Vasconcelos Vilaça on Files, Dust, Law

Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) Law School, has published Files, Dust, Law. Here is the abstract.

The promise of modern law stems from the fact that all necessary data – both about law’s operations and the world – can be retrieved, a fact that in turn crucially did and does things in the world, namely shaping our existence as subjects, our expectations of justice, and the actions available to us. It is a model of both reality and our powers of agency. In turn, these features imply that law, law’s files, law’s dust, and law’s archive, trigger affects both privately and socially. Seeing law as a miniature archive room in which actors live and play according to certain rules then is a metaphor of law’s complex workings in social life. One can come to the realization that law is archive in a multitude of ways and experiences, but the bottom line of the chapter is that this leads to a serious interrogation of law’s place and existence in the world. Herein, I offer an account of my own encounter with the law, files, dust triad by means of an aesthetic examination of “disappearance”, a horrific widespread phenomenon that became a sprawling cultural category and form. I focus on disappearance seen from the legal system itself, that is, as a “lost file” and the performative and constitutive effects that files, and especially “lost files”, trigger for subjects and systems alike. I work through these themes by means of an intertextual analysis of Cristina Rivera Garza’s book “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” and one of Rafael Cauduro’s murals located in the Mexican Supreme Court building entitled Procesos Viciados. Contrasting these works brings to the fore the feeling that files are there to be chased after, picked up, deployed, stored, and sometimes forgotten and lost, constituting at the same time the terrain for and the subject of the performativity of the search. Uniting them, there is the physical element of “dust”, an atmospheric particle that, for files (but also very real physical searches), links past, present and future forcing us to confront our existence in disparate registers. Through this interaction, files, ultimately, force legal systems to witness the affective nature of disappearance and search alike and the potential of law’s archive and counter-archive to channel alternative politics of affects. Finally, I consider some potential consequences of the coming loss of the “dusty file” image and rise of digital archives in which our relationship to files, folders, archives starts to be mediated by our dust conduit in a new nature and texture. To put differently, what will it mean to search for law’s documents, for law’s authoritative narrative of the time that matters, and the historical expectations we attached to law, when this search will take place fully in the virtual world? How will we feel if the chain between folders, file numbers, and files works without any primary link to the “real” archive, one that by definition has to exist in a different medium?

Download the article from SSRN at the link.