Fish’s “pragmatism” is not the philosophy of Emerson or Peirce, James or Dewey; it is the Realpolitik of the junta—a celebration of what Jasper Neel once approvingly called “the strongest voice.” And to people working in a “‘subaltern” field like composition/rhetoric, this celebration of strength and success may look like just the thing for us.[…] The voices we most need to hear in Philosophy are not the most “powerful” voices but the ones that question the violence—the cult of power—so important to the practice of high theory itself.
— Kurt Spellmeyer, JAC 1995
