Luctor et Emergo

An essay – Gone Fishing – by Scott McLemee appeared in the online version of Inside Higher Education last week. The title plays on the name and status of Stanley Fish, celebrity public intellectual.
The essay and the Wikipedia entry both mention Fish’s ideas about reader-response theory and the interpretive community, and the ambiguity of Fish’s relationship to literary and social theories of deconstruction.
Some of Fish’s ideas are almost self-evidently true. Literary works are complex sets of words organized to communicate meaning through complex symbols. A literary text contains a narrative description of real or realistic events as imagined by the writer, presenting meaning within a story of people in conflict, the imagined psychology of the characters, and layers of imagery and metaphor. The reader’s response to the story depends on the reader’s way of unpacking the story. Readers will differ with one another and with the writer over the meaning of words and events, partly because language is a cultural endeavor, inherently imprecise across place and time.
Fish’s suggestion that judges, or judges and lawyers are a privileged community seems to describe part of the legal process very well. The law of a place or a people is made up of words pronounced by authoritative persons – rulemakers accepted within the prevailing culture as sovereign authorities. Lawyers and judges spend a great deal of time and energy quarrelling about the words used in Constitutions, statutes, contracts and judicial opinions, in a theoretical effort to reach a principled, rational understanding. In common practice actual cases are decided by the instinctive or intuitive sense of justice of the judges hearing the case, as conditioned by the values of their interpretive community.

Theodore Dalrymple’s essay In the Asylum in the summer 2005 issue of City Journal is worth reading. It caught my attention because I have spent a fair amount of time on law and social policy around mental health. Dalrymple was a forensic psychiatrist, and his essay demonstates the professional frustration of the medical psychiatry with human rights laws that restrict that profession’s ability to intervene. He discusses one incident where he obviously thought it best, on behalf of prison authorities, to sedate and treat a psychotic inmate.
His essay is informative but polemical. In Canada, the law permits intervention to treat a patient who lacks capacity to make informed decisions. The focus is on the patient’s capacity, and not on whether the patient’s decisions correspond to a psychiatrist’s assessment of what is a patient’s best interests. For the curious, a link to the 2003 judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Starson v. Swayze.
His dissection of the ideas of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault is adept. I agree with his criticisms of R.D. Laing, whose views were naive, romantic, unscientific and unrealistic. I agree with some his criticisms of Foucault, but I think he has largely failed to deal with the substance of Foucault’s argument. He tries to undermine Foucault with ad hominem arguments – bashing him as gay French intellectual doesn’t help to identify or answer Foucault’s critique of therapeutic justice. Foucault made sound points about the loss of dignity inherent in an institutional life and power struggles between patients and care givers. Foucault pointed out that the rhetoric of helping patients obscures the fact that society intervenes to protect itself, and that human dignity is sacrificed in the quest to make the mentally ill safely invisible.