Book of panels and abstracts
The Disabled People’s Protest: the counter-conduct of the benefit scroungers? A Foucauldian perspective on disability resistance in the context of a welfare reform
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- 12. ON THE LEGAL PRODUCTION OF THE (NEW) COMMONS: LAW AS A LIVING PRACTICE
- Panel 1
- The juridical production of reality: towards a theory of legal performativity
- Radical Sovereignty, Law’s Potential
- Panel 2
- Legal personhood – singular plural
- Panel 3
- Joining legal pluralism with legal consciousness in the study of Italian new commons
- Politico-legal dynamics of global constitutionalism and the possibility of commons through law
- 13. PARRHÊSIA AND THE LAW
- Panel 1
- Milton, Parrhesia, and Derridas Force of Law
The Disabled People’s Protest: the counter-conduct of the benefit scroungers? A Foucauldian perspective on disability resistance in the context of a welfare reform Ivanka Antova, Queen’s University Belfast - iantova01@qub.ac.uk We are living in tumultuous times. Austerity, the ongoing welfare reform in the United Kingdom and various insurgencies of the marginalised have led to a moment of crisis for the status-quo and an opportunity to discuss resistance from a variety of perspectives. This paper focuses on disability resistance in the context of a welfare reform; a reform defined as a complex social control mechanism aimed at transforming deviance into responsible and productive citizenship. The reform policies adopted by the Coalition Government between 2010 and 2015 constructed and re-enforced the disabled deviant identity: either a deliberate social criminal (the ‘scrounger’), or a tragic victim of institutional dependency. In 2010 the deviants revolted: disabled people led a mass protest against austerity in Birmingham, known as the Disabled People’s Protest, and demanded not charity, but a strong socio-economic rights framework. Further protests followed, including an occupation of the House of Commons by disabled activists in 2015. These examples of insurgency are more complex than immediate responses to an unfair governance of public funds and its discriminatory effect. A Foucauldian approach to the reform policies as tactics of governmentality opens up the possibility for discussing these actions as part of a resistance to being governed in a particular way, thus mapping the counter-conduct of the disabled deviants. This paper discusses the Disabled People’s Protest as one key example of disability counter-conduct, or the rejection of being governed either as a passive recipient of benefits, or as an active social criminal. The transformative effect of the policies as tactics of governmentality is also being resisted through political narratives that challenge the medical-only truth on disability that the policies construct; and through theoretically disconnecting citizenship and perceived responsible behaviour. 12. ON THE LEGAL PRODUCTION OF THE (NEW) COMMONS: LAW AS A LIVING PRACTICE Stream organisers: Riccardo Baldissone and Vito De Lucia In a world pervaded by the repetition of neoliberal patterns, and in a European context where law is increasingly deployed as a technical tool for the enactment of austerity measures and the precarization of labour and life itself, this stream intends to explore law as a productive radical practice. Whilst law is traditionally considered by critical theorists as an instrument of oppression - and legal critique is often primarily understood as a mode of revealing the architecture of this oppression - we wish to ask: can law become a radical practice and how? If bodies bear the marks of law in multiple ways, can bodies re-claim law with/through their practices? Can law become, as it has been suggested, an insurgent practice, that is, a literally embodied instance of that insurrection of knowledges Foucault considers crucial for critique? As a starting point, we would like to focus on the experiences of the new commons as they unfold in Europe, and especially in Italy, both as beni comuni, common goods, and comune, common. To be sure, law maintains its imbrication with biopower, and it is a privileged instrument of oppression, as a key tool in the continuous re-negotiation of hegemony. And yet, the engagement with law of the claimants of the new commons is at once strategic and ambivalent: as the activists of the occupied Roman theatre Valle put it, “we use law when it proves useful; we break the law when it prevents the realization of a more just common life.” This means a new understanding of law as a living law - that is, a law that remains alive and is animated by the practices of living bodies. In other words, these activists reclaim law itself as a commons through their radical practices of legal production. Here, to be sure, we are not referring to law as a mere tool of emancipation as in the liberal and socialist traditions, but as an explicitly acknowledged subjectivating power. This acknowledgement exceeds the categories and the epistemic imaginary of modernities, and whilst it re-claims, as in the critical tradition, a thoroughly political function of law, it opens toward a radical practice of law here and now. Of course, we conceive of this political function not as necessarily confined within the politics of representative democracy, nor within the perspective of a new constitutionalism (despite the strategic engagement of the practices of the commons with existing Constitutions), contexts within which law is alternately neutralized through its encryption, its spectacularization and its technicization. Panel 1 Chair: Vito De Lucia Of Commons, Heterolegalities and Alter-Temporalities Vito De Lucia, Arctic University of Norway - vitodelucia@gmail.com Foucault’s engagement with space is mostly associated with his concept of heterotopias. As places of otherness that do not abide to the prevailing hegemony, heterotopias seem to capture perfectly the mechanics and aspirations of the practices of the commons. The materiality of places and the social and cognitive practices of commoners combine to effect transversal openings in the hegemonic topography of law. These openings, these opportunities function simultaneously dentro e contro (that is, inside and against) the hegemonic structures, but also, and crucially, in a transversal space that is neither entirely inside, nor entirely outside. The practices of the commons can be in this respect described as a rhizomatic ensemble of heterolegalities (giving to the Foucauldian notion of heterotopias a specific legal inflection) that coalesce into an insurgent legal topography. Moreover, these heterolegalities, that is these places and practices of legal otherness, further suggest the need to operate within novel alter-temporalities that function as insurgent chronographies. In this paper I will try to describe these heterolegalities and these alter-temporalities, and to show their role as re-embodying practices, that is, practices of re-emplacement of law. The juridical production of reality: towards a theory of legal performativity Riccardo Baldissone, Westminster University - riccardobaldissone@yahoo.com.au Aristotle underscored the practical nature of positive law by linking it to the practices of law-makers, judges and rulers as a kind of praxis, that is an activity that has its aim in itself: justice was thus ‘the order of the political community.’ The transcendent order of juridical theology then split justice into a natural and a legal one. The latter’s subordination to the natural order was only overcome by modern conventional constructions of law. And yet, even with the dismissal of natural law, the role of juridical interventions generally did not go beyond the recovery of the Aristotelian ordering capacity of law (albeit more or less disjointed from a world of necessity). On the contrary, juridical practices do not simply order reality within a legal framework, but they have a major impact on the joint processes of subjectification (in the sense of Foucault) and objectification. Hence, we may rather reconsider the category of poiesis, which Aristotle reserved for material production, in order to characterize the effect of juridical practices at large as the production of both their human and non-human objects. We may translate this poietic capacity of law in contemporary terms with the notion of legal performativity – in a similar sense to Austin’s performative utterances – which extends the reach of legal normativity from rule-making to ontopoiesis. Whilst this extension always already surreptitiously operated the formatting of realities, its acknowledgement would open unprecedented perspectives of radical political intervention by legal means here and now. Radical Sovereignty, Law’s Potential Angus McDonald, Staffordshire University - angusmcdonald1@outlook.com The stream organisers propose Law as a productive radical practice; ask Can law become a radical practice and how? They ask Can law become an insurgent practice, an insurrection of knowledges crucial for critique? They add, “We conceive of this political function not as necessarily confined within the politics of representative democracy, nor within the perspective of a new constitutionalism, contexts within which law is alternately neutralized through its encryption, its spectacularization and its technicization. We would rather suggest exploring law’s excess, living law within and beyond constitutionalism.” What is the radical potential of law? Is it part of the essence of law, an essence occluded bylaw’s actual existence? Or is it some other matter, formalised by law but capable of in-surging beyond the neutralisation not of law, but by law? Such is the hypothesis of encryption proposed by Restrepo, the other matter being radical democracy. Law’s role in spectacularisation suggests, alternatively, that the other matter is radical subjectivity, as proposed by Debord and the Situationists. If technicization is the force doing the neutralizing, perhaps the other matter is radical justice. It could be, as a parallel proposal, that the excessive matter pushing law beyond constitutionalism, a force capable of embodying a resistance to law’s neutralizing programmes, combining the within and the beyond of law, might be best investigated under the heading of radical sovereignty, a sovereignty radical in the sense of identifying the root of sovereignty prior to its alienation into political theology (as in Feuerbach), a sovereignty, then, recovered, not so much by the self as by the unique (as in Stirner).How this radical sovereignty might relate to radical democracy, subjectivity and justice; how radical sovereignty might be the insurgent, productive radical excess sought by this stream’s organisers will be the further argument of this paper. Panel 2 Chair: Margherita Pieraccini We as the problem – has it already happened? Kristina Cufar, European University Institute - Kristina.Cufar@eui.eu The turning point we are witnessing is not a mere problem of here-now, it already happened, it’s happening and will happen – the traditional tripartite conception of temporality is part of its urgency. Law is always already a radical practice of production. For this reason, the concepts of complete liberation or of complete state domination are/were never applicable in any compartment of hegemonic understanding of time or law – these concepts are tricks of institutionally organized knowledge. If the conventional (objectively valid) law is to be (ab)used in the struggle for peaceful and joyful coexistence anticipated by the idea of commons, we must take a closer look at this law and its becomings. Subjugating power is an undeniable feature of law, yet, the complexity of the problem exceeds faceless markets or powerful groupings ‘behind the law’. The mass of bodies and things producing law, as corrupt and illegitimate as it might seem, urgently deserves attention. Law, as it is, depends on each living body, on the gesture of sliding across a touchscreen, for example. Commons need bodies, they need more than a formal juridical recognition – to evolve as the living law they must be lived, believed: can commons reach enough fleshy bodies, enough likes, can they excite? There are multiple radical practices, subverting and producing law conditioning them; they pull into multiple directions, many of them frightening. The perpetual practices bringing about a transformation are not exceptional moments, great victories or defeats, but constant processes. The present turning point demands a critical engagement with our collective participation in the practices we despise – which is harder than pointing at the evil other (like state, market, fascism…). Instead of the search for a sovereign enemy, we must face our shared responsibility. Legal personhood – singular plural? Susanna Lindroos-Hovinheimo, University of Helsinki - susanna.lindroos@helsinki.fi This research analyses the legal person in European law. The overall rationale of the project is an awareness of the often invisible workings of law in relation to human beings. The law builds on some understanding of what it means to be a human being, a person, or a subject, but it also influences definitions of personhood. As the human being is taking centre stage in EU law, there is an increasing need for an inquiry into the foundations of our shared being in law. The person of the law can be conceptualised in individualistic terms or intrinsically tied to community. My research project focuses on the right to privacy and personal data protection as exemplary areas of law, where both alternatives may be analysed. This paper, however, concentrates on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy in an attempt to understand legal personhood without a necessary connection to individuality. By accepting the singular plural nature of the legal subject, the paper tries to rethink privacy and personal data regulation and the legal person that comes with them. What seems to happen when privacy and personal data protection are considered in this philosophical framework is a certain kind of confusion. The person becomes both singular and plural. The paper considers what such personhood could mean for law. Panel 3 Chair: Riccardo Baldissone Law's Imaginary Life on the Ground: Liberia and the Rule of Law Shane Chalmers, Australian National University - shane.chalmers@anu.edu.au This paper is concerned with “what takes place in the rule of law”, a question I consider here through an examination of what is taking place in the process of instituting the rule of law in post-war Liberia. This involves an empirical study of law, and as such, a study of law’s imaginary life on the ground. My argument here is that all empirical research engages the imagination, requiring the scholar to develop their capacity to study phenomena through the imaginary rather than seek to eliminate it from their scholarship. I make this argument under the influence of Theodor Adorno’s negative-dialectical philosophy, which bears most pointedly on this paper through his concept of “exact imagination”—a concept that is enlivened by the tension between reason and imagination, in a way that makes them critical to each other and thus to research. This is an attempt to see law through the imaginary by seeing how the national law of Liberia takes form as law through the many different ways in which it diverges from its concept. This is about how the ungrounded situation of the national law of Liberia—a situation that results from its being sea-borne to begin with—is what grounds it as “the law of the land”, and how this is the condition of its rule. Joining legal pluralism with legal consciousness in the study of Italian new commons Margherita Pieraccini, University of Bristol - m.pieraccini@bristol.ac.uk The paper presents some theoretical reflections on the relationship between legal consciousness and legal pluralism, before concretising them in the context of Italian new commons. Both legal consciousness and legal pluralism search for law beyond the state. The former does so by engaging with everyday life and agency (individual understandings and mobilization of law and legality), whilst the latter, in its more traditional positivist form, does so by engaging with objects (a plurality of normative orders out there). If the analytical points of departure of both schools differ, in time they have both experienced internal revisions and certain openings between the schools are detectable. Exploring such openings may allow us to marry certain key insights of those schools, strengthening their analytical value for socio-legal studies. The paper uses the example of Italian new commons to test such analytical framework. The commons movement in Italy has been revitalised in recent years, stepping away from agrarian traditional common land and common property, and politicising the concept of the commons through direct action (occupation of urban spaces such as the Theatre Valle in Rome), through attempts at reforming the law to decouple ownership of goods from their purposes (for example, Rodota’ Commission on civil code reform) and through expansive legal readings drawing on constitutional norms (Court of Cassassion, case n. 3665/2011 and its ). The ways in which we can make sense of such initiatives within a legal pluralist/legal consciousness unified framework is the subject of this paper. Politico-legal dynamics of global constitutionalism and the possibility of commons through law Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko, National University of Ireland - ekaterina.yahyaoui@nuigalway.ie Global constitutionalism purports to create a common framework for orderly life at the global level. The dominant approach to global constitutionalism is normative. The political dynamics of global constitutionalism and the associated projects are usually disregarded or discussed only marginally. I argue for the need to re-discover the link between law and politics in discussions of global constitutionalism. Furthermore, I argue that examining seriously underlying visions of the political is essential for the deeper understanding of the consequences of various visions of global constitutionalism. Focusing on two different visions of the political: that advocated by Carl Schmitt and the one proposed by Agamben in his discussion of coming politics and coming community (Agamben’s diagnosis of the current politics will not be touched upon) the presentation will illustrate this last point. Based on this analysis it will be argued that Agamben’s vision of coming community and the related re-imagination of politics helps us to re-imagine the idea of global constitutionalism. In this vision that remains under-explored by Agamben himself we can discern elements of a radically new role for law. In this vision of the new role for law, law becomes simply a tool, a toy and the world will appear ‘as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.’ 13. PARRHÊSIA AND THE LAW Stream organisers: Samuli Hurri (Helskinki Collegium for Advanced Studies) and Kati Nieminen (University of Helsinki) The stream on parrhêsia and the law probes into Michel Foucault’s lectures on parrhêsia in the 80s, considering also their relevance to critical legal analysis and contemporary society. This ‘spidery kind of notion’, parrhêsia, has three basic meanings – ‘saying everything’, ‘telling the truth’ and ‘free-spokenness’ – but it never seems to mean only one thing. Whereas the element of arrogance was emphasised in the Byzantine religious context, the risks and the courage involved defined an act of speaking as parrhêsia in classical Athenian politics. Foucault’s entry to the theme went through Christian practices of the direction of the soul, whose genealogy he investigated in The Hermeneutics of the Subject. But this genealogy eventually led him to classical Greece. In The Government of Self and Others (GSO) and The Courage of Truth, Foucault explored the political and philosophical period roughly from Pericles to Diogenes the Cynic. What he staged in his lectures was the ‘Greek drama’ of the foundation of truth-telling in the realm of politics. In addition to all types of readings of Foucault’s lectures in the 80s, we invite papers and performances considering the relevance of parrhêsia today. Foucault himself envisaged that the Ancient dilemma of parrhêsia (“No democracy without true discourse, but democracy threatens the very existence of true discourse”; GSO 184) may make also problems of modern times perceptible. What kinds of viewpoints does parrhêsia offer for an analysis of contemporary practices, structures and pathologies of speaking in public? To begin with, papers analysing the problem of freedom of speech, its history and contemporary state, are invited to participate. Instances of honest speech as courageous political action may be found also in contemporary phenomena of whistleblowing and civil disobedience. For a longer time, speaking one’s mind and living one’s truth have existed in the ways in which, e.g., gender and sexuality have surfaced in the sphere of public discourses. Finally, phenomena such as hate speech, trolling, and other forms of aggression appearing on the Internet, can be debated as problems of parrhêsia. Especially, we invite papers and talks considering the relevance of parrhêsia to the critical analysis of the law and its speaking practices. One of the ancient types of parrhêsia Foucault focused on was the ‘judicial parrhêsia’ that takes place in court proceedings. This was, more generally, the discourse where the weak take the risk of reproaching the strong of their injustice (GSO 133, 154). Re-visioning the law from this vantage point may provide, for critical legal scholarship, a fresh possibility to reconstruct legal practice in the field of forces between the weak’s resistance and the strong’s domination. Lastly, considerations of parrhêsia’s critical relation to rhetoric, also legal rhetoric, are invited to participate. Like rhetorical speech, also parrhêsia is about persuasion, but not by way of pleasing the audience, that is, by way of resonating with what the audience wants to hear. On the contrary, parrhêsia’s effectivity relies entirely on the weight of its truth, and this truth is characteristically very uncomfortable to the listeners. Panel 1 Chair: Kati Nieminen The mimesis of free speech: Reading Athenian parrhesia with/against Michel Foucault Jan R. Stenger, University of Glasgow, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies - jan.stenger@helsinki.fi Parrhesia, the freedom of the citizen ‘to say everything’, was seen by the ancient Greeks as a defining characteristic and sine qua non of democracy. Yet, paradoxically, texts from classical Athens insist that free speech had ceased to exist in the democratic polis and that revealing one’s true beliefs carried a big risk. These documents led the philosopher Michel Foucault to postulate a crisis of parrhesia and, more generally, the impossibility of truth-telling in democracy. In this paper, political speeches from fourth-century Athens will be examined in order to demonstrate that, far from faithfully describing political conditions, the speakers made strategic use of the concept of free speech in the struggle for political dominance. On the one hand, the rhetorical mimesis of parrhesia was intended to show the orator, in contrast to his rivals, to be the champion of true democracy. On the other hand, the provocative reflection on democratic free speech resulted in the establishment of ethical criteria which a truth-teller had to meet. I will argue that this shift in the discourse on parrhesia, while presented as a defence of democracy, was in fact an attempt to limit the equal opportunity to say everything in public. Milton, Parrhesia, and Derrida's Force of Law Louise Mabille, University of Hull - louisemab2@yahoo.com This paper considers John Milton, in particular the Milton of the Areopagitica from 1644, as a parrheiastic writer. The paper departs from the position that reading Milton within the context of the seventeenth-century revival of parrhesia does better justice to the complexity of his ideas than the traditional interpretation of Milton as precursor to nineteenth-century liberal defenders of freedom of speech like John Stuart Mill[1] and Oliver Wendell Holmes.[2] Reading Milton as a seventeenth-century parrheiastes goes a long way towards explaining the limitations he put on freedom of expression, the emphasis he placed on the duty to resist tyranny and the tension that existed between his classical frame of reference and the ‘plain speech' embraced by his faith. However, it will be demonstrated that as parrheiastes, Milton found himself in a double bind similar to the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence as argued by Jacques Derrida in Force of Law: implying by his action of engaging in free speech the existence of a free space for which he is in fact arguing. [1] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, (New York: Holden Crowther, 2008), pp. 15-47. [2] His defence of ‘free market of ideas’ occurs in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919). See further, Thomas Healy, How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind And Changed Free Speech Forever in America, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). Directory: law law -> Law in American Society Black History Month Essay Contest law -> A brand New Image? Should Personality Rights be law -> Jurisdiction of the Courts law -> Luther V. Borden: a taney Court Mystery Solved law -> ‘Intellectual Property Rights in Sport’ law -> The law of tort introduction a. What is a Tort? law -> Law of Delict Chapter 1: General Introduction law -> Appendix C: Federal and Minnesota Case Law Summaries Download 0.92 Mb. Share with your friends:
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