Imaginary Boundaries of Justice: Social and Legal Justice Across Disciplines (O~nati International Series in Law and Society)

211 Pages·2004·1.09 MB·English

by  Ronnie Lippens

IMAGINARY BOUNDARIES OF JUSTICE
Oñati International Series in Law and Society
A SERIES PUBLISHED FOR THE OÑATI INSTITUTE
FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF LAW
Oñati International Series in Law and Society
A SERIES PUBLISHED FOR THE OÑATI INSTITUTE
FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF LAW
General Editors
William L F Felstiner Johannes Feest
Board of General Editors
Rosemary Hunter, Griffith University, Australia
Carlos Lugo, Hostos Law School, Puerto Rico
David Nelken, Macerata University, Italy
Jacek Kurczewski, Warsaw University, Poland
Marie Claire Foblets, Leuven University, Belgium
Roderick Macdonald, McGill University, Canada
Titles in this Series
Social Dynamics of Crime and Control:
New Theories for a World in Transition
edited by Susanne Karstedt and Kai Bussmann
Criminal Policy in Transition
edited by Andrew Rutherford and Penny Green
Making Law for Families
edited by Mavis Maclean
Poverty and the Law
edited by Peter Robson and Asbjørn Kjønstad
Adapting Legal Cultures
edited by Johannes Feest and David Nelken
Rethinking Law, Society and Governance: Foucault’s Bequest
edited by Gary Wickham and George Pavlich
Rules and Networks
edited by Richard Appelbaum, Bill Felstiner and Volkmar Gessner
Women in the World’s Legal Professions
edited by Ulrike Schultz and Gisela Shaw
Healing the Wounds
edited by Marie-Claire Foblets and Trutz von Trotha
Imaginary Boundaries of Justice
Social and Legal Justice across
Disciplines
Edited by
RONNIE LIPPENS
OXFORD AND PORTLAND OREGON
2004
Hart Publishing
Oxford and Portland, Oregon
Published in North America (US and Canada)
by Hart Publishing
c/o International Specialized Book Services
5804 NE Hassalo Street
Portland, Oregon
97213-3644
USA
© Oñati IISL 2004
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data Available
ISBN 1-84113-474-0 (cloth)
ISBN 1-84113-475-9 (paper)
Typeset by Olympus Infotech Pvt, India, in Sabon 10/12 pt
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Lightning Source UK Ltd
Contents
The Contributors vii
1 Introduction:
Imaginary. Boundary. Justice. 1
Ronnie Lippens
2 Thought’s Prison: An Image of Images 21
Louis E Wolcher
3 Just Waiting: Endless Deferral and the
Social Injustice of ‘Suspending’ Participants
Between Bidding and Evaluation 51
Rolland Munro
4 Boundaries of Exclusions Past: The Memory of Waste 69
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
5 The Spaces of Irony 97
Claire Valier
6 The Subject of Surveillance: Notes on Mann’s ‘Heat’ 117
and Kies´lowski’s ‘Three Colours: Red’
Richard Jones
7 Make My Day: Images of Masculinity and the
Psycho-Dynamics of Mass Incarceration 141
Simon Hallsworth
8 Imagining Justice at the Cradle of Modernity:
Re-Visiting Huizinga 161
Ronnie Lippens
9 Observing Victims: Global Insecurities and the Systemic
Imagination of Justice in World Society 185
Claudius Messner
Index 000

The Contributors
Simon HALLSWORTH is Senior Lecturer in Criminology (London
Metropolitan University, UK). In his recent work Simon has examined puni-
tive changes in contemporary society and the local politics and practices of
crime control. He is currently completing a research project examining
street crime in Lambeth, and is supporting community safety providers in
the area in the development of their crime reduction strategy.
email : [email protected]
Richard JONES is Lecturer in Criminology (Edinburgh University, UK).
Richard’s research interests are in theoretical criminology, the sociology of
punishment, and cybercrime. He is currently researching the role of
new technologies in crime control and criminal justice, and on political
ideologies and punishment.
email : [email protected]
Ronnie LIPPENS is Reader in Criminology (Keele University, UK). Ronnie
teaches Criminology, and Crime and Social Justice. He has published on
critical criminology, social justice, utopianism, and organisational ethics.
His current research interests include the place of the Imaginary in the pro-
duction and reproduction of ‘visions’ of social justice.
email: [email protected]
Claudius MESSNER is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Law (Lecce
University, Italy). Claudius teaches Sociology of Law and Juvenile Justice.
He has published in different languages on criminial justice issues, systems
theory, and the semantics of subjectivity. Drawing upon hermeneutics and
phenomenology, his research interests focus on the articulation of a social
theory of law and legal phenomena.
email : [email protected]
Rolland MUNRO is Professor of Organisation Theory (Keele University,
UK). Rolland is Director of the Centre for Social Theory and Technology at
Keele University. His numerous publications include Ideas of Difference
and Consumption of Mass (both Sociological Review Monographs) and
cover a wide range of topics including culture, identity and organisation.
email : [email protected]
viii The Contributors
Andreas PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS is Senior Lecturer in Law
(University of Westminster, UK). Andreas teaches European Union Law,
Land Law and Law of the Environment. His research interests are typically
transdisciplinary with a special focus on aspects of critical theory. He
attempts to approach and interpret law from various perspectives such as
geography, psychoanalysis, art theory, biology, autopoiesis, phenomenol-
ogy, feminism, linguistics, sociology, and so on. He recently gave a series of
lectures in Yugoslavia on the Democratic Reconstruction of the Balkans.
He has published articles in the areas of autopoiesis, phenomenology and
environmental law.
email : [email protected]
Claire VALIER is Lecturer in Law (University of London, UK). Claire is a
graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, where she was a Munro Scholar.
She works on the philosophy of crime and the criminal law. In particular,
she is currently looking at the normative bases of criminal liability and
punishment. She has written two books, a textbook on Theories of Crime
and Punishment (Longman, 2002) and a monograph on Crime and
Punishment in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2003). She is presently
finishing Memorial Laws: The Remembrance of the Dead and the Demand
for Justice(Cavendish/Glasshouse, forthcoming).
email : [email protected]
Louis E WOLCHER is Professor of Law (University of Washington, USA).
Holding degrees from both Stanford University and Harvard Law School,
Louis has written extensively in various fields of philosophy, including
philosophy of language and philosophy of law. One of his essays, ‘Time’s
Language’, was recently awarded Second Prize by the final jury
of the Millennial International Essay Competition — a philosophical prize
competition that was co-sponsored by the City of Weimar, Germany, and
the European cultural magazine Lettre International, and that drew 2,500
entries from around the world. He has also given and published numerous
lectures abroad, including at the European Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg, France, at the Institute of Political Science in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan, and at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law in Ljubljana,
Slovenia (as a Fulbright Award recipient).
email : [email protected]
1
Introduction:
Imaginary. Boundary. Justice.
RONNIE LIPPENS
THE VISCOSITY OF IMAGES
SOCIAL JUSTICE. THAT’S the topic of this book. But can we still
speak it, write it? We are often said to have ended up in an age in
which it has become abundantly clear that words cannot provide us
anymore with the comfort of stability which once they seemed to be able to
offer. Indeed, in the wake of deconstruction, when the sound or the sight of
words is turning evermore into an experience of instability, into a relentless
vertigo (Kirby, 1996: 96) that seems to reflect the spatial disorientations of
lives without the clear and distinct boundaries of yesteryear, words tend to
float in and through the volatile circuitries of re-signification. Try talking
social justice in an age like that. However, one might think, if words have
left their moorings, and are now adrift somewhere in spaces of undecid-
ability, then maybe this is not the case with images. Maybe images are
more stable than words. Maybe images, or imagery more generally, have a
certain viscosity about them, something bodily tactile, something sensory
that prevents them from evaporating into mere, disembodied volatility.
This ‘maybe’ is what this book is about.
Now it could very well be argued that images and imagery are as prone
to dissipation and evaporation in what Baudrillard, a few years ago
(Baudrillard, 1996), called the ‘perfect crime’ of a world that has left real-
ity altogether for a viral circuitry of simulation and illusion, and that
therefore has refused us the tools or even the clues to get to grips with
this perfect crime. Images, in Baudrillard’s world of perfect crimes, make
up this reality (as Claire Valier in her contribution to this volume aptly
critiques): the disembodied sparks of simulation in a frenzied network of
illusions, mere flashes of light that preclude any notion or practice of
social justice. So maybe Baudrillard is not much of a guide when it comes
to establishing some level of viscosity in images and imagery. Maybe not.