ABSTRACT
In 1989, Stanley Fish, the original l’enfant terrible of U.S. literary critics, published a collection of essays, one of which provocatively asserted, “Theory has no consequences.” This assertion crystallizes much sentiment in the more postmodern reaches of the STS community and, more generally, in the humanities and social sciences. In this chapter, I present Fish’s defense of this assertion and then counter it with my own view of theory as a transformative rhetorical practice, one grounded in reversing presumption.
