The Global and International Studies Program would like to announce our third Contemporary Trends in Global and International Studies speaker, Dr. Connal Parsley (Lecturer in Law, Kent Law School, UK), whose presentation “Global Spectatorship: the Power of Appearance and the Construction of Authority” will be given on Thursday, April 7th at 4:30pm in Rm 2017, Dunton Tower.
Abstract:
What is the role of spectatorship in relation to sovereign power in a global media economy? Do images of sovereign power still have a role in securing sovereign law’s political authority? Commentary across the disciplines has embraced the ‘global turn’, especially when it comes to discussions of the spectacle and spectatorship. But very often these welcome analyses, which foreground new conditions of political life and enable us to think through the new ethical problems they raise, move away from the question of state power and nationalist political consciousness in favour of the vocabularies of network, economy, locality and materiality. Taking as its dual starting points the global media image and the imaginary foundation of legal systems, this lecture suggests that the global legal imaginary cannot do without the old image of sovereign power. I will contest the Foucauldian orthodoxy that the theatrical reiteration of sovereign power simply disappeared, to be replaced by discipline, surveillance and a logic of epistemic visibility. But has the image of sovereign power remained unchanged? Through a series of contemporary examples of the display of sovereign power, I consider how political conditions—as well as material conditions for the production and viewing of images—result in a transfigured image of sovereignty, and a ‘micro-theatrics of power’ that is fit for a global legal imaginary.