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Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque:

Arabesques & Entanglements
Richard K. Sherwin
New York Law School

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Visualizing Law
in the Age of the
Digital Baroque
Arabesques and Entanglements

Richard K. Sherwin

I~ ~o;nup
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 20 II
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa busi11ess

© 2011 Richard K. Sherwin

The right of Richard K. Sherwin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
Contents
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used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Catalogui11g in Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Sherwin, Richard K. ix
List of Illustrations
Visualizing law in the age of the digital baroque: arabesques and X
entanglements/Richard K. Sherwin. Acknowledgements
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. 1
1 Introduction
I. Law-Philosophy. I. Title.
K230.S535A38 2011 2 Visual Jurisprudence: The New Paradigm 13
340'.1-dc22
2010048526 3 Law's Screen Life: Visualizing Law in Practice 56

ISBN: 978-0-415-61290-6 (hbk) 4 Images Run Riot: Law on the Landscape of the Neo-Baroque 83
ISBN: 978-0-415-61293-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-81586-1 (ebk) 5 Theorizing the Visual Sublime: Law's Legitimation Reconsidered 119

Typeset in Minion 6 The Digital Challenge: Command and Control Culture and
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
the Ethical Sublime 150

7 Conclusion: Visualizing Law's Rhetorical Ideal 173

193
Notes
234
Bibliography
251
Index

JJ
FSC
WWWIIC.org
MIX
Paper from
responsible sources
FSc- C004839
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

Vll
 CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Tell me where is fancy bred,

Or in the heart, or in the head?
It is engendered in the eye.
(William Shakespeare 1)

You're living in a dream world, Neo.

(The Matri:¢ )

0 God, show us things as they are.

(Sufi prayer3 )

This is a book about law and visual culture. It poses the question, what
happens when the search for truth and fact-based justice is increasingly
driven by visual evidence and visual argument inside the courtroom?
The answer takes us beyond the pragmatic concerns of lawyers and
judges facing new interactive, audiovisual technologies of persuasion.
The shape and texture of the legal imagination itself - how we think
and feel and deliberate about truth and justice - are undergoing radical
change.
When I refer to "visual culture" in these pages, I have in mind David
Morgan's description of the field: "what images, acts of seeing, and
attendant intellectual, emotional, and perceptual sensibilities do to build,

1
 2 • Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque Introduction • 3

maintain, or transform the worlds in which people live." 4 When we and now visual storytelling must be added to the lawyer's (scholar's and law
study visual culture we are not only analyzing and interpreting images, teacher's) cultural toolkit. Thus it falls upon us to ask: How does visual
but also "ways of seeing (or gazes) that configure the agents, practices, culture alter the legal mind, and with what consequences for the practice
conceptualities, and institutions that put images to work. " 5 Styles of and theory of law? That is the subject of this book.
imagining the world have been known to shift along with significant How do we know the truth of what we see on the screen? What warrants
changes in technology, culture, and socio-economic conditions. For our belief in images? When does the image add a living reality (of feelings
example, Benedict Anderson has observed that during the nineteenth and impressions) which words alone may not convey, and when does it
century the technologies of "navigation, astronomy, horology, surveying, divert judgment and belief through an intensification of irrational fantasies
photography, and print" gave rise to a manner of imagining a world in and desires? When law marries visual culture their joint offspring requires
which the particular came to be viewed as a fungible representative in a new academic partners, including media and cultural studies, art history,
series, as if everyone and everything wore a serial number. 6 Today the cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. In short, jurists
technologies of digital imaging, interactive computing, and instant access need to cultivate a new visual literacy so that they may understand better
to an almost infinite flow of information online are likewise giving rise to how images work, the better to cultivate competencies in visual communi-
new communities, institutions, and practices, including the communities, cation, cross-examination, and judgment. That objective is one of the core
institutions, and practices of law. In a visual culture law, too, operates goals of this book. But it is not the only one.
visually. In contemporary legal practice, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors Iflaw is to be treated as a part of contemporary visual culture, and of that
face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument. From videos need there can be no doubt, it is not enough to consider the way in which
documenting injuries, crimes, and accidents, or advocating the mitigation law partakes in the various aesthetic, cognitive, and cultural codes that
or enhancement of sentences in criminal cases, to computer displays of all different visual media deploy. Law also shares in the various normative
manner of digital graphics and re-enactments, the search for fact-based aspirations and afflictions that are bound up in the culture at large. For this
justice inside the courtroom is increasingly becoming an offshoot of visual reason, we must also be attentive to cultural conditions. What does it mean
meaning making. to aspire to visual eloquence, for example? How do we recognize and
Visual meaning making is different from the way we make meanings in capture it in contemporary cultural terms? Moving to the other end of the
words alone. Visual meanings are written in the body, so to speak. We spectrum, what anxieties, what loss of confidence in the reliability of visual
respond to images quickly, holistically, and affectively - the same way we representation afflicts the visual legal imagination? Addressing these highs
perceive the world at large. Vision is a complex physiological, cultural, and and lows represents the second core objective of this book.
cognitive response to visual stimuli. It depends on a variety of cues. Implicit Writing about visual eloquence is not an easy undertaking. In what
meanings- often the offspring of emotional and mnemonic associations to follows, I shall seek to retrieve a category that I believe can help. I call it
what we see on the screen- tend to remain hidden from conscious reck- the visual sublime. There is something uncanny in the excess of meaning
oning. Images quickly activate patterns of seeing and feeling that we have that some images convey. The poignant dignity of a victim wrongfully
internalized from a lifetime of watching. So when law lives as an image on harmed, the implicit malice of one who has perpetrated (or is about
the screen it lives there as other images do. That is to say, it motivates belief to perpetrate) an act of violence, the collapse of time in the visual and
and judgment on the basis of visual delight and unconscious fantasies and aural synthesis of various pieces of visual evidence presented at trial- these
desires as well as actualities- all within the discrete aesthetic code in which legal examples, together with a host of other illustrations of the visual
a given visual medium operates. sublime will be explored in these pages. There are times when images move
In short, analyzing and interpreting the visual culture of law requires us with an uncanny power, a sense o( presence that cannot be easily
that we understand the peculiar logic of the media that produce it, and the explained. But there are also times when visual images convey a very
kind of visual world those productions help to create. This is not the world different kind of reality, perhaps something that may not be reality at
of strict linear logic, deductive reasoning, and rational volition that legal all. This is the image as mere sensation or digital simulacrum, the image as
positivists, rational choice theorists, and behavioral economists tend to aesthetic delight or flight of fancy, the image as progenitor of irrational
favor. Law has always been a matter of effective storytelling as well as logic, desire. These forms of vision are also now part of the legal landscape.
 4 • Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque Introduction • 5

They are a part of what it means when we say law lives as an image on the There is something eerily recognizable about Neo's discovery that he is
screen as other images do. living in a neuro-interactive simulation, a vast computer program called
And here is where the specter of the baroque comes to the fore. In a time the matrix. It's as if in the film we've stumbled upon a collective fantasy, or
when we can digitally picture just about anything we can imagine it should shared terror: what we've taken for reality all our lives turns out to be
not prove surprising that doubts may arise concerning the truth of what we no more than a collective dream. That the quintessentially baroque vision
see. This feeling of doubt, which culminates in a loss of confidence in the of dreams endlessly enfolding within dreams resonated so powerfully a
faculty of representation itself, lies at the core of baroque culture- both the decade later in Christopher Nolan's film Inception (2010) should not be
baroque culture of seventeenth century Europe, and the global digital surprising. In these films (and innumerable other contemporary movies,
~aroque culture that we are living in today. What is real, and what is imag- novels, plays, and games on line) the precariousness of our grasp o~
ma:>'?. And h~ can we be sure of the difference? Baroque visuality is an reality has emerged as a pervasive cultural theme. Bruno Latour calls 1t
affhctwn of v1s10n. It comes about amid a proliferation of visual forms, "iconoclash." We love the image and we hate it. We are enchanted by its
f~rms t~a invite an intensification of feeling as well as a dizzying sense of vivid persuasive power, but remain fearful of being seduced and deceived,
d1slocatwn and confusion. For the baroque mind, lurking beneath the taken in unawares, like Neo.
~urface of visual spectacle and delight lies a formidable terror. It takes shape One lesson of the digital baroque is that the rationalist assumptions
m the thoug~ th~ perhaps t.here is nothing else but this, these dancing underlying modern jurisprudence are manifestly inadequate to the
forms, these mfimtely unfoldmg arabesques. Such was Pascal's horror in demands of the times. The Cartesian legacy, with its anti-rhetorical animus
the face of the infinite. and its repudiation of embodied forms of knowing, which is to say, with its
The anxiety that accompanies baroque visuality, on the one hand, which dismissal of emotional knowledge and the creative power of the imagina-
i~ at bot~ a fear of the loss of meaning, and the uncanny presence of the tion, is ill equipped to cope with the challenges of visual culture. The model
v1sua~ subhme on the other, frame the contemporary, culture-wide quest of visual jurisprudence that I propose in these pages offers a new approach
for v1sual competence. The stakes of that search grow weightier when it to legal theory and practice that is more suitable to the actual conditions of
plays out on the landscape of law, where visual representations are secured contemporary life, including the visual life of the law. Cut off from its figu-
by the police power of the state. Law's aspiration to fact-based justice can ill rative, poetic roots, blinded by lack of a pragmatic ethical phenomenology,
afford the baroque recession of reality inside the courtroom. justice recedes from view. In its place, legal forms endlessly proliferate:
In order to counter the uncertainties that afflict the baroque mind, in guidelines and principles, policies and regulations, rules and metrics -
what follows I seek out those cultural and cognitive resources that may help overwhelming in their disparate array. An overabundance of forms and
us to recognize (and display) visual eloquence. Overused categories such as measures leaves us disoriented and uncertain, longing for a way out of the
"p~stmoderni no longer provide a useful source of insight here. And dazzling baroque labyrinth we've made for ourselves.
wh1le the constructivist perspective, and the critical deconstructivist To meet the challenge of visualizing law in the age of the digital baroque,
method that illuminates it, remains of value, it is possible to have too much this book argues for the cultivation of visual literacy and for a renewal of
of a good ~hing. Decon~trui usefully excavates structures of meaning in confidence in the world-maintaining power of human inventiveness.
texts and 1mages. But hke that classic Marx Brothers scene from A Night at Simply put, we need to revitalize the legal imagination. This effort must not
the Opera (1935), in which Chico and Groucho rip away extraneous clauses only incorporate new insights from neuroscience and cognitive psychology,
of a contract until nothing worth saving remains, deconstruction risks but also from the humanities, and in particular from the rich rhetorical
excessive critical zeal. Even the inexpressible (perhaps that above all) in text tradition that flourished before the age of modernity. Inventiveness,
and image alike is worth saving. Ultimately, that act of recuperation and eloquence, and the power to give life to social and legal reality in verbal as
affirmation may well be what deconstruction is for. (After all, didn't well as visual figures and images dominated the pre- (and early) modern
Derrida say, deconstruction is justice? 7) culture oflaw. 8 In this book, I advocate greater attentiveness to the proper-
. Baroque visuality, at any rate, has no difficulty discerning the forms; ties and virtues of visual eloquence not as ornament ("mere rhetoric"), but
1t's meaning that gives it trouble. Consider in this regard the Wachowski as both constitutive and invocative of the real. Visual eloquence takes us
brothers' film, The Matrix (1999), which struck a nerve worldwide. beyond ourselves to something other, something that comes to be in the
 Introduction • 7
6 • Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque

field of attunement that is generated between seer and seen. The authen- eye witnesses to electronically mediated events (filmed, remixed, or digitally
ticity of this kind of visual experience consists in its capacity to animate simulated). But how does the adversarial process test the decision maker's
mimesis- not as mere imitation (as Aristotle wrote), but rather as a form of reliability as witness to these screened realities?
identification. Law's migration to the screen raises in a new form a very old contro-
Visual eloquence invites the viewer to experience the reciprocal nature of versy. It harks back to the ancient Greek debate about .rhetoric vers~
mimetic identification, a process in which the viewer identifies what is philosophy (what Plato called "dialectic"). Platonic ph1losophy pos1ts
present in the field of vision and, in that very act of recognition, experiences universal Ideal Forms of knowledge, effectively reducing everything else to
a renewed sense of identity. This visual experience is not entirely vicarious, mere appearances. In this framework, rhetoric becomes mere ornamenta-
which is to say, it is not wholly removed from the real. It allows an experi- tion, a matter of stylistic adornment without truth-value. Thus began a
ence of the real in its own right. Experience influences our way of knowing long tradition in theW est in which truth and appearances, knowledge and
and being in the world. This kind of embodied cognition serves as a spring- persuasion, ethics and aesthetics were split asunder. Recurrent outbreaks
board to integrated judgment. Judgment in this sense is the offshoot of an of iconoclastic fervor attest to the persistence of this binary opposition.
entangled identity. It reflects both what one knows (and feels) and who one For the iconoclast, false idols (mere appearances) mock hidden realities
is in relation to others and objects in the world beyond the self. Sensation, (invisible truths). Material forms blaspheme against spiritual substance. As
by contrast, merely registers a range of physical stimulations or affects. Protestant reformer John Calvin put it, "Since God has no similarity to
Images that move us simply by simulating the real, perhaps by merely those shapes by means of which people attempt to represent him ... all
reproducing the effects of authentic experience, lack the authority of attempts to represent him are an impudent affront ... to his majesty and
mimetic identification. Sensational images may affect us, but they cannot glory." 9 At issue here is not only how much truth the image can bear (or
change us, or alter our relationships with others and the world around us. bare), but also how much power the image maker should wield. If mimicry
Sensational images leave us as they find us. Judgments made on the basis of is a form of mastery, do we usurp the creative prerogative of God when we
sensation alone are quick, thin, and ephemeral. I shall contend that they are recreate the world in images? History is studded with such contentious
unworthy oflaw's aspiration to fact-based justice. claims - together with the highly destructive and potentially fatal conse-
What constitutes prudent judgment in a predominantly visual society? quences that they carry for perceived transgressors. This is not a distant
How do we know we have gotten right the truth and justice claims that threat. As recently as 2001, we saw the revival of iconoclastic fervor when
visual digital images make in particular cases? These questions make vivid the Taliban dynamited into dust the monumental Bamiyan Buddhas in
the need for forms of knowledge and discourse that are suitable to the prac- central Afganistan, claiming them to be idols forbidden under Sharia
tice, theory, and teaching of law in the digital age. When law shifts away law. We witnessed this destructive impulse at work again in 2005, when
from words alone to encompass visual meaning making, the modern protests, threats, and acts of violence by Islamic fundamentalists erupted
jurist's habitual reliance upon semiotic conventions, deductive and induc- around the world after the Danish newspaper ]yllands-Posten published
tive logic, and dispassion in the deliberative process no longer suffice. 12 editorial cartoons that mockingly depicted Mohammed.
There is much work to be done to excavate and reconstruct the habits of Who can doubt the power of the visual image? And who can doubt the
heart and mind (of passion and knowledge) in the visual meaning making power of new communication technologies to alter the way we live, from
process. Consider in this regard the traditional Anglo-American common our construction of self and interactions with others to our very sense of
law ideal of adversarial justice. The adversarial system has always expressed the world we live in? As Sherry Turkle has observed, digital simulation
a preference for live testimony. The live witness may be tested in court, as wants immersion, and immersion makes it difficult to doubt simulation:
tradition has it, by taking an oath to testify truthfully as well as through the "[C]ompelling virtual objects that engage the body as well as the mind ...
10
clash of cross-examination, and of course based on the fact finder's close [can make it] hard to remember all that lies beyond [simulation]." The
scrutiny of the witness's bodily and expressive demeanor during the testi- potent expressive power of digital simulation raises important questions
monial process. Today, however, videos, graphics, and digital simulations for law and society as a whole. It causes us to wonder, what does it mean
of all kinds increasingly compete with live testimony. As a result, contem- today to speak of our continuing fealty to reality, and in particular oflaw's
porary triers of fact increasingly find themselves cast in the role of putative continuing commitment to fact-based justice? And so we ask, what does it
8 • Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque Introduction • 9

mean to perceive an image? And what does it mean for law to anchor its only arises from the public's acceptance of its commands, and of its right to
authority in perceptions and judgments based on digital simulations? These command in the first place. But what justifies such acceptance? We know
questions prompt practical as well as deeply philosophical responses. It is that the baroque lacks transcendental references. Rousseau, along with
not simply a matter of knowing how to create visual evidence and visual other Liberal theorists of law and the modern state, understood that
arguments that win cases inside the courtroom, although that is no small deprived of traditional metaphysics, no longer able to imagine the sovereign
thing. It is also a question of coming to grips with how we know what's true as the living agent of God on earth, people would need to be taught anew
and what's just in a given legal controversy. How do we avoid being taken how to believe in sovereignty and the legitimacy of state power. Rousseau
in, or led astray by a visually compelling, emotionally fraught, but perhaps referred to this as "civil religion." Expressed in visual terms, however, the
ultimately misleading image? available spectrum for persuasion and belief stretches far wider than
What do we see, and what is absent from (or hidden on) the screen? Rousseau's strategic faith might suggest. It also includes, as Machiavelli and
What reality do images present (or make present)? What makes it seem as Hobbes understood full well, the persuasive inducements of fear and
if the image stares back at us, with a life of its own? How are images inscribed spectacle. And, indeed, in their generation, baroque spectacle was one of the
in our body? How do they affect us, change us, enliven us, distract us, lead paramount agencies of church and state power alike. State sponsored
us astray? What mental tools, what cultural and cognitive categories, do we parades, elaborate pomp and ceremony, awe-inspiring mechanical gardens,
use to see with? How do images draw from popular cultural resources (such massive firework displays - these were the signs of power in the age of
as advertising, film, and television) to cue familiar feelings, memories, baroque spectacle. Today, their digital analogue may be found on screens
thoughts, and desires in the mind of the viewer? And how do these associa- everywhere, including the courtroom.
tive processes and substantive resources for meaning making constitute the Baroque ornamentation ramifies precisely in order to intensify its effect,
legal imagination and, by extension, help to construct the reality oflaw? In as if the power of sensation alone might suffice to distract us from, or
short, what kind of life is it (and what sort of world, what sort of mind) disguise, the fear that hollowness lies at the core of things. Such a condition
when law lives the life of images on the screen? cannot be sustained. Inwardly empty, left with nothing more than the will
Plato taught that when law comports with reality it can aspire to justice. 11 to form, the baroque is haunted by the idea of catastrophe. As Walter
But today we are not so sure about reality. Thus we come · , t Benjamin wrote:
is the fate of law, and justice, in a time when th real grows elusive?
there is no "there" there, if reality becomes interchangea e with digital The baroque knows no eschatology; and for that very reason it
simulation, if it is always being created anew - unfolding from moment possesses no mechanism by which all earthly things are gathered in
to moment, like some Deleuzean assemblage or rhizoidal network of together and exalted before being consigned to their end. The
"movement-images" endlessly flowing in a state of "pure immanence," or hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest
like Derrida's irrepressibly protean differance, that unrepresentable, non- breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion
existent source from which differences, traces without origins, endlessly of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formula-
disseminate- might it be that everything we see on the screen is momen- tion and, at its high point, brings them violently into the light of
tary and inescapably contingent? But if everything is equally contingent, day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum,
then may we also say that everything is equally valuable? Equally true? If one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence.'' 14
that were so, then what aside from the will to power, arbitrates judgment?
This • a wus uncertainty ermeates baroque culture, including the digital Baroque culture stands like a tree whose roots have been excised. Little
baroque cu ture m w tc we live today. In baroque times it often seems as wonder that it feels as if one were being "driven along to a cataract." 15
if we have nothing but our own fabricated forms to live with, nothing but At some point something must occur to arrest the unending profusion
our own "garrulity" (as Stanley Rosen put it 12). of empty baroque form. In this book I call that event the sublime. The
In this sense, baroque law is hyper-positive law, law cut off from nature sublime arrests the recession of the real and the ethical. It helps us to reas-
or from essences of any kind. Such may well be law's fate in a condition of sert our fealty to reality, which is to say, our capacity to respond to what
"creation without grace." 13 Under such conditions, positive law's legitimacy others and the concrete situation that we face demands of us. Indeed, it
10 • Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque Introduction • ll

turns out, or so I shall argue, that both beauty and justice share the sublime, new risks. We see this, for example, when law adopts the screen's code of
albeit each in its own way. In nature, we experience a sublime beauty that representation as its own. Then legal certainty may be conflated with visual
momentarily arrests the recession of being. And in the social domain, delight, and unconscious fantasies (the mass media's logic of desire) may
attuned to the other who stands before us, we experience a sublime ethical become the engine of legislation (as we will see in Chapter 3's case study of
demand, momentarily halting the spiraling recession of justice from the child pornography laws).
fragmented, monadic, and contingent legal forms that it leaves behind. Today, our command and control of digital form continues to grow
Every entanglement is an occasion for mindfulness in our response to while our ethical confidence seems to falter. Aesthetics alone has never
things and others around us. Entanglements ground and focus the attentive provided an adequate basis for constituting ethical judgment, just as ethics
mind in concrete human encounters. They root legal decision making alone has never provided an adequate basis for motivating right outcomes.
in the ethical demands that we experience when we stand face to face The challenge we face is to bring aesthetics and ethics (arabesques and
with others, and with social conflicts in specific contexts that demand entanglements) into better alignment. This challenge is most fraught
resolution. In this sense, justice is an entangled reality from which we turn with consequence where image-based judgments are backed by the power
at our peril. of the state, which is to say, in the domain of law. Accordingly, the task of
Every way of seeing is a way of being (of feeling one's way) among others lawyers, judges, and lay citizens alike in this new digital visual world of ours
in the world. An ethical optics describes attentiveness to what the situation is to cultivate the visual sophistication and ethical competence that is
at hand calls for. This view marks a significant shift in philosophy away needed to judge well, so that we may remain confident that the legal process
from the abstraction of concepts toward the concrete particularities of and its decisional offshoots stay true to the ongoing demands of fact-based
everyday life. This is the way of ethical phenomenology. Applicable rules justice. We need a new visual literacy to crack the aesthetic, cognitive, and
play a part, but mindfulness is not the same thing as placing facts under a cultural codes of law as image in the digital age. But visual literacy will
category or rule. Judgment in this sense takes place in a far richer experien- not suffice without an abiding confidence in the human mimetic faculty,
tial register than the rule-bound domain described in the literature oflegal the inventive act of representation itself. If justice is to continue to play
positivism, rational choice theory, and behavioral economics. In what a part in legal outcomes aesthetics in law must operate in the service of
follows, I shall argue that the shift from abstract linguistic conventions to the ethical. As Jean-Luc Godard put it in a recent film, when law no
concrete visual practices models a concomitant jurisprudential shift from longer knows justice, justice comes to be judged before the law. 16 That
abstract concepts to embodied experience and embodied judgment. The event marks the subversion and demise of equity. True equity looks beyond
conceptual bias in traditional jurisprudence, as we find, for example, in the law to correct it. 17 Justice and the ethical take on a living (albeit imper-
the disembodied, highly decontextualized framework adopted by Rawls, fectly realized) presence in specific acts of judgment that are attuned to the
among others, is ill suited to the highly tactile, emotionally robust, imme- real, and that poetically stir our hearts and minds by means of figurative
diately intuited affordances of visual culture. This is a far cry from Descartes' and visual eloquence.
influential insistence upon disembodied rationality. The devaluation of Each generation bears the burden of acquitting itself of the indictment of
perception and sensory experience, like the medieval subordination of reality. Today it is incumbent upon us to retool the legal mind so that it
flesh to soul, has no place in the legal imaginary constituted by visual may pursue fact-based justice wherever it takes us- including law's life as
jurisprudence. an image on the screen. That is the challenge this book sets out to address.
There is something authentic, something grounding and sublimely We shall proceed first by exploring some of the underlying cultural and
transformative in our experience of the visual, as well as something cognitive conditions in which we live, drawing out the historical analogue
deadening, reductive, flat, and sensationally hollow, as baroque culture to contemporary digital baroque culture in order to see more clearly how
manifestly demonstrates. Of course, in practice we do not enjoy the luxury the visual turn today is affecting (and afflicting) the life of the law. We shall
of choice amid such simple polar extremes. The authentic and the then examine examples of visualizing law in both its sensational and
ornamental (image as empty sensation) often come in dismayingly mixed sublime aspects inside the courtroom and in the culture at large. The next
forms. When law migrates to the screen it brings unprecedented descriptive task is to attempt to marshal those cultural and cognitive resources that are
and persuasive power to the search for truth-based justice. It also creates available to overcome law's iconoclash, which is to say, the baroque anxiety
12 • Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque

and accompanying loss of visual and ethical confidence that currently

afflicts the legal imagination. In pursuit of greater visual and ethical acuity
in the law our path will lead to a renewed encounter with visual eloquence.
This will encompass a retrieval of the ancient virtue of inventiveness forti-
fied by a renewed appreciation of the visual sublime.