Abstract
Administrative—judgment on the nature of judgment—conflict between Judges in judicial practice—claimant (Judge Anderson) challenges the judicial capacity of respondent (Judge Dredd)—claimant open and fluid in judicial style—respondent certain and authoritative in judicial style—insights from Psi Division on the role of judgment in the universe—whether respondent is a good judge—whether judgment closes down meaning—whether respondent is inhuman—whether judges are inhuman—whether judging is horrific—insight from twentieth century fiction on the place of humans in the universe—horror of HP Lovecraft—suppression of horrific cosmic context within judicial institution—suppression for the good of society.
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Notes
The first Judge Dredd narratives, published in 1977, took place in the year 2099. Since then, time has progressed in the diegesis of the Dreddian narrative world in step with our ‘real’ world. Hence, the date this paper was delivered at the ‘Seeing Law’ workshop (7 December 2015) corresponds to 7 December 2137 in ‘Dredd time’. The main text of the judgment is presented here as it was delivered at the workshop, with only minor amendments. I have then added theoretical elaborations and discussion in the footnotes.
As indicated in article note, in the diegetic world of Dredd the Sydney-Melbourne Conurb is the Australian Mega-City; it is encountered most directly in the Oz series [34]. The ‘Seeing Law’ workshop where this paper was delivered was hosted by the Law Futures Centre, Griffith Law School, Gold Coast, Australia; hence, this judgment is being handed down in the leading Australian Mega-City. On the level of the judgment’s fictional coherence, it might be speculated that a case between officers of one Mega-City would likely be heard by Judges in another Mega-City in order to maintain impartiality. So, although Dredd and Anderson work mainly in Mega-City One, their dispute is being dealt with in the distant Sydney-Melbourne Conurb. In the world of Dredd, however, such concerns of impartiality and of taking seriously an attempt to question judicial authority would likely not be given much serious consideration, if any—more likely, Anderson would be submitted for psychiatric testing, as happened to Dredd himself when he uncharacteristically questioned his own judgment; see the three issue mini-series starting with ‘A Question of Judgment’ in [33]. Indeed, in that mini-series Dredd was diagnosed as being a fallible human rather than an unbending conduit for legal rule, a problem that all the hard training, enrobing, and masking of Mega-City judges has never been able to fully eradicate: ‘No matter how hard we try to control it, sooner or later the human being behind the mask always starts to come out. Even in a street-hard Judge like Dredd’ (‘A Case for Treatment’ in [33]). But we should not let this undermine the fruitfulness of considering the question of judgment in the form of a judgment between the opposing views of Dredd and Anderson. The judgement here, in fact, comes to represent a reflective activity that is precisely at odds with Dredd’s dominant ‘hard-line’ judicial style that Anderson seeks to question.
Dredd and Anderson do not get along very well. Dredd is hard-nosed, authoritarian and ‘by the book’, while Anderson is more ready to understand and forgive and use her judicial powers lightly and with discretion; their jurisprudential positions can thus be seen to coincide with the respective characters of the two Judges. As an initial illustration, here is a brief interchange between Anderson and Dredd on the nature of psionic vs street judging, found in [11]:
Anderson: Sorry I can’t be more specific, but that’s how it is with psionics. It all runs on hunches—feelings—guesses…
Dredd: Fat help that’ll be!
This paper does not consider directly the question of legitimate use of force, although it is the case that the world of Dredd is a very violent one. Indeed, the fact the judicial side-arms carried by all Judges are called ‘lawgivers’ is testament to the level of violence and force that is utilised in the enforcement of Mega-City justice. The violence of law has been much discussed elsewhere (for an overview of Sarat and Kearns’s work, for example, see [29]), including in relation to Dredd [18], and is not consciously added to here. The issues in this judgment are the epistemological connotations of Anderson’s opposition to Dredd in terms of their general judicial attitudes and contexts, rather than the specifics of their respective uses of force.
On Judge Fargo and the rise of his ‘Judge’ system, see notably [35].
Desmond Manderson expresses this point clearly, and in its deep cultural contexts, in his extended analysis of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are [21]. Sendak’s story is steeped in the myths of the West, Manderson claims, and re-tells the civilisation processes of human history in the tale of a child’s encounter with rules and judgment—with law. In the place where the wild things are, the protagonist Max recreates his mother’s rule when he orders the wild things to cease their rumpus, but not her judgment. In place of the self-centred desire to keep everything ordered and the same, Max comes to understand the recognition of otherness, difference and ethical subjectivity necessary for responsible judgments, a movement Manderson styles as one from hunger to love: from the desire to consume the world and turn it into self, to respecting that which is different from the self. To be responsible is to recognise difference, to engage with the particularities of a situation, not simply to obey or reduce to sameness. As he explains: ‘A rule can never capture the complex process of judgment… To be responsible is precisely to respond to the particularities of a situation, and to make a choice in relation to it. Merely to apply in rote fashion the words of a rule is no exercise of responsibility at all, because it involves no decision at all; it is, in fact, to claim that one's hands are tied. No one would ask a machine or the wind to act responsibly.’ [21: 123]. See also [2: 961].
Manderson also notes this point, recalling Derrida’s observation that interpretation and judgment must always be retrospective and in some sense ‘unmandated by the past’ [21: 107]. As Derrida expresses it: ‘To be just, the decision of a judge, for example, must not only follow a rule of law or a general law but must also assume it, approve it, confirm its value, by a reinstituting act of interpretation, as if ultimately nothing previously existed of the law, as if the judge himself invented the law in every case.’ [2: 961]. This ‘originary’ element inheres in each judicial decision; every judgment is caught between following the past and creating out of nothing [2: 962–963]. Parallels may also be drawn with practices of improvisation in Jazz music in the interplay of freedom and constraint (see [22]). In the process of decision, then, the previous statements of law are put in a state of suspense in order that justice can take place in the present case (rather than the mere ‘mechanical’ application of pre-existing rules).
See the ‘Satan’ storyline in [11].
See the ‘Contact’ storyline in [32].
‘Helios Part 2’ in [10].
Statement made by Judge Dredd in [32].
Peter Goodrich is the twenty-first century academic who applies Nietzsche’s work to legal texts in this way [see 8]. Highlighting Nietzsche’s love of the text as a philologist, Goodrich argues that he disliked the tendency of jurists to read for the purposes of closing down and reducing meaning—of coming to ‘the interpretation’—rather than opening up and expanding the rich potential of a text. Steeped in their dusty tomes in the library, not out engaging with the world, Nietzsche held the textually-constituted world of the lawyer in little regard. Indeed, the fact legal texts constitute a world increases the importance that they should be read properly—slower, in more detail, with more attention to language and possibility. But this goes against the practical necessities of legality: ‘Jurists tend to flee from indexicality or simple multiplicity of the text. They tend to take the short route, the rapid interpretation, … the literal reading. But it is hardly a reading at all … There are literal meanings, to be sure, but they are several and then one has to add the symbolic and the imagistic, the poetic, the cryptic, the chronic, and the chronological.’ [8: 197]. Any ‘final’ reading, such as that required by a legal judgment, is necessarily limited—it excludes, denies, overlooks, ignores or represses all other possible readings.
Dredd’s ‘instant justice’ on one level does away with justice itself, at least any justice that is predicated upon notions of due process. In Dredd’s world, there is no due process as detective, jury, and sentencing judge are rolled into a single being [15: 927]. This compression of justice into a single instant can be seen as a regression of law to its primitive, foundational form [15: 932–933]. Such a regressive mode of justice, as noted in the main text (and in article note), was instituted as a response to an increasing pace and density of life in a future filled with technology and urban sprawl. The irony, of course, is that such a response—arguably designed to counter the criminogenic problems of a vast but compacted urban society—becomes part of the speeding up of life as the world becomes increasingly technologised. The judicial process speeds up, trying to match the pace of an accelerating world in order to manage its similarly accelerating crime rate.
In meaningful opposition to Goodrich, Derrida notes that, despite the ability to potentially engage with texts and judicial decisions without end, a decision must be made with ‘urgency and precipitation’. Such a point of decision is thus always incomplete and thus not the consequence of previous knowledge—it is a creation, and ‘always marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it’ [2: 967]. And in the high action world of Dredd’s street patrols, he ‘is not a thinking cop but an actor. Action defines and motivates his character as the primary, defining, and only characteristic’ [15: 927]. The ‘instant justice’ of Mega-City One does away with thinking and leaves only action; it omits the preamble of deliberation and moves the judicial process toward a system of mechanistic application of rules rather than judgment. And herein lies much of the satirical work of the series: the right wing, hard-line policies that Dredd parodies are seen to be a shift away from true justice, towards a non-reflective system of the meaningless application of rules.
See note 2, above.
Hence Derrida’s assertion that we must make a decision (see note 14, above).
‘Beyond the Void Part One’ in [10].
Here we see perhaps the first glimpse of the inclination of the Judge in this case to refuse to truly see or hear the epistemological arguments made by Anderson. Although there appears to be real consideration of her arguments, the Judge is still hampered and biased by the judicial position and capacity, and thus works at all points to preserve the power and authority of the judicial system. This becomes abundantly clear in the final stages of the judgment, even against the cosmic and supernatural abyss Anderson brings to light.
Selfhood and personhood are very large topics, and not engaged with in this paper. For an extended analysis of personhood in law, including the tensions between the formal legal concept and the complexity of philosophical, metaphysical and religious perspectives, see for instance [27]. In a law and comics context, issues of law, selfhood and posthumanism in The Ghost in the Shell are examined in [3], and the legal personhood of zombies is considered via The Walking Dead in [31].
A thinly veiled allusion to the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’—the traditional hypothetical ‘reasonable man’ of English law—transposed to a Mega-City context (the Sky-Rail is the main public transport system in Mega-City One).
The police officer’s uniform, for example, has been argued to operate in a way akin to a ‘Rorschach’ ink blot. Rorschach blots do not necessarily hold any meaning in themselves, but work by inspiring fantasy and projection in their observers that enables analysts a glimpse into their psychological processes. Police uniforms similarly can be said to inspire fantasy and projection in the people encountered by officers, enabling such state agents to operate with authority and coercion without needing to always resort to persuasive conversational and other tactics: see [28]. In many ways, the judicial image, particularly as expressed in formal portraiture—an artistic medium that is intricately tied in with the formation of the identity of the modern subject—represents not simply the individual judge but the identity of the institution to which they belong: ‘Judicial portraits are also state portraits’ [25: 95], and employ ‘an aesthetics that negates individuality’ [25: 96]. The judicial costume can thus be seen as displaying the enduring, sovereign authority of the judicial office, rather than just the mortal body of the individual wearer, arguably in a manner akin to the ‘two bodies’ of Kantorowicz’s sovereign: see [26: 300].
The ‘plain texts’ of law are often taken to be clearer and more certain in their meaning than the uncertainty of images that have more fluid interpretations available. (Note [7], which traces the history of the repression of visuality within the legal institution.) But both text and image require interpretation, and both have a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty in what they mean. Although it is the general position in law that the text is primary, with images at best an elaboration upon and assisting the communication of the text, Peter Goodrich argues that images are integral to the operation of legal texts: see [9]. Note also the broader debate over the distinction between text and images that feeds into longstanding ideological and cultural debates (see [23]).
To a large extent, the visual sexualisation of Anderson’s female embodiment varied with the artist depicting her. Some have treated Anderson in a much more sexual manner, such as Brett Ewins who seemed obsessed with the curve of her buttocks at every opportunity, to the point where her physical positioning to gain the ‘best view’ of said derriere took precedence over depiction of her fight for survival and embodied pain of suffering of physical injury (see, for example, ‘Four Dark Judges’ and ‘The Possessed’ in [10]). Others, meanwhile, presented a much more sophisticated and realistic Andersonian figure that depicted her as a living character within the diegesis, rather than an embodied object of desire to be displayed. See, for example, Arthur Ranson’s work in ‘Triad’ in [10] and ‘The Protest’ in [11].
As a visual institution that works to negate individual difference in favour of sovereign uniform (see note 21 above), the appearance of the naked judicial body is a radical challenge to the authority and objectivity of the sombre pronouncements of judicial law. As Les Moran phrases it, the tradition of common law judicial portraiture literally ‘puts the sitter’s sexuality out of the frame’ [25: 97]—sexuality and the sexual body are no part of conscious law-making, and this institutional repression follows through to the portraiture that also refuses to depict it. However, this absence is not a simple disappearance of the sexual body, ‘but a key dimension of its mode of public appearance and operation’ [25: 94]. The de-sexualised appearance of the judge can be argued to actually depict a sexuality that falls in line with the values and virtues of the institution being depicted, thus making their sexuality seemingly invisible [25: 97–98]. But exposing the female sexual body of the judge discards the institutional trappings of the judicial image, making the sovereign body invisible in favour of the individual body. It brings to the foreground the process of clothing, covering and masking that the judicial costume employs in its institution of the judge. The sexuality of the judicial body is no longer a hidden presence within the institution, but an overt one that challenges and ruptures the institutional image.
In Legendre’s psychoanalytic jurisprudence, the institution of law—in particular as an institution of text—divides the subject from themselves. The law addresses its subjects via a sacred discourse, ‘a discourse that is undisclosed, of what is, for the subject himself, inaccessible’ [17: 183]: the subject is divided from the taboo and illegitimate, a division that the legal institution constitutes and that the subject integrates into him or herself as a lack. ‘[T]he subject is not everything’ [17: 183], there are dimensions of the self (and the world) beyond the instituted text, but which we are divided from as we enter into language, and into the institutional order of language. As legal subjects, as beings constituted in law, we are alienated from ourselves. See, generally, [17]. Anderson’s argument is that this alienation is a dehumanisation: we are separated from our living humanity, from the fluidity and excesses of life that cannot be captured in rational and textual legal discourse—the mask of the legal subject, of the legal actor, does not show the ‘living face’ of the human. See also [16], in which Legendre explores similar divisions on a more epistemological level, whereby law becomes something inscribed upon a ‘screen’ that separates and protects us from the ‘speechless void’, from ‘the fantastic beyond of institutions’: ‘To establish [legal] foundations is to erect a screen to protect us from the void. Upon this screen are inscribed all the historical and mythological stories of the world’ [16: 254].
In ‘Contact’ (in [10]), the extent of this totalising dream is made overt when Dredd (at the behest of the Grand Hall of Justice) attempts to arrest the newly arrived interstellar travellers in order to commandeer their travel technology, and thereby ‘open up the whole universe to Mega-City law’. (See also note 11 above.)
Again we see the judge in this case betraying institutional leanings (see note 18 above). These are considered most directly in the following section.
Judge Anderson has tackled a huge number of monstrous and supernatural enemies, from evil psychic humans, demons and ghosts, to the Devil, aliens, and the infamous Judge Death (see, for example, [10]). Judge Death is worth highlighting, as he is something of an ‘arch enemy’, and represents the uncanny horror of the hard-line authoritarian law espoused by Dredd and the Mega-City One Justice Department. Judge Death comes from a parallel dimension where all life has been judged as guilty (without life there can be no crime, runs their logic). He is, in many ways, satire built upon satire—the literal destruction of life by law, critiquing the denial of the fluid, living dimensions of humanity in Dredd’s tough, unemotional judicial stance. Whilst Anderson’s more open and engaging judicial style may enable a more meaningful engagement with human life, it is worth noting that even she cannot ultimately destroy Judge Death, who often returns to haunt her. Having said that, episodes like that where Anderson communes with the ‘astral twin’ of Mega-City One, encountering the ‘city mind’, the psychic background and the suffering of the Mega-City that the Judges mostly exacerbate, should be remembered (see ‘The Protest’ in [11]); they are emblematic of Anderson’s ability to see the problematic effects of the authoritarian Judge system in Mega-City One.
Note that even ‘normal’ human crime is not fully amenable to bureaucratic administration. See in particular the phenomenological criminology of Jonathan Wender [37], who explores the existential dimensions of the reduction of crime ‘on the streets’ to the administrative categories of law and justice. In a comics context, Batman can be seen to navigate the epistemological edge of the rational order of justice [4, 5]. In many ways, the ‘unconscious’ order of ghouls and ghosts that Anderson works in is symbolic of the phenomenal life that remains excessive to the rational order of law, just as similar tropes found in genre horror represent the limits and transgression of the knowable world (note [30: 49–97]).
Just as the Legendre’s legal institution protects us from the ‘speechless void’ of the ‘beyond of institutions’ [16], as noted above (note 25).
As his narrator-character states in The Call of Cthulhu: ‘I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life’ [19: 91]. Lovecraft’s fictional method is one that, rather than simply populating our world with ‘monsters’, works to re-imagine the foundations of the world and thereby create a deeper, more profound horror. He believed that ‘we must show the everyday banality of [life] … undercut from within, by subverting the background conditions’ of normal life [13: 22]. The horror Lovecraft works to evoke thus transcends our mundane existence, and becomes something that challenges the very grounding of the human world. He steps outside the modern remit of reason and language, and thereby becomes something of a postmodern writer—despite his location in the heart of the Victorian period [1: 33]. The features of Lovecraft’s worlds ‘intrude into our otherwise familiar universe and thus imply something which is beyond, which cannot be told’ [1: 10]. In this way, as Lovecraft brings forth the existence of gargantuan beings indifferent to the human world, dwelling within an endless and inhuman cosmos, one becomes ‘a flea on the back of creation, wholly irrelevant, beneath the notice of the greater forces that populate the universe’ [20: 49]. This infinite context of endless and indifferent otherness challenges the meaning of human existence as something that is irrelevant in the universal scheme of things, and that will ultimately be engulfed by the sun and cease. The judicial project, as a human project within this disturbingly broad context, is thus profoundly challenged, particularly in its claims to objectivity and (moral) truth.
Timo Airaksinen argues that the transcendence of boundaries in Lovecraft’s work—his moving outside the order of language through techniques of allusion and the overloading of description to a point where the limits of text are unavoidably encountered (a technique Airaksinen calls ‘unwriting’; see [1: 91-95])—means that his work has no unconscious: once ‘unwritten’, a text ‘may recognise no constraints whatsoever’ [1: 104], not even the boundaries between consciousness and unconsciousness. Airaksinen argues Lovecraft’s work reverts to a childlike, pre-sexual state, thus explaining the supposed lack of sexuality in his stories [1: 104]. But this avoidance of sexuality can also be understood as precisely an exercise in repression, with the monsters of the ‘beyond’ becoming a return of repressed urges in a different form. This is precisely what Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows argue explicitly in their graphic novel Neonomicon [24], with one character eloquently pointing out: ‘You know? The monsters and all that? They’re like a lot of cocks and pussies crawling round.’ [24: np] (see also [12: 269]). The Lovecraftian horror of the infinite cosmos breaking through into our mundane existence can thus be configured as a return of the repressed: the coming to consciousness of our futile place in the universe, and the futile place of law.
‘Judge Corey: Leviathan’s Farewell’ in [10].
In Legendrian terms, Corey and Anderson have both seen through the ‘screen’ that protects us from the ‘speechless void’, and recognised the division (and thus profound lack) inherent in the institution of life. The Judge’s point here, following Dredd, is precisely that we need law as a ‘screen’ to protect us from the fantastic beyond, the speechless void (see above, note 25)—the Lovecraftian abyss of the infinite universe that challenges law’s claims to ultimate justice. Law brings order, it enables us to codify and thus manage the world. But, as outlined in Anderson’s argument, this ‘screen’ hides that which it cannot contain, that which cannot be brought to conscious order. The Judge, exactly because s/he is a judge, similarly cannot consciously see or bring this beyond to order: it threatens, it undermines, it challenges authority and the objectivity and truth of the justice s/he pronounces and is institutionally invested in. We must suppress it, repress it to preserve the conscious order of law—and thence it becomes part of the unconscious of law.
Indeed, this conclusion is unavoidable, insofar as any conclusion can be made. To conclude otherwise is necessarily not to conclude at all, but rather to leave open.
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This judgment is based upon ‘evidence’ derived from the comics series of Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson, both of 2000AD fame. Judge Dredd was first published in the UK in 1977 as a satirical response to the right wing politics its creators saw as problematic [14, 18, 36]. It has since evolved into a highly popular on-going series. Judge Anderson was created as a spin-off series from Judge Dredd, and involves a number of interesting tensions with the masculine, authoritarian narrative world of the initial series. It is the exploration of these seemingly binary tensions, and the substantive issues raised by the series’ judicial context, that precipitated the format of this paper as a judgment, with Anderson’s fluid, psychic, feminine world bringing critical challenges to the dominant rational ideologies and epistemologies of law and justice embodied in Dredd.
The world of Judge Dredd is set in the distant future, where the devastating Volgan War has led to the building of vast Mega-Cities. It is to these Mega-Cities, which are emblematic of the dystopian world Dredd and his colleagues patrol, that the invented Mega-City LR is a reference. The largest, and oldest, Mega-City is Mega-City One, which occupies most of Eastern coast of the USA (subsequent Mega-Cities were built later, including ‘Brit-Cit’ in the UK and the Sydney-Melbourne Conurb in Australia) and is home to many hundreds of millions of citizens. Crime is a massive problem in this sprawling, densely populated urban world; in order to tackle it the Justice Department took control of government and created high-powered ‘Judges’ that operated and sentenced instantly on the streets. It is this ‘instant’ justice of essentially judicial police officers that facilitates much of the satirical critique that initially fuelled Dredd’s creation. For more detail, see [15, 18; cf. 6].
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Giddens, T. Anderson v Dredd [2137] Mega-City LR 1. Int J Semiot Law 30, 389–405 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9492-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9492-7