Volume 14, Issue 1 - Focus: Digital Ontology and Epistemology: Between Law, Literature and the Visual Arts

Truth is never self-evident or based on ocular proof alone. It has to be based on an argument and, thus, to be shaped for communication, which makes knowledge with a truth-claim a social phenomenon that can only be obtained through a complex mediation of theoretical preconditions, research technology, interdisciplinary collaboration and significant financial investments. Moreover, it is always disseminated in a politically charged context through complex media platforms, today ranging from journals and monographs to social media. The contemporary debate on truth-claims, and thus on ontology and epistemology, often lacks historical perspective beyond its contemporaneity nurtured by the debates about fake news. Yet, the awareness of the lies and fake knowledge this modern complexity may release was clear already in the emerging modern entanglement of science and culture during the Enlightenment, before electronic media. A reading of the comedy “Erasmus Montanus” (1731) by Ludvig Holberg serves as a case in point.

Cultural institutions save most of their digital-born and digitalized content within the digital sphere. In doing so, they rely on cloud computing and servers, barely taking into consideration that this infrastructure may fail one day. Furthermore, the institutions seem to factor out that these attempts may be related to profound changes in the digital objects. Our paper aims to explore this situation by focusing on sustainability within the digital realm. In the deliberate process of saving born-digital content, should we run the risk of inadvertently losing the content’s individual character itself? Should we embrace the possibility that dynamic content might be transformed into purely static data – ceasing to be relevant for users? How can we find a solution, set between archiving and the continuous promotion of digital culture? Might it be, that born-digital cultural heritage is not made for storage? Has the eager preservation of cultural heritage become a historical oddity that will not last the test of time, due to its nature?

The question asked in this article is whether the rapidly increasing digitization of the law provides improvements to or detriments to justice. I suggest that the reality is that legal digitization has so far proven to have a negative impact on the delivery of justice. We may say that digital justice is a threat to the rule of law.

This article addresses some of the risks involved in the uses of information technologies such as profiling and data mining by means of the German jurist-philosopher Juli Zeh’s dystopic novel Leere Herzen .

This paper addresses the issue of posthuman bodies in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go against the background of organ transplants and prosthetic surgery. The novel posits a number of questions about what qualifies a human being and/or what distinguishes a human being from a clone, suggesting that art, perhaps, might be a discriminating factor. Further, it also raises questions about the kind of regulation should be applied to organs “donations,” especially when they are not voluntary, but part of a programmed response inscribed in someone’s DNA. Accordingly, the last section of the paper will investigate the social impact of the exploitation of the clones and the medico-legal issues pertaining to it.

It is obvious that AI is marking its entry onto the global scene. Anyway, since any AI is supposed to perform a task in such a way that the outcome would be indistinguishable from the outcome of a human agent working to achieve the same task, it is more and more difficult to recognize its presence in our daily life. Issues of transparency and ethics are crucial not only to be aware of the presence of an AI, but mostly to know how the algorithm is actually working and to verify the ‘quality’ of its dataset. It is important to realize that only the engineers know what an AI does, even if it enacts actions in real life. For common people, and even for regulators, it may turn out to be a digital voodoo that goes far beyond their understanding. Who does what? That is the question. The first part of the essay discusses the claims of “digital philosophy” (or “digital ontology”) under the light of legal analysis. The assumption that humankind and “intelligent” machines share the same digital/algorithmic ontology (as parts of an all-encompassing “digital universe”) could deprive the law of its ethical and emotional foundations. A sound regulation of both the circulation of digital information and AI requires adequate knowledge of technology (transparency) and the capacity to make ethical choices based on wide social consensus, in order to safeguard the fundamentally “human” nature of the law. The second part of the essay is an inquiry into AI as a machine-writing system, that is into the capacity of an AI to produce literary texts. Three examples will be discussed and a comparison to electronic literature will be pointed out. What seems to be fundamental is the idea of a literary output stuck on the very moment of its generation (process of writing) which is conceived by the reader as an anaesthetic experience. More than creativity, it is the perception of creativity that rules such literary works. This literary production can make readers aware of the power of an underlying algorithm.

Thinking about the whatness of the Law in the digital era means to return to question its ontological abyss and its metaphysical violence. The essay rests on the idea that Law, to declare or to command, to condemn or to absolve, needs a material medium of communication that allows its sensible perceptibility. At the same time, the concrete appearances of the Law in the public sphere are partial and paradoxical: they are haunted by an ontological excess that resists against a conclusive form of mundane apprehension. Forensic Iconicity is the expression coined to figuratively depict the structural ambiguity between ostensibility and concealment that marks the Law’s presentialness. The aim of the work is to explore the transmutations and the displacements of the ancient bodies of symbolic representation of the Law up to the current dispersion in algorithmic sequences and digital traces. Moreover, according to the view proposed, the unresolved relationship between the abstract prophecy of Law and its physical precipitate has been captured and explained by the means of different paradigms, moving from political theology to algorithmic angelism.

The article aims to focus on the rhetoric of TV-series. Utopia , Homeland , and Occupied , are thus examined in their characterizing traits, being all constructed via the epistemic filter of a fear-eristics that often produces an oversimplified propaganda jargon linked to a racist imagology. How these digital, but ontologically guided, rhetorical strategies then work with populism is made clear in the essay.

The present paper concentrates on the foundational and conceptual basis of the interdisciplinary endeavor of Law and Literature and contributes to an interdisciplinary concept of text. The concept of text must be considered as one of the basic concepts which lie at the heart of both involved disciplines. By departing from a concept of text inspired by literary studies (Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and others) the paper sets out to sketch the characteristics of a concept of text for Law and Literature and suggests adopting practice theories and social semiotics for this purpose. The French group Oudropo,, ‒ a group of mainly legal scholars who playfully deconstruct existing legal documents ‒ serves as a very successful, and rare, example of law as literature and illustrates convincingly the practical application of an interdisciplinary concept of text.

The Merchant of Venice contains a puzzling passage by Lancelot Gobbo that refers to Ash Wednesday and Easter Monday, two dates in the Christian religious calendar. The passage is nonsensical, yet it is a commonplace that the utterances of Shakespeare’s clowns are often noteworthy. This paper notes that Lancelot refers to an unusual four-fold coincidence of Passover with Easter Monday, the former on the correct Gregorian calendar, the latter on the outdated Julian calendar. The interpretation is tested and leads to the determination of the dramatic time of the play which with other evidence from the script suggests that the paschal moon of 14 Nisan 5357 (April 2, 1597) is a crux of the play. The resulting timeline is consistent with events in the script and leads to a new interpretation for Old Gobbo’s dish of doves. The timeline leads also to a solution for a question on equity and the law.