Robert Cover, in his Supreme Court foreword “Nomos and Narrative,” defines the law’s context as the cultural setting within which law creates meaning, but also as the source of legal meaning. He writes that “many of our actions [can] be understood only in relation to a norm,” or rather, a law governing human behavior (Cover 7-8). Only through such laws can human actions become meaningful to other humans because law provides a context within which actions gain “significance” (8). Law in turn relies on human action as its own context: only “once understood in the context of narratives that give it meaning” does law become “not merely a system of rules to be observed, but the world in which we live” (4-5). In other words, narratives of human action act as a context for the law, just as the law acts as context for human actions. The two concepts serve as context for each other and thus provide meaning for each other. I conclude that Cover interprets ‘context’ as the structures that allow both legal language and physical action to take on meaning.
While Sophocles’ Antigone never mentions the word “context,” the play nevertheless parallels Cover’s assertion that law provides context. For example, Antigone decides to bury her brother Polynices because her religious laws command it, and her decision becomes a source of conflict in response to Creon’s “city-wide proclamation” that “forbids anyone to bury [Polynices], even mourn him” (Sophocles 82, 61, 60). Without the context of the religious laws Antigone obeys and the state laws Creon enforces, Antigone and Creon’s actions would be illogical, and their motivations would be meaningless. Neither the play’s plot nor themes would make sense without the laws that define the play’s “normative universe” (Cover 4). Antigone as a case study of Cover’s emphasis on context not only supports Cover’s reasoning, but also demonstrates that his thoughts apply to religious as well as mortal law.
In his article “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics,” André Lepecki also discusses context via his focus on representation in artist Tania Brugera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5. In Brugera’s piece, real, mounted police officers practice crowd control on Tate Museum visitors (Lepecki 17). Lepecki points out that, since Tatlin’s Whisper #5 occurs within the “frame of the museum” rather than real life, museumgoers are aware that officers’ “commands and imperatives […] belong to something called ‘art’” (17). Visitors have no obligation to obey the officers because of their context. However, “the police always succeed” in commanding visitors to move (17). Lepecki suggests that this phenomenon demonstrates “not the art of controlling behavior by the police, but the already controlled behavior of the public” (17). Individuals are preconditioned by the context within which they live to obey the law rather than redefine its norms.
