ABSTRACT
The monologic character of the secondary legal genre raises the question whether external objects really do constrain a juridical agent. For this issue, I wish to turn to the environing world of the professional knower. If the non-knower embodies his or her signs as he or she represents an indigenously experienced harm, does not the expert knower also embody the secondary genre’s signs with prejudgments drawn from his or her own experiences and expectations as a professional knower? What role do the experiences of the professional knower actually play in passively responding to the given external objects? Is a statute or precedent binding beyond the control of the professional knower? Why does the knower frame his or her configurations of signs in terms of the authority of an absent object, a doctrine, rule, principle, political theory or the “facts and circumstances of the case”? Does the knower identify with the secondary genre so that there seems to be an ‘immediacy’ between knower and genre? Is the immediacy so apparent to the knower that any one statute or judgment or legal opinion or act of enforcement or “fact of a Case” seems to be posited in an objective world? Does that appearance of a posited statute or “fact” or the like seem necessary, natural and beyond the control of the knower? Does this appearance of a posited external world occur at the very moment that the knower embodies the posited statute, judgment or “fact” with his or her own previous experiences, his or her own prejudgments and expectations? Are the “facts of a case” givens? Are the secondary signifying relations autonomous vis-à-vis any knower or interpreter? Does the secondary legal genre really constitute a self-referential system of externally posited constraints?
