communication situation, then author and readers can be expected roughly
to agree on construals of the text, and they agree that nothing deeper than or
apart from such shared backgrounds makes communication possible.
There are to be sure differences of emphasis within their agreements.
Fish, for example, uses the phrase“institutional structures”prominently.
In doing so, he points to the possibility and interest of strategies for under-
standing that see shared linguistic practices as interwoven with shared but
largely unarticulated political stances. Hence Fish’s own strategy in critical
practice for understanding a text often involves noting such political com-
mitments–for example, about who is naturally assumed to possess legitim-
ate political authority: a sovereign over subjects, or men over women–that
are tacitly encoded in the text as part of the large background of assumptions
that tacitly inform both authorial consciousness and the text. He is particu-
larly interested in variations in political stances across different groups of
subjects and in how these variations may enter into both the making and
understanding of art. In taking this direction, Fish’s strategy resembles the
more explicitly political strategies for understanding that have been
developed by figures such as Michel Foucault and Edward Said.
Derrida, in contrast, is interested in the ungovernability by any single
consciousness of the fluidity of language, of the openness of language to
figuration and reconstrual, even against the grain, sometimes, of an acknow-
ledged overt message. His work is strongest when he is himself criticizing the
efforts of critics–for example, Jean Starobinski on Rousseau or Jean-Pierre
Richard on Mallarmé–who have attempted to establish a single, definitive,
unambiguous stance, meaning, or message for a single text or for an author’s
œuvre. Against them, Derrida emphasizes that the very words Rousseau or
Mallarmé use in central figurative passages are multivalent or polysemic. For
example, Rousseau construes (human, propositional) imagination as a self-
proliferating, excessive, and uncontrollable power in us that casts us forever
outside of mere naturalness, insofar as we can fantasize, envy, desire, and
remember, but he also construes imagination as open to the acceptance of its
own natural limits, so that we might come to fantasize about and desire only
that which is reasonably within our power and live“according to nature.”^17
Hence it is a mistake to read Rousseau as either exclusively relentlessly aware
(^17) See Jacques Derrida,Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 186–87.
Understanding art 153