Yearly Archives: 2016
Jun 6, 2016 Sonia Lawrence
Lately I’ve been hoping that the sense of impending doom I feel at the lengthening list of things-that-are-worse-than-they-used-to-be might be at least somewhat mitigated if I could only identify the way(s) in which that list could be boiled down to one – okay, maybe two or even three – big thing(s). Neoliberalism lurks as a strong contender, hence a search for articles I like – lots – that trace this approach, whether at the macro, mezzo, or micro level. There are many such articles, but what I’ve chosen to highlight here is from Vol. 77 of Law and Contemporary Problems, a special edition on law and neoliberalism. Guest Editors Jedediah Purdy and David Singh Grewal explain, with charming delicacy, in their introductory essay, “….the term ‘neoliberalism’ may be unfamiliar to some American legal audiences…[but] it is a common part of the scholarly lexicons of many disciplines and is widely used elsewhere in the world, notably in Latin America and Europe.” (Assuming they are right, here is an attempt at Neoliberalism in a Nutshell: In contrast to the more social-liberal approaches many Western governments followed just after World War II, neoliberalism emphasises the withdrawal of the state in favour of laissez-faire, market based organization, with characteristic policies aimed at privatization, deregulation, and elimination of social benefits regimes). Purdy and Grewal go on, step by step, to build the case for legal scholars in the US to pay some attention to neoliberalism as a phenomenon and a zone of scholarship.
The piece I’m talking about here is Samuel Moyn’s A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism (it occurs to me that the title might not help you understand why I thought this would assist my sense of impending doom). In this piece, Moyn considers three themes – global capitalism, the human rights paradigm, and rising economic inequality. He describes the simultaneous burgeoning of the first two in the 1970’s, and the relatively more recent availability of empirical data that document the third – all noted by numerous other scholars – before arguing that the “crucial connection” between human rights and neoliberalism “is a missed connection: precisely because the human rights revolution has at its most ambitious dedicated itself to establishing a normative and actual floor for protection, it has failed to respond to—or even allowed for recognizing— neoliberalism’s obliteration of the ceiling on inequality.” (P. 151.) He positions his insights as in between Marxist and mainstream, concluding in part that there is no point berating human rights for this failure to engage – rather, human rights should be encouraged to keep out of this zone, lest it be seen as a collaborator. (Id.)
The article is divided into four parts. The first asks, essentially, “What would Marx say?,” positioning Marx’s (shifting) recognition of the comfortable fit between human rights and exploitation as fixed within the state, even if some later iterations might have allowed for recognition of phenomena now established but then barely imagined. The second part traces the concurrent rise of neoliberalism and international human rights regimes. Recognizing the shared “negative conditions” and “ideological building blocks,” Moyn asks if there’s anything beyond these basic similarities. In doing so he creates a research agenda, calling for more (detailed, specific) work on “how exactly to frame the relationship of the human rights explosion with neoliberal victory” (P. 159). He also suggests a conclusion based on what we know now, one which holds the “…prestige and prominence of international human rights to be symptomatic of a loss of structural accounts of social relations without their being causally responsible or morally culpable for it.” (Id.)
In part three, Moyn moves to consider the actual impact of human rights, building the case for his mildly but clearly stated skepticism about both the power of human rights and any causal connection between human rights and neoliberalism by looking at judicially enforced social rights and the relatively newer engagements of human rights in both international trade law and corporate social responsibility. Part four concludes by repeating that conclusions about the complicity of human rights are premature – but their inadequacy in the face of global market fundamentalism is certain. We must look elsewhere for a “threatening enemy,” a peerless champion to supplement (not replace) our powerless companion.
I liked this article for a variety of reasons. Here are just three. First, I teach students who are, for the most part, true believers in human rights. They came of age in the human rights era and most of them seem to see these rights as natural parts of the legal landscape, and definitively good and just (not to mention something inherently in the province of law and lawyers). This article is a careful incision into that thinking, calibrated to engender critical doubt while at the same time offering the language and politics of the neoliberal critique. I look forward to offering it to my students. Second, Moyn has some deftly compact turns of phrase in this very readable article: “In an era in which human rights norms and movements are frequently overloaded with expectation, the best conclusion is that a Band-Aid is not an adequate response to a charnelhouse (even if Band-Aids have their uses).” Finally, I liked this article as a gateway drug. Socioeconomic inequality, in various forms and measures, is the defining feature of these times. I cannot imagine there is a scholar of law who can afford to ignore neoliberalism, the empirical measure of its programs, or its critics. For people not already deeply engaged with this kind of scholarship, Moyn is a great place to start.
May 5, 2016 Elaine Craig
Abbe Smith, Representing Rapists: The Cruelty of Cross Examination and Other Challenges for a Feminist Criminal Defense Lawyer, 53 Am. Crim. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016).
Reading the work of those writing from a different perspective has been productive to the development of my own thinking. Abbe Smith’s forthcoming article, Representing Rapists: The Cruelty of Cross Examination and Other Challenges for a Feminist Criminal Defense Lawyer, is no exception. Like her other scholarship, Representing Rapists is impeccably written, thoughtful, and well reasoned. What makes this work exceptional is its brutal honesty. With its steadfast transparency and willing self-reflection, the article is downright brave.
Abbe Smith, a well known legal ethicist and criminal lawyer, has committed much of her professional attention to theorizing and defending the need for unmitigated zeal in the representation of the criminally accused – including, of course, those accused of sexual offences. With a view to better protecting sexual assault complainants, I have dedicated a lot of scholarly attention in the last few years to developing feminist arguments in support of the ethical limits on defence lawyers who represent clients accused of sexual offences. Where our perspectives likely differ most is with respect to the cross-examination of sexual assault complainants.
However, as Smith states clearly in her opening paragraphs, Representing Rapists is not an articulation of the procedural, ethical, and constitutional justifications for the no-holds-barred cross-examination of the truthful complainant. Instead, this article discusses “how it actually feels to confront and cross-examine” truthful sexual assault complainants, and “how to come to terms with these feelings”. It is an admirable attempt to develop a feminist defense ethos, pursued through open self-reflection and a willingness to engage seriously with the trauma caused to survivors not only by sexual violence but by the judicial system and criminal defence lawyers.
The article proceeds through five parts. In the first part, Smith highlights the broader context for the defence of those accused of rape and other sexual offences. For her, the broader context relates back to her justification for criminal defence work more generally. The United States is one of the most punitive countries in the world. And of course, its carceral state is populated predominantly by poor, racialized, or otherwise vulnerable people. As a result, for the criminal defender, “the stakes are higher, the urgency greater, the feeling of lawyerly responsibility more intense.”
Part II of the article considers the experience of women and children who have been sexually assaulted – aspects of both the sexual violence itself and the trial experiences of sexual assault survivors are contemplated. Smith’s method is unique. She examines the experiences of these survivors by immersing herself in, and quoting significantly in the article from, the rape memoirs of several women. The descriptions are raw, unflinching, and at times difficult to read.
Part of what makes Representing Rapists so bold is the way in which, in Parts III and IV, Smith then integrates these women’s experiences with the criminal justice response to their sexual violation into a discussion of some of her experiences representing men accused of rape. She is honest about the way some of her cases made her feel and the dissonance this causes. At one point, she compares herself to one of the women whose memoir she draws upon. The rapist of another reminds her of a man she once represented. Later she sees herself in another woman’s painful description of the lawyer that cross-examined her. The effect is intense.
Smith includes descriptions of the corporeal details from both the memoirs and cases she has taken, details of the pain and loss of self experienced by these women, and descriptions of the connections they make between the intimacy imposed upon them during the rape and the shame this generates. She also describes the shame she has felt after cross-examining a sexual assault complainant, knowing she has only added to theirs.
And she accepts responsibility: “Defence lawyers do not get to apologize – no matter how much we may want to….Victims of serious crime get to hate us. It is the least we can do for them.”
Smith’s analysis is nuanced. While she attempts, in Part V, to reduce the “dissonance of rape defence” experienced by feminist lawyers, she does not shy away from the tensions she is unable to reconcile. She is ever-cognizant of the humanity of her clients, including those who have committed heinous acts, and unapologetic in her commitment to her conception of justice.
Of the many things that I love about this piece, one is that it pushes me – it challenges me – to be as honest and as nuanced as I can in my own scholarship.
I do not agree with some of the defence counsel strategies Abbe Smith supports, nor the justifications she offers for them. But I could not agree more with the concept of feminism she embraces: a feminism that is brave, that attempts honesty and accepts complexity, and that is committed to dignity for all.
Apr 5, 2016 Ann E. Tweedy
Angela R. Riley & Kristen A. Carpenter,
Owning Red
: A Theory of (Cultural) Appropriation,
Tex. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016), available at
SSRN.
Laguna Pueblo writer and critic Paula Gunn Allen has argued that “[t]he American Indian poet is particularly bereft of listeners.” This is due to the fact that she “has difficulty locating readers/listeners who can comprehend the significance of her work, even when she is being as clear and direct as she can be, because . . . differences in experience and meaning assigned to events create an almost impossible barrier.” It occurred to me in reading and Angela Riley and Kristen Carpenter’s “Owning Red: A Theory of (Cultural) Appropriation,” that Indians face similar problems in telling the story of the harms caused by cultural appropriation, particularly those harms relating to intangible aspects of Native identity.
To non-Indians raised on tales of Wild West cowboy and Indian skirmishes and myths of generous Pilgrims who shared their bounty with Indians during the first Thanksgiving—and particularly to white Americans cloaked in racial privilege—fashion designers’ appropriation of Native dress and beer companies’ use of the names of deceased Indian heroes may seem innocuous—or even—as is sometimes argued—like genuine homage. Professors Carpenter and Riley provide the backstory needed to comprehend and contextualize these harms. They also offer compelling ideas for a solution. Most importantly, they show how contemporary appropriations of Native identities are part and parcel of a history of disrespect of Native property rights, including the right to cultural identity—and further that It is because of this colonial history of never-ending loss that non-Indian Americans so often fail to perceive the losses caused by appropriation. And conversely, it is precisely because of this history that the losses caused by appropriation are so devastating to Native peoples and individuals.
Riley and Carpenter use the term “owning Red” to refer to “the widespread practice by which non-Indians claim and use Indian resources for themselves, often without attribution, compensation, or permission.” (P. 110.) Tying the justice system’s lack of respect for Native property and religious rights to the legal system’s and society’s sanctioning of the appropriation of Native identity and intangible cultural property, Carpenter and Riley explain that, “with the virtually unimpeded taking of Indian lands, lives, bodies, and cultures, eventually all things Red became the property of non-Indians.”
However, their explication of the link between the law’s disrespect of Native rights and the legal system’s and society’s lack of understanding of the harms of cultural appropriation goes beyond the idea that the justice system’s lack of protection of Native property and religious rights leads to more disrespect of Indian rights—both by additional entities and individuals and with respect to additional types of rights—a point I and others have made elsewhere. Rather, their analysis insightfully contextualizes how the federal government’s removal of Indians from their ancestral lands, which began in full force in the 1830s, itself interfered with—and diminished–tribes’ and Indian individuals’ ability to engage in cultural practices and to maintain their cultural identities.
The confiscation of the land was not necessarily a literal appropriation of Native identity–the aspects of identity taken were not always taken to be used by non-Indians, but rather the taking of the land was often an end in itself. However, beyond the immediate and devastating losses of land that Removal and other violations of Indian real property rights effected, they concomitantly caused a disruption of cultural identity and an inability to maintain crucial lifeways. To see this is to better understand—even if the understanding of an outsider like me will always be imperfect—the harm that cultural appropriation wreaks on Native peoples. In contemporary instances of cultural appropriation, then, not only is there a taking and distortion of intensely personal, often sacred–and carefully guarded–cultural practices, but the taking is superimposed on other, earlier legally enforced takings of these very identities from Native peoples themselves. Thus, although Indians’ objections to cultural appropriation are often seen as anomalous in the freewheeling, fluid culture of mainstream America, there is more to the story, as Carpenter and Riley help us understand, than differing understandings of whether it is acceptable to borrow from other cultures. Instead, cultural appropriation of Native identities is especially devastating given the extent to which Native peoples have had to fight—often on the pain of imprisonment and even death—for the right to practice their own cultures.
Professors Carpenter and Riley provide several examples of recent appropriations of intangible cultural property, which they divide into easy and hard cases, and they provide proposed solutions for how to address each of these problems. Their solutions vary according to the problem, and this seems quite fitting given both the diversity of types of cultural appropriation, from use of mascots in professional, college, and K through 12 schools, to fashion designers’ use of Indian regalia on the runway and pharmaceutical companies’ appropriation of Native peoples’ traditional knowledge for commercial gain on the one hand and the diversity among tribes and tribal cultures on the other.
I admired the article in not proposing a one-size-fits-all solution for these quite different types of cultural appropriation and for the fact that, even among mascots at different institutional levels, they offered a nuanced and multi-faceted analysis. One of the challenges in writing about tribes and tribal law is that there is a temptation—as well as pressure from within the academy and from the standards of academic writing—to offer broad-based analyses and solutions, but the incredible diversity of the Nation’s 566 federally recognized tribes simply does not permit this in most contexts. Carpenter and Riley acknowledge and embrace this diversity, as is evident from their analysis of Indian mascots at the college and secondary school levels. At the college level, they note the success of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s policy of disallowing abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots but allowing continued use of Indian mascots and logos in cases where the team seeks and receives the consent of the relevant Indian tribe. They use Florida State University’s modifications of its mascot based on the recommendations of the Seminole Tribe of Florida—and the way that interactions among school and the Tribe about the mascot eventually fostered a deeper relationship between the two–as an example of the policy’s success. Here too, however, they do not shy away from the complexities of tribal diversity, and rightly note that the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma—which was originally based in what is now Florida but was removed to Oklahoma by the federal government—opposes all use of Indian mascots. As the authors suggest, there are good solutions but probably no perfect solutions in such complex situations.
In the other contexts, the authors’ proposed solutions are similarly tailored to the individual case. For example, with respect to use of Indian headdresses—which are traditionally reserved for revered warriors in the tribes in which they are utilized–in fashion shows, Carpenter and Riley suggest that education and increased dialogue may be the answer, given that the First Amendment likely acts as an insurmountable barrier to barring all use of traditional Indian clothing by unauthorized persons and that such a law would be overly restrictive even as to Native artists who wish to provide critiques or innovations. While this solution may seem somewhat dissatisfying at first glance, it is likely the only realistic solution for this wide-ranging problem with its diverse manifestations. Finally, I was intrigued by the authors’ idea that, with respect to commercial appropriation of Indian heroes’ names, such as Hormel Brewing Company’s unauthorized but judicially sanctioned use of Crazy Horse’s name to sell liquor, the answer may be to expand the role of tribal law in such cases. Their analysis led me to wonder what it would be like if a federal law were passed requiring entities attempting to use Native individuals’ names for commercial gain to comply with tribal law—or providing for tribal jurisdiction over such disputes—and what the benefits might be both in terms of protecting indigenous property rights to identity and in fostering greater understanding of—and respect for—Native perspectives. All in all, “Owning Red: A Theory of (Cultural) Appropriation” is a rich and interesting read that does justice to the tremendous complexities of tribal cultures and the vicissitudes of appropriation of intangible cultural property.
Feb 9, 2016 Margaret Davies
Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene is notable for two reasons – it is published under a creative commons license with a publisher committed to innovation, and it is an optimistic book that attempts to prefigure a world in which life and research are undertaken more sustainably. (And it contains an actual manifesto!)
The first thing to like about this book, therefore, is its publisher, in particular its business model and its ethos. Punctum texts are freely available on the internet – readers can make a donation before accessing a title, but can also access them for free. Hard copies can also be ordered. The objective of punctum books is to challenge scholarly norms – its motto is ‘spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion’ and it describes itself as ‘dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms.’ As academics become more critical about certain trends in traditional scholarly endeavor with its formalities and many constraints, there is a huge potential for new forms of more open-ended and innovative scholarship. Books published by punctum are short – novella length – making them ideal for conveying creative interventions succinctly, without getting bogged down in detail.
Which brings me to the Manifesto. The anthropocene is our geological era, the era in which humans actions have shaped the planet, primarily through our impact on the climate and on the earth’s ecosystems. The Manifesto is a short inspirational book which aims to encourage scholars to think and research experimentally in response to this situation in order to better understand human effects on the earth, and to minimize and even reverse them. It was inspired by the work of the late eco-feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, who wrote two significant books about the need to reconceptualise the human-nature relationship (Feminism and the Mastery of Nature 1993 and Environmental Culture 2002). The Manifesto brings together twenty-one brief essays, each around five pages long. These can be read together, but can also be experienced as short, intense, and provocative encounters with new ideas – they are all designed to make the reader think outside conventional forms, and to see new connections between human society and the physical, especially the natural, world.
The book starts with a manifesto encouraging scholars to think in a way which is (among other things), ‘curious’, ‘experimental’, ‘open’, ‘adaptive’, and ‘responsible’ (P. ii) and to tell stories which show connections and ‘reach beyond abstractions’. Research, according to the editors should ‘adopt a reparative rather than a purely critical stance towards knowing’ (P. vii.) The Manifesto directly encourages scholars who are skeptical of limited and formulaic modes of thinking and writing to experiment, innovate, and reach for new intellectual horizons. This harnesses what might be perceived as an anti-conventional energy in scholarship at present but is, more importantly, imperative to the change required for sustainable long-term living with others and with the earth.
These ideas are illustrated in the essays, which deal with a surprising range of topics. A few examples will have to suffice to give a flavor of the creative engagement of the writers with their subject matter. In ‘Conviviality as an Ethic of Care in the City,’ Ruth Fincher and Kurt Iveson write about urban spaces that enhance sociability and play, promoting ‘temporary identification with others in a shared space’ (P. 27.) In ‘Economy as Ecological Livelihood,’ JK Gibson-Graham and Ethan Miller critique mainstream notions of the economy in which it is seen as a separate sphere of human life, and instead argue for a more connected understanding of diverse economies which are more intrinsically linked to earth’s ecologies and to livelihood, not only of human beings in their separated lives but of interconnected and mutually reliant communities of living things (including humans). In ‘Flying Foxes in Sydney,’ Deborah Bird Rose explores various efforts to control and expel flying fox populations in Sydney, an effort which brings conservationists into conflict with those who experience the flying foxes as a pest. Bird’s essay reminds us that ‘in the Anthropocene there is no way out of entanglements within multi-species communities’ (P. 89) and that the ethical imperative is to find ways to co-exist rather than to insist on the purification of human spaces. Many other topics are considered, such as local food economies, graffiti, ethics, walking, and experimentation and mindfulness in research. What connects these essays is an imaginative engagement with a topic that tests or reconstructs received scholarly habits and frameworks – it is an invitation to scholars to think in new ways and make new connections.
Of course, not everybody accepts the term ‘anthropocene’, since it seems to separate humanity from the rest of the physical world and, problematically, attributes responsibility for ecosystem and climate change to our entire species. This species-level thinking elides the massive differences in power and resource consumption between human communities and perpetuates a universalist discourse in which those who have most damaged the earth can spread responsibility, even to those who have benefited the least and suffered the most from capitalist consumption. At the same time, the anthropocene is a useful term, in that it makes a powerful political point about the impact of (a subset of) human beings on the earth whose insatiable desires have exposed earth’s vulnerabilities. Planetary resilience is considerable, but not infinite.
This short book inspires us to think beyond conventional scholarship for a new way of engaging with each other and the planet. It holds the promise of paradigm change, towards styles of thinking which do not counterpose extractive human society against increasingly scarce natural resources. It asks us to think nature and culture together, and to understand that we are all ecologically connected. Although law is not specifically addressed in the book, it poses significant challenges for law, which in the West has been entirely conceptualized as an abstract product of human society. Legal scholarship can become more attentive to law’s material surrounds and more explicitly relational in orientation. This first involves understanding law as relations between human beings, a project which has been evident in legal scholarship for over two decades. Paying attention to the ecological relationships, however, also means situating law in relation to the material interconnectedness of all life systems. Law can no longer be regarded as a separate human sphere. I appreciate that these are broad statements with little explicit substance at present. Exactly how law will be understood in a fully interconnected world is a question which will be thought repeatedly in coming decades – law’s shape is yet to be worked out. Books such as this one inspire such new thinking, and while it would be easy to criticize the optimism and even utopianism of this book and others like it, the problems it is trying to address will be intractable without innovative and expansive attempts to reconceptualise humanity’s place in the world.
Jan 13, 2016 Davina Cooper
One intervention that has stayed with me from my first Law & Society Association meeting (Amsterdam, 1991) involved a British scholar who, midway through the conference’s feminist stream, spoke out against the assumed divide between academic and activist work. Scholarship, she commented, could be politically engaged work also. I was reminded of her words reading Michal Osterweil’s timely article on public anthropology and politics in which she explores how anthropological work might extend and enrich its political practice through both the engaged scholarship it carries out and by expanding the sites it recognises as theory-producing.
Osterweil starts by challenging the division in anthropology between activist research and cultural critique; she describes the former as working with and on behalf of marginalised communities, while the latter addresses politics in the realm of text and theory. Arguing that both are important as scholarly political practices, Osterweil challenges the presuppositions about action and politics underpinning the distinction between them. What gets counted and recognised as action or political also underlies a further, perhaps more fundamental, division, namely between academic and activist practices, as these get posited as two fundamentally different and separate spheres. As Osterweil puts it, there is a working assumption that academia comments upon the world it observes but remains steadfastly apart from. Imagining other worlds thus gets relegated to the academic sphere of intellectual imagining; outside practice, and so never able to flourish, or take hold, within it.
Osterweil explores the problems and limits endemic to these modes of dividing up practice through reflecting on her own ethnographic research with the Italian alter-globalization movement. At the heart of her account is the importance of recognising the experimental, reflexive and critical knowledge practices that contemporary activism undertakes. “Such practices pursue knowledge about the political and social context in order to arrive at better understandings of the present while also working to theorize, create, and posit alternatives to this present.” (P. 606).
Reinterpreting the activist side of the divide in this way is a crucial move. While many academics are ready to recognise the political character and traction of scholarship, there is typically more reluctance to recognise the theoretical work that activists also do. And yet, development of many bodies of ideas – from feminism, anti-racist and Marxist politics to environmentalism, anarchist, peace politics and others – come from activists. Sometimes, ideas are tied to individuals (who may work in universities although many do not); but importantly activist knowledge also emerges from the conversational and argumentative interactions that take place within movement counter-publics, circulating and developing through magazines and newsletters, meetings, and more recently social media. These collaborative processes of ideas formation are easy to miss in an academic environment where authorship is privileged; however, a great deal is lost when the complex, messy process of developing analyses and new ways of thinking are reduced to the output of named individuals.
In her exploration of what social movements do, Osterweil focuses on the relationship between contemplation, experimental innovation, and new imaginaries. Because the alter-globalization movement she is studying, known as the “Movimento dei Movimenti” (Movement of Movements, or MoM), is not simply a force operating in the “real” world, but as well a cyberspace event, a “concept, idea and aspiration”, MoM complicates conventional distinctions between observer and observed, between thinking and what is thought. In an interview accompanying her article, Osterweil comments “Their work is at the order of making visible the contours, sometimes limits, of our current episteme, and showing how new ways of knowing and registering reality could help transform the political terrain.”
Movement engagement in epistemic politics reframes what counts as success, which Osterweil suggests depends on shaping the imagination and desire, making the revisioning of other worlds and institutions possible. Success is not necessarily about outputs and it does not depend on a simplification and closure that rules out complexity. Osterweil rejects the pervasive notion that social movements (at least in the case of MoM) disavow the need for questioning. “The theoretical practice of these Italian activists points to the emergence of a new political ethic based on a different kind of epistemology—one founded on a commitment to critical reflexivity and an open-ended, processual trajectory.” (P. 607.)
But, to the extent action, including academic action with its “claims, propositions, facts and knowledge-claims” (P. 610), relies on decision, temporarily bracketing complexity and uncertainty, does action nevertheless remain better than its alternative – a critique that opposes or impedes doing stuff? Again, Osterweil rejects the distinction. She writes, “truly taking on an understanding of the epistemic as a political terrain of struggle requires shifting our understanding of what constitutes both the criteria for action, and what constitutes action.” (P. 611.) This is an important point. As Osterweil suggests, many academics in their writing and scholarship recognise the significance of non-dominant registers and sites of action. However, when they turn to engaging in political action – understood as an intervention in the “real” world, their focus and engagement shifts to conventional sites and objects, such as the state.
Here, I temporarily part company with Osterweil. For her understanding of the political terrain as complex, and her argument that we need to reimagine and reinvent political forms, does not extend to the state, which is understood, or at least gestured to, according to a dominant state framework in which it is interpreted as a “macro-political entit[y with] formal decision-making and governing powers” (P. 614.) In this account, the state appears as a bounded, implicitly unified, thing-like thing – that exists separately not only from those who act politically in relation to it but also from the ways in which it is thought. Yet, the state like other social dimensions can also be addressed differently – whether by empirically challenging or complicating this prevailing imaginary or by reconceptualising what it means to be a state in ways that make it more extensively available as a productive site of radical or progressive politics. The “micro-political terrain[] of becoming” (P. 615) does not have to be imagined as existing exclusively outside of the state. However, while I would like to see the state subjected to the lines of thought developed in this article, I strongly recommend the piece for its interesting and accessible engagement with a set of prominent and important ideas as important to politically committed legal scholarship as other fields.
