What screen do you have in mind? Contesting the visual context of law and film studies

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000046001
Pages3-31
Published date2008--
Date2008--
AuthorRichard K. Sherwin
WHAT SCREEN DO YOU HAVE IN
MIND? CONTESTING THE VISUAL
CONTEXT OF LAW AND FILM
STUDIES
Richard K. Sherwin
We are living at a time when writing is rapidly losing its social and ideological hegemony.
As it gradually gives way to such audio-visual media as television and computers, our
preferred styles of communication and legal expression will increasingly come to match the
sensory capacities and prejudices of these new technologies. (Bernard Hibbitts, 1992, p. 887)
Visual experience, like its linguistic equivalent, can only mean something in relation to
pre-existing cultural and social formations .. . ‘Between retina and world is inserted a
screen of signs, of all the multiple discourseson vision built into the social arena.’ (Stuart
Clark, 2007, p. 6)
Law cannot flourish without memory. Legal meanings require a stable
medium in order to persist over time. However, there are occasions in the
history of culture and technology when the media through which law’s
meanings are produced and distributed undergo radical transformation.
During such transitional periods changes occur in the way legal meanings are
performed, recorded, and construed. And whenthe epistemology, interpretive
practices, and everyday craft of law undergo significant change, normative
consequences are sure to follow.
It is a commonplace that we are now living in a period of transition with
regard to society’s dominant forms of communication. As Bernard Hibbitts,
among others, presciently observed (Hibbitts, 1992), law has been adapting
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 46, 3–31
Copyright r2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000046004
3
to a culture-wide shift from the hegemony of the written word to the
hegemony of the visual–aural media of television, film and, more recently,
the exploding digital domain of computers, smartphones, and the Internet.
How this profusion of screens large and small is changing the way people
think about and practice law and, more particularly, how particular kinds of
screens bring about particular kinds of changes, have yet to be adequately
thought through by legal scholars.
One general observation, concerning epistemology, may be offered without
cavil. The Cartesian model that played such a large role in shaping and
informing the modernist mindset has lost its privileged status. According to
the Cartesian model of subjective rationality, ‘‘the intellect inspects entities
modeled on retinal images .. . In Descartes’ conception– the one that became
the basis for ‘modern’ epistemology – it is representations which are in the
‘mind’’’ (Rorty, 1979, p. 45). It is this rationally detached viewpoint that
helped advance objective perspectivalism as the dominant scopic regime of
modernity. The Cartesian gaze ‘‘contemplates the visual field from a vantage-
point outside the mobility of duration, in an eternal moment of disclosed
presence’’ (Norman Bryson, ‘‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field,’’ in Foster,
1988, p. 7). Consistent with Descartes’ method of systematically shutting
down the senses (‘‘I will now shut my eyes, I shall stop ears, I shall disregard
my senses’’) (Descartes, 1951 [1641], p. 33), disembodiment was the Cartesian
formula for epistemological certainty. Cut off from the body’s susceptibility
to fleeting impulses and endless deceits, the disembodied, rational mind was
able, according to Descartes, to ascertain truth with a heretofore
unprecedented clarity and distinctness. As Martin Jay observes, ‘‘The
abstract coldness of the perspectival gaze meant the withdrawal of the
[viewer’s] emotional entanglement with the objects depicted in geometricized
space . .. The moment of erotic projection in vision – what St. Augustine had
anxiously condemned as ‘ocular desire’ – was lost as the bodies of the painter
and viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute
eye’’ (Foster, 1988, p. 8).
In more recent times, the Cartesian epistemology has been attacked on
many fronts. Phenomenologists of perception, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
were especially critical of the ahistorical, disembodiednature of the Cartesian
subject which seems somehow to exist apart from what Merleau-Ponty
referred to as our embeddedness in the ‘‘flesh of the world’’ (Merleau-Ponty,
1964, p. 271). The advent of film, television, and computer screens in late
modern society adds a potent, albeit quotidian, dimension to this critique,
for if one thing is certain now it is that with the growing hegemony of moving
images on the screen the senses have returned with a vengeance.
RICHARD K. SHERWIN4

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT