(9:10 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Received Wisdom

Highly speculative: there are phases a text goes through. This is probably covered in the scholarship, with which I am not familiar. I hazard a guess at the phases:

1. Getting noticed or not -- Some texts, no matter how brilliant "in themselves," don't matter. No one reads them, perhaps ever. The only way to survive being ignored by the "mainstream" is to get a rabid cult of fans (see, for example, the writings of St. Paul).
   
2. Agreement or disagreement -- Alright, so it's been established that one must read the text, though not necessarily with rapt attention, just enough to agree or disagree, to be enthusiastic about the author or angry with the author's presumption.
   
3. Provisional canonization -- "Canonization" in all senses of the term. The author becomes "received opinion"; the texts of an author are given attention because of their author, even if they may not have survived on their own. Following the author may not be popular, but it is acknowledged as a legitimate choice, just as "critique" of the author is acknowledged as a worthwhile venture. (The "canon" of "postmodernism" is at this point: it is still considered worth one's while to bother with critiquing Derrida and Foucault.)
   
4. Scripturization -- People become classed as believers or unbelievers, of varying degrees. For believers, anything "bad" that seems to stem from the author is a historical relic or a "misinterpretation." Such belief does not need to be devout. The New Testament, at least, still remains scripture in this sense: even unbelievers largely class the New Testament in the "good" category, so that anyone who uses it to dastardly ends is "misusing" it. It is interesting to consider other texts that have attained this status: the works of Nietzsche are the only ones that leap immediately to mind.
   
5. Historical Criticism -- This is always an insult at first, a reduction -- and then, strangely, it becomes the way of finally unleashing the true, unadulterated meaning of the text, finally being able to assess and judge the text and either embrace or dismiss them as such. All non-historical-critical readings are judged as inadequate or amateurish.
   
6. Re-scripturization (literaturization?) -- The work of historical criticism can continue, but it is no longer adequate to account for the continued currency of the texts. There is a remainder of meaning; these texts continue to be resources of a certain kind, "go-to" texts for opinions that will always be of interest, even if they are never embraced as such by anyone. Creative readings, far from insulting the text, only reaffirm their importance as a provocation to thought. The Bible, in both Testaments, of course continues to be such a text. Nietzsche's texts fall into this category, as well as Freud's. The list goes on -- texts that are available to everyone, whose use no one needs to justify, an inalienable part of our cultural patrimony, but not for that reason "required." Assumed. Everyone already knows what Freud says, what the Bible says -- but we keep reading, nonetheless, often compulsively, in huge gulps.

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