ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that it is precisely mediating forms that interject between writers and readers that constitute the space of scientific discovery. It conceives of authorship broadly as any act of language-use intended to be commodified in the market. Foucault identifies the author function as a discursive construction resulting from the various institutions which facilitate the circulation of the author's own discourse as a disembodied work. In their classic Introduction to Chemical Nomenclature, R. S. Cahn and O. C. Dermer claim that the aim of systematic chemical nomenclature to describe the composition, and insofar as practicable the structure, of compounds. Chemical nomination in the nineteenth century was the preserve of a male academic elite situated within the research laboratory. However, the act of nomination depends upon a network and is therefore protected at a number of points. Ideally chemical nomenclature should provide one name for each compound and, depending on the system in use, this name is the only one possible.
