Take, Read: Scripture, Textuality, and Cultural Practice. - book reviews

Wesley Kort, Take, Read: Scripture, Textuality, and Cultural Practice, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, 156pp.

Wesley Kort's Take, Read is a tour de force directed against the claims of post-modern deconstructionism, according to which nothing can be read as scripture. It takes the form of a proposal for returning to a pre-critical view of reading a text -- any text -- "as though" (sicut) it were scripture. Specifically, the return is to Calvin's doctrine of reading the Bible; this is pursued through the work of Maurice Blanchot and Julia Kristeva who, according to Kort, offer signs that such a return may be on the horizon as a cultural practice.

Kort scrutinizes post-modernism's abilities to deal with this practice in order to argue that the category of scripture should be taken seriously in cultural theory. En route, he offers us solid grounds for approaching the Bible with trust and hope: as Calvin wrote in the Institutes, it's a question of attitude. There seems, then, to be two audiences for this book: one is the academicians in their strongholds of scholarship. The other is the believer, scholar or no, who may be hard pressed to explain how he or she can say (as the Reformed do) "the Bible is the final authority on matters of faith and practice" without idolizing the text.

Deploying the medieval notion of the lectio divina, which is central to Calvin's doctrine of reading, Kort plots a trajectory of diminishing returns. His account is judiciously peppered with sources from the Enlightenment to our own time, indicating exactly what was understood as being read. For Calvin and the Renaissance, it was the Bible which was "read"; during the Enlightenment, the "two-book" theory (i.e. reading both nature and the Bible as revelatory) was reduced to one of these sources -- namely nature. Then the first half of the 19th century replaced nature with history, the second half turned to literature (cf. "The Bible as literature"!), and in our own time it has been said that nothing at all can be read as though it were scripture. Kort's critique of post-modernism serves also as a base on which to "recover and reconstruct" Calvin's doctrine of reading through the lectio divina, in its pre- and post- critical connotations, so as to be relevant to cultural theory.

The lectio divina, as Kort writes, meant more than just "seeing" text. It meant also hearing the text and ingesting or "eating" it. Calvin, according to Kort, deliberately paralleled the act of "eating" scripture with that of receiving the eucharist, as the book's title, Take...Read, suggests: "Take, eat, this is my body..." (pp.21-23). Extending the meaning of the lectio divina through Blanchot's theory of reading, Kort writes that to read is to "take in" rather than to grasp, seize, or know -- all acts associated with violence (pp.98-100). By focusing upon receptivity as pedagogy, Kort does not require either text or subject as an initial condition for his narrative. Of course, someone is reading and there is a text being read; but this move shifts the focus away from epistemological issues.

One reason, I believe, why a doctrine of reading viewed in this light might nestle so snugly among the branches of post-modem deconstructionism is the latter's fixation on words -- words said, written and read. In practically all disciplines, the early 20th century, which featured Wittgenstein's Tractatus Philosophicus Logicus (a book which Kort might have put to good use), the Vienna Circle and the later Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, launched an epistemological critique fuelled by the smoking remains of language as truth-teller. This view, right up to Derrida and Rorty, denies that there is a "perch" standing outside any framework and thus offering a viewpoint from which one can speak, write or judge. The key word is any, since I read Kort's analysis as undermining the functionality of impermeable frameworks, whether these be cultures or textual fields. However modelled, such frameworks foreclose experience and appear incorrigible.

With an easy-going but incisive rhetoric, Kort examines post-modernism's attempts to "light upon a perch" by dividing them into three stages, each exposing its own "lacks and cracks" that succeeding stages try to fill and repair. These repairs do not work, Kort feels; this is due first to an incapacity of texts and/or cultures to locate themselves as critics. It is due second to confusion between the subject who, totally enmeshed in networks of influence and ostensibly their passive product, yet acts autonomously with total licence to influence or create a world. If there is an ethical "undertow" impelling deconstructionism, its premises have no basis upon which to be uttered.

For example, in considering his "third stage" of post-modernism, the search for ethical norms, Kort examines Critchley's comparison of Derrida and Levinas. Derrida wants the reader to hesitate before assenting to texts that, upon reflection, will be seen only and always as making pretentious claims to adequacy or completeness. This strategy deliberately "wounds the thinker" (p.93). Yet Derrida can get "behind" the reader to advise him or her of the peril of assent only by writing or speaking. I picture Den-ida's predicament as illustrated by the front cover of the Flammarian edition (1980) of his La carte postale. This features a medieval woodcut of a dwarfed Plato standing behind an oversized Socrates, who sits at a desk with pen in hand, jotting down what Plato is telling him to write. The joke is obvious, yet the joke is finally on Derrida who dictates criteria for judging all written texts, including the dictator's. But since Derrida cannot escape from the medium of language to stand outside both reader and text, he is caught in the old problem of the liar who says that he lies: in saying that he lies he is telling the truth. As Kort notes of Critchley's analysis: "There is no way, for Derrida, to get out of the machine" (p.93). In any case, the result for Kort is a cul-de-sac in post-modernism's search for ethical norms -- although each of its stages may lead, perhaps, "to a cultural discipline from where ethics can again emerge" (p.95).