The observer actant in the contemporary legal discourse: a semiotic meditation*

ABSTRACT

The sensorial access to the law that a society grants to its members is underpinned by a logic of exhibition and disclosure that, in turn, results from a more abstract cultural propensity to either transparency or opacity. Through investigating the systems of signs by which the functioning of the law is either concealed to external audiences or manifested to them in a more or less spectacular way, one can gain a firmer grasp on the juridical aesthetics of a society. This semiotic approach entails two advantages: on the one hand, the possibility to compare and contrast different regimes of disclosure and secrecy in the synchronic dimension, connecting the discourse of the law with other – apparently distant – types of discourse, adopting the same aesthetics of transparency or opaqueness in other domains of social life and discursive production; on the other hand, the opportunity for a more insightful intelligence of the diachronic development of such aesthetics, so that it may be interpreted as the long-term byproduct of historical watersheds in the history of culture. The article, in particular, proposes to link the socio-pathology of anorexia with several other practices and texts of present-day culture that adopt the same rhetoric of transparency in other discursive arena, including that of law. In all these sign productions, indeed, the trend that predominates is one that, adhering to an ideology of immediacy and transparency, pretends to eliminate all filters, all hindrances, but also all material signifiers that would mar the purity of the content. Although this utopia cannot correspond to any actual semiotic state – for any content needs a material expression to be conveyed – it nevertheless exerts a powerful influence on the present time, until it manifests itself in extreme forms of ‘transparentist’ radicalism.