Legal Pluralism and Science and Technology Studies: Exploring Sources of the Legal Pluriverse

In introducing the contributions to this special section, we explore the links between social and juridical concepts of normativity and science and technology. We follow the Legal Pluralism challenge to the notion of state law as the sole source of normative order and point to how technological transformation creates a pluralistic legal universe that takes on new shapes under conditions of globalization. We promote a science and technology studies (STS)-inspired reworking of Legal Pluralism and suggest expanding the portfolio of legally effective regimes of ordering to include the normativity generated by materiality and technology. This normativity is amply demonstrated in the case studies included in the papers which make up this special section. We conclude that the inclusion of approaches developed in STS research helps analytically to overcome what we view as an incomplete law project, one unable to deal with the technicized lifeworlds of a global modernity. The contributions to this special section illustrate that technomaterial change cannot be understood without recognition of the role of normative impacts, and conversely, the legal pluriverse cannot be understood without recognition of the normative role of techno-material arrangements.

Overcoming “The Language Rubicon": Versions, Steps and Evolutionary Mechanisms

The most plausible hypotheses explaining the breakthrough of our distant ancestors to articulate speech and consciousness include: rituals of solidarity (singing, grooming, facial expressions, gestures), the role of "labor", teaching children, changes in gender relations, recruiting (mobilization for collective action), laryngeal transformation, brain growth, mirror neurons, neuronal overlap; dominance of coalitions over loners, self-domestication, the need to coordinate decisions; joint intentionality, development of normativity. The concretization of the principle of "cultural drive" leads to the following concept: new environmental, social and communicative challenges and concerns lead to multiple trials; successful behavior is consolidated in group practices, mental structures of participants, and hereditary inclinations with multilevel selection and change of many generations. Overcoming the "language Rubicon" took place in several steps, or stages, in which the structures that have developed to provide concerns lead to new concerns that require new structures. Such concerns as pacifying social order in the group, signaling general discontent, coordinating actions, etc., the following structures emerged: egalitarian coalitions with collective practices of intimidation, sound signals uttered in unison, training and self-training, self-domestication, shared intentionality, and normative rituals. The most plausible versions supplement this concept. Сhoral singing as a ritual of solidarity promoted the ability to imitate and articulate. Mirror neurons and neural overlaps have played the role of providing mechanisms for imitation and association processes. The connection between "labor" and speech was complex and interdependent, mediated by normativity. Recruiting as signals of mobilization for collective action also made its contribution but only under the already established normative order. Social learning is in fact a special ritual of constant trial and adjustment which has grown out of a normative ritual. The establishment of a new order of sexual relations also played a role: under the prohibition of violence and rape it was necessary to involve partners. Speech replaced grooming, and those who spoke clearly, convincingly and/or sang beautifully received benefits in sexual selection. The totality of all these processes reinforced the concerns of mutual understanding which were provided by the rituals of naming with the following multiplication of protowords and further growth of linguistic complexity.

De/Stabilizing Heterosexuality in the Pardoner’s Tale

The paper sets out to argue that the Pardoner’s atypical sexuality is subversive of the medieval gender matrix and that his challenge to heteronormativity is ultimately encompassed and disarmed. Chaucer presents the Pardoner as a genderly ambiguous Other who does not fit the compulsory pattern of the two biological sexes. In its pronounced otherness and difference, his queer body disrupts the medieval normative order. Paradoxically, however, his difference re-inscribes that very order and reinforces the institutional status quo. His transgressive potential is met by containment and heterosexual hegemony is eventually re-established and re-affirmed.

Pandemic rage: Everyday frustrations in times of the COVID-19 crisis

In this study, the authors use data from qualitative research to examine the phenomenon of pandemic rage in everyday life. They define pandemic rage as an emotional reaction to feelings of anger, frustration and helplessness resulting from the conviction that fundamental rules have been violated during a pandemic, which is perceived (by the person experiencing pandemic rage) as provocation, impertinence, insolence, and crossing boundaries. The article takes a closer look at the relations between space, normative order, behaviours and pandemic rage. It first introduces the linkages between the occurrence of pandemic rage and the experience of spatial compression in the private and public spheres, situations of feeling ‘condensed’ and ‘condemned’ in the presence of others, and proxemic disturbances. Then the article discusses endogenous and exogenous catalysts of pandemic rage. The last section provides a summary with interpretations and conclusions.

Sensitization of Online Users for Social Resilience: A Case-based Analysis of Learning Outcomes

The article is based on the learning outcomes of a sensitization session held with students enrolled in eleven universities of the twin cities under a project titled Sensitization of Youth for Socially Resilient Communities in the Digitalizing World. The objectives were to sensitize youth for safe digital behaviour, spread the message of respecting human values, personal space, and privacy in digital communication, communicate the harassment policy concerns, and promote the emerging normative order for respecting cultural diversity and harmony for self-actualization behavioural change. Around 500 students directly participated in online and in-person sessions. The findings are based on the post-session assessment results recorded from 374 responses. The project outcome reflects a better understanding of the notion of privacy, personal space, cyber-bullying, cyber-crimes, online sexual assaults, types & legislation against harassment through a US-Pakistan diplomatic soft intervention and initiative for Pakistani youth.

Conjuring Caliban's Woman: Moving beyond Cinema's Memory of Man in Praise House (1991)

Julie Dash's experimental short film, Praise House (1991), situates conjuring as both a narrative and formal device to invent new memories around Black womanhood that exceed our representation within the epistemes of Man. I view Praise House as an example of conjure-cinema with which we can evaluate how Black feminist filmmakers, primarily working in experimental film, manipulate the poetic structure and aesthetics of film to affect audiences rather than rely on representational narrative alone. Following the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, I use Man to refer to the representational body of the Western episteme that defines value through mass accumulation. It is through Wynter's scholarship that we find the ontological emancipation from Man that is Caliban's woman, who represents discourse beyond our normative, colonial mode of feeling/knowing/being. Through an analysis of Praise House that foregrounds film's ability to generate affect via its aesthetics, this article argues that aesthetics can similarly enact the same power of conjure as found in Praise House's narrative, and as such conjures an epistemological rupture to our normative order that is Caliban's woman.

Law and Economics, or Punctum Archimedis in Environmental Law

This article examines the autonomous field of Law and Economics, indicates the importance of integrating the economical methodology in the process of comprehensively understanding the normative order and laments over the undesirable shortage of interdisciplinary education and academic dialogue regarding Law and Economics in Georgia. Moreover, this paper deliberates on the relevance of the Coase theorem for lawyers and policy-makers, displays the specific recommendations of its application in jurisprudence, including elucidating property rights, maximizing economic productivity and minimizing transaction costs. The following article discusses attempts and shortcomings to harmonize a decentralized market solution in environmental law and demonstrates regarding the example of the EU emission trading system that the method of Law and Economics can be used not only for a thorough analysis of the existing model but also as a pragmatic instrument for defining a normative program.

Obedience to authority, cognitive and affective responses and leadership style in relation to a non-normative order: the Milgram experiment

The influence of the context on behavioral and emotional reactions to a war crime situation military cadets (N = 315) is analyzed. The study is based on Milgram’s experience and the tragedy of My Lai.It examines personal and peer obedience to an anti-normative order (asking participants whether they would obey an order to shoot unarmed civilians) in five vignettes or scenarios that reproduce Milgram’s conditions and MyLai scenario. This is an experimental between-within study of five scenarios by two conditions (Milgram, 1974). Personal and collective obedience of other military, emotional reactions and values of Schwartz (2012) were measured. Showing enhancement of self-bias it is reported that the pairs would be more likely to shoot than one would. Replicating Milgrams’s results, obedience is greater when the order is given directly by an authority, and lower when there is conflict between authorities and peers rebel. Confirming that identification with humanity and not just with the in-group may prompt respondents to reject an anti-normative order, values of transcendence of the self are associated with less obedience and congruent emotional reactions. Self-perceived transformational leadership was associated with positive emotions towards peer that disobey to fire. However a transformational style perceived in the superior was associated to positive emotions by respect to soldier who open fire, adding information on the potential dark side of this leadership style. The relevance of personal values, leadership style and affectivity in military context is discussed.

An Immanence without the World

This essay proposes to rethink the conceptual associations that bind immanence to the secular and oppose it to (divine) transcendence. It asks: What if immanence is divorced from the conceptual opposition between the world and its openings to (divine) other(s), between enclosure and the trace of a transcendent outside? What might arise if immanence is severed from its link with secularity, if it ceases to be merely another conceptual support in secularism’s metaphysical armature? To pursue these questions, the essay engages a variety of materials, including medieval mysticism, anthropological critiques of the secular, work in Black studies, critiques of the subject, and François Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought. The result links immanence more intimately with dispossession than with the subject’s self-possession—and entwines it with the undercommons, as the atopic lowest place, rather than with the nomos and topos imposed by the (modern) world and its regime of the proper. Immanence is thought of as anti- and antenomian force, a groundless ground coming underneath the conceptual logics of the world, its normative order of things, and life lived according to its distributions. As a result, rather than a weapon in modernity’s endless self-justifying polemics with religion, immanence opens forth trajectories for its destitution and delegitimation.