Just published: Bildformen des Rechts. Juridische Schauplätze technischer Bilder (Bildwelten des Wissens, 21, 2026)

The recently published, open-access Issue 21 of Bildwelten des Wissens, edited by Katja Müller-Helle, Claudia Blümle, and Tom Holert, is the result of a collaboration between the research center Das Technische Bild and the Department of History and Theory of Form at Humboldt University in Berlin, along with several contributors from Terms and Conditions. The Legal Form of Images, the long-term artistic research project of the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin. Among the starting points of Terms and Conditions is the observation that an increasing juridification of the cultural and artistic field correlates in an uncanny way with the impression that large parts of the legal order of liberal democracies—from the separation of powers to international law—have been eroding for some time. Thus, the contributions in this volume, titled Visual Forms of Law. Legal Scenes of Technical Images, ask: How are these seemingly contradictory developments reflected in contemporary visual culture? Is there such a thing as a specific “legal form” of images and, complementary to this, “visual forms” of law?

Among the proponents of such a line of inquiry is the Soviet legal scholar Yevgeny [Eugen] Pashukanis. In his magnum opus General Theory of Law and Marxism from the 1920s, he introduced the concept of the “legal form” as a complement to that of the “commodity form,” as the “ratio scripta of commodity-producing society.” Some fifty years later, the literary and legal scholar Bernard Edelman took up the thread and applied Pashukanis’s theory of the legal form to the legal history of photography and film. A disruption of the law caused by the emergence of technical-industrial images, as traced by Edelman in the 1970s, can now also be studied in the present. Harun Farocki and Hanns Zischler explored this upheaval as early as 1975 in Filmkritik.

With contributions by Noam M. Elcott, Sven Lütticken, Gertrud Koch, Joseph Vogl, Maayan Amir, Yasemin Keskintepe, Elisabeth Niekrenz, Felix Reidenbach, Ines Schaber, Marlene Militz, Fabian Steinhauer, and Cornelia Vismann.

From the editors’ preface:

“[…] the contributions to this issue deal with the media and visual conditions that the institution of law has always had to contend with and must increasingly contend with. As is well known, some court proceedings are so heavily shaped by the imperative of visibility that they are called show trials. Forms of tribunals that were committed to the principle of heightened mediality are being revived on social media as public pillories, as investigations, trials, and convictions conducted on-screen by non-state actors. In allegorical depictions of Justice, however, she is traditionally blindfolded. The law is thus supposed to be blind to the illusions of visual rhetoric in order to focus entirely on the evidence, arguments, and pleadings presented orally and in writing. This ideal of the law’s lack of imagery, however, could and can be realized only in the rarest of cases. Even the spatial arrangements of the judicial system—the architecture of the courts with their desks and podiums, stages and galleries, robes and wigs—presuppose a multisensory perception of legal proceedings—and simultaneously organize it. For cultural studies scholar Cornelia Vismann, who has devoted much of her research to the “media of jurisprudence,” this also raised the question of how much sovereignty the subject would retain if subjected to a “cultural-technical examination.” For what would happen if one were to grant objects and media a “place commensurate with media-theoretical insights”? But “object-oriented legal concepts” are also subject to criticism for shifting the blame onto the weapon used in the crime, which is why one reflexively returns to the fiction “that every action belongs to an acting subject.”