B. Latour’s The Making of Law – Chapter 5

A week or so ago, I received an early Christmas gift: Bruno Latour’s new book, The Making of Law, expedited from the UK several months before its American release. I’ve been blogging about the book, offering up some very impressionistic, very tentative thoughts on it or, more accurately, my experience of reading it. In this post, I discuss Chapter 5, “Scientific objects and legal objectivity.” Other entries may be found here: Preface & Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 6.

Chapter 5, “Scientific objects and legal objectivity.”

An earlier version of this chapter was published in 2004; this version appears online at Latour’s website. Yet there is something thrilling about reading it in The Making of Law. Perhaps it is that the chapter refreshes, leading the reader to familiar terrain: laboratories, where familiar knowledge-building work is done. Perhaps it is also that the chapter leaves out the lengthy, ethnographic reconstructions of legal talk. Simply put, this chapter is the pay-off that this reader had been seeking.

“When you just see blood”: Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris, & the Double Lie of a Photo

There is a moment in Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure when everything comes together. The impossibility of the MPs task, to securely detain Iraqis; the challenges of the American task, to produce a self-sufficient Iraqi state; and Morris’ analytic project, to convince his audience that the Abu Ghraib photographs do not tell the whole story of the prison merge in a single incident: a “shootout” between a Syrian detainee, who obtained smuggled weapons from an Iraqi security guard, and American soldiers. The aftermath of that incident was photographed and a series of images that show blood, blood, and bullet holes has given the incident a permanence that it would have otherwise lacked. Indeed, I’ve found these photographs, two of which appear below the break, adorning two recent blog entries on torture. (See “Interrogating Torture” @ ONTOSAURUS and “Silence and Indifference in Response to Human Rights Violations” @ TheBentAngle.)

B. Latour’s The Making of Law, Chapter 4

A week or so ago, I received an early Christmas gift: Bruno Latour’s new book, The Making of Law, expedited from the UK several months before its American release. I’ve been blogging about the book, offering up some very impressionistic, very tentative thoughts on it or, more accurately, my experience of reading it. In this post, I discuss Chapter 4, “The passage of law.” Earlier entries may be found here: Preface & Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 5, and Chapter 6.

Chapter 4, “The passage of law.”

Each chapter of The Making of Law opens with a blurb, something like an abstract in the form of a personal note from the author to the reader. Chapter 4’s greeting is rather omninous: “In which things become terribly complicated for the readers.” The warning wouldn’t be so bad if the book itself did not also open this way (see Preface & Chapter 1) and if “The passage of law” was not an exhausting seventy-pages long.

I am a very bad reader right now. I am cast my attention too narrowly and too broadly. That is, I spend most of my time hunting for manageable quotes that I can gesture toward in my own work; I am constantly asking of this book, “what can you do for my dissertation?” And I am also reading it too generally, as a tract on social theory; that is, I am constantly asking of this book, “what do you add to ANT and how does this change sociology?” I am missing the vast middle and what this book is, in fact, mostly about: law. And from here on in, I won’t pretend to be catching, comprehending, and reflecting on what this book possibly means for the sociology of law. (If that’s what you came here for, go away to Levi and Valverde’s review in Law & Social Inquiry.)

What photos show.

Yesterday, I came across two soc-posts on photographs. The first was SocImages post about the interactions between texts, images, and stereotypes. The second was at Everyday Sociology Blog, where Janis Prince Inniss took on the interaction between viewers’ interpretations of photographs and the “societal” context of that viewing. Both posts got me thinking about how a viewer can look a picture and figure out what, precisely, it shows. Now, I do not mean “what” in a narrow sense. Photographs are good at convincing us that what appears in the picture once existed. This is true even if we know that some photographs are, in fact, elaborate hoaxes, rather than honest depictions of objects off which light rebounded. What I am interested in is how it is that we look a photograph and understand how it came to be made. This is something like a “robust understanding” of a photograph, compared with the simpler knowledge that what appears in a photograph once existed in front of a camera. What we want to know is this: What events arranged those light-bouncing objects in that pose and at that moment?

It is a truism of the visual social sciences that this sort of knowledge is not readily apparent in the photograph itself and that our understanding (in that robust sense) of a photograph is generated within some context. This is what Inniss means when she references the “societal” context of viewership. This is implicitly what SocImages entry tells us, since it suggests that cognitive stereotypes profoundly influence how we make sense of what an image shows. I am, however, terribly uneasy with this truism. Not because it’s wrong, mind you. But because it’s so slippery. What, precisely, is a “context of viewership”? What does it include? The SocImages post would lead us to count cognitive stereotypes, which must somehow also be cultural, as part of the context of viewership; the study to which the post points also suggests that the text surrounding images is, in fact, a weaker contextual influence than are those stereotypes. This is an important observation, as scholars, perhaps betraying their commitment to language over the visual, have tended to emphasize the significance of the text surrounding a photograph to viewers’ interpretations of an image. Morris does this, playing with the captions on the infamous images Colin Powell used in his address to the U.N. Security Council.

Iraq as IHOP - Errol Morris & the power of captions.

Beyond the politics of torture

In April of 2004, America discovered Abu Ghraib. To be sure, the discovery was a belated one; evidence of abuse in Iraqi prisons had been available for months. Indeed, a full months before CBS would run its award-winning report on Abu Ghraib, the Boston Globe published a 1200 word story on American detention facilities in Iraq. The article recounted the story of one former-detainee, Khodair

a 55-year-old cafe owner, colorfully recounted to a half-dozen men packed in his dark, half-underground bedroom on a recent afternoon how he was forced to sit on his knees in the sun for 10 hours before his first interrogation. “It was just like hell,” he recalled.

“Nothing has changed since Saddam,” Khodair said. “Before, the Mukhabarat [secret police] would take us away, and at least they wouldn’t blow down the door. Now, some informant fingers you and gets $100 even if you’re innocent.”

But, of course, “it is the photographs that give one the vivid realization of what actually took place. Words don’t do it. The words that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane, all of
which is true—that it was blatant—you read that, and it’s one thing. You see the photographcannot help but be outraged” (Rumsfeld to the Senate Armed Services Committee, May 7, 2004).