ABSTRACT
As the professional knower proceeds to represent social events through configurations of signs which other knowers will consider authoritative, the knower constructs representations which fail to perceive the external events. Likewise, the knower’s inability to reach a presence with the external objects drives him or her to try to reach the witness’s story through configurations of signs. Even the “I” of the knower merges into the web of values, assumptions, style and gestures of privileged spectres of the absent foundation. The ability to rationally link one representation (such as ‘emergency’) to an accepted authoritative configuration (such as ‘peace, order and good government’) to another configuration (such as the British North America Act) to another (such as the Statute of Westerminster) to yet others fills in the boundaries of a picture of the final absent Object of the legal discourse. 1 Such a trace through configurations of signs assimilates the represented event into a picture of the whole. The trace disembodies the interpreter’s signifying relations, just as the interpreter’s signifying relations disembody the embodied meanings of the non-knower. The absence of the final Object from within the “known” secondary configurations drives the knower to assimilate all alien representations and to make them one of the professional knower’s own.
