Preserving textual authority was seen as essential to political power

Evidence

The rabbis kept the text in the canon. They did not delete the verse. They did not declare it abrogated. They preserved it, in the Torah, as written. And then they interpreted it in ways that made operational application impossible. And they explicitly justified this interpretive practice with the line: “d’rosh v’kabel sachar” — “expound it, and receive reward.” The point of the passage, on the rabbinic reading, was the moral instruction it provided when expounded — not the operational legal penalty it appeared to prescribe. — , The Rod and the Child, 2347 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Some time ago, looking at what one can only call the deconstructive deluge (as opposed to deconstructive turn) which had overtaken American literary studies, in its formalist mode, I tried to distinguish the extremely important theoretical and intellectual work which it had made possible in Cultural Studies from a mere repetition, a sort of mimicry or deconstructive ventriloquism which sometimes passes as a serious intellectual exercise. My fear at that moment was that if Cultural Studies gained an equivalent institutionalization in the American context, it would, in rather the same way, formalize out of existence the critical questions of power, history, and politics. Paradoxically, what I mean by theoretical fluency is exactly the reverse. There is no moment now, in American Cultural Studies, where we are not able, extensively and without end, to theorize power—politics, race, class, and gender, subjugation, domination, exclusion, marginality, Otherness, etc. There is hardly anything in Cultural Studies which isn’t so theorized. And yet, there is the nagging doubt that this overwhelming textualization of Cultural Studies’ own discourses somehow constitutes power and politics as exclusively matters of language and textuality itself. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 258 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Institute executive power was seen as essential to guard against conspiratorial rivals — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1971; Textual authority was believed to degenerate over time like political power; Sacred-text authority derives from practical power contexts, not scholarship alone — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival…, 818 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Canonical texts can be preserved while interpretation voids their operational force. #complicates (0.80) — , The Rod and the Child, 2347
• Over-theorizing power as textuality can empty it of real political meaning #complicates (0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 258
• Literary texts retain enough autonomy to resist the power structures reproducing them #complicates (0.72)
• Scientific progress required expelling religious and classical textual authority #complicates (0.72) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1621