Criminology and the Aesthetic of Feminine Disappearance
| Date | 01 May 1997 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00091 |
| Published date | 01 May 1997 |
| Author | Peter Goodrich |
REVIEW ARTICLE
Criminology and the Aesthetic of Feminine
Disappearance
Peter Goodrich*
Alison Young,Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal
Conversations, London: Sage Publications, 1996, vi + 230pp; pb, £15.95.
Pliny recalls the origin of portraiture in terms of a scene of separation. A
Corinthian woman, visited in the late afternoon by her lover immediately prior to
his departure on a journey abroad, noticed that the declining sun cast the shadow of
her lover’s face across the room. Before he left, she traced the shadow of his profile
on the wall of her salon as a reminder of his presence, and so purportedly
inaugurated portraiture. The subsequent tradition did not tend to view this spectral
image or tenebral presence in terms of mimesis, of likeness or the realism of the
representation portrayed. The face was already a mask, an image or ‘false truth,’
and so the silhouette was to be read iconically as a figure of ‘the qualities of
persons and the conditions of the soul.’
1
The umbral face recollected by Pliny as
the original portrait thus reflected a play of representation, a shadow dance of
figuration, the lover at work in the domain of the visual.
The image of the departed lover both marked and celebrated a relationship. The
shadow profile traced on the wall may have been a sign of an absence, a trace of
someone who had disappeared; but it was more than that, it was a way of
imagining what would otherwise be invisible, a lover secreted either by time or
space. What transpires to be both interesting and surprising about the portrait
image is the aesthetic and the ethic of this act of imagining, this art or defiance in
the face of distance or of obstacles to love. The image speaks not so much of
absence as of continuing relation, its function is as much hedonistic as
commemorative, it speaks of the face and of the lover in an active and
participatory mode. The ethic of the image thus relates to questions of Eros and
fidelity, of continued attraction and of the subsisting spiritual or spectral presence
of the lover, and the attendant duty to act as if he were here. It also speaks to more
aesthetic questions of the beauty of the face and so of the virtues of the beloved as
they are evoked in the image. There was even a law and a justice of the portrait
image, within which what the image said of its subject in terms of her qualities
and flaws, her honour and her difference, would be judged. The final scene of
Charles Sorel’s allegorical journey to the Island of Portraiture thus takes the form
of a trial of several paintings which were adjudged to have defamed the spirit of
those whom they claimed to represent.
2
Scandalous, libellous or ‘atrocious’
The Modern Law Review Limited 1997 (MLR 60:3, May). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.428
*Department of Law, University of London, Birkbeck College.
My thanks to Costas Douzinas, David Garland, Niki Lacey, Linda Mills and Lynn Nead for constructive
comments and criticisms of an earlier version of this review.
1 Charles Sorel, La de
´scription de l’Isle de la portraiture et de la ville des portraits (Paris: Charles de
Sercy, 1659) 78.
2ibid 99–101.
portraits were publicly condemned and imprisoned, outlawed or occasionally
burned.
The logic of trying and judging an image, a procedure which the Romans termed
damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of memory often effected through the
burning of effigies, is one which recognises the reality of the image, and the power
and effects of rites and symbols. Later, positive law similarly treated false
representations as crimen falsi, as forgery or as a crime against the order and
legitimacy of representation.
3
Modern law retains this protection of the image and
of the ethics of representation in largely unwitting or simply conventional forms. In
various actions ranging from contempt of court to defamation, from protection of
public morals to recompense of psychiatric harm, the courts regularly recognise,
demarcate and attribute legal significance to concepts as nebulous as honour,
reputation, privacy and feeling. Quasi-legal codes of ethics and conduct similarly
purport to regulate images and words in and of the public sphere. Whatever the
gender assumptions or political predispositions of these norms relating to the
media and to other forms of public speech, they necessarily recognise an imaginary
terrain of subjectivity and an efficacy or power of the image. In more or less direct
forms, the legal tradition has always attempted to address the invisible order of
motives and causes, the imaginary spaces of identification and of the fantasm at the
heart of the subject.
4
It is a key hypothesis of Imagining Crime that the social subject repeats the
characteristics of the individual subject. Collective identity is deemed to be just as
phantasmatic, as driven by pleasure and pain, desire and fear, as the self-image or
persona of the individual. As the western legal tradition has long recognised, a
nation is a system of simulations and it acts ‘as if’ it were a subject.
5
It constructs
an imaginary identity, an array of phantasms of self and other, which acts both to
cohere its sense of community and to demonise its others or its enemies. The image
is thus frequently the reality of the social and to understand that reality requires
that the interpreter pursues the liminal logic of the image, and the various and
visceral pleasures and pains of collective action. None is more visceral or more real
than the social image and imagination of crime. It dominates much of the
contemporary political agenda and absorbs vast amounts of legislative and judicial
time. Crime is also at the heart of the entertainment industry. The phantasm of
crime and the images of criminal acts are pervasive in the social body and in the
collective imaginary, and it is these images which Alison Young pursues in an apt
diversity of sources and within the variable genres of their representation. In her
own words, her desire is to provide ‘a reading of the cultural weight of crime as
imagination. This book constitutes an archaeology of this weight, retracing its
themes and motifs and commonplaces. It devolves upon that which in
representation ruins representation’ (pp 13–14).
3 The classical discussion of crimen falsi can be founded in Bartolus de Saxoferrato, Tractatus de
insigniis et armis (Berkeley: Robbins Collection, 1358/1993 ed). See also John Logan, Analogia
honorum (London: Rycroft, 1677) sig 42r, 156v.
4 A theme elaborately addressed in Pierre Legendre, Dieu au mirroir. Etude sur l’institution des images
(Paris: Fayard, 1995), partially translated in P. Goodrich (ed), Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre
Reader (London: Macmillan, 1997).
5 The classic study of this theme is Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957). See also Louis Marin, Portrait of the King (London: Macmillan, 1983); and,
in contemporary terms, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
May 1997] Criminology and the Aesthetic of Feminine Disappearance
The Modern Law Review Limited 1997 429
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