Trials of the Postmodern

The criminal courtroom is an important institutional site where a modernist epistemology works hard to keep the postmodern disturbance of such concepts as ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ at bay. Nevertheless, some popular television programs exploit the imagistic conditions of postmodernity in order to volatilize the truths certified as final ones by criminal courts. Similarly, in the first trial of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King, the prosecution team exploited the instability of truth in a mediatized society in order to resignify events whose meanings had previously been configured quite differently. This essay examines these events as manifestations of cultural and political contestation in an image-saturated society where the modernist ‘reality principle’ has dissolved and been replaced by a mediatizing process of resimulation and resignification.