Nor, as you do these th
ings, will you have any sense of performing in a willful manner, for you will on
ly be doing what you learned to do in the course of becoming a skilled reader of
poetry. Skilled reading is usually thought to be a matter of discerning what is
there, but if the example of my students can be generalized, it is a matter of
knowing how to produce what can thereafter be said to be there. Interpretation i
s not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not dec
ode poems; they make them.
[9] To many, this will be a distressing conclusion, and there are a number of ar
guments that could be mounted in order to forestall it. One might point out that
the circumstances of my students' performance were special. After all, they had
been concerned exclusively with religious poetry for some weeks, and therefore
would be uniquely vulnerable to the deception I had practiced on them and unique

ly equipped to impose religious themes and patterns on words innocent of either.

I must report, however, that I have duplicated this experiment any number of ti
mes at nine or ten universities in three countries, and the results are always t
he same, even when the participants know from the beginning that what they are l
ooking at was originally an assignment. Of course this very fact could itself be
turned into an objection: doesn't the reproducibility of the exercise prove tha
t there is something about these words that leads everyone to perform in the sam
e way? Isn't it just a happy accident that names like Thorne and Jacobs have cou
nterparts or near counterparts in biblical names and symbols? And wouldn't my st
udents have been unable to do what they did if the assignment I gave to the firs
t class had been made up of different names? The answer to all of these question
s is no. Given a firm belief that they were confronted by a religious poem, my s
tudents would have been able to turn any list of names into the kind of poem we
have before us now, because they would have read the names within the assumption
that they were informed with Christian significances. (This is nothing more tha
n a literary analogue to Augustine's rule of faith.)' You can test this assertio
n by replacing Jacobs-Rosenbaum, Levin, Thorne, Hayes, and Ohman with names draw
n from the faculty of Kenyon College--Temple, Jordan, Seymour, Daniels, Star, Ch
urch. I will not exhaust my time or your patience by performing a full-dress ana
lysis, which would involve, of course, the relation between those who saw the Ri
ver Jordan and those who saw more by seeing the Star of Bethlehem, thus fulfilli
ng the prophecy by which the temple of Jerusalem was replaced by the inner templ
e or church built up in the heart of every Christian. Suffice it to say that it
could easily be done (you can take the poem home and do it yourself) and that th
e shape of its doing would be constrained not by the names but by the interpreti
ve assumptions that gave them a significance even before they were seen. This wo
uld be true even if there were no names on the list, if the paper or blackboard
were blank; the blankness would present no problem to the interpreter, who would
immediately see in it the void out of which God created the earth, or the abyss
into which unregenerate sinners fall, or, in the best of all possible poems, bo
th.
[10] Even so, one might reply, all you've done is demonstrate how an interpretat
ion, if it is prosecuted with sufficient vigor, can impose itself on material wh
ich has its own proper shape. Basically, at the ground level, in the first place
, when all is said and done, "Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Thorne Hayes Ohman (?)" is
an assignment; it is only a trick that allows you to transform it into a poem, a
nd when the effects of the trick have worn off, it will return to its natural fo
rm and be seen as an assignment once again. This is a powerful argu-ment because
it seems at once to give interpretation its due (as an act of the will) and to
maintain the independence of that on which interpretation works. It allows us, i
n short, to preserve our commonsense intuition that interpretation must be inter
pretation of something. Unfortunately, the argument will not hold because the as
signment we all see is no less the product of interpretation than the poem into
which it was turned. That is, it requires just as much work, and work of the sam
e kind, to see this as an assignment as it does to see it as a poem. If this see
ms counterintuitive, it is only because the work required to see it as an assign
ment is work we have already done, in the course of acquir-ing the huge amount o
f background knowledge that enables you and me to function in the academic world
. In order to know what an assignment is, that is, in order to know what to do w
ith something identified as an assignment, you must first know what a class is (
know that it isn't an economic grouping) and know that classes meet at specified
times for so many weeks, and that one's performance in a class is largely a mat
ter of performing between classes.
[11] Think for a moment of how you would explain this last to someone who did no
t already know it. "Well," you might say, "a class is a group situation in which
a number of people are instructed by an informed person in a particular subject
." (Of course the notion of "subject" will itself require explication.) "An assi
gnment is something you do when you're not in class." "Oh, I see," your interloc

utor might respond, "an assignment is something you do to take your mind off wha
t you've been doing in class." "No, an assignment is a part of a class." "But ho
w can that be if you only do it when the class is not meeting?" Now it would be
possible, finally, to answer that question, but only by enlarging the horizons o
f your explanation to include the very concept of a university, what it is one m
ight be doing there, why one might be doing it instead of doing a thousand other
things, and so on. For most of us these matters do not require explanation, and
indeed, it is hard for us to imagine someone for whom they do; but that is beca
use our tacit knowledge of what it means to move around in academic life was acq
uired so gradually and so long ago that it doesn't seem like knowledge at all (a
nd therefore something someone else might not know) but a part of the world. You
might think that when you're on campus (a phrase that itself requires volumes)
that you are simply walking around on the two legs God gave you; but your walkin
g is informed by an internalized awareness of institutional goals and practices,
of norms of behavior, of lists of do's and don't's, of invisible lines and the
dangers of crossing them; and, as a result, you see everything as already organi
zed in relation to those same goals and practices. It would never occur to you,
for example, to wonder if the people pouring out of that building are fleeing fr
om a fire; you know that they are exiting from a class (what could be more obvio
us?) and you know that because your perception of their action occurs within a k
nowledge of what people in a university could possibly be doing and the reasons
they could have for doing it (going to the next class, going back to the dorm, m
eeting someone in the student union). It is within that same knowledge that an a
ssignment becomes intelligible so that it appears to you immediately as an oblig
ation, as a set of directions, as something with parts, some of which may be mor
e significant than others. That is, it is a proper question to ask of an assignm
ent whether some of its parts might be omitted or slighted, whereas readers of p
oetry know that no part of a poem can be slighted (the rule is "everything count
s") and they do not rest until every part has been given a significance.
[12] In a way this amounts to no more than saying what everyone already knows: p
oems and assignments are different, but my point is that the differences are a r
esult of the different interpretive operations we perform and not of something i
nherent in one or the other. An assignment no more compels its own recognition t
han does a poem; rather, as in the case of a poem, the shape of an assignment em
erges when someone looks at something identified as one with assignment-seeing e
yes, that is, with eyes which are capable of seeing the words as already embedde
d within the institutional structure that makes it possible for assignments to h
ave a sense. The ability to see, and therefore to make, an assignment is no less
a learned ability than the ability to see, and therefore to make, a poem. Both
are constructed artifacts, the products and not the producers of interpretation,
and while the differences between them are real, they are interpretive and do n
ot have their source in some bedrock level of objectivity.
[13] Of course one might want to argue that there is a bedrock level at which th
ese names constitute neither an assignment nor a poem but are merely a list. But
that argument too falls because a list is no more a natural object--one that we
ars its meaning on its face and can be recognized by anyone--than an assignment
or a poem. In order to see a list, one must already be equipped with the concept
s of seriality, hierarchy, subordination, and so on, and while these are by no m
eans esoteric concepts and seem available to almost everyone, they are nonethele
ss learned, and if there were someone who had not learned them, he or she would
not be able to see a list. The next recourse is to descend still lower (in the d
irection of atoms) and to claim objectivity for letters, paper, graphite, black
marks on white spaces, and so on; but these entities too have palpability and sh
ape only because of the assumption of some or other system of intelligibility, a
nd they are therefore just as available to a deconstructive dissolution as are p
oems, assignments, and lists.
[14] The conclusion, therefore, is that all objects are made and not found, and

that they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion. This does no
t, however, commit me to subjectivity because the means by which they are made a
re social and conventional. That is, the "you" who does the interpretative work
that puts poems and assignments and lists into the world is a communal you and n
ot an isolated individual. No one of us wakes up in the morning and (in French f
ashion) reinvents poetry or thinks up a new educational system or decides to rej
ect seriality in favor of some other, wholly original, form of organization. We
do not do these things because we could not do them, because the mental operatio
ns we can perform are limited by the institutions in which we are already embedd
ed. These institutions precede us, and it is only by inhabiting them, or being i
nhabited by them, that we have access to the public and conventional senses they
make. Thus while it is true to say that we create poetry (and assignments and l
ists), we create it through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own
but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility. Insofa
r as the system (in this case a literary system) constrains us, it also fashions
us, finishing us with categories of understanding, with which we in turn fashio
n the entities to which we can then point. In short, to the list of made or cons
tructed objects we must add ourselves, for we no less than the poems and assignm
ents we see are the products of social and cultural patterns of thought.
[15] To put the matter in this way is to see that the opposition between objecti
vity and subjectivity is a false one because neither exists in the pure form tha
t would give the opposition its point. This is precisely illustrated by my anecd
ote in which we do not have free-standing readers in a relationship of perceptua
l adequacy or inadequacy to an equally free-standing text. Rather, we have reade
rs whose consciousnesses are constituted by a set of conventional notions which
when put into operation constitute in turn a conventional, and conven-tionally s
een, object. My students could do what they did, and do it in unison, because as
members of a literary community they knew what a poem was (their knowledge was
public), and that knowledge led them to look in such a way as to populate the la
ndscape with what they knew to be poems.
[16] Of course poems are not the only objects that are constituted in unison by
shared ways of seeing. Every object or event that becomes available within an in
stitutional setting can be so characterized. I am thinking, for example, of some
thing that happened in my classroom just the other day. While I was in the cours
e of vigorously making a point, one of my students, William Newlin by name, was
just as vigorously waving his hand. When I asked the other members of the class
what it was that Mr. Newlin was doing, they all answered that he was seeking per
mission to speak. I then asked them how they knew that. The immediate reply was
that it was obvious; what else could he be thought to be doing? The meaning of h
is gesture, in other words, was right there on its surface, available for readin
g by anyone who had the eyes to see. That meaning, however, would not have been
available to someone without any knowledge of what was involved in being a stude
nt. Such a person might have thought that Mr. Newlin was pointing to the fluores
cent lights hanging from the ceiling, or calling our attention to some object th
at was about to fall ("the sky is falling," "the sky is falling"). And if the so
meone in question were a child of elementary or middle-school age, Mr. Newlin mi
ght well have been seen as seeking permission not to speak but to go to the bath
room, an interpretation or reading that would never occur to a student at Johns
Hopkins or any other institution of "higher learning" (and how would we explain
to the uninitiated the meaning of that phrase).
[17] The point is the one I have made so many times before: it is neither the ca
se that the significance of Mr. Newlin's gesture is imprinted on its surface whe
re it need only be read off, or that the construction put on the gesture by ever
yone in the room was individual and idiosyncratic. Rather, the source of our int
erpretive unanimity was a structure of interests and understood goals, a structu
re whose categories so filled our individual consciousnesses that they were rend
ered as one, immediately investing phenomena with the significance they must hav

e, given the already-in-place assumptions about what someone could possibly be i

ntending (by word or gesture) in a classroom. By seeing Mr. Newlin's raised hand
with a single shaping eye, we were demonstrating what Harvey Sacks has characte
rized as "the fine power of a culture. It does not, so to speak, merely fill bra
ins in roughly the same way, it fills them so that they are alike in fine detail
. "I The occasion of Sacks's observation was the ability of his hearers to under
stand a sequence of two sentences--"The baby cried. The mommy picked it up."---e
xactly as he did (assuming, for example that "the 'mommy' who picks up the 'baby
' is the mommy of that baby"), despite the fact that alternative ways of underst
anding were demonstrably possible. That is, the mommy of the second sentence cou
ld well have been the mommy of some other baby, and it need not ever have been a
baby that this "floating" mommy was picking up. One is tempted tc say that in t
he absence of a specific context we are authorized to take the words literally,
which is what Sacks's hearers do; but as Sacks observes, it is within the assump
tion of a context--one so deeply assumed that we are unaware of it---that the wo
rds acquire what seems to be their literal meaning. There is nothing in the word
s that tells Sacks and his hearers how to relate the mommy and the baby of this
story, just as there is nothing in the form of Mr.Newlin's gesture that tells hi
s fellow students how to determine its significance. In both cases the determina
tion (of relation and significance) is the work of categories of organization--t
he family, being a student--that are from the very first giving shape anc value
to what is heard and seen.
[18] Indeed, these categories are the very shape of seeing itself, in that we ar
e not to imagine a perceptual ground more basic than the one they afford. That i
s, we are not to imagine a moment when my students "simply see" a physical confi
guration of atoms and then assign the configuration a significance, according to
the situation they happen to be in. To be in the situation (this or any other)
is to "see" with the eyes of its interests, its goals, its understood practices,
values, and norms, and so to be conferring significance by seeing, not after it
. The categories of my students' vision are the categories by which they underst
and themselves to be functioning as students (what Sacks might term "doing stude
nting"), and objects will appear to them in forms related to that way of functio
ning rather than in some objective or preinterpretive form. (This is true even w
hen an object is seen as not related, since nonrelation is not a pure but a diff
erential category--the specification of something by enumerating what it is not;
in short, nonrelation is merely one form of relation, and its perception is alw
ays situation-specific.)
[19] Of course, if someone who was not functioning as a student was to walk into
my classroom, he might very well see Mr. Newlin's raised hand (and "raised hand
" is already an interpretation-laden description) in some other way, as evidence
of a disease, as the salute of a political follower, as a muscle-improving exer
cise, as an attempt to kill flies; but he would always see it in some way, and n
ever as purely physical data waiting for his interpretation. And, moreover, the
way of seeing, whatever it was, would never be individual or idiosyncratic, sinc
e its source would always be the institutional structure of which the "see-er" w
as an extending agent. This is what Sacks means when he says that a culture fill
s brains "so that they are alike in fine detail"; it fills them so that no one's
interpretive acts are exclusively his own but fall to him by virtue of his posi
tion in some socially organized environment and are therefore always shared and
public. It follows, then, that the fear of solipsism, of the imposition by the u
nconstrained self of its own prejudices, is unfounded be-cause the self does not
exist apart from the communal or conventional categories of thought that enable
its operations (of thinking, seeing, reading). Once one realizes that the conce
ptions that fill consciousness, including any conception of its own status, are
culturally derived, the very notion of an unconstrained self, of a consciousness
wholly and dangerously free, becomes incomprehensible.
[20] But without the notion of the unconstrained self, the arguments of Hirsch,

Abrams, and the other proponents of objective interpretation are deprived of the
ir urgency. They are afraid that in the absence of the controls afforded by a no
rmative system of meanings, the self will simply substitute its own meanings for
the meanings (usually identified with the intentions of the author) that texts
bring with them, the meanings that texts "have"; however, if the self is conceiv
ed of not as an independent entity but as a social construct whose operations ar
e delimited by the systems of intelligibility that inform it, then the meanings
it confers on texts are not its own but have their source in the interpretive co
mmunity (or communities) of which it is a function. Moreover, these meanings wil
l be neither subjective nor objective, at least in the terms assumed by those wh
o argue within the traditional framework: they will not be objective because the
y will always have been the product of a point of view rather than having been s
imply "read off"; and they will not be subjective because that point of view wil
l always be social or institutional. Or by the same reasoning one could say that
they are both subjective and objective: they are subjective because they inhere
in a particular point of view and are therefore not universal; and they are obj
ective because the point of view that delivers them is public and conventional r
ather than individual or unique.
[21] To put the matter in either way is to see how unhelpful the terms "subjecti
ve" and "objective" finally are. Rather than facilitating inquiry, they close it
down, by deciding in advance what shape inquiry can possibly take. Specifically
, they assume, without being aware that it is an assumption and therefore open t
o challenge, the very distinction I have been putting into question, the distinc
tion between interpreters and the objects they interpret. That distinction in tu
rn assumes that interpreters and their objects are two different kinds of aconte
xtual entities, and within these twin assumptions the issue can only be one of c
ontrol: will texts be allowed to constrain their own interpretation or will irre
sponsible interpreters be allowed to obscure and overwhelm texts. In the spectac
le that ensues, the spectacle of Anglo-American critical controversy, texts and
selves fight it out in the persons of their respective champions, Abrams, Hirsch
, Reichert, Graff on the one hand, Holland, Bleich, Slatoff, and (in some charac
terizations of him) Barthes on the other. But if selves are constituted by the w
ays of thinking and seeing that inhere in social organizations, and if these con
stituted selves in turn constitute texts according to these same ways, then ther
e can be no adversary relationship between text and self because they are the ne
cessarily related products of the same cognitive possibilities. A text cannot be
overwhelmed by an irresponsible reader and one need not worry about protecting
the purity of a text from a reader's idiosyncrasies. It is only the distinction
between subject and object that gives rise to these urgencies, and once the dist
inction is blurred they simply fall away. One can respond with a cheerful yes to
the question "Do readers make meanings?" and commit oneself to very little beca
use it would be equally true to say that meanings, in the form of culturally der
ived interpretive categories, make readers.
[22] Indeed, many things look rather different once the subject-object dichotomy
is eliminated as the assumed framework within which critical discussion occurs.
Problems disappear, not because they have been solved but because they are show
n never to have been problems in the first place. Abrams, for example, wonders h
ow, in the absence of a normative system of stable meanings, two people could ev
er agree on the interpretation of a work or even of a sentence; but the difficul
ty is only a difficulty if the two (or more) people are thought of as isolated i
ndividuals whose agreement must be compelled by something external to them. (The
re is something of the police state in Abrams's vision, complete with posted rul
es and boundaries, watchdogs to enforce them, procedures for identifying their v
iolators as criminals.) But if the understandings of the people in question are
informed by the same notions of what counts as a fact, of what is central, perip
heral, and worthy of being noticed--in short, by the same interpretive principle
s--then agreement between them will be assured, and its source will not be a tex
t that enforces its own perception but a way of perceiving that results in the e

mergence to those who share it (or those whom it shares) of the same text. That
text might be a poem, as it was in the case of those who first "saw" "Jacobs-Ros
enbaum Levin Hayes Thorne Ohman (?)," or a hand, as it is every day in a thousan
d classrooms; but whatever it is, the shape and meaning it appears immediately t
o have will be the "ongoing accomplishment" of those who agree to produce it.