ABSTRACT
We need now to bring this processual understanding to bear on the approaches to legal reasoning represented earlier and the problems presented for analysis in Re A. As we have seen, a fundamental tenet of any processphilosophical approach is the idea that knowledge cannot be simply located as the successive quantitative movement from one homogenous, stable, or independent, state to the next; on the contrary, knowledge is a relational effect and fixed states are but specific cases in point. On this view, legal knowledge is not something that travels across the gap between one pole and another; instead, the institutionalisation of knowledge in law constitutes a particular context that emerges to mediate the tension between these two poles and within which individual terms (such as universal and particular, rule-determination and rule-application) assume subsequent and relative meanings. Thus, where knowledge is institutionalised in law, this should not be understood as the outcome of some pre-existent structuring or patterning of positions but as an establishing of ‘internal resonance’ (Wood 2003a: 226). It is this ‘fixing of tensions’ that creates the abstracted structure that is subsequently commanded and controlled according to the conceptual categories of legal thought and representation. What this suggests is a sense in which what we have called the institutio-
nalisation of law is properly understood in terms of the means by which participants make sense of their social interactions. In this sense, institutionalisation comprises both the forces and tendencies that promote order and stability and the mechanisms that tend towards change and de-structuring. It is the continual fluctuation between these that momentarily results in an appearance of order, some thing achieved through reduction, but the two are really inseparable. Law, as a process of institutionalising information, is always-already the outcome of a previous process of institutionalising.
