Stanley Fish and our classroom

I found that the entire time I was reading the interview with Stanley Fish I was constantly comparing his points to how we speak and view speech in this class. Overall I think Fish’s argument is interesting but in some ways extreme – I think his definition of “free speech” is pretty far from how a lot of people see it. However, there were a few phrases that Fish used that really jumped out at me and made me think about our class, for example “weightless situation.” Fish brings this phrase up in the context of his argument that we always speak for a reason, that speech has a purpose. In the context of our class, though, I was thinking that in a way we are in our own “weightless situation.” We are lucky enough to be in an environment where we can read these novels and discuss them without being actively censored and without really having to worry too much about what we say. This doesn’t make our conversations insignificant, but it does mean that they do have a certain hypothetical, non-weighted quality in them. I think the times when we, as a class and individually, have started to change our own opinions and struggled with certain topics has been when we start to think outside of that closed environment and ask questions like, would I really let my kids read that? Is it right to expose younger children to these ideas? The times when we’ve wrestled with these challenging problems and have really gotten down to working through censorship issues has been when we used the environment of a “weightless situation” to think about a time or place that is more consequential.
Another term that Fish used that I found really interesting is his idea of a “trigger point.” Fish claims that no one really believes that everything and anything should be said, and that we all have this point “which is either acknowledged at the beginning or emerges in a moment of crisis.” I think many of us entered this course without being aware of or acknowledging a trigger point, and some of the personal challenge came from a “moment of crisis.” The general views of the class all along has been very anti-censorship, but along the way we have encountered issues (for example, specific words or concepts) that have been triggers for some people and made others re-consider their ideas. For me, at least, it is this conflict between the idealistic urge to be able to say “no, I don’t think literature should be censored” and certain trigger points and personally sensitive subjects that cause a lot of my inner debate about these issues.