Abstract
Socio-legal and critical scholars have long argued that lawyers’ obsession with the word and text limits their appreciation of how law is experienced, or authority is generated, through touch, smell, sight and sound. At the same time, architectural scholars and art historians have contended that the sensory bias of their disciplines towards sight is problematic because it can serve to disengage habitable space and images from a richer experience of their particular place and context. The articles in this issue of Law, Culture and the Humanities argue for the need to explore the phenomenology of law by attending to a panoply of sensory dynamics. By facilitating a broader engagement with experiences of legal spaces, concepts, objects, procedures and their regulation it seeks to consider how spatial experience, scale, depth, sound and tactility inform experiences of substantive law, legal rituals and justice procedures. In short, this special issue seeks to examine how law and the things and processes it controls look, smell and sound.
The contributors to this issue all presented their articles originally as papers at a symposium organized by Kirsten Orr, Emma Rowden and Linda Mulcahy which was generously hosted and financed by the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney in September 2014. The workshop adopted a broad interdisciplinary approach to the question of law, architecture and the senses. As a result a range of perspectives drawn from across the disciplines of architecture, art history, art, criminology and law are represented in the articles in this volume. All of the work produced reflects a shared interest in the interface between the abstract and experiential; between the theory and practice of law. The authors are practicing architects, performance artists and musicians as well as academics. The range of practices looked at is equally broad and encompasses discussions with street artists, incarcerated prisoners, video technicians, the military, designers, and lawyers. What draws these various perspectives and participants together is a focus on the ways in which the senses help us to interpret how particular legal processes and regulations are conceptualized, experienced, constrained and subverted.
While it is undoubtedly the case that the written word is reified in legal education and method, the articles presented here reveal the various ways in which the practice of law can be characterized by a much broader engagement with sound, touch and smell. Parker argues in his contribution on acoustic jurisprudence that law is deeply implicated in what we hear, how we listen and, indeed, what it even means to hear and listen. The same can be said of the other senses discussed in this volume. Flessas and Mulcahy draw attention to what happens when the law treats street art as a discrete object rather than something that needs to be experienced as inextricably bound to the smell and noise of the street. Other articles in this collection suggest ways in which certain encounters with legal process can create a chasm between aspiration and performance. McKay and Rowden both focus on the new and oppressive aesthetics of separation created by increased use of videolinks during trials. More specifically they look at the ways video suites, from which testimony is given remotely, stand in stark contrast to the dignified courtroom that legal theorists and scholars of due process aspire to. For McKay videolinks are symptomatic of the sensory bias to sight that ignores the importance of recognizing other forms of sensory engagement in legal proceedings. By doing so she argues that the prison video studios reinforce expulsion from the human world, exacerbates prisoners’ sensorial impoverishment, and diminishes opportunities for expressive participation in legal procedure. By drawing attention to the ways in which the video suite anaesthetizes encounters with law, Rowden also alerts us to the ways in which this breaks with a strong sensory tradition of craftsmanship and material extravagance in the construction of courthouses. Her contribution goes on to problematize the impact of distributing court space on the symbolic role of the courthouse as a celebrated home of justice in the civic sphere.
These understandings of how the State choreographs legal process can be contrasted with the ways in which substantive laws have failed to capture the aesthetic politics or meaning of the thing they seek to regulate. The focus here is on unraveling some of the ways in which jurisprudential regimes founded on neo-liberal concepts of individual property rights and the commodification of creativity are incapable of appreciating alternative understandings of design and innovation. Brisbin’s exploration of ‘‘face’’ and its effect upon status consumption and piracy in China draws our attention to different ways of thinking about ownership and iconic designs. It also encourages us to reconsider the ways in which preoccupation with visual aesthetics has suppressed questions about what copying reveals about its copier. Flessas and Mulcahy’s article on street art raises a number of related questions about the extent to which contemporary concepts of ownership, heritage or commons provide adequate prisms through which to explain the essence of this artistic genre as constant performance rather than discrete object.
The concept of subversion is also a theme running through the collection. Waerea considers how art performances in the public realm can identify spaces for disagreement and dissent which test and even exploit the authority and legitimacy of laws. Whilst acknowledging that laws give form to, and condition, preferred behavior in the public sphere she argues that the public realm can also be perceived of as a site of undecidability. In doing so she contends that dissensus is not only a necessary counter-hegemonic intervention; but also a form of social agonism which can actively promote the possibility of change. Using the example of the building of the new Coffs Harbour Courthouse in Australia as a case study, Rowden and Jones similarly explore the ways in which conventions about the design of courthouses can be disrupted. By drawing on academic studies of how courthouse space is experienced and promoting widespread consultation with the public they explore the ways in which a series of negotiations about the final design of the courthouse and its sensory and spatial qualities served to challenge the canon and promote more culturally and socially sensitive environments.
Collectively these contributions do much to forward discussions about the phenomenology of law in everyday life, whether viewed in the formal space of the courtroom or out on the street. They reveal how our sensory engagement with both space and law are being prescribed and curtailed to varying degrees. Each warns of the dangers of blindness, deafness, anosmia, aguesia or the loss of the haptic on the ways that law is lived.