Power and the Object
Richard Mohr reviews Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law Edited by Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
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When, and
where, did the figure of justice get her blindfold? This question
has been considered before1, but Martin Jay's 'Must Justice Be
Blind?' in this collection is particularly wide reaching in its sources
and implications. Its origins in the 'iconophobic Reformation [which]
took seriously the Hebrew interdiction of images' (p 21) introduces the
topic which echoes in Jay's considerations of the Frankfurt School,
feminism and Derrida. Peter Goodrich's 'The Iconography of Nothing'
(discussed below) enhances the development of several of these ideas.
Jay's analysis of Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance
(1664) This book announces a project: 'to
consolidate a new interdisciplinary field of visual culture and law' (p
11). It is an important project and a fascinating book. The editors'
lucid introduction outlines several dimensions of the project, including
the responses of law to aesthetics, legal suspicion and regulation of
images, and law's use of art ('a legal iconology'). Go to top of page The novelty claimed by the editors for their project suggests two
questions: Is the project really that new? And if so, why? After all,
iconography, deriving from the school of Aby Warburg, dates back to the
early twentieth century and there have been semiotic analyses of law for
a decade or two. In answer to the first question, yes, the project is
new. The editors acknowledge their intellectual forebears, notably
Ernst Kantorowicz's 'political theology' of images and objects of legal
power, Pierre Legendre's 'psychoanalytically inspired legal history',
Louis Marin and Peter Goodrich. Although the subject matter is not
entirely new, the claim to novelty is based in the development of a
theoretical and methodological paradigm for its analysis. In staking
this claim, the editors open a field while, by a certain neglect of some
parallel developments, potenially closing others. Before looking at
some of those developments, and the possibilities of this new
discipline, we should return to the second question: why hasn't it been
developed earlier? Law and literature has been a popular field of
study since the 1980s. Contemporary law has a more obvious
compatibility with literature than with the visual arts. It uses
language extensively and explicitly, and it was a short step to
discovering many of the linguistic and literary devices on which law is
based. Semiotics provided analytical methods for this work, developed
by Bernard Jackson and Peter Goodrich in Britain and Roberta Kevelson
and law and semiotics movement in the USA. The work in this book is
particularly influenced, among these immediate forerunners, by Peter
Goodrich who is represented among the contributors. One explanation of
the development of the field at this stage is that the law and
literature movement needed new grist for its sophisticated
methodological mill. Go to top
of page Goodrich links the predecessors of this project with its present,
represented in this collection with an erudite interpretation of the
blank spaces in a Reformation painting of the Pope and the accession of
Edward VI as King of England. The blank spaces, he shows convincingly
by reference to other portraits of the period, signify unmapped
territory and yet unwritten laws. From this observation he takes us
through a meticulous documentation of Reformation jurisprudence to the
conclusion that these spaces represent the inner and unrepresentable
sources of post-Reformation common law. This analysis is most solid
while it is based in the contemporary sources calling on law and
government to implement the protestant taboo on imagery, sola scriptura.
When it discovers, however, that the blank space represents the
Derridean aporia of justice - the blank space between the legal and the
just - I feel discomforted that theory may be overwhelming analysis.
This is a recurrent discomfort throughout the book, and it demands we
focus on some issues of method at the heart of any hermeneutic
enterprise. Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead's introduction highlights
the similarities between law and art, particularly in their self
definitions as defined fields, each sui generis. The closure of law is
itself an important field of study, and it is one which looks
particularly amenable to interdisciplinary approaches. I am not
convinced that art is so easily sealed off, despite the protestations of
the critical institutions or the policing of its borders, with law's
assistance (as discussed by several of the contributors). Art theory
may be closed just as law may be closed. But these closures may be
opened to critique as the preservation of professional zones of
privilege, or obfuscation of the social and political origins of art or
law. Legal theory must acknowledge and study law's impetus towards
closure, without defending let alone mimicking it. Legal theory and art
theory both risk hermetic closure. This collection suggests some ways
out of the self-referential closure of the law and, hopefully, of legal
theory, through art itself. This is not so clear in the art of the
image as it is in the art of the object. Law is a representational
economy which transforms its subject matter into its own discourse in
order to manipulate it, and to arrive at a legal result or binding
decision. That result must return to the world of objects and people.
People may be the representers of the law, participating in its gaze,
but they are also present as object and, as Hal Foster would have it, as
abject. In one hand Justitia carries the scales, in the other the
sword. Eleventh century representations were not shy of showing it as
the sword of the
executioner.3 Are we so
inured, today, to the idea that law and the word are inherently violent
that we cannot see the real blood, of the victim or the prisoner? Hal
Foster's contribution which ends the book brings us back to blood and to
the body. It is not just the body rebelling against toilet training (he
refers to Mike Kelley) but the body of the victim of violence (Cindy
Sherman). Perhaps through art - open to the world and to objects - we
can rediscover law's hidden realities. It may draw a veil of
representation over the objects of its deliberation, its victims and
supplicants. But it is not impossible to expose the objects behind the
veil, through analysis of the representational economy. We may approach
this awareness through a deeper understanding of law and the image. Lets
not forget that, behind this screen, lies another world of power and the
object. Go to top of
page The return of the object in Foster's analysis of
grunge culture and abject art seems to highlight the extent to which it
has been veiled by representation since the first century. Among the
fascinating convergences of this disparate collection are Georges
Didi-Huberman's work on Pliny's Natural History of 77 AD and Nead's
analysis of obscenity which takes off from the discovery of the art of
Pompei, buried under the ash of Vesuvius two years later, in much the
same area. Pliny required the object to have a fundamental contact with
the representation. This operated literally, through wax masks of
patriarchs and ancestors, and juridically, through the regulatory force
of the objects and images. For Pliny, obscenity consisted in the
miscegenation of image and object. In Lynda Nead's modern period the
very distinction (her usage follows Bourdieu) of obscenity from art
derives from the connoisseur's insistence that he can draw a veil over
his own (male) desires. The disjuncture between object and image has
been elaborated into a principle of social differentiation. The image,
distinct from its referent, appeals to that faculty of the connoisseur
which distinguishes him within society. Here we find a parallel with
law's insistent self-reference, and its echo in an economy of
regulation. Go to top of
page This tension between the connoisseur and the pleb,
between the object and its representation, exists in the writings
collected in this volume. Those works which invoke their finely honed
interpretive frameworks to arrive at ideal representations of the law
reminiscent of Derrida or Legendre seem, like Nead's connoisseur, to
tell us more about taste and the author than about the object or the
body of work. Nead comments, in passing, that 'Bourdieu argues for the
reintegration of high and mass culture Š' The absence of the latter in
this collection is less a limitation than a challenge. Is it more
difficult to apply semiotic or iconographic analysis at this level to
contemporary legal issues? Piyel Haldar interprets the Israeli Supreme
Court as a vehicle for some important reflections on rhetoric and
ornament in law, deriving from Quintilian and Alberti.4 Katherine Fischer Taylor'slimpid
and historically grounded analysis of the renovation of the Palais de
Justice and the 'festivals of justice' in the period following the 1848
uprisings in Paris suggests valuable methods for contemporary analysis.
It is a valuable contribution to the theoretical and methodological
debate engendered by this book. Taylor's work provides a critique and
counterpoint to the important work done in France by Robert Jacob and
Antoine Garapon, which several other contributors draw on. In contrast
to the continuity of judicial tradition identified by Garapon and Jacob,
Taylor's is a more historically dynamic analysis which emphasises the
controversies and ruptures in representations of justice and law. Not
only have these conflicts shaped the way we see law today, they are
still unfolding in arguments over the access of television cameras to
courts, and representations of law in many different media. The
challenge of analysing law and the image in the contemporary world
points to parallel strands of current intellectual work which may draw
on, illuminate, and perhaps ultimately be intertwined with the
interdisciplinary project announced by this collection. The law and
literature movement, together with the flourishing field of cultural and
media studies, has spawned a more contemporary if sometimes less
rigorous interdisciplinary project which considers images of law in a
variety of media, including film,5 television
and the world wide web.6 The methods
are related to those of Law and the Image, and the pitfalls are also
similar. Here too it may be easier to use visual and narrative
representations of law to illustrate our own theories than to understand
them from within their own interpretive framework, or the framework of
the society which gave rise to them and which must interpret them in
their own way. Other work in law and semiotics approaches these issues
with rigour and imagination, and yet has not been encompassed by this
collection. Douzinas's impressive audit of political portraiture as a
means of legal rule stops short of any contemporary analysis.
Consequently he neglects Willem Witteveen's fine analysis of the use of
the image of the Queen in contemporary law making in the
Netherlands.7
While comprehending contemporary
representations of law and justice, we may draw on a range of
theoretical perspectives, use various methods and rediscover a critical
analysis. In their introduction, Douzinas and Nead note that
contemporary analyses of the political power of images have generally
focused on regimes which are out of favour with their analyst: Soviet
communism, German or Italian Fascism. The works in this collection by
Nead and Mandy Merck on obscenity suggest ways in which a critical
dimension may enter this project. The integration of accurate
analysis, theoretical imagination and a critical perspective is the
challenge to studies of law and its representation in images, and of
power and the juridical force of objects. It is a challenge to other
scholars, who will be inspired and informed by this collection, just as
it is to the project which the editors announce. Further contemporary
analysis may explain more about the uses of images and objects in
contemporary political iconography. The law is surely one of the
richest sources for such an analysis, and this project will continue to
yield rich rewards. Go to top
of page Go to top of page
highlights a feminine attention to detail and context in
contrast to the universalising Last Judgment on the wall behind.
References
1 In addition to several German and French
sources, Jay gives the following sources in English: Bianchi, Herman.
"The Scales of Justice as Represented in Engravings, Emblems, Reliefs
and Sculptures in Early Modern Europe." in G. Lamoine (ed) Images et
representation de la justice:Essai sur l'iconographies judiciare du
Moyen Age a l'age classique(Toulouse,1983) and Curtis, Dennis E. and
Judith Resnic. "Images of Justice." Yale Law Journal96 (1987)
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2Panofsky, Erwin.
Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance. 1972 Icon ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1962 (fp 1939).
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3See, for instance, the representation of
Emperor Henry II as judge reproduced in Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The
King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, fig. 20.
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4 Dr Haldar gave a slightly
modified version of this paper at the Representing Justice conference,
where other papers in this edition of JoSCCI were first presented. For a
sample of the work in this collection on line go to EDIFICE
LEX
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5 An interview with
Steve Greenfield and Guy Osborn of the Centre for the Study of Law,
Society and Popular Culture, University of Westminster, London may be
found at
RADIO NATIONAL LAW REPORT
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text
6For a
tour and some discussion of courts on the web visit
COURTS ON THE WEB
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7Witteveen, Willem
J. "Enacting Law: Ritual Performances in Dutch Political Culture." In
Ritual and Semiotics, edited by J. Ralph Lindgren and Jay Knaack,
193-221. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.