Imagining the foundations of law in Britain: Magna Carta in 2015

The 800th anniversary of Magna Carta offers a study in how the foundations of law have been visualized in the United Kingdom. The fact that the British sense of identity as a free nation has historically been based on its commitment to “unwritten” law means that it lacks a foundational text and has hence traditionally figured the law through a plurality of images without a core. The absence of a singular image on which to focus national identity became acute in the early twenty-first century as the multiplication of sources of legality and justice in a globalized and multicultural world put pressure on the United Kingdom’s sense of sovereignty. The tensions manifest in this crisis can be seen across a range of images produced for the anniversary, each bearing different values. Yet the rival narratives are able to coexist in the same commemorative space, their differences subsumed within Magna Carta’s status as a postmodern “icon,” the consecration of the reciprocal identification between the protection of liberty and the rule of law. The essay concludes by examining a court battle over land on the borders of the commemorative site, and another commissioned artwork, both of which, in their different ways, bring into view the boundaries and bonds imposed by the rule of law that the iconic image elides

Corpus Juris, Habeas Corpus, and the 'corporeal turn' in the humanities

The article identifies a “corporeal turn” in the humanities and locates its implications for the politics of reading within the postmodern crisis in the legitimacy of traditional humanities approaches to culture. The powerful language of the “corpus” is also found during the same period in the staging of a confrontation over liberty between British and European legal systems. Using this as a political framework, the article traces the metaphysical resonance of the “corpus” to its origins in a theological ecology and examines the contrasting ecology revealed by the “monuments” of the unwritten English law, sustained not by faith but by fiction. Central to belief in the justice of the verdicts of this law is the separation of literal fact from legal significance and the allocation of responsibility for their interpretation in the jury trial to different readers. The challenge of the corporeal turn to traditional approaches is the critique of the “close” human reader as the determiner of the facts in favour of a “distant” digital reader. Rather than simply asserting the superiority of the human reader, however, the essay argues that, despite their opposition, the traditional jury and corpus humanities both work institutionally to elide fictionality in their critical judgments. Nonetheless, fictionality persists in the possibility that things could be imagined otherwise, be they verdicts of law or laws of cultural history

Iconic violence: belief, law and the visual

In early 2015, the attacks provoked by cartoons of the Prophet and the execution videos released by Islamic State staged a bloody encounter between two aesthetics of the image and two visions of its law. The confrontation between caricature and documentary realism and between blasphemy and freedom of expression form the context for this inquiry into the violence associated with beliefs about images. Violence can arise not only as a result of religious beliefs but equally from the contribution of visual evidence to secular convictions. The article shows how recent reassessments of the ethics of ‘law and the visual’ draw on the emancipatory discourses of the ‘pictorial turn’ and its recourse to the discourse of the early iconoclastic debates. The key legacy of the Byzantine debates, I argue, is less a theory of the image as the polemical identification of the iconoclast and the idolater and the management of the violent passions they evoke for each other. What is ultimately at issue in laws governing relations between seeing and believing are the attitudes people have to those who do not share their regime of the visual, and which, at times of crisis, can revive passions associated with veneration and execration