The Gospel of Mark
There is a moment in Stephen Moore's text (Moore 1992) that is especially important for socio-rhetorical criticism and its project. In the context of talking about 'cross' Moore introduces 'chiasmus'. 'A cross is also a chiasmus', he says, and he introduces Mark 8.35:
'whoever would save their life will lose it' is inverted ... to 'whoever loses their life ... will save it'. (p. 95)
This is an important moment for socio-rhetorical criticism, because chiasmus is another way to overcome binary oppositions, a way regularly used by 'new historicism'. Chiasmus represents a reciprocity rather than opposition between two things. Reciprocity between Jewish and Greco-Roman culture in the Gospel of Mark stands at the foundation of analysis and interpretation in Jesus the Teacher (1982, 1984, 1992a, 1990: 47-72/1994a: 109-242). In Stephen Greenblatt's terms, there is reciprocal 'energy' exchanged by two phenomena, and the exchange is not simple but highly complex (Thomas 1991: 182-5, 193-6). To describe relations between texts and society, therefore, new historicists use a chiasmus like:
the social dimension of an aesthetic strategy and
the aesthetic dimension of a social strategy.
(Thomas 1991: 193)
For socio-rhetorical criticism, this introduces four chiasmic statements which are at work in each aspect of texture in a text. The four statements are as follows:
Each chiasmus turns the initial formulation back onto itself in a manner that raises decisive issues about any mode of interpretation of a text. Every interpretation of a text requires an interpreter to use a mode of discourse. Every mode of interpretive discourse is ideological, but it is not 'just' ideological. All interpretive discourse both reinscribes some aspect of the discourse in the text and enacts an influential mode of discourse in its own time and place. To put it another way, every interpreter acts out both 'an interpretive role the text has scripted, even dramatized, in advance' (Anderson and Moore 1992: 93) and an interpretive role influential discourse in his or her own time and place has authorized and dramatized. Still in other words, the ideological nature of all interpretation manifests itself in the interplay between the choice of a mode of interpretive discourse and the choice of dimensions of the text the interpreter reinscribes. Let us explore this briefly in relation to each chiastic statement above.
Investigations of inner texture act out some configuration of repetition, progression, opening-middle-closing, narration, argumentation and/or aesthetic in the text itself. Yet every interpretation adopts an interpretive role that uses one or more currently available mode of intellectual discourse, like literary, linguistic, narratological, rhetorical, philosophical, theological or aesthetic discourse. On the one hand, the challenge as stated in the chiasmus above is that Christianity is one of those religions that has created a textual culture that claims to present authentic discourse, perhaps the only authentic discourse, about God. On the other hand, it is the nature of text itself to create a religious culture about itself--texts both authorize their own view of the world and create the need for their own discourse. Analysis and interpretation of the inner texture of New Testament texts, then, occur in a space of interplay between Christianity as a religion that authorizes itself through the thought and action it advocates in its texts and biblical texts as a form of discourse in which narrational voices evoke religious authority for themselves and create a need for their own religious discourse. The ideological dimensions of inner textual analysis and interpretation play out some configuration of the authority and needs created by the text and the authority and needs in the discourse the interpreter chooses from his or her contemporary culture.
Investigations of intertexture play out, in one way or another, an interaction between the history, texts, cultures and social situations and institutions biblical texts evoke and the history, texts, cultures and social situations and institutions interpretations of biblical texts regularly evoke. In other words, individual biblical texts evoke canons, canons within canons and near canons for their intertextuality. In the context of this multiple display of intertextures, interpreters evoke canons, canons within canons and near canons for their own interpretive discourse. The ideological nature of a particular intertextual interpretation, then, lies in the interplay between the intertextures of the biblical text it is reinscribing and the intertexture in the intellectual discourse the interpreter has chosen to analyze and interpret this intertexture.
Investigations of social and cultural texture configure together one or more social and cultural roles the religious text has scripted and one or more roles sociology and anthropology have authorized as important and/or definitive. The ideological nature of analyses and interpretation of social and cultural texture lies in the interplay between the selection of special, common and final social and cultural topics and categories in the discourse and the selection of models, typologies, theories and modes of analysis and explanation from the social sciences.
Investigations of the ideological texture of biblical texts configure an interplay between some mode of authority and creation of needs enacted by the discourse in the text and some mode of authority and creation of needs in modern or postmodern intellectual discourse. On the one hand, the discourse in texts evokes literary, historical, social, cultural, rhetorical, ideological, aesthetic and theological modes of inquiry, discussion and interpretation. On the other hand, modern and postmodern intellectual discourse advances disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, eclectic, empirical, theoretical, constructive and deconstructive modes of analysis and interpretation. Ideological interpretation features an interplay between the selection of a particular ideology to enact intellectual dimensions evoked by the biblical text and the selection of particular intellectual modes of discourse to enact the ideological dimensions of the interpretation. For example, the ideological texture of anthropological discourse is regularly distinctive from the ideological texture of historical discourse. But a particular anthropological interpreter may choose an ideological position very close to a particular historical interpreter. The ideological texture of their respective interpretations exhibits itself both in the particular manner in which the interpreter enacts the discourse of the field of anthropology or history and the particular manner in which the interpreter enacts an aspect of the anthropological or historical texture or intertexture of the text. Thus, in any ideological investigation there is a reciprocal interaction between the ideological texture of the particular mode of interpretation and the intellectual texture--be it anthropological, historical, literary, sociological, aesthetic or theological--of the ideological interpretation.
In conclusion, any investigation of inner texture must wrestle with the 'baptizing' of text by modern critics just as much as it must wrestle with texts' 'baptizing' of religion. Any investigation of intertexture must wrestle with biblical intertextualities' 'canonizing' of itself as much as it must wrestle with the Bible's 'canonizing' of its own intertextuality. Any investigation of social and cultural texture must wrestle with 'adoption' by sociology and anthropology of a religious culture for themselves as much as religion's 'adoption' of sociological and anthropological culture for itself. Any investigation of ideological texture must wrestle with the 'ultimate' claim of any form of intellectual discourse for its own ideology just as much as ideological interpretation makes an 'ultimate' claim for its intellectual mode of discourse. Nothing we say, then, can escape the way we say it and the context in which we say it, and the way other people hear it in the context in which they hear it. But there is no cause for alarm. This is the way it always has been and always will be. And this is the context in which we encounter 'truth' as we know it.
From: Vernon K. Robbins (1996) The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse: Rhetoric, Society and Ideology, London: Routledge: 212-215.
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