Richard K. Sherwin (New York Law School) has posted Presence and Obligation: Why Techno-Digital Spectacle Cannot Legitimate Law’s Claim To Power (International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication: From Text to Semiotics, Anne Wagner, ed., (Springer) forthcoming 2026) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Law’s legitimation takes place within a field of wonder and sacrifice. Wonder comes when we feel the presence of uncontainable excess, a powerful and always incompletely assimilable sense of meaning and value. When a community, or a state, names that excess – which is what charters and constitutions are for – it stakes a claim to collective identity. Constitutional naming, and the legacy it generates, binds a nation in an act of collective responsibility for what is named.
Without wonder the rule of law becomes self-validating. But self-validation lacks transcendental reference. Law’s authority remains immanent to the legal system itself. So, if rules of recognition and validity are nominally posited, on what basis could we judge one legal system to be illegitimate or immoral as compared to another? More troubling still, if wonder in the face of something transcendent (law’s extra-legal source) is a prerequisite to legitimation, how could any legal system devoid of transcendent value call itself legitimate?
The contemporary crisis of legitimation is particularly acute in the currently dominant attention economy where acts of social and commercial exchange online endlessly re-produce mutating forms of identity (the ‘branded’ or ‘profiletic’ self)cast in the image of consumption. This incessant digital semiosis, which the society of techno-spectacle aspires to normalize, provides no place or opening (‘khora’) for the advent and ensuing expressive mediation of an excess out of which foundational constitutive values and beliefs acquire temporal form.