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Abstract
The article identifies a “corporeal turn” in the humanities and locates its implications for the politics of reading within the postmodern crisis in the legitimacy of traditional humanities approaches to culture. The powerful language of the “corpus” is also found during the same period in the staging of a confrontation over liberty between British and European legal systems. Using this as a political framework, the article traces the metaphysical resonance of the “corpus” to its origins in a theological ecology and examines the contrasting ecology revealed by the “monuments” of the unwritten English law, sustained not by faith but by fiction. Central to belief in the justice of the verdicts of this law is the separation of literal fact from legal significance and their allocation in the jury trial to different readers. The challenge of the corporeal turn to traditional approaches in the humanities is the critique of the “close” human reader as the determiner of the facts in favor of a “distant” digital reader. Rather than simply asserting the superiority of the human reader, however, it is argued that, despite their opposition, the traditional jury and corpus humanities both work institutionally to elide fictionality in their critical judgments. Nonetheless, fictionality persists in the possibility that things could be imagined otherwise, be they verdicts of law or laws of cultural history.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Malcolm Coulthard, “On the Use of Corpora in the Analysis of Forensic Texts,” Forensic Linguistics: International Journal of Language and the Law 1, no. 1 (1994): 27–42, 29.
2. I use the term as an adjective derived from “corpus,” rather than, as has occasionally been the case during the period, to refer to “body and bodily life,” to cite Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's gloss in the collection of essays she edited under the title The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), 1. I discuss the distinction between corpus and body below.
3. Important markers in each instance are John Sinclair, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
4. Some of the specific challenges are reviewed in Johanna Drucker, “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 85–95.
5. “Symptomatic reading” is usually associated with Louis Althusser and Frederic Jameson. For a critique, see Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, eds., “The Way We Read Now,” special issue, Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21.
6. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013); N. Katherine Hayles, “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine,” ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 62–79; Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
7. Hayles, “How We Read,” 63; Alan Liu, “Close, Distant, and Unexpected Readings,” paper presented at the HUMLab Seminars, Umea Universitet, May 10, 2011. Retrieved from http://stream.humlab.umu.se/index.php?streamName=closedistant//.
8. Andrew Piper, “Novel Devotions: Conversional Reading, Computational Modeling, and the Modern Novel,” New Literary History 46, no. 1 (2015): 63–64.
9. Ibid., 69. Piper's “conversional” reading might contrast with a self-image of close reading as a “conversational” mode.
10. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Examples of cases promoting the digital humanities in this context include Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?,” ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 55–61; and Cathy N. Davidson, “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions,” in Gold, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 476–89. For a critique of the project from a professional point of view in the context of the North American academy, see David Golumbia, “Death of a Discipline,” differences 25, no. 1 (2014): 156–76.
11. Gary Hall, “There Are No Digital Humanities,” in Gold, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 133–136, 134.
12. Unfortunately, the substance of Stanley Fish's accusation that the digital humanities are both “theological” and “political” is submerged by the reactionary tone and curmudgeonly irony regarding “the likes of me and […] the kind of criticism I practice”; Stanley Fish, “The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality,” The Opinionator (January 9, 2012), http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/the-digital-humanities-and-the-transcending-of-mortality/; idem, “Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation,” The Opinionator (January 23, 2012), http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/mind-your-ps-and-bs-the-digital-humanities-and-interpretation/.
13. Martin A. Kayman, “Bodies of Law and Sculptural Bodies: Writing, Art, and the Real,” Textual Practice 24, no. 5 (2010): 791–817.
14. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. [1765–69] (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979), III: 379.
15. Mireille Delmas-Marty, ed., Corpus Juris Introducing Penal Provisions for the Purpose of the Financial Interests of the European Union (Paris: Economica, 1997).
16. Commission of the European Communities, Green Paper on Criminal-Law Protection of the Financial Interests of the Community and the Establishment of a European Prosecutor (Brussels: European Commission, 2001), 61.
17. Ladislav Hamran and Eva Szabova, “European Public Prosecutor's Office – Cui Bono?,” New Journal of European Criminal Law 4, nos. 1–2 (2013): 40–58, 42. The Coalition Government in Britain (2010–15) chose to opt out of this provision.
18. Ben Taylor, “Does Brussels Have Our Courts in Its Sights?,” Daily Mail (November 30, 1998).
19. Michael Shrimpton, “Freedom's Flame Flickers,” The Times (March 23, 1999).
20. HC Deb (1999) 331 col. 1086.
21. HL Deb (2000) 613 col. 1860.
22. Jeremy Bentham, ‘Legislator of the World’: Writings on Codification, Law, and Education, ed. Philip Schofield and Jonathan Harris (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 124.
23. Anthony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 61ff.
24. Ibid., 89.
25. HC Deb (1999) 336 col. 263.
26. For example, Nigel Farage, “Innocent Until Proven Guilty? Not Under the EU's Justice System,” The Independent (November 10, 2013); and Philip Johnston, “British Justice: We Can't Allow Brussels to Lay Down the Law,” The Telegraph (October 21, 2013).
27. HL Deb (1999) col. 644.
28. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3.
29. The Gospel according to St John 1:14.
30. Ibid., 11:25.
31. For a discussion of figuration, representation, and theories of the novel, see Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell [French ed. 1998] (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
32. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15–24.
33. Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology [1957] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 196.
34. Ibid., 199.
35. Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law of England. Written by a Learned Hand (London, 1713), 23. Blackstone uses the same expression in Commentaries, III: 379.
36. Jacques Rancière, “The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics,” in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 12–19.
37. Kayman, “Bodies of Law and Sculptural Bodies,” 799–801.
38. Igor Toronyi-Lalic, What's That Thing? A Report on Public Art (London: New Culture Forum, 2012), 4.
39. See the following discussion, from one of the figures of American law-and-literature: Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
40. For the UK Independence Party, see http://www.queenjubileestatue.co.uk/aim/.
42. See http://artatrunnymede.com/.
43. For an extended discussion, cf. Kayman, “Imagining the Foundations of Law in Britain: Magna Carta in 2015,” German Law Journal 18, no. 1 (forthcoming 2017), http://www.germanlawjournal.com.
44. See my earlier discussion of sculpture and law: Martin A. Kayman, “The Law and the Statuesque,” Law and Critique 24, no. 1 (2013): 1–22.
45. The work had been commissioned by the Speaker's Advisory Committee on Works of Art for placement in the Members’ Lobby of the House of Commons and was privately funded.
46. “Man Denies Thatcher Statue Charge,” BBC News (July 4, 2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2091660.stm//.
47. R v Kelleher, EWCA Crim, 2846 (2003). For further comments from Kelleher, see Chris Marsden, “Britain: Jury Fails to Convict Man for Beheading Thatcher Statue,” World Socialist Web Site: wsws.org (December 21, 2002).
48. R v Kelleher, 43.
49. Hale, History of the Common Law of England, 25. For an analysis and discussion of the historical significance of the case, see Simon Stern, “Between Local Knowledge and National Politics: Debating Rationales for Jury Nullification after Bushell's Case,” Yale Law Journal 111 (2002): 1815–59.
50. Bushell's Case, 124 Eng. Rep., 1006, 1007 (1670).
51. Ibid., 1010.
52. Ibid., 1009.
53. Ibid., 1012.
54. Ibid.
55. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1957]), 32.
56. Ibid., 31.
57. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Verso, 2004), 148–62, 151.
58. Moretti, Distant Reading, 2.
59. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 148.
60. Ibid., 149, 151.
61. Ibid., 152.
62. Ibid., 151.
63. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 3, 9.
64. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London: 1728) [online ed.].
65. Michael Witmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” in Gold, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 324–27, 325. Italics in the original.
66. Michael Witmore, “The Ancestral Text,” in Gold, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 328–31.
67. Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie, Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 226.
68. The term “culturomics” was introduced in Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331 (2011): 176–82. For the parallel with genomics, see Eric Hand, “Culturomics: Word Play,” Nature 474 (2011): 436–40, 438. The Human Genome Project began in 1990 and was declared complete in 2003.
69. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 151.
70. Moretti, Distant Reading, 77.
71. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 29, 91.
72. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 154.
73. Ibid., 157.
74. Kim Lane Scheppele, “Facing Facts in Legal Interpretation,” Representations 30 (1990): 42–77, 43.
75. Ibid., 62.
76. Ibid., 42.
77. John H. Langbein, “Bifurcation and the Bench: The Influence of the Jury on English Conceptions of the Judiciary,” in Judges and Judging in the History of the Common Law and Civil Law: From Antiquity to Modern Times, ed. Paul Brand and Joshua Getzle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 67–82, 77. To take a pertinent example in contemporary Britain that parallels the question of Kelleher's beliefs, when the Criminal Procedure (Insanity and Unfitness to Plead) Act 1991 introduced the figure of a “trial of the facts” in the case of the accused being found unfit to plead (sec. 4A), the decision about fitness to plead remained, as it had been under the 1964 Criminal Procedure (Insanity) Act, with the jury; however, in 2004 the decision was made the responsibility of the court (sec. 22).
78. Thomas P. Gallanis, “The Rise of Modern Evidence Law,” Iowa Law Review 84, no. 3 (1999): 499–560.
79. Martin A. Kayman, The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry (New York: St. Martin's, 1986); Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1992).
80. Steven E. Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (London: Routledge, 2013), 8.
81. Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.”
83. Classically, the collaboration between Birmingham University and Collins publishers that produced the COBUILD corpus (later the “Bank of English”) and the pioneering Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary in 1987.
84. Eitan Adam Pechenick, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds, “Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 10 (2015): 1–24, 23.
85. Ibid., 2.
86. Ibid. They also point out that the corpus plays no attention to lags in publication – and also to the distorting effects of the progressive increase in scientific literature which might have only a specialized readership.
87. John Sinclair, “Corpus and Text – Basic Principles,” in Developing Linguistic Corpora: A Guide to Good Practice, ed. Martin Wynne (Oxford: Oxbow, 2005), 1–16. Retrieved from http://www.ahds.ac.uk/creating/guides/linguistic-corpora/chapter1.htm//.
88. Mark Algee-Hewitt and Mark McGurl, Between Canon and Corpus: Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels. Pamphlet 8 (Stanford: Stanford Literary Lab, 2015). Retrieved from http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet8.pdf//.
89. The most conspicuous issue here for a corpus linguistics devoted to language as a means of communication has been its historical dependence on text. For a description of the state of the art in addressing this limitation, see Dawn Knight, Multimodality and Active Listenership (London: Continuum, 2011). I should here acknowledge Knight's assistance in refining my ideas on the corpus, although with a more than usually strong declaration that the persistence of error remains entirely my own responsibility. Gratitude is also due to Silvana Colella and Ralf Grütemeier, with the same qualification.
90. For an enthusiastic example of the latter, cf. Fabian M. Suchanek and Nicoleta Preda, “Semantic Culturomics (Vision Paper),” paper presented at the 40th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Hangzhou, China, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol7/p1215-suchanek.pdf//.
91. For example, a recent study of the detective fiction of Agatha Christie decided to “assess […] the sentiment of the first mentions of the culprit in each work, using a sentiment analysis programme, Semantria, to unmask themes in Christie's word patterns and choices when mentioning the culprit”; Dominique Jeannerod, senior research fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queen's University Belfast, quoted in Ian Johnson, “Agatha Christie: Experts Discover Secret Formula to Unmask Killers in Author's Books,” The Independent (August 4, 2015). For Semantria and other tools developed by “the industry leader in translating text into profitable decisions,” see http://www.lexalytics.com/about//.
92. In the case of habeas corpus, most notorious, of course, were the attempts to deny the detainees of Guantanamo Bay access to the courts. More generally, see Larry W. Yackle, “The Habeas Hagioscope,” California Law Review 66 (1993): 2331–430. For the erosion of jury trial in the United States through the growth of plea bargaining, see John H. Langbein, “On the Myth of Written Constitutions: The Disappearance of Criminal Jury Trial,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 15, no. 1 (1992): 119–27.
93. Zachary Davies Boren, “Hilary Mantel ‘Should Be Investigated by Police’ over Margaret Thatcher Assassination Story, Says Lord Bell,” The Independent (September 21, 2014); Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and Other Stories (London: Fourth Estate, 2014).
94. Mantel, Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, 237.
95. Ibid., 240.
96. For an eloquent articulation of a similar position in a critical engagement with traditional approaches against the background in the crisis in English in the UK, see Catherine Belsey, “Does the Study of English Matter? Fiction and Customary Knowledge,” SubStance #131 42, no. 2 (2013): 114–27.
97. Liu, “Close, Distant, and Unexpected Readings.”
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Martin A. Kayman
Martin A. Kayman works in the Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy, which he joined in 2000 having spent his career thereto in the Department of Anglo-American Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He has published on law and literature in the 18th century; 19th-century mystery and detective fiction; Ezra Pound and modernist poetics; and the cultural politics of English in the world. His most recent publications have focused on contemporary theoretical issues relating to law, religion, and the visual. He is a general editor of The European Journal of English Studies.