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67 Talking Back These essays provoke our thinking about what “scriptures” are, why they are invented, the work we make them do for us. Whatever else scriptures may be made to be for us, whatever else they may be made to do for us, we seem to make them a centering force.1 We allow them to locate us, help define us, orient us—always, of course, in obvious relationships to some circle or framework. This means that no matter the passionate rhetorical claims and arguments, no matter the long-standing and widely held assumptions, no matter the entrenched practices and rituals in relationship to them, there are no free-floating “scriptures.” The latter always come out of and reflect the operations of some small-scale local circle or network or some large-scale extensive world or some formation between the two. In other words, “scriptures” are not the same as texts, though they may sometimes appear as such. But they represent a more complex social-psychological phenomenon than a text or text-ed-ness. That we sometimes think of “scriptures” as free-floating, as having independent existence, as something to out there or here to be grasped, to be touched, to be manipulated, to be strictly adhered to or rejected is a measure of the occluding, obfuscating power of the phenomenon of center-ing that takes the form of scripturalizing. That center-ing forces can be called “scriptures” with little qualification or explanation is also worth continued consideration. Although not always the case in human history, the text-ed-ness of the center-ing operation has obtained powerfully for some time. The power of the written, of textuality, in the social-political arrangements we know and experience is obvious. Why would we not come to a point of making scriptures one of the most important center-ing forces? The phenomenon of making texts into scriptures as center-forces carries implications and ramifications aplenty for our ongoing cultural-critical analysis and structuring of relationships. Here we have to do less with the origins of scriptures in terms of a pointed time and place for an appearance from which everything else develops. No, what we are inspired to think about here are the situations and dynamics within societies and cultures that account for the invention of “scriptures”—in non-textual and textual forms. So the baseline question with which we begin this probing—what is it about us, our constitution, our social arrangements and the webs we have spun, that make “scriptures” compelling? —ed. Notes 1. Rudolph Arnheim, The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1988). ...

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