Technical Legality: Law, Technology and Science Fiction
01 Jan 2010-
TL;DR: In this article, the intersections of law and technology, referred to here as technical legality, are explored through taking science fiction seriously, and it is argued that reflection on technical legality reveals the mythic of modernity.
Abstract: 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.
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TL;DR: In this paper, a judge in some representative American jurisdiction is assumed to accept the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction and to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l
Abstract: 1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen, whom I shall call Hercules. I suppose that Hercules is a judge in some representative American jurisdiction. I assume that he accepts the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction. He accepts, that is, that statutes have the general power to create and extinguish legal rights, and that judges have the general duty to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l
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References
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Book•
01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: The role of space travel in popular imagination is explored in this paper, where the authors look at the way NASA has openly borrowed from the TV show Star Trek to reinforce its public standing and the work of a group of fans who rewrite its story-lines in porno-romance fanzines.
Abstract: This wry and highly readable investigation of the role of space travel in popular imagination looks at the way NASA has openly borrowed from the TV show Star Trek to reinforce its public standing. It also celebrates the work of a group of the show's fans who rewrite its story-lines in porno-romance fanzines. Constance Penley advocates that scientific experimentation, and devoted to exploring inner as well as outer space.
147 citations
Additional excerpts
...131 Penley (1997), pp 18–21....
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Posted Content•
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the experiences of the exception appear to be in retreat at Guantanamo Bay, rather than in ascendancy, and that strategies of detention, interrogation and control being utilized at Guantanamo bay are being sustained in part through domestication, evisceration and avoidance of experiences of deciding on the exception.
Abstract: This article takes issue with prevailing characterizations of Guantanamo Bay as an instance of international law and US law's breakdown or withdrawal: a surmounting of the rule by the exception. Contentions along these lines circulating in international legal literature and, in a divergent sense, in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, are examined in a critical light. Against these accounts, this article argues that Guantanamo Bay is, to a hyperbolic degree, a work of legal representation and classification: an instance of the norm struggling to overtake the exception. Moreover, this article argues, strategies of detention, interrogation and control being utilized at Guantanamo Bay are being sustained in part through domestication, evisceration and avoidance of experiences of deciding on the exception. In short, this article maintains, experiences of the exception appear to be in retreat at Guantanamo Bay, rather than in ascendancy. The author develops this argument by reference to public records and official characterizations of decision-making at Guantanamo Bay. By way of a critical response, the author then presents a heterodox reading of Carl Schmitt's theorization of the exception, whereby the experience of exceptional decisionism is read away from Schmitt's preoccupation with the state. It is to such a renewed, diffuse sense of the exception within law, rather than to a vehement insistence upon the norm, that this article suggests turning in raising doubts about the ongoing work of the US Government at Guantanamo Bay.
145 citations
Book•
21 Oct 2003
TL;DR: Muller as discussed by the authors traces the permutations of Schmitt's ideas after the Second World War and relates them to broader political developments, and assesses the current uses of his thought in debates on globalization and the quest for a liberal world order, and offers a range of insights into the liberalization of political thinking in post-authoritarian societies.
Abstract: Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and disturbing critics of liberalism. He was also one of the most important intellectuals to offer his services to the Nazis, for which he was dubbed the 'crown jurist of the Third Reich'. Despite this fateful alliance Schmitt has exercised a profound influence on post-war European political and legal thought - on both the Right and the Left, from Franco's legal advisors to Italian Marxists. In this illuminating book, Jan-Werner Muller traces for the first time the permutations of Schmitt's ideas after the Second World War and relates them to broader political developments. Offering a concise account of Schmitt's life and career along with discussions of his key concepts, Muller explains why interest in the political theorist continues. He analyses Schmitt's post-1945 writings on international order, partisanship, and terror. He explores in detail the responses of liberal thinkers to Schmitt's challenging legacy and the highly ingenious (and often problematic) defences of liberalism they devised. Muller offers a range of insights into the liberalization of political thinking in post-authoritarian societies and the persistent vulnerabilities and blind spots of certain strands of Western liberalism. Finally, he also assesses the current uses of Schmitt's thought in debates on globalization and the quest for a liberal world order. Jan-Werner Muller is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of 'Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity' also published by Yale University Press.
135 citations
Book•
02 Jan 2004
Abstract: In Art and Suburbia Chris McAuliffe describes Graeme Davison as “the foremost historian of the Australian suburb” (1996, p. 44). This claim, although necessarily inviting debate, is no mere hyperbole. Since gaining a wide audience with The Rise and Fall of Marvelous Melbourne (1978), a revision of his 1969 doctoral study of Australia’s first suburban boom of the 1880s, Davison has deftly narrated the events, motivations and contradictions that have shaped the suburban forms in which the majority of Australians now live. While Australian urban history was a neglected subject in the 1970s, it now boasts many excellent works. Yet few have the interdisciplinary appeal typical of Davison’s contributions and few can be claimed to have added as much impetus to the emergent field of Australian suburban studies. With his latest book, Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities, a study of Australia’s second suburban boom of the 1950s and 1960s, Davison is likely to extend this appeal further and reach a general audience. In easy-going prose, and once again taking Melbourne as his subject, Davison describes Australia’s troubled love affair with the car from 1945 to the Kennett Government’s manic ‘automobilism’ of the 1990s. The narrative moves fluidly. Internal academic debates are avoided and the record of detailed research is submerged in endnotes. The book’s exclusive focus on Melbourne (a fact that ought be acknowledged in the title) enables a richness of detail, but also inevitably raises questions about Australian urban experience that lies beyond its range. While a case can be made for the national, and international, significance of Melbourne’s encounter with the car, Davison seems simply to assume this. Nonetheless, despite this limitation, he broadly succeeds in his aim of telling nothing less than a story of Australia’s “encounter with the project we sometimes call ‘modernity’” (p. xii). It is a story saturated in irony and ambivalence. In keeping with his previous efforts to counter patronising and deterministic representations of suburbs as ‘half-worlds’ for the vacuous, Davison challenges “terrace-dwelling intellectuals” who might “sneer at the delight of suburban Australians in their cars” (p. xi). He calls upon his readers to “make an honest and open-minded appraisal of how cars have both enriched and impoverished our lives” (p. xii). In so doing, Car Wars adds another layer to our understanding of the complexity and heterogeneity of Australian suburbs with their mix of noble intentions and avarice, passivity and passion, democratic achievement and reckless wastefulness. A Melbournian whose life spans the period under study, Davison is
133 citations
TL;DR: Haraway as mentioned in this paper argued that the practices of the sciences the sciences as cultural production force one to accept two simultaneous, apparently incompatible truths: the historical contingency of what counts as nature for us: the thoroughgoing artifactuality of a scientific object of knowledge, that which makes it inescapably and radically contingent.
Abstract: Andrew Ross: Many people from different audiences and disciplines came to your work through "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," which has become a cult text since its appearance in Socialist Review in 1985. For those readers, who include ourselves, the recent publication of Primate Visions and the forthcoming Simians, Cyborgs, and Women provides the opportunity to see how your work as a historian of science was always more or less directly concerned with many of the questions about nature, culture and technology that you gave an especially inspirational spin to in the Cyborg Manifesto. So we'd like to begin with a more general discussion of your radical critiques of the institutions of science. Although you often now speak of having been a historian of science, almost in the past tense, as it were, it's also clear that you have many more than vestigial loyalties to the goals of scientific rationality among which being the need, as you put it, in a phrase that goes out of its way to flirt with empiricism, the need for a "no-nonsense commitment" to faithful accounts of reality. Surely there is more involved here than a lingering devotion to the ideals of your professional training? Donna Haraway: You've got your finger right on the heart of the anxiety some of the anxiety and some of the pleasure in the kind of political writing that I'm trying to do. It seems to me that the practices of the sciences the sciences as cultural production force one to accept two simultaneous, apparently incompatible truths. One is the historical contingency of what counts as nature for us: the thoroughgoing artifactuality of a scientific object of knowledge, that which makes it inescapably and radically contingent. You peel away all the layers of the onion and there's nothing in the center. And simultaneously, scientific discourses, without ever ceasing to be radically and historically specific, do still make claims on you, ethically, physically. The objects of these discourses, the discourses themselves, have a kind of materiality; they have a sort of reality to them that is inescapable. No scientific account escapes being story-laden, but it is equally true that stories are not all equal here. Radical relativism just won't do as a way of finding your way across and through these terrains. There are political consequences to scientific accounts of the world, and I remain, in some ways, an old-fashioned Russian nihilist. My heroes are
133 citations
Additional excerpts
...59 See Haraway (1985); Penley and Ross (1990), p 9; Latour (1993), p 47....
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...133 Penley and Ross (1990), p 12....
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