Theatrocracy Unwired: Legal Performance in the Modern Mediasphere

Abstract

Writing in the middle of the 4th century BC, in an age of mass trials and dramatically trained rhetoricians, Plato worried that Athens was becoming a “theatrocracy” – a state ruled by theatre – in which audience applause or catcalls determined verdicts and established laws. In the 21st century – with legal news, television trials, reality police shows, YouTube execution videos (etc.) shouting at us from our many screens – Plato might think his theatrocratic nightmare had come true with a vengeance. In our theatrocracy, where the media and its ever-online TV spectators can determine guilt or innocence, are the boundaries of the legal system beginning to dissolve? Does theatrocracy threaten law's “stability,” “legitimacy,” “autonomy,” and “authority,” as some have argued? Is theatrocracy a threat to nomocracy, to the very existence of law? “Theatrocracy Unwired” looks at the nature of our legal theatrocracy (from the age of television to the age of the Internet), theoretical discussions of law and media (Deleuze, Virilio, Rancière, etc.), the (antitheatrical) anxieties awakened by the swelling of the legal mediasphere, and the significance of these to the force and meaning of law.