Open Access. © 2019 Ishita Banerjee-Dube et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580853-047 Ishita Banerjee-Dube, Max Deeg, Saurabh Dube, Anne Feldhaus, Ian Henderson, Rahul Bjørn Parson, Sabine Sander Afterword: texts and narratives The ‘texts’ portion of this part of the publication has explored narratives of reli- gious individualisation that have set in motion discourses which, to varying degrees, empower and promote religious individualisation. The authors of these narratives are, in a sense, the founders of discursivity, from whom currents of thought seem to flow which have informed modes of religious individualisation. It is, however, often the ‘modes of circulation, valorisation, attribution, and appropriation’ (Foucault, Faubion 1998, 220) that provide insights into the cul- tures and social relations of a process of individualisation. It is the production and modifications of the ‘author function’ that indicate the emergence of insti- tutions that propel and valorise the ‘individual’ author. In this section, we have discussed how the author does not necessarily connote a specific individual; several narrators, selves, and subjects confuse and complicate the link between author and individual (historical or imaginary). The author may function as a mere ‘scriptor’, the composer of a text, but its ultimate use, meaning, and destiny are in the hands of the recipients of that text (Barthes, Heath 1977, 145). Some of the contributions here have engaged with the idea that the author/scriptor plays a smaller role in the emergence of conventions than the community that rallies around their texts. For it is this community that valorises the author as an exem- plar to be emulated. Yet other contributors have examined the intentionality of an author’s narrative strategies to initiate discursivity and to provide a model for posterity. We have discovered, in contrast to the ‘Practices’ section of this part of the publication, that texts intuitively tend toward collective efforts of stabilisa- tion and conventionalisation, sometimes tangential or even at variance with the pronouncements of the author. Processes of text composition, reception, and itinerancy, and the many ironic and quirky stances that authors, characters, and audiences take with regard to texts, suggest that previous assumptions about sequential and/or dialectical dynamics of religious institutionalisation and individualisation need to be recon- sidered. Is it possible to think of individualisation and institutionalisation as intertwined processes rather than opposing or contrasting and sequential pro- cesses? In other words, can we think of a process in which the narrative creates the author? And one in which the individual author is produced when he or she is institutionalised or stabilised through the work? In such a scenario, individu- alisation and institutionalisation, rather than being ambiguous and ambivalent processes, can become mutual, reciprocal, and coeval, and the congealing of Unauthenticated Download Date | 2/26/20 8:39 AM