Elizabeth Davis ∆ (Sociology and Anthropology / Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada; Department of Social Justice Education, OISE/University of Toronto, Canada) 

“I know it when I see it”: Liberalism Sensing the Obscene

Contrary to US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous evaluation of pornography as something that the good judge knows when he sees, this paper traces how obscenity and pornography have never been quite so easily discerned. In Walter Kendrick’s well-known phrasing, pornography names “an argument, not a thing” (Secret Museum, 1987). Indeed, this paper argues that the origins of obscenity and pornography should be understood less as the emergence of a genre, and more as an emerging domain of biopolitics, specifically, the biopolitics of aesthetics. In this way, the paper shows how the sensibility of the subject of early liberalism was fundamental to understanding and delimiting what is at stake in the public sphere (Heath, Purifying Empire, 2010; Leonard, Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls, 2015; Stern, “Fanny Hill and the ‘Laws of Decency,’” 2019). By addressing the history of the human senses through the idiom of sensibility (Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 2013), this paper argues that a feeling subject was at the center of early liberal attempts to manage the emergent public sphere. Obscenity has served to this day as the privileged limit concept for acceptable speech—all because of how representation is imagined to affect the senses.

Keywords: obscenity, public sphere, affect theory, sexuality, socio-legal studies

 

Alina Hruba ∆ (Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity, and the European Narratives, University of Helsinki, Finland)
Swordy Law and Blindfolded Justice: Is There a (Court)Room for Healing?

The concept of sensory perception in law has opened new avenues of inquiry into multidisciplinary approaches to legal studies. Despite criticism of the ocular-centric nature of the law, visual representation of legal matters has been influencing people's perceptions and expectations for centuries. In the culture of tarot readings, the sword is frequently depicted as an embodiment of law and people’s interaction with state structures. During a workshop at a documentation centre in Berlin (2023), I concluded with a tarot reading aimed at healing the silence of displacement and exile. The question I seek to answer is whether the law, in the form of the court, can heal the human soul. The sensory turn in law is often contrasted with the coldness of legal abstraction. When working with the different elements in the tarot, swords usually describe people who are emotionless, following only cold logic and being over-rational. By analysing the symbols representing court administration and their tarot card counterparts, I want to find a connection between the formal procedure of the hearing and the healing of the human heart. How can we combine our senses and law to achieve justice? Before conducting the fieldwork in Ukrainian courts of each instance, I want this paper to be based on analysed literature, legal norms, and symbols of the courtroom and justice in general. Combination of mentioned approaches will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of how the representation of the court affects its comprehension by those who seek retribution and justice. Keywords: sensori-legal studies, justice, courtroom, symbolism, rituals

 

Mario Michas ∆ (Faculty of Law, McGill University, Canada)

Can Artifacts Have Standing? Troubling and Transcending the Distinction Between Persons and Things

In Impersonations: Troubling the Person in Law and Culture (2009), Sheryl Hamilton presents an analysis of the historic controversies surrounding the attribution of legal personhood to corporations, artificial intelligences (or bots), clones and women. These innovations all depart from the conventional understanding of the legal subject as an individual, biological human being. In recent years, in different parts of the world, this list has expanded to include animals, rivers and Nature (Pachamama), often at the insistence of Indigenous people – that is, from without the Western legal tradition. In line with these developments, this presentation explores the question: Might a concept like the self-determination of Indigenous artifacts, which are considered and treated as other-than-human persons – that is, as having sentience, and agency or “will,” and sanctity – in their culture of provenance, and emphatically not as things or “cultural property,” in turn contribute to the self-determination of the peoples who make them in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)? Two landmark cases will be examined: namely, Pramatha Nath Mullick (1925) and Bumper Development Corporation (1988, 1991), which present an unanticipated answer to this question, and have significant implications for the recognition of a new legal category – the “rights of artifacts.” The research reported in this presentation as carried out under the auspices of the “Sensitive Material” research project directed by David Howes.