Richard K. Sherwin (New York Law School) has posted Law as simulacrum: Legitimation is the heart of the matter on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The heart of the matter concerning the proliferation of visual evidence in a society of techno-digital spectacle is both the crux and its normative key. It is above all a matter of mediating singular transcendentals to stop the incessant digital flux that relativizes truth, meaning, and values – blurring them into an equivocal flow of normatively equivalent affective intensities.
Digital programming for optimal outputs cannot replicate presence – which is the legitimating and authenticating source of the real. Social media’s conflation of truth and fantasy as well as value and counterfeit value (which is to say, affective intensity for its own sake) is toxic to the rule of law. Only something capable of transcending and hence normatively stabilizing the incessant transformations of immanent reality, can properly perform the work of law’s legitimation – or, for that matter, the authentication of digital simulacra that purport to visualize, but more likely serve to impugn what is real.
Recommended.
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