SOURCE: “It's All Just History,” in London Review of Books, June 9, 1994, p. 9.

In the following review, Malcolmson provides an overview of Fish's theoretical perspective and arguments in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too. Malcolmson commends Fish's dissection of political correctness and multiculturalism but finds contradictions in his historical determinism and disavowal of principle.

People who can find the world in a grain of sand are not necessarily people one wants to spend a lot of time with. At a recent conference held in a SoHo gallery in New York, the moderator spoke of interventions and discursive spaces, of enacting positions in a performative way, of avoiding both essentialism and relativism. He spoke of crucial theoretical work. To a person of my generation, this rap is utterly familiar, even homey; one has to struggle to imagine a time when things were different...