Abstract
Law as commodity value is not a new position. The most easily recognisable forms of law (state law, private law, corporations’ law, etc.) have always been associated with an economic value. Law’s commodity value, however, is increasingly superseded by its affective value, namely law’s ability to stage itself and communicate to the world that itself and none other is the law. This is not purely a declaratory need: it is not enough for law to say that it is law. It has to stage itself in a consumer-oriented way, to market itself in a socially engaging way and to package itself in a media-appetising aesthetic way. Legal aesthetics is now all about understanding the aesthetic practices the law employs in order to prove itself socially relevant. This is not an isolated legal phenomenon but largely a consequence of a shift in aesthetics as a whole, from the ontology of definition (beauty, art, sublime) to the new ontology of apparition (or staging). From the society of discipline (Foucault) to that of control (Deleuze), and now to that of self-staging, the law deals with the need for legitimation by marketing itself as desirable. This legal ‘selfie’, as it were, relies on manipulation of affects to generate an atmosphere in which the law can carry on proving itself relevant.
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Notes
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Yet, his understanding of the shift, although perspicacious, remains rooted in a phenomenological theory of perception, and his use of senses, while, in theory, moving away from Western understandings of aesthetic appreciation, seem to end up reiterating the same historically anthropocentric, text-focused, male-centred and colonial conception of aesthetics as art. The only reference to art created by women is the Folies Bergère, seen through the male gaze of Mallarmé’s writing on them; there is no reference to anything but Western art, and there are only scant references to anything but the visual in terms of senses, making this essentially a classic ocular-centric piece of research. See also Vasquez and Mignolo (2013).
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Another mode of arriving perhaps at similar arguments in terms of the affective is through Platonic beauty and desire. See Colebrook (2011).
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This is not uncontroversial, and at various points, the aesthetic has been separated from the moral in Aristotle. Milliken, however, makes a compelling argument, confirmed also by the etymology of kalon.
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Feminist aesthetics have been working the way in law as well: see Rose (1996, 613).
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In relation to law, Craig (2007, 207).
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See also transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/ (Accessed November 6, 2018).
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Addison (in Addison and Steele 1712): “That faculty of soul, which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike”. Although Addison relies more on imagination than the pure inner senses’ reliance of someone like Shaftesbury.
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This is the point of Sloterdijk (2005, 170): “a climatized luxury shell in which there would be an eternal spring of consensus”. The affectivity of luxury finds its most prominent form in the Grand Installation of the glasshouse of capitalism: that “interior-creating violence of contemporary traffic and communication media” (Sloterdijk 2005, 198).
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Böhme points out that “desires cannot be permanently satisfied, but only temporarily appeased, since they are actually intensified by being fulfilled” (2016, 11). While this is true for the kind of desires that we could identify as false desires, and that form part of an economy of desire that is indeed inexhaustible, they have to be contrasted to the kind of desire that emerges from a body’s movement and pause, namely the conative desire of a body that is ethically situated in relation to other bodies.
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An atmosphere “precedes analysis and influences from the outset the emotional situation of the perceiver, resisting moreover any conscious attempt at projective adaptation” (Griffero 2013).
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Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2019). Atmospheric Aestheses: Law as Affect. In: Griffero, T., Tedeschini, M. (eds) Atmosphere and Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24942-7_9
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