Actors or spectators? Vulnerability and critical environmental law

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LAW 328 Green Legal Theory

Notes

instead of the rather grand ontological polarisation between 'us' and 'the environment' , the debate has moved to an epistemological debate between anthropocentricity and ecocentricity.

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An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action'

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It is a peculiar position that humans have managed to construct for themselves, where the world performs for them.

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Any need for observational distance is swallowed up by the velocity at which the surface moves - from polarisation and dialectics to what Heidegger has famously called being thrown-into the world: a forceful abandonment into the world.

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As soon as one is present, one is vulnerable.

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futility of looking for a centre in the way life, society or anything else is structured.

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critical environmental law's main theoretical task is to reconcile the observer with the actant, namely the epistemology of observation and the ontology of being in the middle.

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'make rhizomes, not roots, never plant ! Don't sow, grow off-shoots ! '

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vulnerability is the moment where the spectator takes herself in, in her full actant dimension, and when the actant swallows up the spectacle of herself in the world.

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Jurisprudence is a philosophical thought that amounts to praxis

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spatial specificity, its materiality and its acentricity

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environmental jurisprudence as being a form of legal concreteness that dives headlong into the case at hand without preconceived structures as to how the law should act.

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To put it bluntly, environmental law cannot save the planet. What is more, society cannot expect environmental law to want to save the planet.

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after all its disciplinary excursus, environmental law must always return to the employment of a legal language and house itself in courts.

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striving to avoid the binary distinction between observer and actant, namely critical observation on the one hand and participation on the other.

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critical distance would be a betrayal, a departure from the suffering of the matter for a 'higher', 'safer' sphere of almost theological overview.

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is it really the case that for environmental law to be reconfigured as critical environmental law, a higher, transcendent perspective must be adopted?

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while for Deleuze there are no boundaries, just folds, for Luhmann, the system is defined by (while it itself defines) its boundary.

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To realise that there is no opposition between maintaining a distance and immersing oneself is the way critical environmental law needs to conceptualise itself.

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Position One: Critical Environmental Law Begins in the Middle

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Position Two: Critical Environmental Law is Moving Along its Open Ecology

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Position Three: Critical Environmental Law is Singular

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Position Four: Critical Environmental Law is Immanent

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Just as environmental law cannot refrain from being law, it also cannot refrain from not being law. Its identity crisis offers the perfect platform for its continuous becoming-other, becoming-science, becoming-animal, becoming-economy, becoming-Earth.

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