Affective aesthetics and the visual culture of the high courts

ABSTRACT In ‘From the Colonial to the Contemporary – Images, Iconography, Memories and Performance of Law in India's High Court’, Rahela Khorakiwala, explores the role of visual culture of the High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. These court spaces are sites from where law exercises its power. Khorakiwala's strength lies in presenting a rich ethnographic account of this visual culture which provides an illustration for the visuality of the courts but which simultaneously as this essay shows, unsettles the relationship between law and the ocular. The following essay argues that the ethnographic account becomes a pivotal entry into examining the affective aesthetic dimensions of law. These affective aesthetic dimensions are located not merely in the dispersal of visual-sensorial narrative of law which consolidates the coherency of law, but which also makes the movement of law possible by allowing specific affective encounters to take place. In allowing such affective aesthetic encounters, law compels specific movement of bodies as well as empower itself to move beyond its own fixed location embedded as it is in a specific geography. Khorakiwala's contribution to visual cultures of law, is precisely in mobilizing an ethnographic lens to understand and broaden the scope of studying the affective aesthetics of law.