Chronotopes in the scopic regime of sovereignty

Abstract

The foundations of law are embedded in a cultural imaginary. The exercise of sovereignty by governments today, and how we as citizens relate to it and are constituted by it, is intimately connected to the modes and discourses through which we experience it on a daily basis. To demonstrate this argument, the first two sections address iconic images by two Australians who are among the greatest photo-journalists of the twentieth century – Frank Hurley in World War I and Damien Parer in World War II. The essay then proceed to considers contemporary and global images of sovereign violence. A comparison, not just in terms of what is represented but how, will help us articulate three different ‘scopic regimes’ of war, power, and subjectivity. In particular, we will see that the images organise differing relationships between experience and time. As Mikhail Bakhtin argued in his pioneering work on the novel, these ‘chronotopes,’ by giving aesthetic form to different orientations to time and the temporal, express and indeed constitute different forms of subjectivity. The argument is advanced in this essay by shifting our attention to visual forms and to legal subjectivity.