The article analyses the ways in which technology and law disperse, channel and reassemble agency in ICT-enabled legal proceedings. It works from case studies of online civil claims in England and Italy, and the automatically issued speed camera fine process in Australia. Information and communication technologies affect legal procedures in three dimensions: legitimacy, efficacy and performativity. The law can legitimate ensembles of technological and performative procedures, but it cannot construct them by regulation. Technology is a distinct regulative regime that opens some channels of communication while closing others. Machines and software codes identify and admit participants and direct human activity. The focus on the performative explores the requirements of sense-making, by which participants recognise the context and the legal consequences of ICT-enabled procedures. The interfaces of law and technology rely on the interpretive context in which messages are understood as well as the legal forms in which they are transmitted. Each of these elements is essential to the circulation of agency between people and things that reassembles and constitutes legal and social relationships.

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Reassembling the legal: the wonders of modern science in court-related proceedings

On 27 June 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini declared, ‘drugs are prohibited” and their trafficking, consumption and “promotion” were against the rules of Islam and could not take place in the Islamic Republic. This ruling, although informal in nature, sanctioned a swift re-direction of Iran's previous approach to narcotic drugs, both in terms of production and consumption. As had happened in 1955, Iran seemed ready to go back to a policy of total prohibition and eradication of opiates, this time under the banner of Islam rather than that of the international drug control regime. Drugs and the politics surrounding them have been a crucial, yet neglected, aspect of the history of modern Iran that have changed the nature of the state bolstering its capacity of social intervention, while hindering its legitimacy, in the Pahlavi, as in the republican, era. By moving on “from the analysis of the state to a concern with the actualities of social subordination”, this article attempts to interpret how social subordination...

Drugs and Revolution in Iran: Islamic Devotion, Revolutionary Zeal and Republican Means

What sort of reality is produced and conveyed to the business trainee through the set of pedagogical techniques that characterize the experiential business curriculum, and how does immersion in this particular kind of reality configure the business self? This essay discusses some of the rhetorical and theatrical contrivances that are used to generate artificial business situations in which the student can experience a moment of decision and test his quality as a leader These training formulas, we argue, rely on the therapeutic hope of dramaturgical self-realization, but often degenerate into a form of regressive fetishism in which the fantasy of existential resolve and serious decision-making can be playfully and safely enacted Surrealism and its demise provide an angle from which the peculiar fragility of these operations can be understood: what the experiential business curriculum provides, in this interpretation, amounts to a sort of subrealist shield, a protective dilution of the challenges 

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Twilight in the leadership playground: subrealism and the training of the business self

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Beware of Mad John: Political Theology, Psychedelics and Literature

While this ‘extraordinary’ book appears as an intermezzo within the Homo Sacer series (Negri, 2008), it supports two fundamental theses with its own philological, epigraphic, liturgical and religio...

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Justin Clemens

Papers

The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (review)