Abstract
The introduction to a special issue of Law, Culture and the Humanities on “Goodrich’s Law,” which critically engages and celebrates the scholarly corpus and conduct of Professor Peter Goodrich.
I. The Emblems of Peter Goodrich Have Been Lost in the Post
Once upon a time, the eminent visual historian Valérie Hayaert manifested on ‘the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay’. 1 She was visiting the Scottish city of Dundee to give a lecture at a university there, the topic of which was the allegorical anatomy of our good Lady Justice. 2 While present in material form, Dr Hayaert visited my humble home for dinner, whereupon she presented me with two original drawings. Each was an emblem of the inimitable Peter Goodrich, whose law is the subject of this special issue. As a witness, I can honestly attest to their matter and inscription, the weight and texture of the papery substrate that held them, the impression of their lines and the presence of the spaces they delimited. They were, your honours, real: they were material images that existed and were available for sensory encounter – and encounter them I did.
I dutifully photographed the images with my phone, under good and even lighting, creating dematerialized copies of them in digital storage, ready for relay and inclusion in Dr Hayaert’s paper for this very issue and its journey through the variable rigors of journal production. Like Mike Teavee in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the images survived this process but in diminished form; you can view the results in Dr Hayaert’s contribution. Dr Hayaert then took the real images, the material insertions into the visible that staged certain qualities of Professor Goodrich, and popped them in the post to le grand Pierre himself.
Peter, as it happens, lives in New York, which is in a number of respects a long way from Dundee. During its travels, the package of images was lost. Misplaced, diverted – undelivered. The emblems have been inscribed and transmitted, but they will never arrive, and we are left only with their digital shadows. The emblems of Peter Goodrich have been lost in the post. They cannot be reached, and have been replaced, cancelled and overwritten by their digital remains.
II. A True Story
The above anecdote, dear reader, is a true story. It is true both in its factual accuracy and its quality as itself an emblem. Its narrative features, its beat and plot, figure and unfold the dominant themes of the scholarly corpus and conduct of Peter Goodrich. It is an anecdote of images and emblems, of originals and copies, of amity and scholarship, and of messages and their deferred or deformed arrival. Across his vast corpus of work, Peter Goodrich has encountered and elaborated upon and around these themes, amongst others, as central concerns. Whether in the critical question of how we make legal meaning out of the sources available to us as evidence of an absent law, 3 in the breaking open of the dogmatics of legal language, 4 the traditions and images of law’s grammatologies, 5 the diagnoses of law’s repressive madness, 6 the recognition of law’s articulation of disregarded jurisdictions, 7 the exposition and interrogation of emblems of legality, 8 the manifestations of judicial madness, 9 the critique of jurisliterature 10 or the clinical examination of visual images in judgments, 11 Goodrich’s work engages questions of the transmission of law and legal discourse. He is concerned with messages and their arrival, with the hermeneutic of legality, the encounter with its available forms and the images and imagination these encounters make available. And, moreover, with the relations between subjects both within and beyond legal structures – the sinews of the social that messages administer.
III. Goodrich’s First Law
According to Goodrich’s First Law, the quality of conversation is inversely proportional to the number of people in the room. 12 The ideal speech situation – to misapply Habermas 13 – is talking to oneself. Once we start sending messages to other people, the unpredictable interferences of hermeneutics and the matterphorical architectures of discourse get in the way. The signal immediately starts to degrade, and the meanings of the message vanish into the infinite potentials of the immaterial. Emblems are the primal site of articulation – the moment that images are thrown inside (emballo) the visible order, staging their presence and revealing fundamental or radical features of their subject. 14 To send a message requires, at a fundamental level, the revelatory process of the emblematic. Emblems, however, do not present their content in unmediated form; they merely “reveal” in the sense of veiling (velare) the thing (res): they show by hiding, draping the concept or principle, the information or epistemic structure, with the perceptible costume necessary for subjective perception. 15 The immaterial is given a perceptible shape by the dust sheets of form. The initial message is already corrupted, altered and mediated – as Goodrich’s law indicates.
The non-arrival of an emblem, however, is a more profound problem. It is a failure at the very outset of visuality, a failure to manifest or appear at all. The emblems of Peter Goodrich, lost in the post, remain invisible, yet to manifest, still to come, always deferred, circulating unseen, orbiting out of reach beyond the visible world. The poor digital copies begin by coming back, referring to an absent and inaccessible source, a cancelled original that structures the authority of that which we perceive and shapes our imaginings. The “lost emblems of Peter Goodrich” thus itself becomes an emblem of Peter’s relentless thematics. Yet this special issue aims to be emblematic of Peter Goodrich in multiple ways: not only in the most obvious way of explicitly containing Dr Hayaert’s curated collection, but in itself being a collection of visual manifestations that signal and set alive thematic streams of Goodrichy fervour, animating critical thought in numerous directions.
While my editing of this special issue has necessarily unfolded within the circumstantial limitations of its venue, I have sought to generate for my assumed audience a collection that at once manifests sufficient resources for the imaginal construction of Goodrich’s central themes and concerns, and the revelation of the explorative inheritance that his work has bestowed upon subsequent study, and incorporates a number of texts that play with or challenge the conventional format and style of academic texts, such as those typically found within the (now digital) pages of Law, Culture and the Humanities. Goodrich’s legacy, in its refocusing of concern with form and appearance, means I could spend many hours regaling you with intricate details of the journal’s font choices, which consist of Gill Sans (for headings and abstracts) and Times New Roman (for body text). These are quite possibly the two worst choices available, both on an ethical and political level and for a home of supposedly critical texts. Gill Sans, for instance, was lovingly crafted and contoured by the sculptor and infamous sexual abuser Eric Gill, 16 embodying his preferred sense of form and desire. Times New Roman, meanwhile, was created as an imperialist facilitator of capitalist exploitation – compressed to fit more news per square yard for The Times newspaper to maximize profits, and constructed from a historical pastiche that suppresses the individuality and difference of letterforms within the colonial impetus of print capitalism 17 (Gill Sans, as it happens, is also bound up with the British state 18 ). But I won’t go on about that. Instead, the challenges to format in this special issue are to be found in the imagined content of some of the texts, rather than their visual form per se: a short story, an emblem collection, a contract. Such transgressive seasoning augments the flavour of this collection of texts that, while examining ideas that seek to break open the conservative dogma of the legal discipline in different ways, otherwise follow more typical scholarly and academic conventions.
IV. A List of Emblems
The proceedings open with a short story about mice. Not just any mice, but the little mouse assistants attached to the pedagogical office of Peter Goodrich, given form and gravitas by Deepak Unnikrishnen. Following such mythic fabulations – emblematic and interpretively open, gesturing in multiple ways towards features of both Peter’s character and his execution of academic office – I have quite selfishly located my own paper. I have done this because, of all the papers, I felt (modestly, of course) that my own was unequivocally the best general introduction to the wide corpus of Peter’s work, which can be challenging to the uninitiated and infuriating to the dogmatic. My paper thus seeks to map the dominant overarching themes of Peter’s work, drawing only from evidence found in the archive of his published materials – themes that resolve, or so I presume to claim, to a concern with the (in)visible. It does contain a rude word that I quoted from one of Peter’s papers (which he had already quoted, second-hand, from another source), so watch out. Hopefully, the disclaimer that the publisher felt necessary to include will protect you from any offence and ensure you give the word due attention whenever it arises.
From here we move to the explicit emblems of Valérie Hayaert – incorrectly located as the third paper, rather than prior to everything else as is typically demanded by the logic of emblemata. Hayaert not only provides a disquisition on emblems but also applies her expertise to expound upon the now-vanished emblems of Goodrich for her audience, articulating his central features of critical vision and critical generosity. By the time we get to the fourth paper, we resolve to something more traditional: an excavation by the eminent lawyer and commentator David Campbell of some actual legal doctrine found in Peter’s work, namely his conception of contract law. A doctrinal focus, as the peer reviewers helpfully observed, that is out of line with common understandings of Peter’s work, which many associate not with core doctrine but with either a distracting irreverence or a rich critical hermeneutics (as if “critical hermeneutics” wasn’t just another way of saying “contracts”). Campbell thus presents an important corrective, highlighting that Peter’s work actually (and quite scandalously) can be seen to be in line with traditional common law doctrine. Turns out Goodrich is a lawyer after all.
The fifth chapter, eruditely compiled, drafted and navigated by the ascendant Ben Goh, provides a focused examination of one of Peter’s most overt symptoms: his book Oedipus Lex. Goh reads the book alongside Freud’s oneiric monograph, unpacking the medial psychoanalytic of legal analysis that opens through the window of legal forms to the strange distortions and potential of the legal unconscious. Continuing the psychoanalytic theme, the gently powerful Serene Richards provides a scholarly examination of Goodrich’s Legendrean inheritance and the images and fantasms that the corporeal of law – the existential and embodied forms of institution and conduct – enable us to encounter and that Goodrich’s thought brings into focus, heightening concern with the bodily as a minor jurisprudence.
Who knows what may manifest from the unconscious or the invisible? The invariably dapper punk crit Adam Gearey, however, realizes that the law provides not only resources for managing social relations but also for encounters with the spooky and the unknown. Applying Goodrich’s concern with the (in)visible, he interrogates law’s doctrinal responses to hauntings and other nocturnal bumps, clarifying the resources available to upstanding legal subjects and the formulae to be followed in the event of the dead manifesting or finding oneself in possession of a property infected or infused with poltergeists. Hauntings, of course, are not only corporeal – they are also intellectual. One of Peter’s erstwhile students, the professionally astute Cecilia Gebruers, takes the time to set out the unspoken presence of Goodrich’s thought in her work on intersectionality and her experiences of Peter’s execution of his academic office – namely his role within the academy as a friend and facilitator, an opener of doors. After which we have Swethaa Ballakrishnen’s rich, rewarding and radically reorienting engagement with amity and non-romantic forms of relation, drawing on Goodrich’s amity and the visual archive of popular television – a paper and a scholar of such erudition as to be without need of introduction, but, as this is already an introduction, now has one anyway.
Well, after all that, the only ending available is a contract. A legal titbit to sate the doctrinal desire so far only glimpsed through the obfuscating relays of analysis and exposition. Not just any contract, however, but a multi-partite love contract – drafted, made evident in (disappointing) typographic form, and offered for signage, by that other inimitable legal pragmatist: Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. A categorically lovely ending.
V. Punctum Manifesta
And so, the only thing left is the punctum: the period, full stop, or other demarcation that ends the sententia of the text. 19 In our case, it is a response from none other than Professor Peter Goodrich himself – or, at least, some visual artefacts that stage the historical and now-vanished presence of his thought and body, his dreams and madness, the whirls of his fingers on the keyboard impressing his symptoms into the digital substrate.
VI. Ad infinitum
I thus depart this introduction with good wishes to you, dear and intrepid reader, as you embark upon your journey through the typographic theatre of this special issue. Suppress, if you can, the legacies of corruption embodied in the typefaces, and orient your hallucinations towards the progressive immaterial architectures their visual prop enables. Ideas and doctrines and concepts and methods that, in their generosity and excoriation, seek to counter everything the typography repeats. It is hoped – perhaps with futility, but no less enthusiastically – that this special issue will act both as an introductory and critical guide to the work of Peter Goodrich and as its critical relay and reanimation for friends and scholars alike who may already be acquainted with Goodrich and his legacy – one way or another.
