5 - The Doctor and Technical Lawyering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2021
Summary
The previous chapter, drawing upon Xenogenesis, charted a myth for living positively within the totality of technology. The focused location was that of the monster formally known as the legal subject. No longer human, but not bare life, this transient entity was seen as a node within the networks of becoming – an embodied location of connections where, through affect, there is the potential to nurture life. Technicity is the defining feature of our world, ourselves, and our law and, rather than Heidegger's precipitous fall, this provides the possibility to be responsible for becoming.
Often this embodied node in the networks is a location for something more. Revealing the technical legal subject as a non-unitary self – changing yet enduring – allows for absolute and radical difference. The monstrous cyborgs of the West can have different attachments, be plugged into different networks, and have different identities, selves, relations, meanings, powers, and responsibilities. It would be a fundamental miscoding of the analysis over the past two chapters if what emerged was a vision of the inhabitants of the West as the same, the image rendered nicely by the ‘battery’ scene in The Matrix (1999) or the clones from Lucas's Attack of the Clones (2002), identical units within the mega-machine. The actual image is not so mechanical; we are not the same cogs in the machine or, looking back to earlier biological metaphors, we are not organs of the body politic. Rather, the scanner registers a primordial soup, eddies within a strange fluid of varying colours, movement, and density; it is a changing, swirling, fluxing complex, dynamic and full of potential. The totality of technicity means that difference cannot be accounted for by the binaries of the old West – nature/culture, male/female, sovereign/subject, black/white, bourgeoisie/proletariat; rather, fields of comparison, graduation, and uniqueness allow for representing difference. Ironically, the digitalisation of information has replaced the binary mode with a much more graded and complex analogue process. The monsters of the West, even more than the monad of their ancestor, the liberal human, demark nodes that are radically unique.
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- Information
- Living in Technical LegalityScience Fiction and Law as Technology, pp. 133 - 163Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018