Uncommon Future PressLondon, UK

PRESS · FIG. C · SUPPORTING DOCUMENTARCHIVAL RECORD · RGS-IBG 2023

Taking the law for a walk in the Anthropocene.

This is how law inspired our design’s visual universe.

Writing the imagery in this text gave birth to the imagery that surrounds UFP — goo, bloom, organic substrate, fractalisation, ether: the rigid, coming undone in the wake of something more powerful — liquid matter composed to dissolve it.

CLIMATE CHANGED (LEGAL) GEOGRAPHIES · SESSION WRITTEN AND CHAIRED BY CATHERINE D.L. TAN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE · RGS-IBG, 1 SEPTEMBER 2023 · TRANSCRIBED FROM THE POSTER SET, SPELLINGS PRESERVED

Are rights-based mechanisms the future or the past? How does a person litigate lightning? To what extent can sovereignty suture the world together? How does law colonise aestheticism? Who drafts the future constitution of our worlds? Is the ascription of legal agency to nonhumans helpful or fetishistic? Does it help or hinder the climate cause? Is there ever a case for dissolving the legal form?

PROVOCATION 1 OF 3

The Anthropocene

What is "the Anthropocene"? Prevailing scholarship identifies it as nomenclature for time, a marker of temporality. But it could also be framed as: a place, a spatio-temporal landscape, a utopia, a dystopia, a statement of complicity, an attribution of causality, a socio-technical imaginary, a moral one, and a composite of existential & metaphysical problems on the limits of humanity. In this regard the "Anthropocene" holds a slippery quality of being everywhere at once: underpinning social reality, residing horizontal to it, looming above it, or existing diffusely in its discursive ether. How do we orient ourselves in this slippery "Anthropocene"? Borrowing from Johns (2012), what does it mean to be an object before, after, within, outside, above, and below it?

PROVOCATION 2 OF 3

The Law

How would another discursive object fare when you take it out for a walk in "the Anthropocene" -- and what if that object were "Law"? Law — an object framed in paradoxical terms in recent decades: (1) on one hand, as stiff, solid, rigid, inflexible, loyal to historicity, and rife with a large degree of obsolescence, due to its inclination toward precedence, formalism, positivism, and doctrinal analysis; (2) but on the other, almost as nimble, elusive, & ether-like as the Anthropocene itself. Ether-like, meaning, something that exists alongside taste, smell, touch, and sound, (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2016), and has the ability - should we let it - to appropriate something as mundane as our sensory and affective experiences. Ether-like in a second sense, too, as in something that exists almost omni-directionally, locating itself before, after, within, inside, outside, above, and below social reality itself (Johns, 2012).

PROVOCATION 3 OF 3

Law and / in the Anthropocene

What is the Law to you: solid or diffuse? Or neither? How do you orient its (im)materiality in "the Anthropocene"? And what happens to that form (or lack thereof) when you take it out for a walk in the Anthropocene -- where climate change can intensify deep-time & accelerate extinction, rendering this very question moot? "The Anthropocene" prompts reflection on the ends of the earth (Chakrabarty, 2009; Clark and Gunaratnam, 2016; Yusoff 2013), and of the humans (Machin, 2019; Povinelli, 2017), but juxtaposed with law, it invokes the end of law too. If the Law is "solid," does it dissolve in the Anthropocene? And if the Law is "diffuse," does it survive in the Anthropocene? What does it mean to theorize about the end of law? How does that praxis change the way we perform law, legal geography, and our own legal subjectivities?

BIBLIOGRAPHY · AS CITED IN THE PROVOCATION

The session closed by asking for a research agenda. The agenda was transmuted into a press.

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( DOCUMENT PRESERVED AS WRITTEN IN 2023 — DASHES, AMPERSANDS AND QUOTATION MARKS INCLUDED · CLOSING LINE ⚑ HOUSE CHROME, NOT POSTER TEXT )