This thesis concerns the intersections of law and technology, referred to here as
‘technical legality’. It argues that reflection on technical legality reveals the
mythic of modernity. The starting point for the argument is that the orthodox
framing of technology by law – the ‘law and technology enterprise’ – does not
comprehend its own speculative jurisdiction – that is, it fails to realise its oracle
orientation towards imagining the future. In this science fiction as the modern
West’s mythform, as the repository for projections of technological futures, is
recognised as both the law and technology enterprise’s wellspring and cipher.
What is offered in this thesis is a more thorough exploration of technical
legality through taking science fiction seriously. This seriousness results in two
implications for the understanding of technical legality. The first implication is
that the anxieties and fantasies that animate the calling forth of law by technology
become clearer. Science fiction operates as a window into the cultural milieu that
frames law-making moments. In locating law-making events – specifically the
making of the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 (Cth) and the Motor Car
Act 1909 (Vic) – with the clone ‘canon’ in science fiction (specifically Star Trek:
Nemesis (2002)) and H.G. Wells’ scientific romances, what is offered is a much
richer understanding of how the cultural framing of technology becomes law than
that provided by the ‘pragmatic’ positivism of the law and technology enterprise.
The second implication arises from the excess that appears at the margins
of the richer analyses. Exploring technical legality through science fiction does
not remain within the epistemological frame. Each of the analyses gestures
towards something essential about technical legality. The law and technology
enterprise is grounded on the modern myth, which is also the myth of modernity – Frankenstein. It tells a story of monstrous technology, vulnerable humanity and
saving law. The analyses of the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 (Cth) and
the Motor Car Act 1909 (Vic) show that this narrative is terrorised, that the saving
law turns out to be the monster in disguise; that the law called forth by technology
is in itself technological. In extended readings of two critically acclaimed science
fictions, Frank Herbert’s Dune cycle (1965–83) and the recent television series
Battlestar Galactica (2003–10), the essential commitments of technological law
are exposed. Dune as technical legality makes clear that technological law is truly
monstrous, for behind its positivism and sovereignty its essence is with the
alchemy of death and time. Battlestar Galactica as technical legality reduces
further the alchemical properties of technical law. Battlestar Galactica moves the
metaphysical highlight to the essence of technology and very nearly ends with
Heidegger’s demise of Being in ‘Enframing’: monstrous technology and
monstrous law reveal a humanity that cannot be saved. However, at the very
moment of this fall, Battlestar Galactica collapses the metaphysical frame,
affirming technological Being-in-the-world over empty ordering, life over death.
This free responsibility to becoming that emerges from Battlestar
Galactica reunites technical legality with the mythic of modernity. The modern
denial of myth, which allowed Frankenstein to narrate technical legality, has been
challenged. Free responsibility to becoming means a confidence with myths; it clears the way for the telling of new stories about law and technology.

Technical Legality: Law, Technology and Science Fiction

Although many classroom exercises use movies to focus on management and organizational behavior issues, none of those do so in the context of project management. This article presents such an exercise using The Flight of the Phoenix, an incredibly rich story for any management class, which provides clear examples of organizational behavior issues such as forming teams and the inevitable interpersonal issues (conflict, group process, power) that arise. The movie also highlights the importance of technical issues in projects such as the controlling of budgets and understanding the trade-offs in the project management triangle, and the impact interpersonal issues have on them. Detailed examples from the movie are provided to illustrate key concepts.

The Flight of the Phoenix Interpersonal Aspects of Project Management

In this chapter I pursue the effects for knowledge, pedagogy and learning of practice led research in art and design education. I examine how postgraduate students of art, design and museology at the Institute of Education, University of London, explore and critically engage with the implications of art as a situated research practice. In particular, I foreground the complexities and antinomies surrounding methodology when students negotiate the practice of making in a studio context that encourages them to analyse their subject identities as teachers/lecturers, students, artists, academics and researchers. The expectation of academe and the position which language (written, spoken and visual) occupies is central to the formation of these identities, negotiations and dialogues. I will demonstrate, through discussion of work produced by students, that the traditional division between engagements with art making as a ‘sensory experience’ and with reading, writing and research as ‘rational activities’, presents a false dichotomy that needs to be reappraised in the debates surrounding practice-led research and its potential for pedagogy.

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Art, academe and the language of knowledge

The following paper explores three Venezuelan contemporary poets who wrote about their psychiatric experiences. Through their poems they “talk back” to a psychiatric language that medicalized their suffering and stripped their experiences of meaning. The parallels between their writings and psychiatric survivor literature are considered.

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R. L. LaFevers

Papers

Flight of the Phoenix