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International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

VISUAL SEMIOTICS

(by Christina Spiesel)

Derrida and Semiotics

  The law has been a discipline of words, whether spoken or written. They have made it possible to develop systems of reading, rules, and applications as well as be a medium of rhetoric, of persuasion. Written language constitutes a special kind of picture in which the relationship between the word and its objects of representation are purely conventional and are more or less arbitrary; even onomatpoesis is largely conventional in nature. It is this quality of words that makes them good for logical constructions and deductive reasoning while retaining the possibility of all kinds of metaphorical and metonymic dimensions of communication.

Increasingly, pictures are a part of legal practice, as evidence, as demonstrative illustration, and they are used for argument. Pictures,* in contrast to words, can directly evoke their objects of semiosis not only through symbolic (conventional) relationships, but also through resembling what we might see (an iconic relation in Peirce’s terms) and through seeming to be caused by the object of representation (charred edges of paper, a fingerprint on a surface, etc.) Any visual semiotic analysis ought to involve firstness, secondness, and thirdness in the Peircean sense. As each of these levels qualifies the others, they are all necessary. But to carry the analysis out, we confront the fact that a) pictures have no semantics and therefore no predetermined order of reading, and b) many pictures are compounds of different kinds of signs, so a reductive assignment to categories runs the risk of missing many elements within the picture that build its meaning.

As our technologies have advanced, picture making technology is now ubiquitous and available to a mass market, so people are making and sharing pictures of all kinds. When all visual data is digitized, it is very simple to make and exchange hybrid pictures that may contain video or animation materials, handwriting, drawing, digital painting, still photography and so on. Such pictures are not new by any means; what is new is that anybody with a computer can make them. A visual semiotic account of any picture deployed in a legal context therefore has to account not only for the ostensible subject (identifiable signs within the format), but also for the media referred to, the remediation, as an element of content. Not only will hybrid pictures contain media references, but in the context of legal presentation, they will be embedded in a verbal presentational stream and, more likely than not, be shown using various kinds of technology that will add to the meaning as well. Pictures in PowerPoint or other presentation media that are linear with occur within a sequence that is known in advance; pictures that are shown using interactive non-linear software like Trial Director or Sanction that allow attorneys to access files at will and show them in juxtaposition to other case materials maybe be visually recontextualized during the presentation. The medium will suggest that the picture is not embedded but a single linear scheme. Each configuration will change the semiotic meaning somewhat.

Some skillful legal rhetors will use both electronic pictures and analog media, moving back and forth between them. While legal scholarship tends to focus on the semiotic analysis of one or another picture in a case or legal situation, understanding the role of the picture in the performance of a case will require much more documentation than is currently available—not to mention changes in legal publishing.

What the study of signs nevertheless makes possible as we saw above is the thought that the concept, signified or truth cannot exist without a signifier. The signifier makes possible the signified. In comparison with metaphysics, the image becomes the precondition for ‘reality’ to appear. Access to the truth and to meaning is in other words always mediated. Mediation is as we saw not however derived from full presence (of consciousness to the signified), but is instead made possible by that which produces difference. Based on this insight, the sign can be said to show that there is a lack in what was believed to be the origin (the self-presence of the subject). The origin, we could also say, is always already in need of supplementation for it to appear as origin. Edmund Husserl’s reflections on signs in this respect show that a certain kind of dislocation from self-present experience always takes place. Mediation through signs is in other words a necessary condition for auto-affection, for a relation to the self. A study of signs and their necessity can be said to point to a certain kind of ‘drift’ that is a feature of all experience. To understand this better we have to enquire into the reason for the privilege accorded to speech in metaphysics and the aspersions cast on writing. Derrida traces the reason for this in metaphysics to a fear for death with which writing has always been closely associated. Philosophy since Plato has for this reason found it necessary to construct, based on the model of a living organism, a pure inside which had to be guarded from an external outside. Writing as we saw has been viewed as external, as a fallen kind of speech, as a mere aid, dangerous and secondary to living memory, as corrupting originary meaning, as dead or empty repetition, as compared to living speech. Why specifically writing, something that seems so innocuous? This is because writing in metaphysics points to death, which is always already lodged inside of life, as Heidegger and Nietzsche had also contended. Death is not however only something we fear, but also what we ultimately desire, as Freud and Schopenhauer realised. It is because of this dislocation of the self, the drift referred to above, of death lodged inside of life, that the self can relate to itself as well as to others in the first place, and not because of self-presence as metaphysics has always believed. Derrida refers to this ‘pre-origin’ inter alia as arche-writing or the trace: the condition of possibility of both writing in the common sense and of speech, which itself is a certain kind of writing. It can also be referred to as différance, that which produces differences (through which as we saw in Saussure, meaning is constituted as a secondary effect), and also defers or postpones death (or full presence, which would amount to death). This has important implications for the sign. The signified must in light of the above be understood as ‘originarily and essentially…trace, [and]…always already in the position of the signifier’ (Of Grammatology 73). This thinking of a pre-origin can translate into a different kind of politics, law and ethics, to what Derrida refers to in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason 152 as a hyper-politics or a hyper-ethics or in Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ as ‘justice’ which as he contends, is characterised by disproportion, a responsibility without limits, and a suspension of law and meaning. Such a ‘politics’, ‘law’ and ‘ethics’ would in other words no longer start off from the self-identity of the subject, but from that which makes the latter possible, requiring therefore necessarily a negotiation between the unconditional and the conditional.

Finally, all participants in a legal proceeding will bring their own experiences and culture with them. This will influence their interpretations of what they are looking at, consciously and unconsciously, and it is not possible to assume a uniformity of response among all individuals even as we can understand cultural trends. If legal rhetors use pictures as a kind of vernacular, much as they would use story telling and popular cultural references, they will evoke associations that may or may not serve their cases. For this reason, any understanding of the semiotic deployment of pictures in a case has to include a larger cultural view. Thus “reading” pictures requires a rich abductive process where readers test hypotheses against the object of inquiry and then revised, going back and forth until the account answers the question raised with the knowledge that the resulting conclusion is not the only one possible. Restricting analysis to iconography will leave out too much.

These paragraphs are a very general statement. The word “picture” should be understood to refer to all kinds of visual expression of a non-verbal sort, or where words are contained within a non-verbal representational object, from charts and graphs to photographs and films to animation. I am referring to visuals made by someone, still or moving, analog or digital.

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