ABSTRACT
Forensic logic’s promise to eliminate doubt is a kind of divine intervention into the human that reflects the waning of traditional forms of divinity. We live in a forensic turn in which ideas of truth are increasingly tied to techniques of verification. The forum is where the rhetoric that underlies forensic aesthetics is honed. Forensic identification, even before it reaches the stage of public persuasion, is more than a mechanical process of revelation or uncovering. The rampant spread of the term ‘forensic’ is symptomatic of what forensic aesthetics responds to: a large-scale breakdown of certainty about the basis of truth. The forensic is an attempt to wrest back certainty by technical means, transcending the messiness of subjectivity. The phrase ‘forensic aesthetics’ is appropriately oxymoronic given the tension which lies within the idea of a forensic aesthetics. The forensic’s informatic logic impels all things to be rendered as machine-readable information commodities: data.
