What Makes Fish's Assignment a Poem

Fish, like Chandler, realizes that recognition is what started the process of classifying. The class was told that the assignment on the board was a poem and so they immediately started making associations and obtain meaning from it. They were seeing with “eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties they knew poems to possess” (Fish). This is exactly like knowing what will happen in a given genre- for example mystery stories like Sherlock Holmes. The reader going into it knows to expect a protagonist to solve a case, the clues and exposition and then finally, the solution. Though this is a very broad outline, it’s basically what we’ve been adjusted to. Chandler is aware of this ability to control by categorization just like Fish is. Chandler says “defining genres may be problematic, but even if theorists were to abandon the concept, in everyday life people would continue to categorize texts.” Fish proves this theory also because he says that the ‘poem’ or assignment on the board did not need to be those exact words to get similar results, and he had tested it several times.
Chandler also argues “genre conventions lead to passive consumption of generic texts,” meaning that limitations are being placed on a work’s full potential. The same goes for Fish’s observance of classroom etiquette. The class is used to participating in a class, studying text, his students are used to raising their hands. These are all learned actions that the students were conditioned to, just like when a character in a horror story meets their demise in some gruesome way we’re conditioned to expect it. This is where the problem of objective v. subjective occurs, because objective is without bias and subjective has our own personal bias, and it’s nearly impossible to separate the two. Fish argues, our “ability to see and to make an assignment…both are constructed artifacts, the products and the producers of interpretation, and while the differences between them are real, they are interpretive and do not have their source in some bedrock level of objectivity.” It’s very difficult to look at something objectively when automatically or involuntarily, we don’t have a choice but to look at it subjectively because universal standards or ‘rules’ have been set for us what that something is. This is why Jane Feuer argues according to Chandler’s article that “a genre is ultimately an abstract conception rather than something that exists empirically in the world.” A job is one of the several places drawn from life where social expectations are critical to interpreting interaction. Most likely, you have to be there, on time, dress a certain way, act a certain way, do certain tasks. Then follow that routine through to maintain the job and you get paid in return for your services. For example, if you’re a lawyer or accountant who works in an office and you walk in one day in jeans and a t-shirt and your favorite Converse (and it’s not acceptable dress code), there’s probably going to be a problem. These are conventions that would cause harm to yourself and you’d probably never go against them because it would ruin your livelihood, and it’s not the social norm. This goes back to what makes Fish’s ‘assignment’ a so-called poem in his classroom.