The Social Logic of Isa 40:1-11

Elizabeth Clark, in her provocative, thought-provoking book History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, cites Gabrielle Spiegel's work on the "social logic of the text" as one of the most promising ways forward for historians after the linguistic turn. Spiegel's concept of the social logic of the text suggests that the social location of the speaker is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) embedded in the text, and that the "moment of inscription"—"the moment of choice, decision, and action"—provides the historian a means for investigating the "social reality of the text." Spiegel argues, "At work in shaping a literary text is a host of unstated desires, beliefs, misunderstandings, and interests which impress themselves upon the work, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, but which arise from pressures that are social and not merely intertextual" (emphasis mine). These external social pressures leave their mark on the text and allow the historian a means for constructing a text's social context.

For Spiegel, the concept of the "social logic of the text" enables the historian to find the "text's social site—its location within an embedded social environment of which it is a product and in which it acts as an agent—and its own discursive character as 'logos,' that is, as itself a literary artifact composed of language." The text both acts and is acted upon, and it is both linguistic and material. Further, Spiegel emphasizes that texts possess social (and not merely linguistic) realities; "even the purely aesthetic character of a work can be related to the social world from which it emerges."^, I approach Isa 40:1-11 as a text that has been substantially shaped by external social elements that constitute various strands of the author's social context. I examine the text of Isa 40:1-11 in order to construct a social context based on the residues of these social pressures, which left their mark on the text.

In particular, the disembodied voice of verses 3 and 6 and the grass metaphor in verses 6-8 provide excellent possibilities for an analysis of the sort that I have proposed here. Given the text itself, these two elements seem to be incongruent with, or at least problematic for, the text's logic. This causes me to believe that there is an underlying social logic that causes these elements to fit the logic of the rest of the passage but that is unavailable to us as readers set within a radically different social context. I am uninterested in the specific, broad historical context. Rather, I am interested in the local context that surrounded this particular passage (my assumption is that language is always local). I am still exploring what people have said about the social context of this passage, so I may have more to say on Wednesday.