Synesthetic Legalities

Sensory Dimensions of Law and Jurisprudence

Sarah Marusek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317047254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Synesthesia is the phenomenon where sensual perceptions are joined together as a combined experience – that is, the ability to feel color, hear the visual, or even smell emotion. These types of unions expand the normativity of our legal thinking, as the abilities to represent the tethering of emotion, place, and concept to law are magnified. In this way, interpretations of law and legal phenomena that are enriched with embodied meaning contribute to our understanding of how law works – namely through sensory input, sensory output, and the attachment that happens within these sensory unions. This edited volume explores the richly complex manifestations of synesthesia and law drawing from a plurality of approaches, including legal studies, philosophy, social science, linguistics, history, cultural studies, and the humanities. Contributions in the volume discuss how we feel/taste/smell/see/hear law within the synesthetic scope of legal interpretation, legal consciousness, and legal culture. The collection examines aspects of embodiment, place, and presence that constitutively frame law amidst social, cultural, and historical contexts.

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Exploring layers of law and the sensory at the volcano

Sarah Marusek

Introduction

This chapter introduces law as it synesthetically overlaps and engages with the sensory as contextualized within the discourse of the 16th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law. The setting for this remarkably collegial interplay of ideas and approaches was the historic Kilauea Military Camp located within the Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park at Kilauea Volcano on Hawai‘i Island. Over four days (April 29–May 1, 2015) at the rim of Halema‘uma‘u Crater, researchers and students from a variety of countries and disciplines wrestled with the multiple frameworks of legality related to the conference theme “Synesthetic Legalities: Sensory Dimensions of Law and Jurisprudence.” This edited volume, unique in its approach to law and jurisprudence, explores aspects of embodiment, place, and presence that constitutively position law and legality amidst social, cultural, political, and historical environments and perspectives. Metaphorically, this volcano – with her active lava flows, her glowing crater, her sulfuric emissions, her steaming earth, and her deep stillness – represents the sometimes volatile, yet sometimes docile, relationship between law and the senses. As convener for the roundtable and now editor for this book, I hope that this work synesthetically engages readers to consider the myriad forms, methods, and conceptualizations of law’s relationship to the senses that extend even beyond our rich academic exchange.

Synesthetic jurisprudence

We see law. We hear law. We feel law. We touch law. We even taste law. How? Where? Under what conditions? Legal semiotics provides the framework for the visual study of law; however, legal semiotics also provides a ripe intellectual avenue for seeing beyond the visual. Synesthesia is the phenomenon in which sensual perceptions are joined together as a combined experience – i.e., the ability to feel color, hear the visual, or even smell emotion; legal synesthesia refers to the ways in which law is portrayed, embodied, and resisted in multiple sites, stimuli, responses, and constructions. Richard Cytowic¹ describes this neuroscientific phenomenon – he notes:

The word synesthesia comes from the Greek syn (union) and aesthesis (sensation), literally a joining of the senses. Synesthesia is an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense.

With regard to law, these types of amalgamations expand the reaches of our thinking, as the normative ideas of governance and order present challenges to traditional forms of legal knowledge and actions. In this way, sensory perceptions are interpreted in conjunction with embodied approaches to legal reasoning, legal consciousness, as well as resistance. Such sensory hybridity from a multilayering of contextual approaches, circumstances, and atmospheres stimulates a potentially otherwise linear consciousness concerning law. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos² describes the lawscape as “the interfolding” of the material and the immaterial.³ When we synesthetically conceptualize various realms of (im)materialized law and legalities, the resultant social, cultural, and political unions (and disunions) offer creative insight into the complexities of how law works using our bodies, our hands, our ears, our eyes, our noses, and our tongues. In this way, the interpretations of law through sensory perceptions become a type of legal phenomena that is enriched with meaning from enlivened understandings of law in conjunction with sensory input, sensory output, and this sensory overlay. Particulars located in the layers of synesthetic legalities semiotically generate a notion of law that challenges and transforms the legally semiotic beyond the visual to include the spatial, the temporal, the aural, the tangible, the culinary, and the olfactory.

Kilauea’s layering: natural, historical, and local

Home to Pele, the Hawaiian Goddess of Fire, Kilauea Volcano is a shield volcano that has been continuously active since 1983. Adjacent to the rim of her main summit, Halema‘uma‘u Crater, Kilauea Military Camp was originally established in 1916 as a training facility for the United States National Guard. Today, the camp, locally known as KMC, serves as a working military vacation camp open also to the local community. In that same year of 1916, Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park was established even prior to Hawaii statehood in 1959 as the fifteenth national park within the United States. Actively flowing lava is a rarity, and, as such, the legality of volcanic terrain is constantly evolving and challenging static frameworks of property, ownership, and jurisdiction. Lava is not contained by law, and, as such, most recent flows from Kilauea’s Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō Vent are located outside the park’s boundaries. Through the literal ebbs and flows of this oozing shield volcano in the Pacific, Kilauea is not only a natural phenomenon but a legal phenomenon as well, involving the regulation of movement, the framing of emergency, and the accompanying disputes over the right of way. As a site of natural wonder, Kilauea heightens the sensory intersections of experiencing molten lava through sight, smell, and touch with the jurisprudential overlapping of legal phenomena, such as jurisdiction and regulation. Scientific and cultural knowledge also factor into the mix.⁴ Through synesthetic legalities and sensory-based jurisprudence, the volcano’s effect on visiting bodies metaphorically supports the chapters of this volume as this emerging frontier of law corresponds nicely to the changing volcanic landscape.

Kilauea provides visitors with a unique sensory experience that excites all five senses. One can smell Kilauea’s sulfuric volcanic emissions known as “vog” (volcanic smog) in the air all over the Big Island and even in Honolulu some two hundred miles away. One can see the bright orange glow of lava in Halema‘uma‘u Crater at night from the Jaggar Museum’s overlook. One can feel the earth shake in the countless daily and weekly earthquakes that rumble beneath the mountain (and nearby volcanoes: Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, Hualālai and Lō‘ihi Seamount). One can taste the volcano’s fertility in the locally grown Ka‘u, Kona, and Hilo coffees grown in rich volcanic soil. At night, her glow appears fiery red with the occasional muted thunder of rocks crashing into the molten soup within. One can touch cooled lava as it is everywhere on the island, from the black-sand beaches to local architecture (walls, buildings, and fences).

Pele, the Hawaiian Goddess of the Volcano, is locally personified as oozingly present and whimsically capricious through her flows and generally gentle manner of eruption. At Halema‘uma‘u Crater, Pele rises and falls and the lava gets higher and higher, then falls within the boiling crater. During the roundtable, the lava lake within the crater was extremely high and actually, at one point, overflowed the caldera walls. Later, in the June 27 flow, local understandings about Pele were visible as red pieces of paper poked into a chainlink fence. Written on these red sheets of paper were letters to Pele from local elementary students asking her to spare their school. Despite being in the direct path of the oncoming flow, the school was spared and the lava stopped. Perhaps Pele listened, and perhaps her advance was geologically hindered. Local perceptions about Pele and the volcano shape how regulations are designed and implemented.

Locality and law go hand in hand. In Chapter 2, “What legal rules are suitable for protruding media of law and why? Contribution to the concept of locality/non-locality of legal rules,” Michał Dudek considers how law, as rules and technologies, is locally understood according to its visible materiality. As either “flat” or “protruding media of law,” Dudek examines the meaning of law inherent to the interactions between humans and objects. From the mundane (speed bumps, seat belts) to the more exquisite (benches, breathalyzers), law communicates through things, or what Dudek terms as “artifacts” that are locally generated and understood. In this way, law is localized to the extent that specific meanings through rules are associated with and understood in conjunction with place. As the extension of place-based immediacy, law can become “enchanted” and embodied through technologies that expand the local beyond the locale, such as with copyrighted print and media.

Local knowledge, in its unique character (as suggested by Dudek), is often in competition with external forms of knowledge. In Chapter 3, “From waste management to recycling: constructing mental health policy in the Kingdom of Tonga,” Timothy Fadgen examines the local framework of mental illness in the Pacific island nation of Tonga from traditional perspectives that compete with the legacy of post-coloniality. As a former British colony, the treatment of “madness” in Tonga appears at the intersection of traditional knowledges and practices with Western mental health policy. Mental health reform in Tonga today is the paradoxical continuation of British-based jurisprudence through the actions of donors from New Zealand, Australia, and the World Health Organization with local applications of social advocacy, civil society, and public education. This tension is embodied in the work of the nation’s sole psychiatrist, a Tongan, Dr. Mapa Puloka.

Fadgen’s focus on the juxtaposition between various forms of knowledge in Tonga (local, inherited, imported) correlates with the layers of local knowledge found at Kilauea (indigenous, local, tourist, scientific, cultural, religious). Despite their differences, one thing that each of these groups at the volcano have in common is the practice of eating. Although that which is eaten may not be the same (many Hawaiians enjoy poi, or pounded kalo [taro root]), the process of eating as a social activity, biological necessity, and cultural source of identity provides commonality. In Chapter 14, John Brigham discusses the relationship between eating and conference life in academia. Providing jurisprudential insight into eating is the subject of Chapter 4, “What law tastes like: a free conjecture on the palate of juridicity.” Here, Marcílio Franca and Maria Francisca Carneiro offer a gastronomical discussion of contemporary legal epistemology. Law can be tasted and digested as one would enjoy a meal with appetizer, main course, wine pairings, and dessert. In this meal, the concept of juridicity becomes the palate of law in which justice, legality, and decideability can be tasted and cooked. With mixed ingredients and methods, the courses of the meal and stages of the wine-making process become metaphors for law, in which law is characterized, and often ripens, through maturation and complexity. Franca and Carneiro remind us, “There is no single flavor, rather, there are multiple flavors, palates, tastes, for they are all dynamic and constantly changing.”

During the roundtable, the lava at Halema‘uma‘u Crater was at an all-time high. The bright glow of the lava within drew exceptionally large crowds of visitors as Kilauea dynamically and dramatically put on a show. Pele seemed ready to burst from her chamber in the earth. Threads of molten lava thrown high into the sky (called Pele’s Tears) seemed to dance in the cool night air. The excitement of the rising lava lake enlivened our discussions at KMC. Like the volcano, law was/is alive. In Chapter 5, “How to dance the law: engaged embodiment in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Christopher Lauer invites us to consider law through a Hegelian approach of engaged embodiment. To “dance the law” is to engage with its unfolding and ongoing cultural development. Law is to be lived, and, to do so, “we need, in short, to learn to dance.” Law becomes the habituation of self and will within our social (and often localized) environments that in turn becomes playfully engaged in specific and historical moments. Interpretations of legality compel the active participation in the experience of living for “to dance the law is thus not merely to narrate and celebrate its existence; it is to engage our bodies with it with as much grace as we can muster.”

Molten lava is a s-l-o-w-l-y moving natural phenomenon, a graceful spectacle that is legally regulated through designated lava-viewing areas outside the park or at fenced overlooks within the park. As a source of wonder, lava invites adventure and defies the stability associated with regulation. The viewing of lava (viewing of Pele) is under the control of governmental discourses that frame lava as a hazard and source of concern for public safety. Arguably, lava isn’t something to mess with! Yet, common sense related to molten lava doesn’t seem to factor into these regulatory frameworks. Take for example the penance, yet acknowledgment of her adventurous role in assuming risk, through the words of local resident Ruth Crawford. With a friend, Crawford was arrested on grounds of second-degree criminal trespassing for poking an egg beater, golf club, and variety of other objects into the June 27 lava flow:

“As we were up there, we turned around and said, ‘Oh wow, this is coming all around us. We gotta get out of here,’ because it was circling around us,” she said. “It was very hot and I felt like my face was burning. It was really hot, but it was exciting and it was fun and adventurous. I know we’re not supposed to, but okay, I won’t again.”⁵

Law engenders responsibility, yet also irresponsibility. Ruth was not harmed despite her thrill; yet law (in conjunction with the media’s portrayal of the case) made sure to be present in her public rebuke. In Chapter 6, “A tale of outsourcing: the enhanced presence and absence of law through the senses,” Yue S. Ang considers the outsourcing tragedy of the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh as interpreted according to the dance piece “ConsuMorphosis.” For Rana’s 3,600 victims, law was absent. For the performance’s audience, law’s absence was embodied through the dancers’ movements as a source of injustice. The symbiosis of the dancers’ bodies with the fallen building and lost (or wounded) lives created a synesthetic experience in which law’s absence was abusively rampant. The “synchronicity” between the tragedy and the dance piece compels closer scrutiny to law’s relationship with outsourcing in general as one of betrayal, complacency, and complicit exploitation. Evoked in the Rana tragedy and through the accompanying performance, law’s alignment with the prowess of global economic institutions fails the most vulnerable global citizens. Ang reminds us, “Law’s engagement can be detected through the blended senses of touch, smell, sight, sounds, and taste” insofar as “synesthetic experience is therefore vital for law’s efficacy.”

In movements of bodies that touched one another in sorrowful movements, the dancers represented law’s absence in the Rana tragedy. Touch can also be represented through law’s presence, as seen in the locally legal response of Hawaii County Civil Defense Director Darryl Oliveira to the lava-dipping escapades of Ruth Crawford. In his response, Oliveira reasoned the relationship between danger and rules and encouraged the reporting of people seen beyond police barricades or near active lava:

It’s unfortunate. We’d hope that we wouldn’t have to take steps to enforce the rules, that we would expect compliance from everyone. But unfortunately, like with anything else, rules exist and people break the rules and we do what we need to do. We’re still asking for everyone’s cooperation. HVO (Hawaiian Volcanoes Observatory) does a great job explaining the hazards out there. For the scientists saying that they get jarred or startled by the explosion, that tells me that its concerning. For them to describe a section of ground that’s been upheaved or basically just displaced because of the explosion, is concerning. So that’s some of the reasons why we don’t want people out there on the flow front.⁶

Through law’s presence (as well as absence), touch is regulated. In Chapter 7, “ ‘Do not touch’: prohibitions on touch and the incarcerated female body,” Marilyn Brown examines the prison as the “signification of flesh juxtaposed with razor wire.” Within the context of a women’s prison on the Island of O‘ahu in the State of Hawai‘i, touch, as “the most fundamental communicative of human experiences,” is restricted and controlled within this carceral setting. In the contemporary prison complex of American society, all forms of touch are regulated, often with the consequential benefit for the governing and great detriment for the incarcerated. In Brown’s chapter, touch from visitation is not allowed, yet “adverse touch” from strip searches to unwanted medical procedures routinely affects the lives of prisoners. Touch is the medium through which law controls and punishes. The absence of touch becomes the presence of law as is characterized by the concrete coldness of the modern prison and “bureaucratization of punishment” in which bodies lose their humanity and law again creates victims.

Touch (as perpetuated or denied) becomes a visual connection of law to the soul. Pele is the anthropogene of Kilauea. It is locally accepted that Pele appears in specter form, either as a white lady with a dog or as a white dog itself, to warn of impending eruptions. The symbolism behind these ghosts generates a local knowledge about the volcano that transcend the crater’s rim. The presence of and potential for lava’s flow is told through these stories and engenders a form of internalized knowledge about life on a volcanic island. In Chapter 8, “Deconstruction and bio-politics: asymmetrical visuality, spacing, power,” Chris Lloyd related visuality to law via the internalization of law. Lloyd speaks of Foucault’s panopticism as a model for the internalization of law and relates this to a nuanced reading of Hamlet. The effect that law has becomes the hauntology of law in which, according to Derridean juridical thought, law becomes hidden from view. The resultant “asymmetrical visuality” of bio-politics and place invites the spatio-temporal considerations of law’s engagement with the obvious and the not-so-obvious. Like law, lava is all ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors (in alphabetical order)
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Exploring layers of law and the sensory at the volcano
• 2 What legal rules are suitable for protruding media of law and why? Contribution to the concept of locality/non-locality of legal rules
• 3 From waste management to recycling: Constructing mental health policy in the Kingdom of Tonga
• 4 What law tastes like: A free conjecture on the palate of juridicity (Menu dégustation en quatre services)
• 5 How to dance to the law: Engaged embodiment in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
• 6 A tale of outsourcing: The enhanced presence and absence of law through the senses
• 7 “Do not touch”: Prohibitions on touch and the incarcerated female body
• 8 Deconstruction and bio-politics: Asymmetrical visuality, spacing, power
• 9 Artistic flash: Sketching the courtroom trial
• 10 Dependency and care in Peirce’s training of reasoning
• 11 “Warmth” in justice: (Re)semiotization of “frozen embryo” in the civil case of the four shidu parents
• 12 The copyright of my sensorimotor experience
• 13 An incitement to rapey discourse: Blurred lines and the erotics of protest
• 14 “The map is not the territory”: Thoughts about synesthesia and law
• Index