Remediation
- Peter Goodrich
- Jun 22, 2021
- 21 min read
Updated: Jun 27
The will to transparency, the scopic drive to see through, to scrutinise naked truth, encounters a significant impediment in the dead letters, the literae mortuae, of law. The puppet show of juridical interpretation, the marionettes that are pulled as heavy signifiers, gothic black-letter dogmas from the pickle jar of precedent, perform a spectacle that is always a trope and costume, a stage and screen away from the viewing subject. As the pop philosopher and ‘narcotheorist’ Laurent de Sutter observes of a prime example of this paradox—the new Palais de Justice, the judicial city and island of law designed by Renzo Piano on the outskirts of Paris entirely in glass façade—it is the opposite of transparent.[1] The intimidating size, the insular location, the monumental aura, and the nomothetic lines of the rectangular structure suggest, at best, a juggernaut of justice. It appears open to the lines of sight but closed and excluding of any miniature mortal who might wish, in some unauthorised fashion, to enter and somehow animate the dead letters or lost epistles of what is to all appearances an instance of vox Dei suprema lex esto. Neither missive nor monumental building was authored in any recognisable manner by the populace.
The megalith that replaces the classical architecture, highly symbolic designs, and artwork of the old Palais on Île de la Cité suggests, in more quotidian terms, a vast office building, an indistinct corporate structure not so dissimilar to a rectangular and stacked version of the World Trade Center. There is nothing legal, no symbol of jurist or justice, in the plain glass façade. The use of windows reverses the traditional windowless spaces of judgement, the subtly in camera character of the courthouse, and suggests the appearance of an interior, a window into the beating heart of legality, figura fenestris appearing in law. The glass, however, is more panopticon and occlusion than it is, in any sensible concept of appearance, likely to be entered by the viewing eye. The passing subject will have their eye deflected to the building as a structure, a scalar manifestation of forensis as a faceless leviathan, a supraterrestrial but blankly uniform front. The other irony is that if the gaze is focussed beyond the reflections in the panes to pierce the wall of glass, what is visible is primarily a corporate space of passages, corridors, stairs and benches for waiting.[2] The juridical interior is not open to view, and so the eye that penetrates the windows will see only a labyrinth of nondescript open spaces leading inexorably to the closed doors and opaque walls of the inner sancta, the temples of judgement, the hotwired, multiply screened, media-saturated courts. Where earlier legal architecture, replete with columns, classical statuary, and monumental inscriptions in archaic languages, invited attention to the façade, to the appreciation of an illocutionary presence and civic message, a symbolic spectacle of justice and law, the glass façade acts more as a mirror deflecting sight to the presence and size of this particular space station.[3]
The visible leviathan perhaps makes its optical case too vehemently, a hyperbole that often signals decay and demise—but such proleptic prognostications are for other occasions. The paradox to be pursued here is rather the tension between the purported transparency of the exterior, the sense of remediation from stone to glass, and the visually desipient opacity of the interior. An installation of the juridical in the remediated form of a monumental, quadripartite glass structure creates an impermeable visibility, a faceless mausoleum of legal acts that effectuates the trompe-l’œil of being a window into invisible proceedings. The trick and trope of the design is to create the appearance of transparency, the illusion of exposure of the physical presence and public accessibility of the juridical, to make it ordinary, popular, recognisably corporate, while creating a site on the periphery of the city that discourages both viewing and visiting. The apparent is never simply appearance, and to look into is also always a matter of looking away, of noticing and of overlooking, as the expression goes. Law is no different in its scopic choices, its rules of seeing, as also in its blindspots and scotomising aspects.
Scopic desires
Juridical optical desire, by which I mean no more than the institutional regulation of appearance and disappearance, and most specifically, the rules that control looking and being viewed, is strictly regulated. When cameras were allowed for the first time into a terrorist trial in the new Palais, they were prohibited from filming anyone other than the speakers.[4] The lens was blinkered, the images were to be restricted to the orators and the dialogue. Discourse governed sight. Filming in the UK Supreme Court has similar rules, and static cameras that relay bench and advocates. At common law, the regimen of lines of sight, spaces of audition, and optical scrutiny is surprisingly limited, as also are the means of looking, the lenses, ocular and artificial, that are permitted and those that are forbidden. This dates back to section 41 of the Criminal Evidence Act 1925, which makes it an offence to ‘take or attempt to take in any court any photograph, or with a view to publication make or attempt to make in any court any portrait or sketch, of any person’ participating in the proceedings. This statute against visual representation of parties was pitched against the social media of the era, the so-called ‘yellow press’, the legislation responding most directly to popular criticism of a death penalty decision and the wide circulation of a photograph of the judge, a black cloth over his bewigged head.[5] Thenceforth, the tableau vivant of judicial determinations could only be seen in the minimalist sense of attending the trial, and the viewing cannot be shown to the public in any other form of direct visual reportage. A variety of later criminal laws of procedure further restrain the modes of viewing and relaying proceedings.
