If the multiplication of possibilities were not to be met by
effective ways of making choices, we would be sucked into the
whirlwind of entropy. In practice, this translates into an
obvious course of events: allowing for new possibilities, which
sometimes take the appearance of alternatives, means to disallow
certain known and practiced options of confirmed output. For
example, where democracy is taken over by bureaucracy, the town
meeting fulfills only a decorative function. There is nothing of
consequence in the American President's State of the Union
address, or in the conventions where political parties nominate
candidates for the Presidency. With the choice of local and
national political representation, the possibility to directly
participate in power is precluded.
The possibility of using sign systems other than language is far
from being a novelty. Even the possibility of achieving some
form of syncretism is not new by any means. What is new is the
awareness of their potential malfunctioning and of the potential
for losing control over forms of praxis that become highly
complex. From among the many ways the relation between the
individual and the community is manifested, the condition of the
legal system is probably the best example. Whether independent,
constituting a domain of regulations and checks with its own
motivations, or part of other components of social and political
life, the institution of justice encodes its typologies,
classifications, and rules in laws. This domain parallels one of
human interactions where expected values are permanently
subjected to the scrutiny of the pragmatic activity. Integrity
of the individual and his lawfully acquired goods, the binding
nature of commitments, and prohibition of misrepresentation or of
rules essential to the well being of the community are rules on
which legal experience developed. Right and wrong, once
identified under circumstances of direct practical experience
through consequences for the community's well being, are now
constituted in a domain with a life and rules of its own.
Killing, stealing, and misrepresentation are actions well defined
in the written texts of the law. But the law itself, anchored in
literacy, consequently detached itself from the real world and
now constitutes its own reality and motivations. Since this is
the case, it is no surprise that legal practice turns out to be
nothing more than interpretations of texts and attempts to use
language to bring about an outcome based on chimera, not
reality.
The legal system reacts to innovation by forcing rules
originating in other pragmatic frameworks-the strong evidence of
DNA analysis is only one example-to fit its own criteria of
evaluation. Instead of constituting a proactive context for the
unfolding of the human genius, legal praxis ends up defending
only its own interests. The jury system in the USA might appear
to many people as an expression of democracy. In the pragmatic
context in which the jury system originated, even the notion of
peer made sense, since it applied to a reduced and relatively
homogeneous community. Today, the jury has become part of the
odious equation of the dispute between lawyers. The jury is
selected to reflect the lowest common denominator so that its
members, mostly incompetent, can be manipulated in the
adversarial game of the performance produced under the generic
label of justice.
As an extension of literate language, the experience of legal
language builds on its own rules for efficient functioning and
establishes criteria for success that corrupt the process of
justice. It is a typical example of malfunctioning, probably as
vivid as the language of politics. Judicial and political praxes
document, from another angle, how democracy fails once it
reaches the symbolic phase manifested in the bureaucracy of the
legal system and of reified power relations.