ix 10/24

During the discussion in class of stable referent and trace I recalled an article in Falling Into Theory named “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” by Stanley Fish. In it Fish discusses how he had been teaching two courses, one for the Linguistic Institute of America, and the other for the English Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo. He recounts how during one discussion (in the first course) on prominent linguists he wrote down these names on the board in the following order:

Jacobs—Rosenbaum
Levin
Thorne
Hayes
Ohman (?)

He did not erase the board when his other class—the “English religious poetry of the seventeenth century” course for NYU @ Buffalo—came in. Fish drew a frame around these names, told his class this was a religious poem and to interpret it. This is where the stability of these names/referents began to wobble and the trace, with its “layers of meaning" bled through. One student says this poem is a hieroglyph that is in the shape of either a cross or an alter. Other students chime in after scrutinizing the individual name/words and their order. Some posit that the first line is an allegory of Jacobs ladder but here the means of ascent is a rose tree or rosenbaum. Thorne, of course, was a referent to the crown of thorns. Levin was both a reference to the tribe of Levi, “of whose priestly function Christ was the fulfillment,” and a reference to the unleavened bread eaten by those lead out of Exodus and so on. One student went so far as to count the most common letters, and as Fish says, “to no one’s surprise,” they were S, O, N.

Fish further asserted that the names on the board themselves did not matter. Even if blank, the interpreter would see the trace of something in it, whether it be the absence of God, the non representation of Him, etc. This, he says is because “objects are made and not found, and they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion” because the “‘you’ that does the interpretive work…is a communal you and not an isolated individual” (268-274).