Stacy Douglas

Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial (1925) plunges an unsuspecting young man into the brutalities of bureaucracy, when one day he wakes to find himself charged with an offense he knows nothing about. His attempts to fight this injustice lampoon the opacity and absurdity of legal proceedings, though his inability to defend himself is far from comic.

As a professor of legal studies, Stacy Douglas draws on her expertise to comment on the ways that legal codes operate on the presumption of always being right, rather than existing as a malleable (and fallible) social contract. This means those who find themselves in alternative positions—even unknowingly, as Kafka’s protagonist did—are automatically deemed wrong.

Douglas tackles the implications of this misconception in Law Is Aesthetic: Trope. The first chapter in this quartet of videos combines examples of the trope of abruptly finding oneself on the wrong side of the law with footage of news anchors describing turns of events as “Kafkaesque.” The coinage repeats in the second installment, in which an individual who has found themself at odds with the law reads sections of Canadian case law that use the same term. A third video follows the rehearsal of Douglas’ one-act play, Waiting for Law—a riff on Samuel Beckett—, which charges two protagonists with the crime of both waiting and not waiting, neither of which is allowed. The final video presents love letters on “counter-monumentality,” a central thesis of her academic work.

Text: Kate Sutton