Connal Parsley

Performing the Border: Australia's Judgment of 'Unauthorised Arrivals' at the Airport

This paper examines the process of interviewing unauthorised arrivals at Australian airports to determine whether they have a prima facie claim for asylum. Through focusing on this initial inclusion or exclusion, attention is drawn to the processes of maintaining a border. As a judgment is performed on an interviewee, so the border is augured into being. From within a postcolonial approach to the national border as a liminal enaction, the paper addresses the place of law in securing exclusion, and the place of exclusion in securing national identity. These two related tropes are considered through the language of universality which, it is shown, is an assimilative technology leaving no room for the ethics of alterity which could enable an ethical legal engagement between Australia and those who arrive at its borders in need of asylum.

Public Art, Public Law

Martin Buchhorn’s 1995 German film The Private Life Show (Buchhorn, 1995) depicts a reality TV show in which contestants win money based on how willingly, and how honestly, they lay bare the emotional skeletons in their closets. Before a live studio audience, their private lives are interrogated; slowly evinced for the titillation of the audience who, armed in their seats with high-tech keypads, award a monetary figure as ‘prize money’ for each new titbit of personal revelation. As confessional statements spiral toward an ever-truer truth about each contestant, the game show’s audience eventually confront a truth not about the contestant but about themselves. This is Buchhorn’s ‘truth’ about the danger of a desire to participate vicariously in the traumatic scenes of someone else’s everyday. Such a confrontation is forced through the climactic scene in which a contestant, so humiliated and embarrassed by the procession of his inner private life for the televisual community, snaps and makes a physical threat upon the life of the show’s host. Buchhorn’s apocalyptic vision of the immorality or perversion of public culture presents a commentary of the German public gone wrong. It depicts a public gone private, turning its attention inward and demanding the availability of the personal for public consumption as a commodity-spectacle, and rewarding it financially—money being the medium of the abstract exchange, or the gatekeeper to the public sphere where the private is now inverted, valorized, metaphorized, and commodified. If Buchhorn had to hyperbolize this process for effect, it’s because by now many viewers are, well, bored with the phenomenon already. Through constant exposure to reality television, and to the Big Brother franchise in particular, we now routinely see people who are prepared to publicly perform the conditions through which they become subjects.

The law of persons today: at the margins of jurisprudence

ABSTRACT Recent decisions have given legal identity to rivers such as Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand, and the Ganges and Yamuna in India, effectively treating them as having all the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person. Looking at such cases, in which the enduring fiction of the legal person is extended over an increasingly wide range of referents, we are reminded that this fiction is anything but marginal – especially in the law of any jurisdiction influenced, however indirectly, by Roman jurisprudence. This paper begins from the point of view that the anthropological embedding of the juridical person ought not to be anachronistically attributed to the Roman ‘law of persons’ in which its craft originated. Rather, we suggest, the well-known Christian metaphysicalization of the juridical person as a moral entity not only adds to but also transforms and displaces that law as a juristic enterprise. What is marginalized in this sense is in fact Roman laws discrete and self-conscious techniques of shaping the legal person. This chapter aims not just to highlight the familiar fate of the person under the influence of church doctrine, but also to draw a contemporary inspiration – and, more cautiously, a critical potential – from a return to a casuistic, concrete and immanent conception of the jurisprudential art of crafting the person. Rather than argue for the inclusion of excluded identities within laws categories (thus extending such categories but doing nothing to challenge the often heteronormative construction of the identities it encompasses), this chapter asks what would it mean to return to an ‘experimental’ law of persons (or a ‘profaned’ art of fashioning the person, in Giorgio Agambens sense)? Might this eventually be a path by which to liberate juristic technique to new uses?