Desmond Manderson

Metamorphoses: Clashing Symbols in the Social Construction of Drugs

In order to understand the nature and intensity of the debate over the reform of “drug” legislation, it is necessary to appreciate the aesthetic forces which influence attitudes to this question, and the symbolic meaning which is attached to the imagery of drugs. The “war on drugs” is a war about emotional imagery and contested symbols, and in particular about the idea of the boundary—a matter crucial to the metaphysics and social organization of Western society. At the same time, it will be argued, it is the failure to recognize that we are dealing with the symbolic realm which bedevils both drug users and legislative policy. The reification of symbols causes and perpetuates the very problems that are intended to be solved. In their fetishization of the objects of drug use, the law and the addict are far more alike than one might think.

Possessed: Drug Policy, Witchcraft and Belief

When our friends and family behave irrationally, indulging in fears and behaviours that even they agree are dysfunctional, eventually we stop reasoning with them and send them to an analyst instead. It is their irrational impulses that need to be understood if they are to change. After 50 years of prohibition, we know that banning heroin has not worked. Yet, still we persist. The question is why. It is time to psychoanalyse our drug policies, searching for the irrational fears and anxieties that lie at its heart. We find a surprisingly helpful parallel in another series of laws from long ago: the Witchcraft Laws of the sixteenth century. Entwining the two stories together, this essay argues that our drug laws are not intended to get rid of drugs, any more than the Inquisition wanted to ban the devil. The crime of possession is the sin of being possessed.When our friends and family behave irrationally, indulging in fears and behaviours that even they agree are dysfunctional, eventually we stop reasoning with them and send them to an analyst instead. It is their irrational impulses that need to be understood if they are to change. After 50 years of prohibition, we know that banning heroin has not worked. Yet, still we persist. The question is why. It is time to psychoanalyse our drug policies, searching for the irrational fears and anxieties that lie at its heart. We find a surprisingly helpful parallel in another series of laws from long ago: the Witchcraft Laws of the sixteenth century. Entwining the two stories together, this essay argues that our drug laws are not intended to get rid of drugs, any more than the Inquisition wanted to ban the devil. The crime of possession is the sin of being possessed.

The first loss of freedom: early opium laws in Australia

The article considers opiate usage and legislation in nineteenth century Australia, focusing on the contrast with contemporary laws controlling drugs of addiction. It then goes on to consider the first laws which prohibited the use of a particular drug for non-medicinal purposes, concluding that the origins of the opium prohibition laws had nothing to do with the health risks involved with drug use or dependence, but were rather a reflection of racism and a consequence of political expediency.

Socialisation in a Space of Law: Student Performativity at ‘Coffee House’ in a University Law Faculty

Working with ideas of performance and performativity, the geographies of law, and the sociology of the legal profession, this paper reports on a study of the microgeography of a social space in a major Canadian law school, and, more specifically, questions what it means to be a law student there. ‘Coffee House’ at McGill University Faculty of Law is a weekly social event sponsored for half the academic year by prominent Canadian law firms who supply free alcohol and food to the students attending in an effort to ‘brand’ their firm. These events contribute in different ways to the socialisation and identity of the law students present. We argue that a performativity of what it is to be a McGill law student heading towards corporate success begins to be structured through the repetition of a range of performances undertaken in this space.

Mikhail Bakhtin and the Field of Law and Literature

This essay takes as its focus the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, a leading literary theorist who has, to date, received relatively little attention in the field of law and literature. Central themes in the work of Bakhtin include the dialogic quality of the novel and its ethical implications, its commitment to singularity and context, its comprehensive critique of authority and, tying all of these features together, the importance of form and style to our understanding of the experience of literature. These themes all pay attention less to the subject-matter or content of particular works of literature than to its historical trajectory, its distinctive characteristics, and its approach to language. This is perhaps one important way in which Bakhtin’s approach is distinct from the focus on ‘‘narrative’’ which is so much the staple of law and literature writing. The novel’s ‘‘heteroglossia,’’ as Bakhtin puts it – its irony, ambiguity, and ‘‘doubleness’’ – is neither a serendipitous features of certain texts nor a secondary element of normatively driven ‘‘story-telling,’’ but structural and stylistic characteristics of the novel as such. Bakhtin thus problematizes the treatment of narrative and the authenticity of voice assumed in much of the standard literature. While Bakhtin brings to these arguments an unprecedented sweep and command of detail, and a highly distinctive vocabulary for analysis, his arguments parallel the work of the other twentieth-century writers on literature. In particular, writing at the same critical historical moment, Bakhtin’s claims are echoed in D.H. Lawrence’s own essays on the novel, and illustrated – indeed, performed – in his fiction.

Making a Point and Making a Noise: A Punk Prayer

Recent scholarship in the new interdisciplinary field of law and music has done much to explore the relationship between these two cultural forms, in terms of force and meaning, history and structure. More must now be done to show how they matter to one another, how music can charge a social conflict with political urgency and color it with a distinct emotional timbre. The future lies in developing these research trajectories still more intently: towards the embodied and sonic dimensions of music on the one hand, and towards its contemporary relevance on the other. Such a discussion would have to be alert to the places and times in which music inserts a kind of pressing aesthetic note into the political and juridical process. And it would have to think the aesthetic, the legal, and the political in connection with one another. These propositions are explored through a case study of the trial of Pussy Riot in Moscow during 2012. While the prosecution chose to present the group’s actions as a species of ‘religious hatred,’ the defense characterized them as engaging in ‘political dissent.’ But neither adequately capture the role and meaning of the music and aesthetic elements of the performance of the three women. Yet these were integral to Pussy Riot’s actions. While the trial achieved some recognition as a political trial it deserves recognition rather as one of the great trials of modern art.

“As if” — the Court of Shakespeare and the Relationships of Law and Literature

The Shakespeare Moot Court is a form of serious play that inspires participating legal and literary students and professors to think about interdisciplinary in a new way - by doing it. Members of the Court apply their analytical and argumentative skills to the task of creating the law of Shakespeare, tackling matters of public concern such as same-sex marriage, crimes against humanity, and freedom of religion. In the course, senior Law students and graduate students from English team up to argue cases in the “Court of Shakespeare” (where the sole Institutes, Codex, and Digest are comprised by the plays of William Shakespeare). The Court involves students (as counsel) and Shakespeareans and legal scholars (as judges) in a competitive and collaborative form of play whose object is to engage with Shakespeare’s plays in order to render judgments concerning particular contemporary legal problems. In the first part, this essay reflects on critical practice in Shakespeare studies and the argues that the legal model of the moot court offers this practice dimensions of accountability, corrigibility, and temporality which are essential to the future of the critical practice of literary studies. Above all the Shakespeare Moot Court provides a new and necessary way of restoring Shakespeare criticism, or some significant part of it, to the public realm. In the second part, the argument is reversed. The literary conceit of the Shakespeare Moot Project serves to dramatize that literature’s very different orientation offers to the world of law a vital reminder that the question of judgment is always imbricated in the character, experiences, and subjectivity of the judge. This perspective, which was indeed universally understood as integral to the exercise of judgment, whether literary or legal, in Shakespeare’s time, seems in many ways to have been forgotten or sidelined in most modern understandings of law. For the literary theorist, the “privatization” of literature from the late eighteenth century on has obscured its role in public discourse, as the first part argues. For the legal theorist, as the second part argues, the “publicization” of law from the late eighteenth century on has obscured its connection to personal responsibility. The two arguments together demonstrate that the Enlightenment’s project of defining and dividing disciplines - allocating the realm of public action to law and that of private feeling to literature - has come at the cost of the relevance of one and the humanity of the other.

Trends and Influences in the History of Australian Drug Legislation

In this article the author briefly traces some features in the emergence in Australia of legislation controlling “dangerous drugs” such as opium, morphine, cocaine and heroin from 1900 to 1950. It is argued that, in common with other similar countries, the first laws prohibiting the non-medical use of drugs were enacted as a symptom of anti-Chinese racism and not out of any concern for the health of users. It is further argued that later laws, which built upon that precedent, developed not through any independent assessment of the drug problem in Australia but rather in response to pressure from the international community. Australias unthinking acceptance of the growing U.S.-led international consensus relating to “dangerous drugs” influenced legislation, policy and attitudes to illicit drug use. The structure of drug control which emerged incorporated and promoted the fears, values and solutions of other societies without any assessment of their validity or appropriateness.

Memory and echo: pop cult, hi tech and the irony of tradition.

Much contemporary writing about law treats popular culture as a creature of modern technology and the phenomenon of mass media. This misunderstands both its continuity with traditional forms, and the precise differences that modern technology creates. Popular cultural representations of law and justice appeal to a longstanding tradition evident in familiar archetypes of cowboys and superheroes. Indeed, such a tradition reaches back to much older Christological models of justice and subjectivity, which modernism has deflected but never destroyed. On the other hand, hi-tech media embeds those traditions in technologys language of passivity and its strange but insistent erasure of the past. Under conditions of the contemporary world, popular culture appears not as the memory of past thinking about law, but as an echo. The irony is that while popular cultures presentations of law appeal to a substantive tradition, their formal hyper-modernity not only negates that past but undermines the pluralist and discursive openness which are its well-spring. In a world shorn of faith in the traditional structures sustaining the ‘moral economy’ and a moral legality, the appeal to simply trust in an inarticulable justice opens the prospect not of salvation but of legal tyranny.

Modernism and the Critique of Law and Literature

Abstract ‘Law and literature’ suffers from two besetting weaknesses: first, a concentration on substance and plot and, second, a salvific belief in the capacity of literature to cure law or perfect its justice. The first fails to question the Platonic ideal that the purpose of art is mimetic. The second fails to question the romantic ideal that the purpose of art is to heal the world’s wounds. Too often in opening a dialogue with law we fail to capture the real experience or worth of literature—a worth irreducible to either the morality it ‘stands for’, or to the coherence or harmony it promises. Indeed, the aesthetic ideals of modernism, which so dramatically altered the landscape of literature, philosophy and politics around the turn of the (twentieth) century, reject just these claims. Modernism—to be more sharply distinguished from ‘modernity’ than it often is—produced instead a heightened attentiveness to questions of style, form, and language, and to questions of diversity and subjectivity in voice and perspective. Modernism cast off the aesthetic ideologies of mimesis and romanticism and opened up claims of truth, progress, and perfection to the destabilizing subtlety of irony. This essay’s focus on modernist irony, with particular attention to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, suggests a very different orientation and defence of ‘law and literature’.