My hope is that Alan Audi's important and necessary intervention
represents a turning point in “cultural property argument.” In
Parts I and II of his critique, Audi expertly uses the tools of
“legal semiotics” to do exactly what those tools were designed
to do: demystify the language game of legal argument to reveal the
“irreducibly antinomal” and dialectical nature of its maxims
and countermaxims. Audi quite persuasively sets forth a disturbing vision
of a discourse that functions by its nature not so much to generate
meaning and normative force as to suppress them, all so that the status
quo remains undisturbed. Just as the fact that the English are unlikely to
give up the Elgin Marbles anytime soon “suggests a kind of idle or
recreational character to cultural property argument,” so too
Audi's critique. Indeed, stripped of its legal features, the field of
cultural property argument does look “rather barren.”