Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Justice

I am interested in the idea of justice and the crowd. Rafael writes of People Power II: “This heterogeneous crowd was not entirely constituted by texting, for obviously not everyone owned cell phones. It emerged primarily, we might imagine, in response to a call for and the call of justice. Put another way, the crowd at Edsa was held together by the promise of justice’s arrival” (420). According to him, the crowd’s nonviolence suggests waiting for justice rather than exacting revenge (an interesting assumption about the friction between violence and justice). He goes on to write that the very uncertainty inherent in waiting for justice constitutes the “present waiting” of the crowd and t constructs justice as something that simply exists, as Professor Chun noted in class. (421). Professor Chun also talked about justice as an opening to the future and as existing in opposition to law.
I am curious as to how “justice” is being defined by Rafael. How does justice never fully arrive, and what is just in the first place? I’m not sure I understand who determines what is just, or if it is possible to determine what justice is if it never arrives. What is the relationship between violence and justice? Between freedom and justice? How does the absence of justice make it free from sociotechnical determination? What is the relationship, then, between absence and freedom?

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