These items connect an essay to a longer lineage of writers and working with these gears helps understand what kind of machine you’re working with
They also define the Interpretative Community:
LAST TIME I ended by suggesting that the fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members (also and simultaneously constituted) can then agree.
from "What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?"