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DissertationDOI

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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Journal ArticleDOI
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

2,050 citations

Journal ArticleDOI

369 citations

References
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Book
29 Aug 2007
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that Star Trek is not just a set of television series, but has become a pervasive part of the identity of the millions of people who watch, read and consume the films, television episodes, network specials, novelizations, and fan stories.
Abstract: When the first season of Star Trek opened to American television viewers in 1966, the thematically insightful sci-fi story line presented audiences with the exciting vision of a bold voyage into the final frontiers of space and strange, new galactic worlds. Perpetuating this enchanting vision, the story has become one of the longest running and most multifaceted franchises in television history. Moreover, it has presented an inspiring message for the future, addressing everything from social, political, philosophical, and ethical issues to progressive and humanist representations of race, gender, and class. This book contends that Star Trek is not just a set of television series, but has become a pervasive part of the identity of the millions of people who watch, read and consume the films, television episodes, network specials, novelizations, and fan stories. Examining Star Trek from various critical angles, the essays in this collection provide vital new insights into the myriad ways that the franchise has affected the culture it represents, the people who watch the series, and the industry that created it.

10 citations

01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: Nearamnew is the name of a public artwork created at Federation Square, Melbourne as discussed by the authors, which reproduces all the stories woven into the plaza, and explains where they come from, and how they were turned into 'concrete poems'.
Abstract: Nearamnew is the name of a public artwork created at Federation Square, Melbourne. This is the story of how the artwork was conceived, developed and installed. It reproduces all the stories woven into the plaza, and explains where they come from, and how they were turned into 'concrete poems'.

10 citations


"Technical Legality: Law, Technology..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Lawrence Friedman suggests that science fiction’s aliens and alien invasion narratives provide a window into political and legal controversies surrounding both immigration and race.(165) Following the republican emphasis in the law as literature scholarship, Anna Lorien Nelson and John S. Nelson examine feminist science fiction, and particularly Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1969),(166) to ‘suggest that post-modern institutions have no need to embrace the modern pathos of bureaucracy’....

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  • ...165 Friedman (1989), pp 1590–1591. 166 Le Guin (1973). 167 Nelson and Nelson (1999), p 653....

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  • ...76 Friedman (1989), pp 1598–1603. 77 Hart (1961), pp 109–112. 78 On the development of law and culture from the emergence of cultural studies, see Sarat et al (2005), p 3. 79 Hart (1961), p v; Hutchinson (1995), p 788. 80 Macaulay (1987), p 186. 81 MacNeil ‘maps’ many of the key scholars during this period. See MacNeil (2007), pp 6–8. 82 A point made by Leslie Moran, Emma Sandon, Elena Loizidou and Ian Christie in their recent edited volume: Moran et al (2004), p xiii. 83 For example Christine A. Corcos (1997b) examined Ghostbusters (1984) (Reitman, Ghostbusters, (Columbia Pictures, 1984)) as informing the popular attitudes to environmental regulation....

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  • ...334 For other articulations of this scholarship, see Friedman (2001)....

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Book
01 Jan 1905
TL;DR: This novel recounts the social ascent of a shop assistant and his painful adaptation to the new standards forced upon him.
Abstract: Part of the "Everyman" series, which includes a themed introduction, a chronology, a plot summary and reading list. This novel recounts the social ascent of a shop assistant and his painful adaptation to the new standards forced upon him.

10 citations


"Technical Legality: Law, Technology..." refers background in this paper

  • ...114 For the study of myth in science fiction studies generally, see Scholes and Rabkin (1977), pp 165– 169; George (2000) (frontier myths in 1950s films)....

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  • ...In this, George S. Robinson was a lone voice in his opposition to the positivism of international space law and space law scholarship: Jurisprudentially inclined minds should be ripe for the opportunity, not simply to extend the usual anthropocentric legal positivism into the arena of man-in-space, but to grasp the significance of viewing and evaluating the social relationships of man in a totally controlled environment.94 Robinson’s law and [cybernetic]society re-conceptualising found little support.95 It stands as testimony to what space law scholarship was not: it was not a literature that engaged with technical legality and questioned modern law in technology’s light....

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  • ...In 1968 George P. Smith II located artificial insemination and the future prospect of IVF in ‘[t]he shadowy predictions of Huxley and Orwell [that] can no longer be dismissed as blurred and unrealistic’.16 George J. Annas and Sherman Elias expressed more expansively that: 6 Wells (1954)....

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  • ...Herbert George Wells is universally acclaimed as major god in the science fiction pantheon.(165) Long-lived (1866–1946) and prolific, Wells’ oeuvre can be divided into three groups.(166) The first are his late nineteenth century scientific romances, of which The Time Machine (1895),(167) The Island of Dr Moreau (1896),(168) The Invisible Man (1897),(169) War of the Worlds (1898)(170) and The First Men on the Moon (1901)(171) are the...

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  • ...Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927),118 Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),119 Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982)120 and even George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977)121 regularly make it on to critics’ lists.122 As Susan Sontag observed in 1965, it seems that that science fiction is more at home with the moving image than with the written word.123 For Annette Kuhn, this wider acceptance of science fiction cinema comes because of the medium’s visual and visceral enactment of technological futures: ‘the medium fitting, if not exactly being, the message’.124 This dimension of science fiction seems to be encapsulated in Broderick’s definition of science fiction as involving ‘specific … attention to the object in preference to the subject’....

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