Alec McHoul

In August 1999, Jacques Derrida gave a number of lectures and seminars in Melbourne and Sydney. The seminar of 13 August, held at Sydney's Seymour Centre Theatre, was open to the public. It consisted of a question-and-answer session with Genevieve Lloyd, David Wills, Paul Patton and Penelope Deutscher. Its title, 'Themes from Recent Work', reflected interests in the work from Specters of Marx (1994) onwards which some, including Paul Patton, have referred to as deconstruction in its affirmative phase. What follows is a by-no-means verbatim record of the event. Rather it is but one member of the audience's account of what transpired in the seminar – an account which is therefore necessarily selective and pressed through the grid of my own quasi-philosophical interests. Following this account of the seminar, I offer some marginal notes on the open discussion following the seminar, then, finally, some reflections on a particular matter discussed at the dinner which followed that – madness.

Membership categorisation analysis (MCA) is a well-accepted approach in the areas of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology―yet it is hardly known in mainstream semiotics, let alone in social semiotics; and even less so in the comparatively recent uptake of social semiotics by legal scholars. Despite this, we think the basics of MCA could have important consequences for the emergent field of legal semiotics and we try to show this here by reference to aspects of family law in Australia.

We compare here the everyday and legal readings of two controversial cases from mid-2008 in Australia in which the legal status of a number of photographs came into contestation. The first case turned on an exhibition of photographs by the well-known artist, Bill Henson; the second, a cover from Art Monthly magazine. Both cases involved young persons and nudity. Our first approach to the cases is to look in detail at ‘child pornography’ law in Australia, by reference to the three jurisdictions in which the photographs were tested. We want to tease out the actual legal situation regarding the demarcation between licit and unlawful images (in terms of their pornographic status), especially where minors may be concerned. Our second approach is ethnosemiotic. Here we investigate how non-specialist or ordinary members of the society treated the controversies. As an example, we turn to a web discussion site and describe the ethnosemiotic resources that the contributors brought into play in an effort to comprehend these matters. Finally, we speculate on the gaps and overlaps between ‘ordinary’ and ‘formal’ modes of legal reasoning based on these two approaches.

In this chapter I turn to a seminal essay by Gilbert Ryle. Here Ryle explores the possible distinctions between ordinary everyday knowledge and recondite philosophical knowledge. He uses a number of metaphors in order to achieve this including those of “morning” vs “afternoon” types of questions, and the distinction between the villager’s and the cartographer’s knowledge of the locale. I extend these metaphors by drawing on Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between the potter’s and the geologist’s knowledge of clay and use this to reflect on lay as against professional knowledges of language. The idea of a “socio-logic” of ordinary talk, from Harvey Sacks, is alluded to as a way of seeing how such ordinary talk is grounded.

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward.