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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
Law needs a force; without its force, it would be nothing. This article proposes a conceptualization of the force of law as affective by examining the political aesthetics of “Forensic Architecture,” a project based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The novelty of Forensic Architecture's analytical approach arises, on the one hand, from its use of technologies of power that are otherwise employed by states and their military forces—thus reversing the direction of the surveillant gaze towards a disobedient practice of seeing and sensing. On the other hand, the notion of a “force field” operates as a particular critique of European border policy. The force of law appears to merge into, and at the same time emerge out of, a complex arrangement of technological devices, legal regulations, and human actions. This essay re-traces the political aesthetics of the “left-to-die-boat” case, where a boat filled with migrants was left without any assistance despite the legal regulation that obliges obliging seafarers to rescue anyone in distress in the Mediterranean Sea. Forensic Architecture's case-work unsettles human-centered “norms of representation” typically used in critical writings on the European Union (EU) border regime; instead, the law is demonstrated to be enfolded within an affective force field that operates with “touch” and “connectivity” and that allows us to see and sense the law in a newly pluralistic manner.
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