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3 L. & Critique 3 (1992)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq3 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Critique Vol. III no.1 [1992] SPECTACULAR EVIDENCE DISCOURSES OF SUBJECTIVITY IN THE TRIAL OF JOHN HINCKLEY by ROSANNE KENNEDY' In the form of the logic of the image or the spectacle of the simulacrum, everything has become 'cultural' in some sense. Fredric Jameson1 Suppose, as theorists of postmodernism such as Jameson claim, everything has become cultural in some sense. I take this claim to signal, among other things, the transformation of society by elec- tronic technologies, particularly television and cinema, and the emergence of a new cultural logic. What implications follow for the practice of law, and for law's self-representation, when the real be- comes the cinematic?2 In the essay that follows, I approach this question through the analysis of a case which exemplifies certain features of the cultural logic of postmodernism: long before the trial began, the case entered the media aura and became a spectacle, the defendant, obsessed with the film Taxi Driver, dreamed of becoming a media image, and the defense used the film in evidence to estab- lish the defendant's insanity. On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley, the son of a wealthy Denver oil family, attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Al- * Women's Studies, Australian National University. 1 F. Jameson, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in Postmodernism Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 2 Ethan Katsh addresses some of these questions in his pathbreaking study, The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). He does not, however, situate his study within the context of theories of postmodernism.