Is there a point in this argument?

I mean I know that Stanley Fish is the academic academics love to hate, the curmudgeonly éminence grise of the humanities, but I've harbored a fondness for him since I first read Is There A Text in This Class.  At least, unlike some of the other dinosaur old D00Ds at the top of our profession he is conversant with the phrase "digital humanities" but jesus he sounds like an old fart in the NYT this week.

I'm sure many lit prof DigHum peeps have already noted all of this but Fish's assumption that

The direction of my inferences is critical: first the interpretive hypothesis and then the formal pattern, which attains the status of noticeability only because an interpretation already in place is picking it out. The direction is the reverse in the digital humanities: first you run the numbers, and then you see if they prompt an interpretive hypothesis,

calls to mind the farce of David Lodge's novel Small World

"You could get the computer to list every word phrase and syntactical construction the two writers have in common. You could precisely quantify the influence of Shakespeare on TS Eliot"

“But my thesis isn't about that,” said Persse. “It's about the influence of TS Eliot on Shakespeare"

Srsly it is like Lodge presaged Fish's worst nightmare, in which the sum tote of what digital humanities has to offer is counting how many times the Bard used a specific preposition and then using that to create nonsensical arguments.  The mere fact that profs went digital well over a decade ago seems to have escaped Fish, who I presume is reacting to the digital turn of the most recent MLA.

Still for heaven's sake Stan, it's time to recognize that barbarians are no longer at the gate.  They are, in fact, sitting around the table with you at faculty meetings and sh1t seems to be going along just fine.  His analysis that there are

two attitudes digital humanists typically strike: (1) we’re doing what you’ve always been doing, only we have tools that will enable you to do it better; let us in, and (2) we are the heralds and bearers of a new truth and it is the disruptive challenge of that new truth that accounts for your recoiling from us

would make me feel kind of bad for old Stan -- he's had a hell of a run hasn't he?-- but the end is a bit self indulgent

 whatever vision of the digital humanities is proclaimed, it will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice:

yup retiring from that endowed chair and the bully pulpit of the NYT will be a biatch.