Finally Done

Well my paper for Law & Culture is done. It is a bit of a mess. I spend a third of the paper talking about semiotics and the apparatuses through which empty signs aquire meaning (index, icon, contradistinction) and talk about how those apparatuses can serve to infuse signs with a meaning that is moralized. Then in the second part I totally jump to how law is like a modernist grid, is therefore mythic, and therefore has internal contradictions (with a critique of positivist law mixed-in!). In the third part I talk about cognitive culture and societal understandings of danger, order, and good citizenship. At each part of the way I was trying to tie these ideas back to the film we were supposed to analyze, and so I ended up talking about how the index is used in the film to reverse the truth-value of the object it denotates (!), about how the film asserts both a protection myth (that the government protects us from another 9/11) and how the film itself sets up a mythic metanarrative of justice (how justice works, with contradictions built-in), and then I tried to synthesize the whole thing by arguing that the signs which coded for dangerous/threatening (first part) mapped-onto cognitive understandings of threat and good citizenship (third part) in order to reinforce the myth of government as protector (second part), the result being the prosecution of a poor art professor for bioterrorism.

Really need to sleep lol

This paper was a MESS!