WilliamW. Fisher III 44 we can say and thereby limit what we can think.Oneimplication of that fact is that a quest for the “intent” of the author of a text is chimerical - partly because “linguistic conventions constrain subjective intent into objectively given forms” and more seriously because “there is no point of private or individual intent that is separate from the social representational practices.It is equally misleading, Peller argues, to think that “representational terms, ‘signifiers,’ have a direct correlation with the concepts represented, their ‘signified’ meaning.” “The signified concept is itself never present but always already a representation. This re-presentation is a signifier containing traces referring to other signifiers within a chain of differentiation. This analysis suggests that meaning is created socially through the economy of difference within representational contexts. Thus, there is no re-presentation, only interpretation. And meaning is indeterminate to the extent that it is never positively present in an expression; it is always deferred or absent. The attempt to fix the meaning of an expression leads to an infinite regress. One must follow traces pointing away fromexpressions to other terms, which themselves contain traces leading to still other terms, and so on. Meaning does not “exist” anywhere; it is constructed in differential relations, in the blank spaces and silences of communications.^"* The meaninglessness of an individual text, Peller argues, cannot be cured through reference to its discursive context. “Any attempt to fix the meaning of a text by the specification of context runs up against the problem that any given context is open to further description. Context does not exist somewhere. Context is constructed by the interpreter according to her calculus of relevance and irrelevance.”^-'’ Nor can it be cured by charting the “underlying representational structures which are imagined to animate” the text [i.e., through a Structuralist inquiry], because those “representational structures can never be conclusively determined; their relational meaning depends on the representational practice in which they are found.Nor, finally, can it be cured through invocation of the hermeneutic conventions developed by a “community of interpretation” because there is no “positive, fixed content” to such a group; an interpretive community, in other words, must be “constructed” just as the meaning of the text itself must be constructed. Armed with these insights, Peller turns his attention to a particular historical problem: the displacement in early twentieth-century American legal thought of Classicismby Legal Realism. That transition is conventionally understocid, <’> Ibid., 1159. Ibid., 1162, 1163 n. 9. « Ibid., 1163-65. M Ibid., 1168. f-5 Ibid., 1172. Ibid., 1173. Ibid., 1174. 67
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