Deserts and Technical Legality

This chapter summarises the book through emphasis on the reoccurrence of deserts throughout the book. Like deserts, technical legality could appear empty and harsh, but such superficial glances mislead. With closer looking deserts are revealed as full of ingenious life; so to with technical legality. The ingenious forms of life are not the humans of an earlier epoch, but these monsters live and can live well within technical legality. However, to say that life endures in technical legality and to condition that with a potential of ‘can live well’ invites critical reflection. If the touchstone of ethical action in technical legality is a vitalist injunction to nurture life, than how are those streams in the meta-data of the network that might answer the description of law be seen? This chapter concludes with some further critical reflections on the monstrous ends of both law and the human in technical legality and the hopes and fears of this present future.

Dune, Modern Law, and the Alchemy of Death and Time

This chapter examines technical legality through looking in detail at how modernity allowed law as technology. This is undertaken through a jurisprudential reading of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune cycle’. The Dune cycle has been read as involving an affirmation of chaos over rationality in public activities — religion, politics and ecology — concluding with the message of self-care and Zen-like calm in coping with an uncertain universe. But these accounts sell Herbert’s imagining short. This chapter re-examines the Dune cycle as a story of tyrants and leviathan sandworms. In this re-reading, Dune can be seen as an account of the metaphysics of law as technology. The themes of the secondary literature on Dune can be rewoven into a critical elaboration of Hobbes’ ‘mortal God’ which exposes the essential commitments of sovereignty and its technical law. These commitments are death and time. Located within the bloody alchemy of modernity, the monstrousness of the law as technology is revealed – the consumption of bare life in time. This brutal realisation seems to end with Schmitt’s representative sovereign deciding to make the world.

The Doctor and Technical Lawyering

This chapter argues that the British science fiction television icon Doctor Who provides guidance on how to live well as an entity designated ‘lawyer’ within the networks of technical legality. Technical legality challenges the received tradition of legal ethics. Lawyering is revealed not as a ‘profession’ but a demonic calling to be an alchemist of death and time. This calling to be a ‘time lord’ who brings ‘death’ immediately suggests Doctor Who. A consistent theme through the unfolding text that is Doctor Who has been the ‘ethics’ of the Doctor. The Doctor overcomes and endures because the weight of his responsibility for death and time is within his time lord being. There is neither sound judgment nor technical somnambulism in the Doctor’s actions. Instead his actions appear as a hybrid of both, unified by an acceptance that actions performed from this location break, change and destroy the networks of the present. Ultimately, the Doctor shows that lawyering within technical legality demands an accepting of the powers of time and death to safeguard ‘life.’

Introduction: Living in Technical Legality

This chapter introduces the book. It introduces the key concepts of the Frankenstein myth, law as technology and the role of science fiction as the site for the collective dream of technological culture and society in the West. This chapter also locates the book to come in the emergent field of law and humanities and the existing literature that examines law and legality of science fiction. It also introduces the concepts of the monster and the trickster.

Mad Max and Mapping the Monsters in the Networks

This chapter examines living in technical legality from the location of the legal scholar. Technical legality means that thinking about law and especially law and technology, has to escape the circularity of the Frankenstein myth, through coming to know the complex networks of technical legality. In this chapter George Miller’s classic Australian post-apocalyptic film Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior provides a map of the functions of a very familiar manifestation of technological humanity, the human-automobile in Australian law, politics and culture. What is shown through this cartography is a way of thinking law and technology that goes beyond the closed metaphysics of the Frankenstein myth. In mapping complexity, complicity, collusions and surprises within the networks of the present, the law scholar-nodes functions as a privileged location whereby the technical legality can be self-reflective; where the effects and affects of the continually changing world are seen. Further, in generating knowledge about the networks of the present, law-scholar-nodes can empower others, other embodied nodes in the networks, the monsters that have come to inherit the Earth, to live well in technical legality.

Battlestar Galactica, Technology, and Life

This chapter explores the forms of life made by technical legality, through the re-imagined series Battlestar Galactica. It is argued that Battlestar Galactica deals directly with the triumph of technology and in so doing charts a way for living within technical legality.This chapter opens with the sovereign and moves to the personal. Battlestar Galactica, however, does not invite a return to the public. Rather the personal is the technical and the distinction between essence and artefact becomes blurred. Here Battlestar Galactica seemingly performs Heidegger’s foundational account of technology that sees technology as consuming humanity leaving a false, destructive and empty shell. Battlestar Galactica does not quite follow this script. It affirms that living remains after the end. Humanity as it has been known has been changed but agency and ‘life’ remains. This location, identified by Haraway, and developed by Braidotti, offers the possibility for living well in technical legality through knowing and feeling the ‘networks of the present.’

Xenogenesis and the Technical Legal Subject

This chapter argues that a detailed reading of Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ series clarifies how, notwithstanding the challenges to its being and its agency by technical legality, responsibility to becoming can allow the technical legal subject to live well in the present. The technical legal subject is revealed as a node within the networks, a blob of natureculture, a nexus point for biopolitical operations. Through Butler’s narrative of Lilith and her monstrous, hybrid human-alien children possibilities for the technical legal subject to be ‘embodied’ within a ‘location’ and ‘navigate’ the networks of the present emerge. Not only is agency empowered, notwithstanding the weight of the technical networks and the inclination to automation, but so is a form of ethics. Butler’s afrofuturism present a powerful affirmation that knowing and acting well to nurture life remains ever present, even in technical legality.

From Law and Technology to Law as Technology

This chapter argues that law can be seen as technological when, ironically, law is called to respond to technological change. Through a focus on the legal responses to cloning, it is shown that the called-for laws were responding to visions of cloning futures directly sourced from science fiction. Having located these legal acts within science fiction, the essential elements of this future-oriented process – monstrous technology, vulnerable humanity and saving law – can be seen. This will be identified as the ‘Frankenstein myth.’ What is revealed is that science fiction holds the technical and legal together at the level of substantive dreaming and also at the level of basic commitments. The irony intrudes at this point. This saving law that can determine the future has a particular character. It is a species of pure power, manufactured through procedure in the present to determine the future. It appears to have the same characteristics that have been ascribed to technology. With this the categories established by the Frankenstein myth of ‘technology’, ‘humanity’ and ‘law’ seem to be imploded. What is glimpsed is the singularity of technical legality.