How Does Justice Sound? Enunciative Modalities, Law’s Logos and Woman’s Voice

In the throes of her mimetic exposure of the lie of phallocratic discursive unity in 'Speculum of the Other Woman', Irigaray paused on the impossibility of woman’s voice and remarked that ‘it [was] still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables.’ Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don’t understand. After all, she said, ‘they never have understood.’ (Irigaray 1985, 143).

That the law has never understood a uniquely feminine narrative is hardly controversial, but that this erasure continues to have real and substantive consequences for justice is a reality that feminists have been compelled to remain vigilant in exposing. How does the authority of the word compound law’s exclusionary matrix? How does law remain impervious to woman’s voice and how might it hear woman’s voice? Is there capacity for a dialogic engagement between woman, parler femme, and law?

This paper will explore these questions with particular reference to the experience of women testifying to trauma during the rape trial. It will argue that a logically linked historical genealogy can be traced through which law has come to posit itself as an originary discourse by which thinking is very much conflated with being, or in other terms, law is conflated with justice. This has consequences both for women’s capacity to speak or represent the harm of rape to law, but also for law’s ability to ‘hear’ woman’s voice and objectively adjudicate in cases of rape. It will suggest that justice requires law acknowledge the presence of two distinct and different subjects and that this must be done not only at the symbolic level but also at the level of the parole, syntax and discourse.

Pitfalls in Strategic Planning: Lessons for Legitimacy

The paper considers how planning as a political activity is underpinned by concepts of justice and how professional practitioners are consistently faced with making ethical choices in the public interest. The key objective is therefore to identify the centrality of ethics in praxis. In this context, political liberal theory is empirically useful in exploring both the role of participants and the processes employed in strategic planning. A case study analysis generates key issues which are relevant to planning in the wider arena and an extensive series of interviews provides interesting insights into the dynamic between those involved and the effectiveness of procedures followed.

Conundrums in Conservation: Complexity in Control

The departure point for this investigation is to highlight the centrality of regulation theory as a praxis in planning enforcement. The value of the conceptual framework is demonstrated by application in the problematic arena of conservation regulatory compliance, where there is currently a dearth of investigation. It is evidenced that this thematic approach provides a lens to scrutinise problematic areas of control and provides a deeper understanding of the difficulties faced by planning enforcement operational practice generally and heritage regimes specifically. The utility of the proposed mechanism is that it remedies the current well documented pitfalls of disjointed, piecemeal strategies by providing a framework for robust, coherent decision making not only in planning but in the wider regulatory arena.

The Musical Body: Devising a choreo-musical interpretation for the work Tierkreis (1974-75) by Karlheinz Stockhausen

In this chapter the authors explore a practice-led approach to understanding the role of the body in music performance.

Many writers have discussed the body in music performance, in improvised music, as well as in electronic music. In this chapter the authors offer new modalities of reflection on the musical body in the interpretation of existing contemporary repertoire. Specifically, the authors discuss a re-interpretation of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's musical work 'Tierkreis'. Through the development of a specifically physical approach to the performance, the authors investigate the intrinsic relationship between the body and the music and point to an under-explored modality, which is not a musical choreography, but a choreography that is shaped through the musical body itself. It is a modality in which music itself propels forward choreographic ideas, the body becoming the driving force behind musical interpretation. The authors' thinking is influenced by Susan Kozel’s understanding of performance as an ecosystem (Kozel 2007) and framed within a subjective account of musical embodiment.

By merging theory with praxis the authors offer a deeper understanding of the role of the body in music performance and consider how such contributions might lead to new and exciting interpretive frameworks for existing musical repertoires.