On Comics and Legal Aesthetics

Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing

Thomas Giddens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315310114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare nell'arte

What are the implications of comics for law? Tackling this question, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics explores the epistemological dimensions of comics and the way this once-maligned medium can help think about – and reshape – the form of law. Traversing comics, critical, and cultural legal studies, it seeks to enrich the theorisation of comics with a critical aesthetics that expands its value and significance for law, as well as knowledge more generally. It argues that comics' multimodality – its hybrid structure, which represents a meeting point of text, image, reason, and aesthetics – opens understanding of the limits of law's rational texts by shifting between multiple frames and modes of presentation. Comics thereby exposes the way all forms of knowledge are shaped out of an unstructured universe, becoming a mask over this chaotic 'beyond'. This mask of knowing remains haunted – by that which it can never fully capture or represent. Comics thus models knowledge as an infinity of nested frames haunted by the chaos without structure. In such a model, the multiple aspects of law become one region of a vast and bottomless cascade of perspectives – an infinite multiframe that extends far beyond the traditional confines of the comics page, rendering law boundless.

Chapter 1

On comics and other ways of knowing

Once one starts looking around, comics appear everywhere …¹

To begin our journey, comics needs to be introduced – not as a juvenile phenomenon of disposable culture, nor as a sophisticated narrative medium of increasing cultural capital, but as a way of knowing. As a medium, comics is multimodal, in that it employs, exploits, or presents a variety of different modes of communicating – visual, textual, graphic, linguistic, spatial, narrational, and so forth – in a complex layering of multiple frames. This ‘multiframe’ has sophisticated aesthetic and formal rules that can be enforced, played with, or rejected to different ends. Because of this, as a way of knowing comics encounters complex boundaries and intersections between different forms of knowledge. And this epistemological mediation makes comics a deeply relevant form through which to think about the limits of law’s textual-rational order. This chapter argues that, through the lens of legal aesthetics, law can be seen to have a conscious/unconscious structure, with a conscious legality that is grounded in reason and textual discourse underpinned by a legal unconscious of visuality, embodied experience, emotion, and aesthetic engagement. Moreover, that comics’ multimodal form, and its wider complexity as a multiframe, can navigate these conscious/unconscious legalities, a navigation that the remainder of the book will pursue as it works towards a reimagining of law as a multimodal phenomenon integrated into an infinite multiframe of knowing.

This opening chapter introduces comics on a theoretical level in the context of legal aesthetics, indicating the epistemological significance of placing comics alongside law. The first main section introduces the frame of cultural legal aesthetics occupied by the book and sets up the idea of a conscious legality of rational text, the unconscious of which is populated with the repressed visual, sensory, and aesthetic dimensions of the legal institution. The second main section then focuses directly on the connections between comics and law, encountering the sustained attempts to theorise the comics form within the discipline of comics studies and highlighting its systemic formal qualities, before moving to more aesthetic ground to explore the idea of the multiframe and how comics may circulate beyond the page, including in the structures of law. Overall, it is the multimodality of comics (as komos ²) that enables it to navigate complex boundaries and interactions between conscious and unconscious legality, as well as other ways of knowing more generally.

Drawing the frame

Cultural legal aesthetics

The manifold ways in which legality and culture intertwine can directly inform our understandings of law and its status in contemporary life.³ A leading contemporary movement in this regard is that of cultural legal studies, which is about exploring this world outside traditional law and doctrine: moving beyond the rational text and frolicking in the rich diversity of the worlds of human culture.⁴ Indeed, it is asserted that it is only by crossing the threshold at law’s traditional limits that these important cultural dimensions can be encountered, reflected upon, and interrogated. But this is no simple interdisciplinarity; cultural legal studies does not just involve taking aspects or insights from other disciplines and applying them to law.⁵ Rather, it is my contention that in crossing law’s cultural threshold we are challenging the very existence of that threshold.

When we reject the limits of traditional legal texts, we not only challenge law’s limits but also the forms in which law can appear – and thus cultural legal studies can be wrought as a breed of aesthetics. As aesthetics, the focus shifts to the consideration of the form and presentation of knowledge – be it visual, verbal, multimodal, or otherwise. In this expanded world – this world of cultural legal aesthetics – we find multiple forms of law beyond the dry texts of statutes, judgments, and policy documents: a jurisprudential world of popular imagination and visual codes, diverse in its cultural dynamism, burgeoning with the traces and hallmarks of legality.⁶ But this ‘other world’ is also one of rich humanity and aesthetic experience,⁷ of the complex human realities that dwell beyond the limits of law’s rational order.⁸ In moving toward a cultural legal aesthetics, we are discovering that law is bigger than we had thought – and bigger than traditional legal study was able to think.

There is a strong connection between the traditional boundaries of law and the limits of rationality; the black letter orthodoxy of yesteryear may have receded significantly in certain scholarly circles,⁹ but the priorities of mainstream study and practice remain those allied with a particular rational order,¹⁰ arguably in tension with the fluidity of the aesthetic. In his musical analysis of legal aesthetics, Desmond Manderson notes that as ‘a discipline traditionally based on the paramountcy of reason, philosophy has tried not to explain the power of the aesthetic but to tame it’.¹¹ The belief that truth was ‘out there’ to be discovered underlay most classical quests for knowledge; the world and the universe beyond was something ultimately knowable, and true knowledge could only be obtained through reason and rationality. Although some thinkers tried to render the observation of beauty an objective experience, they were constantly undermined by the inherent contingency of aesthetic production and perception; the woolly subjectivity of the aesthetic could at best only mimic or implicate a more rationally objective truth.¹² As Richard Sherwin notes – acknowledging law’s need to have an authoritative source of truth if it is to achieve justice – in modernity it is scientific rationalism that provides law’s ‘authorising function’.¹³ But law is more than this:

Analytic rationality and the culture of argument must join with emotional knowledge and the interpretive methods of narrative and visual expression as co-equal sources of truth, knowledge, and value.¹⁴

That is, they must join as ways of knowing, found beyond reason and logic in the realm of the aesthetic. Aesthetics, though, is not necessarily so easily divided from rationality. The aesthetic can be understood to infuse our broad understanding of the world.¹⁵ Aesthetics is not simply the analysis of art, but an episteme. It is something that permeates the very process of knowing: with aesthetics, what is communicated by art is not as important as how it is communicated.¹⁶ We experience art, as we do everything else, through the physical perception of our senses. Thus:

the aesthetic realm suffuses our engagement with everything about us … It is part of what it means to be a human being, part of our relationship with the world … Nothing remains untouched by the aesthetic temperament.¹⁷

Neither law nor comics can escape the aesthetic; they are bound inexorably by their shared character as human objects. Life, the world, our experiences, our emotions, our understandings: whether encoded into legal rules or comics panels, they are all filtered through the aesthetic perception of our senses. Aesthetics speaks to our sensations and emotions; it is a way of knowing that is beyond purely rational understanding¹⁸ and is embedded in our contexts of culture and experience.¹⁹

This book is about comics and its form, about comics’ relationship with legality and jurisprudence, and about the implications of comics and law existing together as two examples of, in some sense, the same thing – as ways of knowing. In this regard, it is not about ‘popular culture’ per se, but is more accurately a work of cultural legal aesthetics. William MacNeil’s method of ‘reading jurisprudentially’, deftly demonstrated in his seminal work Lex Populi,²⁰ captures much of what I do in the following pages – taking comics as a form of legal discourse, unpacking their legal meanings and juristic insights, and thereby encountering, as a dimension of popular culture, a form of lex populi or law ‘by and for the people’.²¹ Indeed, despite its cultural baggage as a denigrated and dismissed art-form, the comics medium has taken over huge regions of the popular imaginary²² and extended its tendrils into all manner of human artefacts. Film, television, merchandise, clothing, political protest,²³ violent crime²⁴ – all have been informed in some way by comics. As a global medium with increasing cultural impact, comics certainly plays into the broader cultural or communal understandings within a lex populi.

My broader aim, however, is to push beyond MacNeil’s notion of an intertextual jurisprudence. The real significance of comics for the exploration of, and beyond, law’s cultural threshold lies not only in its global capital or impact – its potential status as a lex populi – but in something much more profound: in its implications for the very nature of knowledge and law’s relation to the wider ecosystem of knowing. This is what makes this book a work specifically of cultural legal aesthetics. MacNeil’s vision of an intertextual jurisprudence works expressly against the limited study of law in the doctrinal tradition: for MacNeil, culture, literature, and jurisprudence can be read together in a joyful transgression of boundaries.²⁵ But, thanks in large part to the work of people like MacNeil alongside other leading cultural legal studies scholars such as Alison Young, Desmond Manderson, and Adam Gearey, this need to orient against an established order has been mitigated. The ‘joy’ of jurisprudence²⁶ has been unleashed, and cultural legal studies has gained a deal of traction in recent years, particularly following something of a visual turn in jurisprudence.²⁷ But the discipline remains largely an intertext that, despite all its value and insight, is necessarily ‘inter’: to bring together requires a pre-existing separation, a separation that works like Lex Populi needed to expressly transgress, but which now – building on the work of MacNeil and others – I am in a privileged position of being able to deny.

My project in this volume is to move cultural legal studies, through engagement with comics and legal aesthetics, to a space where we can acknowledge that such boundaries no longer exist. This is a work of legal reform – that is, a cultural legal aesthetics t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. On comics and other ways of knowing
• 2. A ghostless machine
• 3. The irrational threat
• 4. Horrific jurisprudence
• 5. On haunted masks
• 6. Redrawing the law
• Appendix A: Details of comics discussed
• Appendix B: Text from figures
• Index