Naturalising the myth : Hart, biopolitics, and the body corporate

This article extends the critique of H. L. A. Hart developed by Peter Fitzpatrick in the conclusion to The Mythology of Modern Law. Fitzpatrick finds myth at the very heart of positivist legal theory, functioning to reproduce an imperialist worldview. Through a focus on Hart’s account of incorporation, this article will argue that Hart naturalises this mythic law by insinuating it into social relations. Incorporation, alongside other ‘facilitative’ or ‘power-conferring’ elements of law such as wills and marriages, are so important that we could not imagine life without them. At the same time, Hart maintains the importance of choice and autonomy in relation to such rules, but in so doing obscures their constitutive function. In his reliance on myth, Hart avoids contending with the history that forms the unacknowledged context for his account of incorporation. By reintroducing this history, this article demonstrates that Hart participates in the normalisation of law that Michel Foucault locates in the union between life and law that is characteristic of biopolitics

When a business isn’t a business: law and the political in the history of the United Kingdom’s co-operative movement

Contemporary efforts to develop and promote co-operatives and the social economy confront a tension in the competing and often conflicting aims to achieve commercial sustainability in a capitalist market while also promoting social transformation. Through a review of the historical experience of institutionalization in the Co-operative Movement in the United Kingdom, this article attempts to generate insights into these tensions. Despite being seen as unpolitical, co-operatives can be understood as political at the level of re-shaping sociality through co-operative practice. Although the similarity between co-operatives and joint-stock companies produces ambiguities within the movement, this does not in itself detract from the co-operative project. It is argued that the codification of co-operatives in law as bodies corporate constitutes the closure of the political aspect of co-operation and reinforces and gives consequence to the misconception of co-operatives as primarily commercial entities.Los esfuerzos por desarrollar y promover las cooperativas y la economía social se enfrentan a un conflicto entre los objetivos contrapuestos de lograr la sostenibilidad comercial en un mercado capitalista, a la vez que se promueve una transformación de la sociedad. Realizando una revisión de la experiencia histórica de la institucionalización del movimiento cooperativista en el Reino Unido, este artículo pretende analizar estas tensiones. A pesar de ser apolíticas, las cooperativas se pueden entender como un elemento político por su intento de reformular la sociedad. Aunque la similitud entre cooperativas y sociedades anónimas produce ambigüedades dentro del movimiento cooperativista, esto no va, por sí mismo, en detrimento del proyecto de cooperación. Se argumenta que, al contemplar en la legislación a las cooperativas como personas jurídicas, se acaba con el aspecto político de las cooperativas. A su vez, esto refuerza y termina con la idea errónea de las cooperativas como entes básicamente comerciales

Constituting the co-operative: law and the political in the history of the English co-operative movement

Co-operatives are often regarded as alternatives to capitalist forms of business organisation. This thesis argues that this alterity has been circumscribed by the legal recognition and constitution of co-operatives as bodies corporate within a broader system of political economy in the mid-nineteenth century, in which co-operatives came to be regarded primarily as commercial entities. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this thesis pursues a genealogy of the co-operative in order to expose the conditions of its constitution, beginning with a critique of dominant historiographical approaches to the co-operative movement that regard legal recognition as ‘enabling’ for a co-operative form that already existed outside the law. Following an alternative historical account that locates the beginnings of the co-operative movement in the late eighteenth century, in what E.P. Thompson referred to as the ‘moral economy of the English crowd’, this thesis situates legal recognition within shifting forms of power and governmentality in the creation of the modern state, while also emphasising the historicity of the legal form of the body corporate. The body corporate imports a transcendent form of unity from the medieval church that becomes normalised in the nineteenth century as part of the emergence of liberal and biopolitical governmentality, serving as a form of metaphysical enclosure that facilitates market discipline. While co-operatives do offer a meaningful alternative by virtue of an ethos of mutuality derived from the moral economy, this thesis argues that legal recognition was depoliticising for the co-operative, not in the narrow terms of political economy, but through what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy refer to as ‘the closure of the political’

Decentering law through public legal education

Public legal education (PLE) has received renewed attention in the context of deregulation and recent cuts to publicly funded legal assistance in the UK. However, while PLE practices can support access to justice and supplement provision, they also risk placing the burden of responsibility for coping with legal problems on those most in need of support. In this paper we will argue this tension plays on a false dichotomy between education and advice, one that we suggest arises partly as a consequence of the discourse of legal need, in which law can come to seem like the best or the only way of framing social relations. However PLE works an important ‘boundary of law’: the division between who can know, speak about and access the law, and who cannot. As such, we argue that it can critically ‘decenter’ the law and expose law’s political contingency

Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport

It is widely assumed that the more information surveillance apparatuses can collect about an individual, the less risk she poses. In this article, we examine how gender figures into and potentially disrupts the link between identity and security. Our analysis centers on one very particular event: the confusion that erupts at the airport when US Transportation Security Administration agents perceive a conflict between the gender marked on one\u27s papers, the image of one\u27s body produced by a machine, and/or an individual\u27s perceived gender presentation. Gender has been so deeply naturalized—as immutable, as easily apprehended, and as existing before and outside of political arrangements—for so long that its installation in identity verification practices largely goes unthought. In what follows, we describe how the two TSA programs, Secure Flight and Advanced Imaging Technology, operationalize gender differently. We examine what happens when different sources of knowledge about gender clash within the security assemblage of the airport. As part of state security apparatuses\u27 unceasing quest for more and better information, both programs securitize gender. They also reveal the impossibility of predicting with certainty that something about a person, even something thought to be sourced/lodged in the body such as gender, will stay the same over time. We argue, however, that the effects of gender\u27s unreliability as a measure of identity do not constitute a problem for the TSA but rather for the transgender individuals whose narratives, documents, and bodies reveal the category\u27s mutability. We conclude by suggesting that the securitization of gender at the airport is best understood as an assemblage

Constituting the co-operative: law and the political in the history of the English co-operative movement

Co-operatives are often regarded as alternatives to capitalist forms of business organisation. This thesis argues that this alterity has been circumscribed by the legal recognition and constitution of co-operatives as bodies corporate within a broader system of political economy in the mid-nineteenth century, in which co-operatives came to be regarded primarily as commercial entities. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this thesis pursues a genealogy of the co-operative in order to expose the conditions of its constitution, beginning with a critique of dominant historiographical approaches to the co-operative movement that regard legal recognition as ‘enabling’ for a co-operative form that already existed outside the law. Following an alternative historical account that locates the beginnings of the co-operative movement in the late eighteenth century, in what E.P. Thompson referred to as the ‘moral economy of the English crowd’, this thesis situates legal recognition within shifting forms of power and governmentality in the creation of the modern state, while also emphasising the historicity of the legal form of the body corporate. The body corporate imports a transcendent form of unity from the medieval church that becomes normalised in the nineteenth century as part of the emergence of liberal and biopolitical governmentality, serving as a form of metaphysical enclosure that facilitates market discipline. While co-operatives do offer a meaningful alternative by virtue of an ethos of mutuality derived from the moral economy, this thesis argues that legal recognition was depoliticising for the co-operative, not in the narrow terms of political economy, but through what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy refer to as ‘the closure of the political’

Ultimate Legality: Reading the Community of Law

This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a major book that has influenced the author. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André‐Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, Roger Brownsword, Roger Cotterrell, Nicola Lacey, Carol J. Greenhouse, and David Garland. An initial twist: several acute observers would consider the way I read to be the most influential effect of reading on me – a way of reading that extends beyond the specificity of the text yet, in so doing, connects integrally with it. Salvation of specificity is at hand, however. That way of reading is intimately reflective of Derridean deconstruction and a hugely influential reading becomes his ‘Force of Law’. A problem ensues. Other influential reading came before my love of Derrida – influential reading to do with law and society (of course), with decolonization and imperialism, with engaged anthropology, and with critical legal studies. A retrospective revelation then follows. Derridean deconstruction is found to haunt and inform these other readings. They can be read in a way that inherently anticipates deconstruction. Some culminating coherence is offered by the inescapable insistence of community and the mutually intrinsic fusion of community and law

Co-operatives in the Cultural Industries

This podcast is a recording of a roundtable discussion on Co-operatives in the Cultural Industries, that took place at City University London on April 1, 2015, organised by Marisol Sandoval and Jo Littler. Speakers were Robin Murray, Rhiannon Colvin, Sion Whellens and Tara Mulqueen. The lives of cultural workers are complex and contradictory; often combining work satisfaction, pleasure and autonomy with job insecurity, low pay, long hours, anxiety and inequality. The roundtable discussed the potentials and limits of worker co-operatives as an alternative way of organizing cultural work. It explored how worker co-operation might contribute to new collaborative forms of cultural production; how they do, or might, strengthen a 'cultural commons'; and the role cultural co-ops play in the wider context of movements for workers' rights. Questions that were discussed include: To what extent can worker co-operatives be a means to confront precariousness and individualisation in work in the cultural sector? Do worker co-ops open up new possibilities for the collaborative production of cultural commons? What role can worker co-operatives play within a broader movement for creating more just, equal and humane cultural work and an alternative to capitalist economies? Where lies the boundary between neoliberal calls for self-help and individual responsibility and a radical co-op movement? What is the relation between worker co-ops and other forms of progressive politics such as the union movements, social protests and civil society activism? Can cultural co-ops contribute to reinventing the meaning and practice of work in the 21st century? About the speakers: Marisol Sandoval is a Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Creative Industries at City University London. Her research critically deals with questions of power, responsibility, commodification, exploitation, ideology and resistance in the global culture industry. Jo Littler is Senior Lecturer at City University London's Department of Culture and Creative Industries. Her work explores questions of culture and power from an interdisciplinary, cultural studies-informed perspective. Rhiannon Colvin after graduating in 2010 to find the world of work competitive and brutal, Rhiannon founded AltGen to empower young graduates to get together and create their own work. http://www.altgen.org.uk/ Tara Mulqueen is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College School of Law. Her thesis concerns the development of legislation for co-operatives in the 19th century. Robin Murray is an industrial economist. He was Director of Industry at the Greater London Council (GLC) in the 1980s, and has been a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, the Director of Development for the Government of Ontario and co-founder of Twin and Twin Trading. He is an associate of Co-operatives UK and author of Co-operation in the age of Google. http://www.uk.coop/ageofgoogle Sion Whellens is a member of the graphic design and print co-operative Calverts. As part of the Principle Six partnership, he also advises and supports co-ops in creative industries. http://www.calverts.coo