GalleryCivilisation

Law could not have taken birth without lawyers. There was an idea of course, there was a code that had its roots in reportedly ancient rites and customs. But this code needed to be practiced, to be knead into the dough and sweat of everyday life. This practice was put in place more by the lawyers than the police, the police was just hired by the bureaucracy to give a visible face to fear. The police has done its bit, it has put up a face to match the needs of its commissioning agency, but law is but bland fodder for the police force, it couldn't care less. They do not memorise the entire code, with its numeric short reference digits. They just upkeep the dominant social notions of acceptability. If it is OK, it is legal as far as they are concerned.

The lawyers fabricate the whole web of legalese we live in, by actively pursuing their victims and by upholding the value of knowing the law at all. Law is a monopoly, contracts are prepared by lawyers, read by lawyers, negotiated by lawyers. No one in the middle gets a foot in. It might seem that law only encodes the moral, ethical and fair-play concerns of people. It might seem that law has no mind of its own and blindly follows the desires expressed, it might seem that law is a just a language with a syntax and a context. But that is not true, law has a will, it has a spirit, it has eyes which spew blood on everything it sees. Both the flip sides of life in a law-bound society are created by the existence of the code and its enactment by the community of lawyers.

A little bit more needs to be known. This lawyer I know gets up in the morning and peers into the urban landscape for any leak of crime that she can plug. Plugging leaks of crimes only leads to unspent, pent-up criminal energy to throttle the system. If you want the establish a minimum base-line for a ethical way of living, you have to minimise the extent of things that law has something to say about. You have to let systems reach a level of animal equilibrium. The flaw is that even when you have laws you know that as long as you can conceal incidents well, breaking them is not a problem. Breaking a law doesn't render you unfit to be a human in the first place. Human-rights of criminals are still intact. The intrinsic ability to follow not a social code but a code of the species is missing or as yet unrealised in humans. Law as a beautiful tapestry that exhibits the genetic makeup that informs our nature does not exist. That would be a law that would inspire social pride. I mean we would go out on Sundays and look at that tapestry.

Also, accepting as a received fact that everything that advances through time in a species helps it survive, has value for the evolutionary project; then what is the evolutionary benefit of not having a code of the species? How does it help humans to be able to do anything as opposed to being an animal that does what it does? How does it help humans to have law?

Friction is breath. We don't mean in the physics-is-fun sense, meaning to celebrate the wonders of nature and the profound meaning in each subtle tangent of how the world operates. Maybe we would, on some other day, in some other exhibit at the museum, it is surely worth doing that. But here we are talking about friction in a different way. In the sense of the social discord, in the sense of the distance, the sync between what is there in our heads and what is there on the screen or in the mirror or maybe even sitting in front of us, not being there. There is no sync. There is no ball and socket, no grease to soften the screeching and scratching of surface on surface. And that is the reason we are alive.

Imagine a more well-oiled inter-personal nexus and you might be looking at the forthcoming extinction of the species. When we say friction is breath, we mean it. This friction is apparent in multiple forms. The displeasure we feel when we think about the fact that we occupy space on the same street, sometimes in the same bus, sometimes working on the same things is immense. It is such that, for an instant we even get shaken off the the ground we are stationed on, we have an encounter with insecurity and do the unpardonable offence of introspection. It is like our negative space, our shadow has come alive and we do no not take it very nicely. Friction between two surfaces is the force which caused the discovery of fire. What did the friction between figures and entities cause us to discover?

Only our smallness, the depths to which we can fall and never rise, the dark side.

The social was actually first prototyped and proposed as a system of conventions to blur this friction. Once this blur was applied, the job description of selectively making instances of friction visible and coherent became real. Different people fill this job description at different times. There are even modes of conversation in which reports of friction are shared.

For some this friction is the sole descriptor or art, literary truth, journalistic merit. For others there is something else well above this. For some friction is the only way of figure and ground separation, for others that separation is rendered in view by default. No work needs to be done.

The verdict is an organ that civilisation grew to replace the bite. Bite here holds both meanings — the jaws that close on food or on threat, and the phrase that stings the listener — and the verdict is civilisation's attempt to borrow the sting without the jaws. An animal bites what it eats and what it fights. The bite ends a matter because the body has ended it. Civilisation noticed, at some point in its long ascent away from the animal, that the sting of the bite could be produced by a mouth without the body that would make the sting answerable. The production is the verdict.

The verdict is a word that pretends to do the work of a body. It says of a thing that the thing is bad, or good, or unworthy, or admissible, and then it stops. Nothing happens. The sentenced thing continues. The person who passed the sentence has moved on to the next thing. The verdict leaves no mark on the world beyond a small disturbance in the air. This is its design. A bite would be answerable, a bite would bleed, a bite would require that the bitten and the biter agree at least on the fact of the encounter. The verdict requires no such agreement. It has been issued before the encounter has had time to finish. And because it has been issued and not received, it accumulates. Verdicts pile up in the cultural record without any corresponding change in what they were issued against. A verdict on a painting from 1892 can still be read in 2026 while the painting continues to do whatever paintings do, untouched by what was said of it. A verdict on a human being from twenty years ago can still be carried by the one who passed it, while the human being has become a different arrangement of matter that the verdict no longer applies to, if it ever did.

The mouth that issues a verdict receives a small pleasure for having done so. The pleasure is not mysterious. It is the feeling of having closed something without having to touch it. The feeling is continuous with, and counterfeits, the feeling of having bitten — the moment after the jaws release, when a matter is over. A mouth that issues several verdicts a day begins to live in this counterfeit of completion. The world outside the mouth is left as it was, but the mouth reports back to itself that work has been done. This is the verdict's principal domestic function. It does very little to the world and a great deal to the one who issues it, which is why it is so hard to stop.

The ear that receives a verdict has no such pleasure available to it. A bite would have been legible; the person struck would have known what had happened and could have arranged a response. A verdict is not answerable in kind. The ear has no teeth. The person cannot bite the verdict back, because biting it back would require that the verdict have a body. The person cannot ignore it either, because the verdict has been placed in the air and will hang there as long as the mouth that issued it is remembered. The damage of the verdict is this exactly: the person is left with no way out except to open their own mouth and issue another verdict, which has the same form and will hang in the air in the same way. One mouth produces another mouth by not being answerable to the first.

The verdict is not the first organ civilisation grew from the mouth. The curse came first, and the oath, and the blessing — utterances that claimed to do something to the world without biting it. The earlier mouth-organs at least conceded that they were working through a god, a force, a fate — that the effect would arrive by some path other than the teeth. The verdict has dropped the concession. It claims no intermediary. It simply says and expects the world to move. In this it is the most refined of the family and the most absurd. What began as a ritual acknowledgement that the mouth could not, unaided, act on the world has become a piece of equipment used as though the mouth could act on the world all by itself.

The earlier entry on animals, a few doors down, claimed that the direction of evolution had been reversed — that animals are ahead of us and we are the deep far end. We can now name what they are ahead of us in. They never grew this organ. They kept the bite and refused the verdict. When an animal's mouth opens, what comes out is a sound that is part of the world or a set of teeth that rearranges part of the world. It is not a report on the world, and it is not a sorting of the world into kinds. The mouth stays in contact with what is there. Our mouths, by contrast, have spent the last several thousand years learning to open on commentary — on what is there restated as a kind of thing, and on that kind of thing declared fit or unfit to be the kind of thing it has been restated as. The commentary is continuous. The contact has receded.

And so the verdict takes its place in this shrine. A desire that has outlived its object. An organ that stings without touching. A ghost that hovers over our mouths as we prepare to speak, daring us to issue it one more time, as though this time it would finally land.