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2001 Volume 10(2) - Special Issue: Law's Cultural Mediations
Edited by Dr William MacNeil and Dr Peter Hutchings

I. Il miglior fabbro

II. Words

III. Images

IV. Entr'acte

V. Subjects

VI. Things

VII. Envoi

VIII. Reviews

"The Umfalisation of Alfred Prufrock J; or How could you believe me when I said I'd be a lawyer when you know I've been a liar all my life" by Mark Thomas

Canto I: The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock J
Canto II: New Companions: Including - A Sonnet on the Immanence of things possessory (by Diogenes)
Canto III: On the Sale of Goods: The cruelty of Christmastide
Canto IV: a l'agent timide: by His/Her Coye Agent
Canto V: Epilogue The umfralisation of Prufrock J

"Examples Gross as Earth: Hamlet's Inaction and the Problem of Stare Decisis" by Michael Pantazakos

This paper argues that Hamlet's inaction is essentially a problem of stare decisis. Despite his prodigious lawyer-like ability to 'quarter' a thought into its most remote elements and to 'scan' a situation in order to reckon with all possible outcomes, Hamlet proves wholly incapable of using his mental/verbal acumen to piece out of the many obvious precedents before him ('examples gross as earth') a general principle of conduct he might in turn reapply to address his own - and his nation's - specific predicament. Moreover, precedent disempowered is linked through Hamlet's putative antinomianism to the law's corporeal demise, ultimately against the metaphorical and metaphysical concept of resurrection

"Prometheus Unbound: Shelley, Legendre and the Psychoanalysis of Law" by Adam Gearey

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound tells of an escape from established structures and a revolt in the name of love. Reading Prometheus Unbound will allow a recasting of key notions used by the psychoanalyst and mythographer Pierre Legendre. Love is not to be identified with the desire for the institution, but with a poetic and utopian imagination of human possibility. At the same time, reading Legendre alongside Shelley assists in an approach to the poet that does not simply restate his 'humanism'. The politics of Prometheus Unbound can be understood as a vision of what Legendre has christened 'the void'. Contra Legendre, Shelley's work suggests that the only way to relate to the profound emptiness that defines us is to mythologise the strength necessary to accede to the empty place of power. Realising the void allows a refiguring of patriarchal genealogy. The play prompts the rediscovery of the theogony, a mythic narrative that disrupts the genealogical principles of legitimacy. If this is associated with the role of the imagination and the poet as the 'legislator' of love, Prometheus Unbound can be read as a progressive reinterpretation of the Legendrian legacy.

"Gothic Law" by Leslie J. Moran

This paper begins an exploration of the complex interface between law and the Gothic imagination. The Gothic imagination is a system for making sense of experience, as a semantic field of force. By way of two extended examples, the paper explores the ways in which legal discourse generates and is generated by the Gothic imaginary. It open with a preliminary exploration of law themes within Gothic literature. Gothic interest has ranged from the domestic legal tradition in general, the English common law, to a more specific focus on a wide range of locations within law's institutional topography. It then offers an overview of the attributes ascribed to law and its various institutions and practices associated with the Gothic in legal scholarship. The Gothic offers representations of law's corruption as well as law's wisdom. Having set out a preliminary preliminary catalogue of associations between law and the Gothic imagination, the paper then offers two extended reflections of the place of Gothic imaginery within law. By way of an analysis of the jurisprudence of buggery, the paper examines law's role in the production of the Gothic imaginary. Turning then to contemporary jurisprudence, the paper plots the resort to familiar gothic tropes within postmodern jurisprudence.

"Discipline and Punish: Despatches from the Citation Manual Wars and Other (Literally) Unspeakable Stories" by Penny Pether

In this generically experimental essay in 'situated' comparative interdisciplinary scholarship, the author takes as a starting point one set of disciplinary practices of US legal education, law review culture and the related cultural value accorded to practices of citation to legal authority. She draws on Goodrich's recent work on the relationship between rhetoric and law to theorise both the attitude of intellectual disdain for, and student anxiety in relation to, fundamental legal skills courses in US law schools in a way that might open up the possibility of productive change. She also critiques the dominant politics of the group of subaltern law teachers to whom the teaching of legal literacy is consigned

"When Memory Speaks: Remembrance and Revenge in Unforgiven" by Austin Sarat

In this essay I take up the way different ideas of memory are linked to an advocacy/critique of revenge. Through a reading of Unforgiven, I suggest that memory is one cultural key to violence. I also read this film as a reflection of film itself: film's fascination with heroic violence. What kinds of spectators do we become in Unforgiven's world and in the world Unforgiven represents?

"Tracing the Law Through the Matrix" by Kirsty Duncanson

In The Matrix, the audience's sense of time and space is challenged through state-of-the-art special effects, technology and digital abstraction. The body is confused and excited. However, this audience is ultimately comforted by the unquestionable presences of a Real. And, while the simulation is tempting and narrative reality is dull - even painful - it is through the very promise of pain that the limited reality is ultimately celebrated.

"The Violent Excess of the Image and the Negation of Law in Starship Troopers" by Mark Rosenthal

Paul Verhoeven's film adaptation of the classic science fiction adventure story Starship Troopers ostensibly articulates (among other things) a vision of everything that is wrong with the law today. The law is simply another spectacle in a world overflowing with spectacles. Using the affective framework developed by Brian Massumi from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I suggest that Verhoeven's use of the affective power of the spectacle is not populism, but recognition that affect cannot be expunged. As powerful and dangerous as affect may be, it is potentially a productive tool.

"Rebel at the End of History" by Angus Macdonald

There is an opinion that Hegelian philosophy of history is a teleological grand narrative which can only leave us at the end of history, and so justify now a kind of post-communist bourgeois triumphalism, inverting its former employment as a kind of marxist inevitabilism. This casting of Kojeve's reading of Hegel's Phenomenology as a role-play game/computer game aims only to demonstrate that a far more aleatoric logic is possible while still respecting the key elements of the game.

"Poetic Reflections on Law, Race & Society" by Michele Goodwin

This essay explores how both the creative word and legal analysis can merge to explore, reflect and discuss race in the twentieth century. Within the realm of literature, the law lives. As subjects of the law, we too dwell in that sacred space. Social understanding of the law and its operations is enhanced by reflecting on the stories that retell events, encounters, quarrels, agreements, births, deaths and the myriad of ways in which people live. From this, certain truths are translated to readers in the present. Literature provides a voice to those who have been legally and socially silenced. Those who were once legally banned from telling their stories or being heard within the judicial system could nevertheless articulate their stories to others either broadly or within the more discreet confines of community. For Blacks in the Americas, these narratives have proven invaluable in retelling history, resuscitating the dead and reclaiming a collective voice. While it is not to say that the voice speaks with uniformity, Black Americans have used literature to inform not only their local communities, but also the world at large about their legal and social conditions. Often these articulations emerged when Blacks lacked legal recognition or full participation within the legal system. For purposes of this creative prose, poetry shall supply much of the voice in this project. Prolific poets such as Phillis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard ES Toomey and Benjamin Franklin Wheeler inform this po-essay, along with the author's own poetic contributions.

"Equality, Difference and All That Jazz: The Infamous Debate and a Spanish Take on it" by Anja Louis

This article analyses the work of Spanish feminist writer Carmen de Burgos (1867-1932) focussing on her essay entitled La mujer moderna y sus derechos [The Modern Woman and Her Rights]. It is theoretically informed by the current 'equality versus difference' debate, and hopes to demonstrate how equality feminism at the time of de Burgos sometimes resists its own politics and slides into difference feminism. To this end. the legal discussion is supplemented by recourse to Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex (1992) which argues, amongst other things, that medical discourse in the nineteenth century 'created' biological difference in order to legitimate legal difference between the sexes'. In order to put de Burgos's feminist writing into the legal context of her time, the analysis is also extended to two legal writers who were contemporaries of hers: José Francos Rodríguez and Miguel Romera Navarro.

"Discourse, Difference and Confining Circumstances: The Case of R. v. Gladue and the Proper Interpretation of s.718.2 (e) of the Criminal Code" by Isobel Findlay

This article explores the consequences of hegemonic discursive practices for the treatment of Aboriginal offenders within the Canadian judicial system. The focus is on deficits in language, understanding and remedial action at the intersections of law and culture and on the challenge to build on R v Gladue (1999) to a more effectively healing legal hermeneutic. R v Gladue offers compelling evidence of both the Supreme Court of Canada's determination to address the disproportionate incarceration of Aboriginal peoples by attending to their exceptional circumstances and its persistent failure to do so effectively. While the court honours the past as culturally encoded, it remains confined by inherited categories that prevent it from seeing and acting on the full range of socio-cultural connections and causalities. By actively valuing the Indigenous cultural archive and the current Indigenous cultural renaissance, this article aims to rethink legal terms, categories and consequences.

"Hubris in the High Court: The High Court in Green v R" by Dirk Meure

This paper is an experiment in legal thinking and writing in the form of a case-note. The subject is law's violence. The paper is structured as pretext, context and text. The case is Green v R, a decision of the High Court of Australia reported in (1997) 191 CLR 334.

"Representation and the Framing of Modernity" by David Seymour

This essay discusses the frame's impact upon one of the enduring images of modernity: that of an active individual dominating the passive Earth free of interference or constraint from other inhabitants. Tracing the utilisation of this image across a wide range of disciplines, I argue that, by failing to recognise the frame's influence, critical thought treats modernity's representation of itself as an unmediated presentation. As a consequence of this confusion, critical thinking is unable to recognise any oppositional resources within modernity and thereby unintentionally perpetuates the myth of total conquest. The essay continues by investigating the difficulties and paradoxes that such a perspective entails, including problems of identifying the location and accessibility of an opposition outside or beyond modernity and the ambivalent position adopted by the critic. Drawing on the work of the nineteenth century war photographer Mathew Brady, the essay concludes by noting the means through which the rhetoric of the frame can be undermined in such a way that the dominant image contained is robbed of its power.

"Mad or Just Acting? Insanity and Theatricalisation" by Chris Fleming

A very common figuration of madness suggests that it is not simply 'blindness', but blindness 'blind to itself'. This construal of insanity figures the mad as those who have supposedly lost the distantiation in consciousness that would allow them to be both subject and object to themselves; it suggests that they can 'act' but cannot see themselves 'acting'. This conception is indispensable to legal constructions of subjectivity: to commit murder, one must have mens rea, a guilty mind. It follows, then, that the capacity for choice, the distinction between actor and act, is a fundamental assumption in our notions of punishability. And it is this assumption that this paper attempts to question. It sets out to examine those figurations of madness which deny that it can be as much 'strategic' as 'pathological'. To this end, the paper will utilise a number of examples drawn from philosophy, literature and film. The inclusion of this collection of texts serves to illustrate a rarely questioned logic, best exemplified by the question that we feel we must ask about Hamlet: is he mad or is he merely acting mad? It may turn out, on closer examination, that he is both.

"Clashing Things: Things" by Marett Leiboff

Law has an ambivalent relationship with artistic and cultural material, for the artistic is malleable and unstable. Law assumes and prefers the stable and reliable, and the closed, and distrusts the vagaries that typify the artistic. Law likes to keep its distance from the artistic, though it is happy to be its judge, and to have its own views on art. It then firmly intrudes into the artistic, especially where rogue aspects of art and culture operate. While law is unable to trust its judgment about the artistic and cultural, it will still make art experts and institution subject to the overriding truth of the law.