ABSTRACT
Any critic interested in seeing literary texts not as isolated artifacts complete in themselves, but as participating in the relationships between human beings would be attracted to the notion of an interpretive community. This is not simply because it contains the word "community," but because it seems to promise an account of the link between interpretation and society. If this link could indeed be spelled out, it would help us see that texts are social not by virtue of some intrinsic properties that they have, or by virtue of simply "representing" social relationships, but that they become social entities in the process of being interpreted by individuals who are members of communities. A knowledge of how these communities are formed, how they define and change the objects of their interpretations, would thus be essential for examining the political aspects of reading. Since I concluded in the previous chapter that the deconstructionist treatment of the subject does not take adequate account of the notion of community, it will be useful to
The notion of an interpretive community can be seen as part of important and more or less parallel developments in the philosophy of science and literary theory that have taken place during the last few decades. The works of such historians, philosophers, and critics as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and David Bleich attempt to show the impossibility for philosophy or literary theory to occupy a neutral transcendental position from which principles about the limits and scope of knowledge in general can be established and objective grounds for deciding which representations are true can be provided. These accounts of science and literature stress the paradigmatic nature of all types of inquiry and the theory-laden character of all facts. They reject the image of knowledge as an increasingly more faithful representation of an objective state of affairs, whether that be nature, the real world, or a meaning encoded in a text. Adopting the view that there are no universal criteria for rational validation of hypotheses, and that scientists as well as critics change their views through persuasion rather than demonstration, they attack the Cartesian mind/body duality as the source of a bankrupt epistemological tradition aiming to rule on the legitimacy of the intellectual endeavors of the entire culture. According to this account, the definition of mind and matter as ontologically separate entities is the framework in which philosophers have so far tried to formulate the notions of the observational given and the truth of meaning, providing unshakable empirical grounds for knowledge. They propose that this project be abandoned, for knowledge needs no foundation, and there is no way to separate the empirical from the conceptual. Most of the authors sharing this perspective also claim that abandoning the search for an absolute, supra-historical and universal foundation of knowledge would result in a new awareness of communal activity and responsibility in the shaping of human knowledge.
