Literature and Law: Consensus and the Art of Disagreement

Literary and legal judgments require, formulate, and defend, but also retain an urge to disrupt, a consensus of like-minded people. This essay studies the aesthetic of taste in literature and the jury system in law to show how consensus works, and at what cost. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of social “fields” competing for authority, it argues that consensus must be won within a dissensus that it can never quite quell. Concord emerges from discord, which remains unruly. This dynamic energizes theories of taste (Burke, Hume, Scarry), which derive social and moral relevance from the sensory immediacy of art, and the jury system, which theatrically forges agreement out of judicial dispute. Jane Austen provides examples of irony in the service of critical taste; the O.J. Simpson criminal trial illustrates the tribulations of reaching a unanimous verdict, which it displays to a disputatious public.