In the Thick of Images: Law, History and the Visual
Call for Papers
10 & 11 June 2024, University of Lucerne
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“Suppose that whatever we’ve done, felt, and thought has always happened in the thick of images.” (Anand Pandian, Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation)
The ‘visual turn’ has long been turning in critical and cultural studies of law (see Douzinas & Nead 1999). In the past twenty-five years, a growing body of scholarship has evolved that emphasises law’s “constitutive imbrication” (Crawley 2020) with an array of visual forms, and elaborates on the ways in which images “shape and transform legal life” (Sarat et al. 2005). Weaving together an eclectic set of theories, concepts, methods and materials, such studies refuse thin readings of images as merely illustrative of law, and invite us to think more deeply about their ideological and visual operations – about the meanings they carry and make available, about their material presence and affective effects, and about the cultural-political and cultural-legal work they perform across their multiple contexts of production, circulation and reception.
Much of this scholarship focuses on the contemporary conjuncture of law and visual representation. Yet law’s imbrication with the visual is not exclusive to the present; law has always lived, happened and mattered “in the thick of images”. This is the starting point for our two-day conference, which seeks to explicitly foreground historical and historicist work on law and the visual. Situated at the disciplinary crossroads of law, history, visual cultural studies, art history, film and photography studies, In the Thick of Images invites multiple viewpoints and approaches to converge on ways of negotiating the entanglements of law, history and the visual – in various contexts, scales and timeframes.
From this broad perspective, we would like to set out three main lines of discussion. First, we welcome proposals that delve into ‘thick’ descriptions of visual images in their historical and discursive context(s). With W.J.T. Mitchell, we encourage contributors to think not only about what these images show and mean, but also what they ask of – or ‘want’ from – the viewer (Mitchell 2005). What prompts do they give? What emotions do they evoke? What acts of encounter and spectatorship do they enable? What “experience” (Manderson 2012) of law and justice do they provide? In short, we aim to gather a cross-section of situated case studies in order to develop a richer sense of the historical stakes of legal images, and of the nuanced vocabularies needed to appraise the cultural-legal work they do – both in the initial context of their production and reception, and across subsequent contexts of circulation, appropriation and display.
Second, we invite contributions that consider the traffic of legal images at specific sites and moments, and which locate these flows within the history of the visual. In particular, we ask for inquiries that connect the study of legal images with historical shifts in visual cultures. How do new visual technologies and practices transform conditions for the circulation of legal images, ideas and ideologies? What new spaces of representation and expression do they create? Which new publics do they bring into being? What are the perceptual changes wrought by new visual media and how do these alter how the law is seen? How do new visual practices and materials reinforce or disrupt the conventional limits of the visible and invisible?
Third, we want to open a space for reflecting on what it means to do scholarship on and in law using visual objects from the past. How might the study of images cultivate new routes into legal history? What stakes are involved when we think law with images, and to what extent does this require a “constant recalibration of the dialogue between law and society, history, visual studies, and theory” (Manderson 2018). Given the inescapability of our own historicity, and given that we too are always “in the thick of images”, we also challenge contributors to think critically about the images we use in our work, their mediums and materialities, and the effects and affects of bringing certain images into circulation in the present.
Across these main lines of inquiry, we hope to gather a diverse group of scholars for lively discussion and exchange. We welcome fully-developed contributions but also works-in-progress, as well as more speculative soundings, interventions and provocations. The overarching aim is to prod convention and to suggest some new routes worth navigating as we continue to think and re-think the connections of law and the visual through history.
Submissions & Registration
Please note that the deadline for submission of abstracts has now passed. We thank all prospective participants for their interest.
The conference programme will be published shortly.
Keynote Talks
Lady Justice's Fragility (Valérie Hayaert, University of Warwick)
The early modern tradition of depicting Lady Justice oscillates between images of divine justice as an immobile goddess in the empyrean of fixed forms and a tellurian woman, performing judicial gestures in the here and now of diurnal sphere. As a cardinal political virtue, Justitia often defines herself by the overthrow of her victims, a victorious virgin trampling trespassers and evildoers.
A less common approach is needed to question this propensity of Lady Justice to fight vice with such ardour. If we look at the ways in which artists imagine Lady Justice being assaulted, raped, injured or shackled, the use of allegory now differs from a mere encomium. Her intrinsic fragility has a more intriguing side; it implies a contrasting perception of Justice, where norms of allegorical decorum may also be denied.
I will examine Lady Justice's pathos formulae as I believe her earthly woes may even symbolise more by inversion than their victorious counterparts.
- The Rock That Stands Against Time: Re-Constitutional Law (Desmond Manderson, The Australian National University)
In this talk I explore notions of the constitutional imaginary in the context of recent Australian debates. In particular I use images to argue for the long history of an alternative vision of constitutionalism and show how they are drenched in the distinctive concepts of Indigenous legal temporality. This temporality, called dreaming, tjukurrpa, or everywhen, is often presented as a radically alien concept to Western theories of constitutionalism. On the contrary, it provides a powerful focal point that connects Indigenous and Western theories of constitutionalism, and therefore offers an ambitious point of departure for re-constituting law in a postcolonial age. The figure of Dr Yunupingu haunts these questions. From 1963 until his death in 2023, he exemplified—as an artist, a law man, and an activist—what was needed to re-constitute and re-imagine the nature of law.
- Visualizing Indigenous Governance (Jolene K. Rickard, Cornell University)
The impact of ongoing settler colonialism in North America, the rise of the modern nation state, and unanswered treaty relationships forced the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois or Six Nations) to implement alternative strategies to protect and assert our autonomy as nations throughout the 20th to 21st centuries. The visualization of Haudenosaunee or more broadly Indigenous sovereignties are entangled with contextualized relationships to time and place and do not conform to the defined boundaries of Westphalian sovereignty. The connection between Indigenous governance and visual legibility, since early contact, was affirmed in 2023 when a cache of wampum beads, strings, and belts from the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris, France) traveled home in exhibitions titled, WAMPUM/OTGÖA at Ganondagan’s Seneca Art and Culture Center (Victor, New York) and Wampum: Beads of Diplomacy at the McCord Museum (Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, Quebec). The role of multiple forms of media, with emphasis on lens based images became critical emissaries in the assertion of Indigenous nationhood. Exemplified in the exhibition, Deskaheh in Geneva 1923-2023: Defending Haudenosaunee Sovereignty, Geneva, Switzerland (July 3, 2023-August 18, 2023) Haudenosaunee sovereignty is visualized and remembered through a photographic and wampum belt record.
- Bertolt Brecht, Media and the Law (Frederic J. Schwartz, University College London)
Bertolt Brecht was fascinated by legal proceedings of all kinds. Trials, tribunals and lawsuits were recurrent motifs in his work and indeed punctuated his professional life. Most famously, he sued the producers of the film version of his Threepenny Opera for violation of his author’s rights: he had been contracted to write the screenplay and had negotiated the right to ‘co-determination’ of the film, but in the end the Nero Film Company simply produced its own, somewhat anodyne version. Brecht lost his case, but if we are to believe him, he knew he would do so and had staged the lawsuit as a ‘sociological experiment,’ to show in a public forum that the laws concerning artistic rights were mere ideology and that they would inevitably be found null and void before the power of big business. In the essay ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit’ we also find Brecht’s most sustained exploration of the new media and their role in culture. Starting from ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit,’ this talk will explore Brecht’s use of the apparatus of the law as a medium, namely for the public production of knowledge. And it will explore Brecht’s understanding of the media of law, the way the new technologies of photography, radio and film are inscribed in his understanding of forms of justice adequate to twentieth-century modernity.
Venue
The conference will be held at the main campus of the University of Lucerne, situated on the shore of the Vierwaldstättersee (Lake Lucerne).
The campus lies directly behind the main train station, which is well-connected to the European rail network and within easy reach of the international airports at Zurich and Basel.
Contact
Please direct all enquiries to laura.petersen@unilu.ch.