I pointed out a couple of posts back that virtually the entire “spiritual” vocabulary we have inherited from scripture was derived from other socio-political institutional relationships: roughly, debt and slavery; testimony and judgment; treaties between imperial powers and vassal states, often including dire threats directed toward the latter; diplomatic messages; and the ceremonies surrounding kingship. I hasten to add that in my view this doesn’t delegitimate scripture derived vocabularies in the slightest—these vocabularies were revised and transformed so as to generate new disciplinary spaces making real discoveries regarding fundamental human paradoxes. Indeed, where else would such discoveries come from, if not from crises in social relations? The observation enables us to see patterns we wouldn’t have otherwise and vindicates the assumption that thinking is always embedded textually, in practices of translation that are themselves embedded in institutions, and not something we carry out inside our own heads. And now I want to reverse the relation of derivation and point out that the earliest forms of discourse and therefore of thinking were no doubt prayers, which would mean that all those economic, juridical, political and geo-political discourses were themselves translated forms of petition to the center.
Petitioning Technology
Petitioning Technology
Petitioning Technology
I pointed out a couple of posts back that virtually the entire “spiritual” vocabulary we have inherited from scripture was derived from other socio-political institutional relationships: roughly, debt and slavery; testimony and judgment; treaties between imperial powers and vassal states, often including dire threats directed toward the latter; diplomatic messages; and the ceremonies surrounding kingship. I hasten to add that in my view this doesn’t delegitimate scripture derived vocabularies in the slightest—these vocabularies were revised and transformed so as to generate new disciplinary spaces making real discoveries regarding fundamental human paradoxes. Indeed, where else would such discoveries come from, if not from crises in social relations? The observation enables us to see patterns we wouldn’t have otherwise and vindicates the assumption that thinking is always embedded textually, in practices of translation that are themselves embedded in institutions, and not something we carry out inside our own heads. And now I want to reverse the relation of derivation and point out that the earliest forms of discourse and therefore of thinking were no doubt prayers, which would mean that all those economic, juridical, political and geo-political discourses were themselves translated forms of petition to the center.