Bodies in the Water: On Reading Images More Sensibly

Abstract

This essay deploys three modes of reading the relationship of visual art to law. In the first or objective mode of representation, we are attentive to the external referents of the artwork. In the second or subjective mode, we turn our attention to the internal or constitutive effects of the artwork – the way such depictions constitute affective relationships to legal and political power. In the third or critical mode, the ambivalence between “subject” and “object” effects unleashes the critical potential of the artwork. These three modes are each connected to different ways of understanding ideas of sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy. Analyzing J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship, I show how the three modes of reading interpret the painting differently and position the viewer differently in relation to it. But the representation of drowning bodies in the water is not merely an historical phenomenon. On the contrary, the ideological construction of images of drowning is an important issue around the world – most notably in relation to the figure of the asylum-seeker or refugee. Here too it is argued that the potential exists to develop a critical mode of reading these images, and to engage with them in ways that reorient our affective response from pity to responsibility, from mercy to justice, and from common sense to uncommon sensibility.