Images in Law

William Pencak, Anne Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138264496
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317118800
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

What does 'the law' look like? While numerous attempts have been made to examine law and legal action in terms of its language, little has yet been written that considers how visual images of the law influence its interpretation and execution in ways not discernible from written texts. This groundbreaking collection focuses on images in law, featuring contributions that show and discuss the perception of the legal universe on a theoretical basis or when dealing with visual semiotics (dress, ceremony, technology, etc.). It also examines 'language in action', analyzing jury instructions, police directives, and how imagery is used in conjunction with contentious social and political issues within a country, such as the image of family in Ireland or the image of racism in France.

PART 1
Images of Law

Chapter 1

Deep Structures of Empire: A Note on Imperial Machines and Bodies

Ronnie Lippens

The ‘Biological Culture’ of Empire

In a recent paper, Nikolas Rose has aptly shown how a ‘biological culture’, over the past few decades, seems to have emerged and developed in the wake of neoliberalism.1 Indeed, Rose demonstrates, in an age when we are all constituted as individual actors who are constantly required to freely exploit opportunities and, while taking such initiative, to restrict ourselves from harmful excess, in short, to behave when necessary, then those who fail to combine both prescribed lines of action await a new form of regulation. Freely exploiting opportunities while self-restricting when necessary, in neo-liberalist ideology, should come naturally. Failing to do so constitutes unnatural, indeed unhealthy behaviour, and should therefore be dealt with accordingly. This line of reasoning, claims Rose, forms the backdrop or foundation of recent and current strategies of regulation and control ‘that aim to identify, treat and control individuals predisposed to impulsive or aggressive conduct’, and that should be implemented against ‘those whose conduct seems to show wanton disregard for the moral constraints on the conduct of free individuals in a liberal society’.2 Genetics, or medicine more generally, clearly has turned out to provide the logic with which unnaturally deficient individuals should be sanitized away from the allegedly natural, free flowing though orderly body of neo-liberal society. The latter, neo-liberal society, appears here – in this emerging ‘biological culture’ – as the natural, healthy state of humanity, that is a state that, as we have heard before, has moved beyond history after the fall of despotism and totalitarianism.3

Let us now have a closer look at a quotation. The contribution at hand shall attempt to delineate the quotation’s ‘narrative integration’, as Barthes would have called it, referring to Greimas’s notion of isotopy.4 The quotation is in fact an extract from Prime Minister Tony Blair’s congressional address on 17 July 2003, delivered shortly after the formal end of the Iraq War:

We are bound together as never before. This coming together provides us with unprecedented opportunity but also makes us uniquely vulnerable. The threat comes, because, in another part of the globe, there is shadow and darkness where not all the world is free, where many millions suffer under brutal dictatorship; where a third of our planet lives in poverty beyond anything even the poorest in our societies can imagine; and where a fanatical strain of religious extremism has arisen, that is a mutation of the true and peaceful faith of Islam and because in the combination of these afflictions, a new and deadly virus has emerged. The virus is terrorism, whose intent to inflict destruction is unconstrained by human feeling.

Let us focus on just this extract, and on an emerging imaginary of Empire (an emerging new Law of Empire, that is) therein.5 There is a way of reading this extract as another expression of a ‘biological culture’ in a neo-liberalist age, albeit on a bigger, global scale now. Blair’s address seems to betray a particular imaginary. There is an image of a world – a world of ‘technology, communication, trade and travel’, Blair claims elsewhere in his speech – that is now truly connected, unified, full of opportunity, freedom, human feeling, and moral constraint. The state the world is in appears to be a natural state, albeit one that has emerged ‘as never before’; it appears to be an accomplished state, not unlike the state of a natural body, a naturally healthy body. The global world of interconnected freedom, opportunity, and (self-) constraint, however, like any other body, is ‘vulnerable’. Dangers lurk outside, in ‘shadow and darkness’. The most lethal danger of all is of a medical, indeed epidemiological nature: it is viral. This virus, ‘terrorism’, is ‘unconstrained’, knows no boundaries, is wildly fanatical (rather than free and self-constrained), frequently crosses the skin of the healthy body, constantly threatens to unsettle its delicate, interconnected balance of freedom, opportunity, and order, and should therefore be dealt with epidemiologically. To deal with global terrorism is to adopt and to follow the logic of epidemiological emergencies and interventions. This is not the logic of a policeman, a diplomat, a magistrate, or a judge. It is the logic of a globalizing ‘biological culture’.

In this short contribution, it will be argued that underneath this shift towards a biological, medical, and epidemiological culture of regulation and control, one could distinguish another one. This would be a shift from the imagination of Empire as highly effortful, ever-unaccomplished engineering, to the imagination of Empire as accomplished nature. It will be our contention here to argue that this change in the deep structures of the imperial imaginary is of the uttermost import for anyone who tries to come to grips with issues of contemporary regulation and control. ‘Empire’, in this contribution, stands not just for the (imaginary) logic of global or regional domination in matters of regulation and control, but for the imaginary of regulation and control as such.

Hobbes’s Leviathan: Artificial Unity of Fragments

For a long time, Empire, or the location of regulation and control, tended to be imagined as unnatural, exhausting engineering, or, as the workings – ever-fallible workings at that – of a particular kind of machine, engine, or machinerie placed there, somewhere at the centre of authority, to bring stability, order, peace, or anything else that would lead to modernity.6 Ever since Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), one might argue, Empire has, at least to some extent, been imagined as the painfully exhaustive and highly burdensome process of constructing, maintaining, and reaping the productive results of machines. Leviathan arguably lies at the heart of the modern imperial imagination. Let us be clear here: when writing Leviathan, Hobbes did not particularly have a global empire in mind (in fact, something like a British Empire did not yet exist fully-fledged). He merely tried to think through the need for a way of modern governance in a ‘common wealth, ecclesisticall and civil’ beyond, on the one hand, sheer anarchy and, on the other, utter tyranny. The images and imagery evoked and used by Hobbes, however, are telling. The engraving on the frontispiece of Leviathan, for example, has recently stirred some scholarly interest.7 The well-known image – it has now indeed turned into an iconic image of modernity as such – shows a giant figure (the Sovereign) towering over a landscape dotted with towns and churches. The Sovereign thus towers over religious as well as public, or political life. Upon closer inspection, however, the body of this Sovereign (the Body Politick, Civil Societie, or the State, in Hobbes’s view) appears to be not a physical, natural body, but a complex of countless minuscule little figures (the citizens) looking up to the Sovereign’s head. Many of these little figures appear to be connected, as in a joint effort suggesting co-operation or collaboration. In order to avoid the sheer chaos (Hobbes wrote the book against the backdrop of the English Civil War) of utter, unconstrained, self-interested individuals, modern government should result from and should presuppose two moves.8 The first move is the one whereby individuals become citizens in and through the agreement of a covenant (subsequent philosophers would call this a social contract), each thereby surrendering (some of) their personal sovereignty to an ‘artificiall unitie’, the State, or, in Hobbes’s words, civil society. However, this artificial construction (indeed, it does not come naturally, it is a feigned person9) can only come about, can only be a real unity, with a second move, that is if and when it can act as one person. That can only be the case if this artificial unity is represented by a Sovereign, that is a monarch or a committee (Hobbes himself was undecided on this issue), whose authority is based in the artificial covenant of civil society (and not in some divine right, for example), but whose own sovereign Being in turn is the only way in and through which this covenant, strangely and artificially so, can acquire a level of unity sufficient to prevent the chaos and the tyranny of an unchecked ‘multitude’ of self-interest. Hobbes here seems to read or to re-imagine the much older notion of the Body Politick as an artificial contraption (a contract-ion?), as a two-stroke engine, if you wish.

The imagination of governance and authority as that which goes on in the artificial and machine-like unity of covenants and sovereign representation should not have come as a big surprise in an age of trade and exploration that was obsessed with regularity, calculation, predictability, and so on, and that therefore also cultivated a serious penchant for machines, astrolabes and clockworks in particular. Nature itself, somewhere in the seventeenth century, turned into a machine, the predictabilities and regularities of which Isaac Newton was at pains to lay bare as the Great Machine-Maker’s laws of physics. The sovereign machine of the impersonal State and its laws of the covenant were there to safeguard an orderly modernity from the whims of passion, unconstrained self-interest, and, Hobbes stresses, from anything that purports to be natural law. Hobbes was desperate to get beyond nature. His Leviathan may have appeared as a body; Hobbes meant for it to be an impersonal machine. A similar logic would one century later forcefully express itself in writings such as Cesare Beccaria’s, which argued for the unpredictable, irregular, passionate, and subjective chaos of the Ancien Régime to be replaced with the simplicity and certainty of an objective, detached, smoothly running (like clockwork) system of tariffs. After the French revolution, this mechanics of governance would re-emerge, for example, in the idea that the judiciary can only be the impersonal and objective ‘mouthpiece’ of the law, as well as in bureaucratic machinerie that, as Zygmunt Bauman has claimed, all too often expressed and facilitated the typically modern logic of adiaphorization, that is detached, rule-centred, impersonal amorality.10

As Noel Malcolm has been able to establish,11 Hobbes himself, when writing Leviathan, was heavily inspired by two particular forms of machinerie that were very much en vogue at the time. The first, a specially fabricated cylindrical lens that enabled ‘catoptric anamorphosis’, that is, a process whereby a viewer, looking through the lens, sees a coherent image emerging – artificially – out of a number – a multitude – of fragments drawn on a sheet of paper. And it is the lens, this ‘curious perspective’, a particular machine, an artificial engine, that in turn produces an artificial unity. The second form of machinerie was the theatre, again an artificial world, a world of illusion and representation, a world of impersonal masks and roles.12 Both machines, Hobbes noticed, had the desirable capacity to artificially transform the restless chaos of multitudes into an ordered, and therefore peaceful unity. However, the artificial unity and logic of the machine of the commonwealth is a work that is never finished. Like all machines, the commonwealth needs constant attention and maintenance. Empire here emerges as a never-ending process of creative production. Empire does not come naturally. It does not flow from natural rights or natural law. As Howard Caygill writes in his chapter on Leviathan, ‘Hobbes identifies life with order, and order with a continually produced unity’,13 a commonwealth that ‘is being continually re-created by the acknowledgement of the imperium of the sovereign and the ordering of the citizens as persons’.14 It is this deep structure of Empire, this deeply rooted imaginary, that for centuries has framed the imperial imagination, not just with regards to the building of local commonwealths or nation-states, but also, and particularly so, during the age of colonization. Empire was something to be achieved, to be accomplished. It was a goal, and, as such, it was strived for. Empire was not just there, it was not given. Forces had to be marshalled, populations had to be subdued or mobilized or destroyed, crops had to be cultivated, peoples had to be disciplined and ‘civilized’, landscapes had to be changed, goods had to be transported, networks and dependencies had to be established, and ultimately, something like imperial integration or better, inclusion, had to be accomplished. Referring to Victorian writers such as Ruskin (who considered English architecture to be the imperial technology par excellence) and Lord Macaulay (who thought it was the English ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Biographical Notes
• Introduction
• Part 1: Images of Law
• Part 2: Legal Language in Action
• Bibliography
• Index