Politics & Power Quote by Stanley Fish

Fish is describing a familiar intellectual rush: the moment historicism stops being a method and turns into a solvent. If standards are made, not given, then the mind reaches for the easy sequel - unmake them. The sentence captures how quickly a descriptive claim ("standards emerge historically") gets smuggled into a liberatory moral posture ("discard all the norms"). That slide is the point. Fish is ventriloquizing his admirers on the left with just enough distance to make their enthusiasm look like a category error.

The subtext is a warning about the politics of interpretation. Fish, a leading voice in reader-response and anti-foundational criticism, spent years arguing that meaning and standards are produced inside communities rather than anchored in timeless truths. Some readers treated that as a master key for emancipation: expose the genealogy of a norm, and it loses its authority. Fish is suggesting that this is less brave than it sounds. "Psychologically liberating" is a surgical phrase: the payoff is affective, not necessarily ethical or practical. It feels like freedom to call norms "false enslavers", but the rhetoric also flatters the speaker as newly unfooled.

Context matters: this is post-1960s academia, where theory often functioned as politics by other means. Fish is needling a common academic fantasy that critique equals escape. His deeper claim, consistent with his work, is that you never get outside norms; you trade one interpretive regime for another. Historicism doesn't abolish standards. It relocates them - and makes them easier to deny responsibility for.