Law’s Materiality: Between Concrete Matters and Abstract Forms, or How Matter Becomes Material (original) (raw)
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Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory Legalities and materialities
This chapter reflects on what materiality-inflected methodologies can bring to an anthropology of law, and to legal studies more generally. Its starting point is an increasing attention across the social sciences and humanities for objects, and thinking beyond the human. These have often, but not only, emerged from science and technology studies (STS), to which we pay particular attention. However, approaches to materiality have themselves become diversified, and their implications for law can similarly be read in multiple ways. At the same time, legal anthropology has helped to re-characterise the complexity of law as a field of social activity by paying attention to its meanings, for actors within as well as outside its own institutions; to its modes of action in practice, again within its explicitly designated spaces as well as its everyday; to its unexpected forms, patterns and directions; to its multiplicity and uncertainty. Approaches within a broadly defined ‘legal anthropology’ agenda have provided tools to move away from grand and removed theorisation of the law, or an exclusive attention to its own claims, and towards a subtler understanding of law as a relatively fluid, changing and uncertain set of practices. While doing so, legal anthropology has also reminded us of the significance of empirical research to identify and theorise the complex existences of law, a contribution which echoes some of the implications of materiality-oriented theories.
Introduction to Special Issue on 'Legal Materiality'
Law Text Culture, 2019
Over the last decade there has been an increased interest in materiality within legal scholarship, as well as in related disciplines that study law and its practices. Much of it has accounted for the concrete and complex manifestations of law through various materials: from formats of inscription to other mediated devices, such as files and images, to bodies and spaces upon and through which law acts. Yet the terms ‘matter’, ‘materials’ and ‘materiality’ are employed in divergent ways across different works, and often without clear distinctions or theoretical delineations. This special issue begins from proposing a differentiated understanding of these terms in relation to law and legal scholarship, and embeds them in a broader conception of legality, unpacking their premises and implications.
Critical Autopoiesis and the Materiality of Law
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 2014, 27:389–418, 2014
Autopoietic theory is increasingly seen as a candidate for a radical theory of law, both in relation to its theoretical credentials and its relevance in terms of new and emerging forms of law. An aspect of the theory that has remained less developed, however, is its material side, and more concretely the theory’s accommodation of bodies, space, objects and their claim to legal agency. The present article reads Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems in a radical and material manner, linking it on the one hand to current post-structural theorisations of law and society, and on the other hand extending its ambit to accommodate the influx of material considerations that have been working their way through various other disciplines. The latter comprises both a materialisation of the theory itself and ways of conceptualising the legal system as material through and through. This I do by further developing what I have called Critical Autopoiesis, namely an acentric, topological, post-ecological and posthuman understanding of Luhmann’s theory, that draws on Deleuzian thought, feminist theory, geography, non-representational theory, and new material and object-oriented ontologies. These are combined with some well-rehearsed autopoietic concepts, such as distinction, environment and boundaries; Luhmann’s earlier work on materiality continuum; more recent work on bodies and space; as well as his work on form and medium in relation to art. The article concludes with five suggestions for an understanding of what critical autopoietic materiality might mean for law.
Varieties of vital materialism
In the shift from early modern matter theory to complex forms of Enlightenment materialism – from Bacon to Toland, and the clandestine manuscript tradition – we are faced with a reconfiguration of matter. From passive or mechanistic (defined strictly in terms of size, shape and motion), it becomes dynamic and plastic, as in this statement by John Toland in the fifth of his Letters to Serena: “Activity ought to enter into the Definition of Matter, it ought likewise to express the Essence thereof” (Toland 1704, 165). In addition, matter in this process of ‘endowment’ or incorporation of properties becomes vitalized, notably with the incorporation of properties such as irritability and sensibility (Wolfe 2014). Here, it is important not to oppose vitalism and materialism, for at least two reasons: first, because the concept of matter is becoming reconfigured so it possesses irreducibly vital properties (if Toland had granted it motion and activity, and rejected Newton’s distinction between gravity and matter, further texts of the period add on additional, biomedically or embryologically derived properties); but also, second, because several distinctive eighteenth-century medical vitalists insist on the irreducible materiality of the living systems they study. The ‘life’ they are interested in is not that of a vital principle, archaeus, semina rerum, vis vita or entelechy: it is that of a living body, or organism. This interrelation or even interpenetration of a materialist project to understand Life, and a vitalist project of articulating the specific, organized materiality of living bodies shows how the purported novelty of a ‘new materialism’ which claims to discover, in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, the fact of our embodiment, including its cultural ramifications, may need to be taken with a considerable dose of salt. I seek to reconstruct this articulation of a vital materialism, so different from the old vision of a mechanistic materialism (Kaitaro 2008, Wolfe 2012), as classically presented by Engels (Engels 1888, in Marx & Engels 1982). In addition, I emphasize that this vital materialism is not a wholesale holism: it embraces a reductionist dimension, in its medicalized approach to body:soul relations. Matter is active, but not spiritualized.
Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, forthcoming, 2019
(Final copyedited version) This chapter presents legal materiality as a distinct approach within law and humanities scholarship. Legal materiality is concerned with the conditions of possibility in and through which law arises, rather than taking law’s materiality to be self-evident, as when it is regarded as a form of material culture or when objects are taken as symbols of law. It distinguishes between matters and materials: if matters are problematizations or ‘matters of concern’ to law, materials are the attributes or properties that are enlisted in acts of interpretation. Rather than addressing materials as inert physical elements that are acted upon by law, legal materiality is concerned with how materials come to matter by being engaged in the production of legal meaning through interpretive and representational practices. Section 2.2 situates this approach in relation to a broader inheritance of materialism and materiality in the Western tradition. It considers different understandings of “materialism,” such as “new materialisms” and historical materialism, that inform but also diverge from legal materiality. Section 2.3 engages with different uses of “materiality” in recent legal scholarship, followed by a detailed discussion of its meaning in two works of legal theory that have sought to articulate a conception of legal materiality. The concluding section discusses the potentials of this approach for law and humanities scholarship to understand how materials are directly implicated in the making of legal difference rather than serving solely as law’s objects. Keywords: materiality, materialism, new materialism, textuality, media studies, Foucault, Latour, Luhmann, Vismann
Theory, Culture and Society, 2019
This paper considers whether and how 'vitalism' might be considered relevant as a concept today; whether its relevance should be expressed in terms of disciplinary demarcations between the life sciences and the natural sciences; and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between a 'vitalism of process' and a 'vitalism as pathos' (Osborne, 2016). I argue that the relevance of vitalism as an epistemological and ontological problem concerning the categorical distinction between living and non-living beings must be contextualised historically, and referred exclusively to the epistemic horizon defined by classical physics. In contrast to this, drawing on the philosophies of Canguilhem, Whitehead, and Atlan, I propose an appreciation of the contemporary relevance of vitalism premised on the pathic and indeterminate character of nature as a whole. From this perspective vitalism expresses a politically significant ethos concerning the relationship between life, knowledge, problems and their solutions.
Form, Function, and Matter: Crossing the Border of Materiality
Social Interaction in a Technological World, 2012
In a hallway I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way, and I was struck by the thought that the inoffensive symbol had once been a thing of iron, an inexorable, mortal projectile that had penetrated the flesh of men and lions and clouded the sun of Thermopylae and bequeathed Harald Sigurdson, for all time, six feet of English earth.