Richard Sherwin

The heart of the matter concerning the proliferation of visual evidence in a society of techno-digital spectacle is both the crux and its normative key. It is above all a matter of mediating singular transcendentals to stop the incessant digital flux that relativizes truth, meaning, and values—blurring them into an equivocal flow of normatively equivalent affective intensities. Digital programming for optimal outputs cannot replicate presence—which is the legitimating and authenticating source of the real. Social media’s conflation of truth and fantasy as well as value and counterfeit value (which is to say, affective intensity for its own sake) is toxic to the rule of law. Only something capable of transcending and hence normatively stabilizing the incessant transformations of immanent reality, can properly perform the work of law’s legitimation—or, for that matter, the authentication of digital simulacra that purport to visualize, but more likely serve to impugn what is real.

In this chapter, I contend that Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure provides a brilliant case study in the entangled vicissitudes of character and state sovereignty. From the hyper-moral and hyper-legalistic rigidity of Angelo, the Duke’s substitute sovereign, to the bawdy irreverence of Lucio, the Duke’s trickster double, to the indomitable life force of imprisoned Barnardine—divergent microclimates are breaking out all over town, emanating from one character to the next. Which will rule the other? Measure invites us to try on and assess different political and personal identities. In what emotional bandwidth, in the name of what character ideal, shall we participate in social and political discourse and action, and with what individual and collective consequences? Do we like who we become? Might we choose to forge a different personal and collective reality? Everything depends on how the properties of government unfold: by whose agency, in what preferred (or imposed) register? In this way, Measure dramatizes freedom’s promise in the development of self and political governance against the backdrop of its Machiavellian shadow. It is a remarkably prescient lesson in the overlapping vicissitudes and responsibilities of a liberal democratic politics to come.

The second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump provides a useful test case for exploring law’s tacit dimension – a domain in which thinking in pictures and sounds remains largely hidden (or disguised) and thus protected from the deliberative work of critical reason. The impeachment team’s failure to refer to the January 6 rally video suggests an insufficient understanding of how, and with what predictable impact, Trump’s video helped to incite his supporters to violent insurrection at the nation’s capital. Lawyers, judges, and lay jurors alike can ill-afford to ignore the implications of such a massive blind spot when it comes to the strategic composition and critical assessment of such a pervasive form of communication in contemporary society. If trial lawyers cannot identify how jurors are being tacitly persuaded on the screen, they will be unable to properly test the sounds and images their opponents rely on in court. This is how the adversarial quest for truth and justice breaks down. As spectacle and critical reason contend for dominance in late modern culture an insistent question echoes: will the craft of reason overcome the wild impulses of spectacle in our time? The fate of liberal democracy hinges on our response.

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia.

Law clings to rules to stabilize a preferred normative reality. But rules never suffice. Character is the dark matter of law. Ethos anthropos daimon. “Character is fate.” This paradoxically reversible saying by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus asserts that we are defined by the daimon – the god or messenger angel – with which we identify most. As Plato queried in the Phaedrus: which god do you follow, whose love claims you? In contemporary terms we might say, what character type, what emotional ideal, what deep story do you hold most sacred? Out of the maelstrom that is the state of exception, choices must be made. What emotional field shall we occupy when we do politics and law? Bound by what sovereign values or ideals, embodied within what sort of character, emplotted in what sort of political or legal narrative? In synergy with culture, character plays out the emotional conflicts and aspirations of the time. Whether we witness this in the mostly silent resistance of unassimilable characters like Barnardine in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure or in the silent prayer of nineteen-year-old Emma Gonzalez, in public protest against uncontrolled gun violence in American schools, we are all called upon, as citizens in public life, to occupy an emotional space that attains centrality within deep narratives that vie for political dominance. Reverse engineering liberal society, we might ask: what emotional and character ideals are optimal in order for a particular kind of political society to arise and be sustained? There is a reciprocal relationship between the sovereign authority of law and the character ideals that express a capacity and willingness to accept that authority. What will the configuration be? Addressing this question constitutes the ethical, esthetic, and epistemological calling of our time.

The broad dissemination of digital communication technologies is raising disturbing questions about the nature of truth as representation. This epistemological crisis shares an uncanny affinity with the crisis of representation that lay at the heart of the baroque era during the 17th century in Europe. The resolution of that crisis, through the work of Descartes and others, came on the heels of a philosophical shift from the image to the sign. Not incidentally, that move was accompanied by significant political and juridical developments, including: the origin of legal positivism, the rise of conventionalism (or nominalism), the disenchantment of nature and the decline of natural law, and the emergence of the modern nation-state. The semiotic model today, however, is strained to the breaking point. Infinitely mutable digital signs proliferate as copies of copies; signifiers have been shorn of the signified. The ensuing mutation of the Cartesian sign into the digital image has been accompanied by significant political and juridical developments. Individual autonomy, universal reason, and calculative rationality - the traditional foundation for core Liberal values - are being challenged by digital practices. Like the baroque crisis of visuality that preceded it, the current crisis of the digital neo-baroque will not ease until confidence is restored not only in acceptable forms of truth as representation, but also in the mimetic faculty itself, which is to say, in the human capacity to represent self and others. 'Sublime jurisprudence' is a metaphysical model that seeks to address this need.