Dispensing with the Fixed Point: Scientific Law as Historical Event

Abstract

Interdisciplinary work has long been the refuge of those trying to break apart the single author/single field complex. But at the most, perhaps the first and sometimes the second of these categories is challenged or broadened; usually interdisciplinary work approaches the interpretation of a text, no matter how broadly defined, by using a methodology imported from another discipline. A researcher may find it useful to privilege one field in order to use it to study another. But is it possible to talk about a generalized process of interpretation? Can one change the hierarchy that privileges the work of a single scientist, the artifact of one artist, or the text of a single author above his intellectual milieu or the work of his critics? In the same way that a discovery in the sciences is often perceived as an isolated event, a piece of writing is often taken to be a singular phenomenon: it results primarily from the thought processes of a single person, and its interpretation is a dependent process, which takes its cues from and is justified by the text it works on. What are the other perspectives available to a critic?