Epistemologies of Doubt

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3. Epistemologies of doubt Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

1. WE BEGIN WITH DOUBT The whole title could be: ‘Epistemologies of doubt or the doubt of epistemology’. This is potentially perilous ground: what is there outside epistemology? If epistemology is the way we acquire knowledge – the big how of the question ‘how we know what we know’ – then how can we doubt epistemology? Do we doubt our ability or even necessity of access to knowledge? Do we doubt the fact that some of the most sophisticated theoretical constructions of knowledge are based on either an experiential or on an observational mode of knowing? And what is there to suggest as an alternative, if we find these wanting? This chapter aims to do something slightly unsettling: to position the human in a posthuman discourse that questions the centrality of the human, and in so doing also questions the ability of the human to know. This is perhaps the greatest reversal one can inflict on the connection between human rights and environment. If humans are not adequately positioned to have access to knowledge, human rights’ assumption of an anthropocentric approach, either in substance or in tools, is flawed. This is not surprising. Ecocentric literature, ecofeminism, deep ecology, earth jurisprudence, and more recently wild law, have been pointing to the absurdity of the anthropocentric position.1 What is surprising (and this is an insight that also derives directly from the position of doubting epistemology) is that the ecocentric position that the above assume rather uncritically is also flawed. To see the human as just one other part of the larger unsystematic system of nature is both inaccurate and not immediately useful. Ecocentrism has failed to understand the Anthropocene, namely the present geological era, which is determined by human presence more than any other species, as I show below; or perhaps deliberately blindfolds itself to it for the sake of a utopia that never existed (and if it did, we never had access to it). Ecocentrism suffers from the same delusions as anthropocentrism. Their mutual flaw (and delusion) lies with the assumption of access to knowledge based on an a priori constructed centre of discourse. Whether anthropocentric or ecocentric, we are pinned to the tyranny of the centre. In what follows, I aim at going behind the human rights/environmental protection debate by reconceptualizing the terms of the distinction. I will not deal with rights but with responsibility. I will not deal with the human but with the posthuman. I will not 1 Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered (Gibbs Smith 1985); Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Routledge 1993); Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (UCL Press 1992); Cormac Cullinan, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice (Chelsea Green Publishing 2011); Michelle Maloney and Peter Burdon (eds), Wild Law – In Practice (Routledge 2014).

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Epistemologies of doubt 29 deal with ‘the environment’ but with a ruptured continuum. My aim is to go beyond easy, comfortable distinctions that allow for imaginary third spaces to emerge, and sketch a way of avoiding the issue of epistemology and ontology. I do this by taking recourse to two, seemingly opposing, theories that have determined the way the human understands herself in relation to her surrounding: Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoiesis and Gilles Deleuze’s radical ontology.2 Finally, emphatically not by way of answer, I offer a description of the effects of doubt in a potential environmental legal discourse, what I have called critical environmental law.3

2. CENTRE Both anthropocentrism and ecocentrism are fascinated by power. This power, whether concentrated or dispersed, is located centrally. It is a panoptical power, one that sits in the apex of all possibilities, surveilling the avenues to and of knowledge. The centre is the hardest place to let go, harder than any other places in which epistemologies have dwelt: margins have on their side the fascination of progress, of possibility, of betterment; the ‘outside’ has the ability to provide an overview, often facilitated by the necessary distance of ‘objective’ observation; the in-between basks in the light of post-dialectical, post-Hegelian panacea, where counting to three seems, miraculously, both the way out of dialectics and the perfect coronation of the dialectic method. But the centre! The centre is moderate yet fair, all-radiating, all-thematizing, all-seeing. It is the limelight, the epicentre of power – why would anyone want to leave this behind? The centre of both anthropo/ecocentrism is one of intense visibilization. Unlike Foucault’s version of the panoptic power that withdraws from visibility while controlling everything,4 the environmental debate’s centre has nothing subtle about it. It is there for everyone to see, and splits itself into two shiny polarities, so that everyone necessarily takes sides. The tyranny of the centre is that it splits into two: it is either/or. It cannot be one without the other, it cannot be both simultaneously, it cannot be neither one nor the other. The centre of environmental discourse commands a total submission to the rupture, squeezing the margins into polar positions, draining lines of the creative flight that might allow doubt about the centrality of the centre, organizing itself into a binary discourse that envelops the universe and adds a good dose of smugness for managing that. To put it differently: the centre is the bastion of dialectics: between humans and environment, reason and nature, rationality and emotionality, masculine and feminine, 2 See for example, Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Tom Conley tr., Continuum 2006); Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Paul Patton tr., Continuum 2004); Niklas Luhmann, Ecological Communication (John Bednarz Jr. tr., Polity Press 1989); Niklas Luhmann, Law as a Social System (Klaus A. Ziegert tr, Fatima Kastner, Richard Nobles, David Schiff and Rosamund Ziegert (eds) and tr., Oxford University Press 2004). 3 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘Towards a Critical Environmental Law’, in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed.), Law and Ecology: New Environmental Foundations (Routledge 2011). 4 Michel Foucault, Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 (Harvester Press 1980).

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30 Research handbook on human rights and the environment inside and outside, Cartesian res cogitans and res extensa. We are so conditioned by such distinctions that we often cannot see what is wrong with them, or even worse, cannot easily apprehend them. Anna Grear has talked eloquently about the ensuing fracturing of the link between mind and body and its effects on environmental degradation.5 It is a matter of relative wonder and perhaps some regret that the way bodies and environment have been structuring their relationship has followed a clear and almost undisputed line from Plato to Descartes, Kant to Hegel and, leading up to the debate between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, then taking what remains essentially a phenomenological avenue.6 And it is a residual question: what would have happened had the world been structured, less according to the above great men, and more following this other, subterranean, off-centre philosophical route, not a route in itself but more a flow of starts and pauses, explosions and quietude, constant questioning, profoundly doubting yet also radically affirming; a route that can be traced back to the Stoics, and then seen to be taken up by a maverick Spinoza, endorsed with passion by Nietzsche, fleshed and splayed by Deleuze and Guattari, and fanning out into to the current vibrant streams of ecofeminism, geophilosophy, ecological autopoietics, and vitalist and material philosophical praxes.7 Would that have been a better route? One can never be certain. It would have been a dangerous route also: one of ethical undecidability, locational responsibility, particularity rather than a priori judgements, minimal molecules of ethical insight rather than maximal moralisms. It sounds good, but who knows whether these would not also have been co-opted, forced out of their intention? So perhaps what we are now left to do is the best we could be doing: doubting the route we took. Dualist thought is the bread and butter, as it were, of the West and has sanctioned the legitimation of environmental degradation without, moreover, managing to explain how it is that the degradation affects human society.8 Since ecological disasters do not respect the conceptual limits of the polarization between human and nature, the polarization had to be put on a more benign epistemological basis and reinvented along 5 Anna Grear, ‘The Vulnerable Living Order: Human Rights and the Environment in a Critical and Philosophical Perspective’ 2011 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 2(1): 23. 6 David Seamon, ‘Lived bodies, place, and phenomenology: implications for human rights and environmental justice’ 2013 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 4(2): 143. I have dealt with the problematic delivery of phenomenology in my work (see Andreas PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, Spatial Justice: Bodies, Lawscape, Atmosphere (Routledge 2014), which even in its most promising manifestation in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, has never managed to establish a continuum between body and environment, nor to engage successfully with nonhuman bodies. 7 Attempts to that effect are plenty but still far from replacing the canon. See Rosie Braidotti, ‘Locating Deleuze’s Eco-Philosophy: between Bio/Zoe-Power and Necro-Politics’ in Rosie Braidotti, Claire Colebrook and Patrick Hanafin (eds), Deleuze and the Law: Forensic Futures (Palgrave Macmillan 2009); Rosie Braidotti, The Posthuman (Polity Press 2013); Moira Gatens, Imaginary bodies: Ethics, power and corporeality (Routledge 1996); Hanjo Berressem, ‘Structural couplings: radical constructivism and a Deleuzian ecologics’ in Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.), Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology (Palgrave Macmillan 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press 2010). 8 See e.g., Teodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso 1997).

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Epistemologies of doubt 31 the lines of a new theoretical dialectics. Thus, instead of the rather grand ontological polarization between ‘us’ and ‘the environment’, the debate has moved to an epistemological debate between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. There are two problems with this move: first, this new theoretical language has provided the safety of distance from the ontological immersion in the human/non-human interaction, replacing ontology with an epistemology of supposed action; and, second, the new polarization legitimized rather neatly another perennial problem: that of ‘the centre’. The former has had the result of legitimation of standard practices in the name of ecocentrism, as it has been shown in various contexts.9 The latter has gone even further: indeed, while the ontological divide between ‘us’ and ‘the environment’ only insinuated the need for a centre (habitually assumed by humans), the epistemology of anthropo/ecocentrism plainly states that there is no alternative: however much we battle between extremes, we have no choice but to remain faithful to the soothing idea that there must be a centre. Whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the centre remains central in the discourse of anthopo- and eco-centrism. Why is this? It is largely fear. When Peter Sloterdijk talks of the need of human societies for ‘immunity’, he reveals the vast arsenal of concepts built around our fear of being exposed, of being thrown out into the open rather than hidden behind our makeshift bubbles of immunity and spheres of fragile cohesion.10 Sloterdijk’s description of society is of an infinite foam-like structure consisting of self-contained yet other-clinging bubbles. This is not just a metaphor. Sloterdijk understands materiality as a distinct socio-environmental issue, itself given to the preponderance of one kind of consideration: immunity. We are bubbled-up because of fear of contagion; we lock ourselves up in gated communities for fear of lack of security; we delude ourselves that our skin, walls, state boundaries, epistemological concepts keeps us safe from the world. It is not just the contours or the distinctions that ‘protect’ us. Contrary to initial impressions, the centre is itself one such tool of avoiding exposure. While impressionistically placed in the limelight, the centre hides behind blinding light and conceals its all-controlling position with a thick blanket of hinterlands, purely in the service of confirming centrality while avoiding exposure. There is no centre that is not surrounded by a floating periphery, capable of coating harsh edges in soft, invisibilizing matter. One feels safe in a centre – the selective, controlled form of exposure that comes with it has the invigorating effect of full attention to ‘us’ as being the most important, most protected ones. Conceptualizing the centre in this way, one quickly understands how the whole eco/anthropocentric debate builds on bravado rather than on the actual courage that a real exposure entails. This is the grand paradox of the centre: it looks exposed but it is actually the safest position to take refuge in. 9 Mark Halsey, Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text (Ashgate 2006); Andreas Kotsakis, ‘Heterotopias of the Environment: Law’s Forgotten Spaces’ in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed.), Law and Ecology (Routledge 2011); Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, ‘Green Postcolonialism’ 2007 Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 9(1): 1. 10 Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären I: Blasen: Mikrosphärologie (Suhrkamp 1998); Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären II: Globen: Makrosphärologie (Suhrkamp 1999); Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären III: Schäume: Plurale Sphärologie (Suhrkamp 2004).

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32 Research handbook on human rights and the environment And there we have it: a continuous polarization, which – on the side of ecocentrism – fights for a sound cause, but is destined to fail in any transformative aim because of its reproduction of old dialectical, hierarchical semantics. Neither is this trap successfully resisted by environmental human rights discourses, since they are perhaps most acutely characterized by the tension between protecting the human centre while not divorcing this centre from an environmental consciousness. But the issue here is, once again, that all-too-human consciousness that trammels the ‘surrounding’ ecology in specific and, ultimately, anthropocentric ways. New semantics are needed that move away from the glib safety of the centre and its consequent, misaddressed dialectics. New semantics, I argue, must be sought on a surface of acentric continuum, traversed by velocities and pauses that do not easily subscribe to centralizing generalizations. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call this the plane of immanence or consistency, namely ‘the “holding together” of heterogeneous elements’.11 This is an immanent totality open to its own boundlessness, an omnipresent geographical ‘holding together’12 of an enlivened, vibrating space on whose surface the universal and the particular encounter each other. From a different perspective, Niklas Luhmann calls this World Society, namely the totality of all systemic operations, all communications regardless of their geographical or chronological provenance.13 There are many names for this (and each one with its own variation of approach): Spinozan nature or god, Nietzschean eternal return, Bohr’s implicate order. Let me call this, rather simply, continuum.14 This continuum, as I show below, operates across both an ontological and an epistemological level – it is both how we conceive of things and how things are. This does not mean that we have access to some sort of absolute truth. Nor does it mean, however, that everything is subjective. Rather, that we can never know things for what they are. ‘Everything withdraws into itself.’15 At the same time, the continuun is not some magic surface that guarantees flatness through an enlightened epistemological construction. The continuum is tilted. Bodies fall more readily onto other bodies, the sliding is more easily allowed by the terrain. Some bodies weigh more than others, are 11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Brian Massumi tr., Athlone Press 1988). 12 Charles J. Stivale, ‘The Literary Element in “Mille Plateaux”: The New Cartography of Deleuze and Guattari’ 1984 SubStance 13: 20. 13 Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Volume 1 (Rhodes Barrett tr., Stanford University Press 2012); Jean Clam’s, ‘What is Modern Power?’ in Michael King and Chris Thornhill (eds), Luhmann on Law and Politics: Critical Appraisals and Applications (Hart 2006) 148 at 160, remains the most complete description of the Luhmann’s world society: ‘The topology of world society is the topology of paradoxical surfaces, of surfaces which re-enter themselves and make it impossible to distinguish the inside from the outside, the engulfing from the engulfed, the penetrating from the penetrated … an all-present, non-sequential, paradoxical space of a constantly accomplished entanglement of a self and other.’ 14 I have been consistently referring to this as continuum despite the fact that I have used it in different contexts. The term has retained its ‘continuum’, as it were, throughout my thinking and, regardless of the various manifestations it has taken (the lawscape, atmosphere, open ecology, materiality continuum, surface and so on), it is always characterized by this one quality, as I show below: that the continuum is always ruptured, indeed self-ruptured, through foldings on its surface. 15 Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (re.press 2009).

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Epistemologies of doubt 33 more powerful than other bodies and force the latter out. The conflict of bodies carries on, mostly on an unequal footing. We owe this awareness to the new feminist thinking that has come from a material engagement with bodies, elements and spaces, and which the given flat unhierarchical surfaces of new materialisms were once again reproducing some masculine imaginary. Astrida Neimanis puts it excellently when she says that the ‘challenge to a hierachized ontology of bodies cannot, for posthumanist feminist positions, result in a flat ethics: non-hierarchy does not mean homogenization; difference and differentiation are still fundamental and necessary facets of embodied being and relationality.’16 Posthumanist feminism sees the continuum as a tilted surface where bodies have unequal power. But, as Spinoza reminds us, we ignore what a body can do.17 We do not know the body’s limits, capabilities, power. We can try and predict how it might affect and be affected, but cannot tell for certain. There is always space for initiative, waking up, revolution, deceit, vengeful memory or plain inertia. There is always room for surprises, for ruptures in the continuum.

3. EPISTEMOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY The continuum contains no distinction along the lines of human/natural/artificial/ technological. These categories fold into each other and constantly emerge as epistemological and ontological hybrids. I would like to refer to these, again rather simply, as bodies, which include human and nonhuman matter. While previously, whenever included in our accounting, nonhuman bodies were either resource, context or the negative of the dialectics of humanity, here I follow the schools of thought largely identified as new materialisms, non-representational theory, speculative realism and object-oriented ontologies,18 themselves generally drawing from a Spinozan/ Deleuzian understanding of the body. Thus, for Deleuze, ‘a body can be anything: it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’.19 This is intimately connected to the fact that a body is not a neatly defined, contour-bound entity. All bodies are assemblages, namely aggregations of human and nonhuman bodies that are contingent upon the conditions of their emergence and which do not presuppose the centrality, and certainly not the exclusive presence, of the human. What is more, assemblages are both actual, namely space and matter, and virtual, namely – the potential but still real.20 Actual and virtual are not found in a dialectical opposition, nor does the actual determine the virtual. Rather, there 16 Astrida Neimanis, ‘Alongside the Right to Water, a Posthumanist Feminist Imaginary’ 2014 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 5(1): 5. 17 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (G.H.R. Parkinson tr., Oxford University Press 2000). 18 See for example Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Duke University Press 2010); Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space | Politics | Affect (Routledge 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press 2010); Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (re.press 2011). 19 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Robert Hurley tr., City Light Books 1988). 20 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Brian Massumi tr., Athlone Press 1988).

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34 Research handbook on human rights and the environment is no ontological distinction between the two: they are both aspects of the continuum. This means that each body has a spatiality and materiality that is both, as it were, its own (actual), and part of the wider continuum with other bodies (virtual). They are properly speaking geophilosophical, namely spatial and temporal, part of the great earth continuum yet singular and different to each other. Bruno Latour has introduced the term actant as ‘something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action.’21 This is intimately connected to the idea of agency, which also appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages. In fact, they employ the term agencements (which is translated as ‘assemblages’). As the editors of New Materialisms, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write, we have moved away from an era where agents are exclusively humans who possess the cognitive abilities, intentionality, and freedom to make autonomous decisions and the corollary presumption that humans have the right or ability to master nature. Instead, the human species is being relocated within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities and in which the domain of unintended or unanticipated effects is considerably broadened.22

This is what Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter 23 means when she refers to the vibrant self-organizing nature of both organic and inorganic matter. As I explain below, this is a distinctly posthuman conception of matter and agency. These new corporeal agencies are not effects of an agency-giving social system (such as the law, politics, medicine or the state) but emerging bodies that, by virtue of containing law or politics within their assemblages, acquire agency.24 As I have written elsewhere,25 materiality is a process of proliferation of agency. A posthuman conception of matter and legal agency allows us to trace the process by which matter organizes itself above and beyond human input.26 On the other side of the spectrum, Alain Pottage’s work on genetically modified crops has shown how the entelechy of the best-before date or the pre-determined way of use, which are inscribed within the very material body of the crop, do not exhaust themselves in the vertical, hierarchical superpower of corporations (that too, of course), but also in the way the modified organism as such extends spatially, tending to occupy surrounding space, physically and legally.27 Worryingly, genetically modified crops and their in-built obsolescence go against the most fundamental trait of matter: in Spinozan terms (and following Jane 21 Bruno Latour, ‘On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications’ 1996 Soziale Welt 47(4): 369 at 374. 22 cf Coole and Frost, above n 18 at 10. 23 cf Bennett, above n 18. 24 See also Peter Lenco, Deleuze and World Politics (Routledge 2012). 25 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘Critical Autopoiesis and the Materiality of Law’ 2014 International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 27(2): 389. 26 See for example, Manuel De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (Continuum 2002). 27 Alain Pottage, ‘Biotechnology as Environmental Regulation’ in Andreas PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos (ed.), Law and Ecology: New Environmental Foundations (Routledge 2011).

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Epistemologies of doubt 35 Bennett’s use) the conative (from conatus, i.e. the tendency to affirm and maintain oneself) endeavours of matter; and in systems theory/autopoietic terms, the autopoiesis of matter, namely the desire/innate programme of matter to maintain itself, and both offer resistance and expand its extensive (namely, spatial) physical qualities. The above difficulty is in the heart of the current environmental crisis. The idea of a body as an assemblage is not, as such, an ethical concept. Human technology, financial and political interests, and genetically modified crops constitute a body that is geared towards exploitation, potential environmental degradation and a grand reinstatement of human centrality. Everything moves towards that. This is the source of the crisis of environmental law.28 This crisis is indistinguishable to yet another crisis: the crisis of location of the critical perspective within a continuum where all is connected. In other words, is there space for doubt in a continuum? What is more, where is this space when the surface is not horizontal but tilting, that is given to various configurations of unequal power? Critique (of existing legal and social structures), at least according to some definitions, requires a distancing from and an overview of the object of critique, a movement away and indeed higher than the object of critique. Doubting of structures implies a critical position, and this latter presupposes, first, a boundary between the law and its ecological continuum (a distance), and second, the crossing of the boundary (a transcendence). This is because to be critical entails a departure (from the current situation and indeed the object of critique). It also entails an (illusion of) arrival (to a better situation explicitly or implicitly assumed behind the act of critique). In this movement from one side of the boundary to the other, critique performs its actualizing, its krinein, its distinguishing, indicating and judging: as Douzinas and Gearey write, ‘krinein means also to cut; critique is a diacritical or cutting force, a critical separation and demarcation’.29 Thus, a legal critique begins from the current state of the law and crosses the boundary that distinguishes the latter from a ‘better’ state of the law. In its urge to cross, critique announces a crisis (a judgement, a distinction), a crisis of crossing (critique cannot leave itself out) as well as a crisis that can only be observed through this crossing. On a continuum, however, where the body cannot distance itself from its environment because they are co-extensive, or from other bodies because they are always implicated in assemblages, there can be no distance. On the basis of a posthuman body, which, as I show below, entails the radical decentring of the human, and discovers its inherent connectivity with other, nonhuman bodies, there can be no distance. On a continuum where the connecting event is that of exposed, vulnerable matter shaped in affective singularities, the critical distance would be a betrayal, a departure from the suffering of matter for a ‘higher’, ‘safer’ sphere of theological overview. In this sense, critique would imply that whatever the continuum might be, the law (and above all, human rights law) needs to construct for itself a simplified, legalistic, distant representation. But with this, we go back to the problem of epistemology as construction, distance, abstraction, rather than ontological immersion, exposure, vulnerability. 28

Dan Tarlock, ‘Is There a There in Environmental Law?’ 2004 Journal of Land Use 19(2):

213. 29 Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey, Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice (Hart 2005) at 38.

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36 Research handbook on human rights and the environment I will briefly embark on a discussion of the problem in terms of the difference between the radical epistemology of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoiesis and Gilles Deleuze’s ontological immersion. These theorists represent the spectrum of epistemological and ontological extremism. Niklas Luhmann, through the theory of autopoiesis, has introduced a performative and radical constructivism that denies itself any access to ontological reality. Gilles Deleuze, on the other, has embraced a radical ontology that revolves around the plane of immanence. In the latter, everything begins in the middle. The middle is emphatically not an in-between: [T]he middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal moment that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.30

The middle (or milieu) is the space of revolt against the usual tools of origin, centre and boundary: ‘[O]ne never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms’.31 Just as the grass has no one root, central part or limits to its expansion, in the same way to begin in the middle is to find oneself folded between the multiplicity of the world without a discernible origin, a specific centre and determined territorial limits. The space in the middle is a space of encounters with other bodies, a space in which one’s body affects and is affected by other bodies. An encounter for Deleuze pushes the encountered parties off their comfort zone of categories and identities, and throws them in a ‘mad becoming’.32 The middle is not a space of judgement, of secure values, of fixed constructions. Rather, the space in the middle is precisely in the middle: neither this nor that side; but then again, not a boundary and therefore not flanked by sides. In many ways, the space in the middle is a fold that constructs an interiority and an exteriority, while keep on folding unto itself, doubling up and thus producing a doubling that is not a doubling of the One, but a redoubling of the Other. It is not a reproduction of the Same, but a repetition of the Different. It is not an emanation of an ‘I’, but something that places in immanence an always other or a Non-self. It is never the other who is a double in the doubling process, it is a self that lives in me as the double of the other. I do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me.33

This is not a description of the way the plane of immanence is structured, nor of the way the fold operates. There is no such thing as a description – only the starting point which, at the same time, is the point of ontological immersion. We are in it and we stream through it. 30

cf Deleuze and Guattari, above n 11 at 28. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Robert Hurley tr., City Light Books 1988) at 123. 32 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (Mike Taormina tr., Semiotext(e) 2004) at 141. 33 cf Deleuze, above n 31 at 98. 31

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Epistemologies of doubt 37 Autopoiesis on the other hand, is a theory of observation par excellence. The main concept of autopoietic theory is that law (or politics, religion, economy and so on) is an autopoietic system, namely a moving and amoeba-like sum of (legal, political and so on) processes and operations that evolves by learning from its ecological position amidst the greater openness of society. In this way, the system constructs its own self-description, its location and its boundaries, not unlike the Deleuzian understanding of the plane of immanence. The system, however, is contained by a boundary that determines interiority and exteriority. Although the system learns from its ecology (it is cognitively open to it), nothing ever crosses the boundary between the system and its ecology: in that sense, an autopoietic system is a closed system that observes, from a safe distance, its ‘other’. This other, however, is nowhere to be found but inside the system. Everything is internalized and self-constructed within the system, as an infinite plane of immanence folded within the system – except that this one is placed on an epistemological, systemic level, rather than the ontological level of Deleuze’s immanence. Everything in autopoiesis constitutes its own singularity, and indeed believes in it: as far as the system is concerned, there is nothing outside its boundary. Yet, other systems, each one believing in its own absolute singularity, carry on constructing their own world, containing everything that they (actually or latently) understand, meteoric formations swirling in a claustrophobic embrace with themselves. And despite all this, everything is somewhat connected, coupled up and operating in unison. I have worked elsewhere through the various points of contact between Deleuzian ontology and Luhmannian epistemology,34 so here I will limit myself to a few observations. The question of the boundary is the defining difference between the two approaches and at the same time the apparatus of distance/propinquity. Thus, while for Deleuze there are no boundaries, just folding multiplicities, for Luhmann, the system is defined by (while it itself defines) its boundary. The question of the boundary is not just/only of theoretical interest. Crucially, it has profound implications for the kind of theoretical advancements that one can pursue in terms of environmental law. If environmental law operates within a boundary that distinguishes it from politics, science, other law, and even the materiality of ecology, its critical transformation will entail a crossing of this boundary. If, however, environmental law is simply another plane within the plane, a fold of the Deleuzian plane of immanence, its critical manifestation will not involve crossing but a looking deeper inside, a further digging within for ‘the repetition of the Different’ as Deleuze writes. The positions of Deleuze and Luhmann, however, have more in common than it would appear at first impression. For Luhmann, as far as the system is concerned, the boundary does not exist. The system considers itself infinite, spreading itself on thick layers of universal matter and containing all that is to be contained. Does the universe have a boundary? A system does not know any more than we do. The system’s self-construction of its outside is (almost) so fault-proof that there is no difference between construction and ‘reality’. Likewise, in Deleuze, the fold institutes a certain distance that allows the inside and the outside of the fold to begin their unfolding repetition. Bodies encounter each other by 34 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘Folding Autopoiesis’, in Andreas PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos and Anders La Cour (eds), Observing Luhmann: Radical Theoretical Encounters (Palgrave 2013).

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38 Research handbook on human rights and the environment way of having already distanced themselves from each other: each body is a singularity, however implicated in the continuum the body might be. To put it provocatively, there is no difference between (Luhmannian) epistemology and (Deleuzian) ontology: the boundary dis/appears yet a distance emerges. I refer to these boundaries within the continuum as ruptures. Ruptures are folds on the continuum, differential planes of perspective, vantage points of reorientation. These are both ontological (since they refer to corporeal positionings) foldings of material bodies that move across the continuum; and epistemological (since they operate as Luhmannian distinctions or boundary formations that temporarily interrupt the observational continuum). The paradox (and difficulty) is that they are both necessity and illusion: we need to differentiate between humans and nonhumans, even though the continuum operates on the basis of their indistinguishability. We need to differentiate between epistemology and ontology, although the distinction is mere epistemological defeat.35 We even might need to choose ecocentrism over anthropocentrism, while however retaining the knowledge of the problematic of the centre. Finally, we need to differentiate between environmental law as a self-contained discipline and environmental law as an assemblage of other disciplines, because otherwise we do not know how to manage the infinity of the disciplinary continuum. This is the greatest challenge: to realize that there is no opposition between maintaining a distance and immersing oneself. The biggest trap is that ruptures (that is, boundaries, closures, distinctions, epistemological perspectives) are much easier to understand, manage, organize (and indeed manipulate, co-opt and strategize) than the continuum. The answer can be neither to stop rupturing, nor to interrupt the continuum for good. The answer lies folded within the necessity of illusion. As Deleuze writes in the context of the Baroque fold, the challenge ‘entails neither falling into nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion itself’.36 The challenge, therefore, is this: to keep on rupturing while maintaining the continuum; to keep on carving new spaces while maintaining the realization of indistinction; to form new understandings of human responsibility while acknowledging the fact that humanity is by now the most incontestable presence on earth.

4. RESPONSIBILITY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE How to maintain the paradox without succumbing to the easy lure of ruptures? I would like to put forward here the possibility of what I would call a posthuman methodology. The way I would like to define it, posthuman methodology is characterized by two main traits. First, posthuman methodology is a radically interdisciplinary methodology. Rosi Braidotti puts it in terms of both a challenge to humanities and an opportunity to 35 This is what Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press 2013), calls the Rift, namely the way epistemology needs to divorce, however temporarily, from ontology. 36 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Tom Conley tr., Continuum 2006) at 143.

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Epistemologies of doubt 39 reach out to new constitutive horizons.37 Cary Wolfe puts it succinctly: ‘posthumanism can be defined quite specifically as the necessity for any discourse or critical procedure to take account of the constitutive (and constitutively paradoxical) nature of its own distinctions, forms and procedures’.38 Why is this any different to a simply critical interdisciplinarity? For the simple reason that posthumanism decentres the centre of observational ability. The epistemologist who has an overview of the field of observation is the only one responsible for her choices, contingent, on the one hand, upon the observations of other epistemologists, in their turn rupturing and undercutting the observational field; and, on the other, the grand ontological continuum that includes the epistemologist while at the same, as I show below, withdrawing from her. Posthumanism requires both an epistemological humility and an ontological ambition. Posthumanism is immediately connected to what I have earlier referred to as ontological vulnerability, namely the condition of finding oneself in the middle of the continuum, exposed in a space where skin does not separate, walls do not protect, seas do not isolate. There is nothing soothing about the continuum: it is precipitous, anti-gravitational, whirling, and on that, the epistemologist attempts to construct ruptures of distance and folds of safety. No matter how well protected humanity feels behind its technological armour, it remains exposed to the flow that surrounds it, be this in the form of natural disasters, autopoietically-produced technological risks, humancaused accidents or hybrid forms of life between the natural and the artificial. This is the reason for which the space of vulnerability exposes the futility of looking for a centre in the way life, society or anything else is structured. Second, posthumanist methodology is directly related to the new position of responsibility in which the human has found itself, which derives directly from the Anthropocene, namely the geological era that is determined by the presence of a single species on earth: the human. The term was coined by Crutzen and Stoermer in 2000,39 and has been the source of a cross-disciplinary debate on the repercussions of such a name as well as of such a geological era. One of the clearest affirmations arising from it is that ‘with the arrival of the Anthropocene, this division [between human/nonhuman or nature/culture] is de-ontologized; as such, the separation appears instead as a epistemological product mistakenly presumed as a given fact of being.’40 This advances the posthuman methodology in radical ways: one is forced to question the distinction between ontology and epistemology more fully,41 and to wonder whether this difference can be maintained in view of the fact that the Anthropocene also augurs the de-individualization of the human in favour of a human collectivization as a geological agent that affects the Earth.42 This means that even epistemology is now ontologized 37

Rosie Braidotti, The Posthuman (Polity Press 2013) at 143ff. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press 2010) at 122. 39 Paul Josef Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene’ 2000 IGBP Newsletter 41(17): 17. 40 Etienne Turpin, ‘Who Does the Earth Think It Is, Now?’, in Etienne Turpin (ed.), Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy (Open Humanities Press 2013) 8. 41 See Ray Brasier, ‘Concepts and Objects’ in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds) The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (re.press 2011). 42 Morton Timothy, The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press 2010). 38

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40 Research handbook on human rights and the environment through sheer geological imprint and co-relation between human presence as cause and sign of a new ontology of indistinction. This gives rise to what I would call the responsibility of indistinction, which refers to the ontological indistinguishability between bodies. I revisit this later in the text, but here I would like to emphasize, first, that human responsibility is heightened because of the indistinction. The counterargument, namely that assemblages are just another face for neoliberalist practices of responsibility-deferral and biopolitical control has of course some purchase,43 and there is no reason why indeed assemblages are not and cannot be used in that way if placed in the wrong context. Assemblages are inherently amoral. Yet, the position a body (individual or collective) assumes with regards to the assemblage is significant, and can be made into an ethical tool. While indeed the assemblage ‘makes us do things’ that we cannot even control, to detach oneself from the assemblage in terms of demoting oneself to the position of mere object given to the whims of the big bad assemblage wolf, is both dishonest and rehashes old ontological distinctions. Assemblages are bodies, and each body, individually or collectively, has the power to move the assemblage in specific directions. Although there are stronger bodies in the assemblage and although the surface is tilted rather than equally diffused, a body retains the possibility of affecting the assemblage in its own way. Assemblage-thinking allows one to reposition oneself in relation to the continuum, both in terms of freedom and responsibility. There is no panacea – only the possibility of re-describing things in a way that neither completely absolves a body from the responsibility of situating itself, nor inebriates this body with the illusion of control of the assemblage, or indeed the whole world. The question now becomes how to take advantage of the human omnipresence and not be fooled by the superficial impression that to be everywhere equates to being central to everything.44 It is clear that responsibility now becomes fully spatialized: it is the responsibility of situating one’s body within an assemblage of indistinguishability. The spatiality of responsibility is geological, ecological, and future-tending. Clare Colebrook writes: the positing of the anthropocene era relies on looking at our own world and imagining it as it will be when it has become the past … We can see, now, from changes in the earth’s composition that there will be a discernible strata that – in a manner akin to our dating of the earth’s already layered geological epochs – will be readable.45

Our geological imprint situates the responsibility not just with regards to other humans, not even with regards to future generations of humans, but with regards to the globe 43

See Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (Verso 2007); Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah, ‘Markets Made Flesh: Performativity, and a Problem in Science Studies, Augmented with Consideration of the FCC Auctions’, in Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu (eds), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton University Press 2007). 44 See David Chandler, ‘The World of Attachment? The Post-humanist Challenge to Freedom and Necessity’ 2013 Millennium – Journal of International Studies 41: 516. 45 Clare Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Open Humanities Press 2014) at 26.

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Epistemologies of doubt 41 that will outlive us. The Anthropocene demands a geophilosophical situatedness of thought in relation to the earth. Reza Negarestani writes: geophilosophy is a philosophy that grasps thought in relation to earth and territory … it is a philosophy that, perhaps unconsciously, grasps thought in relation to two traumas, one precipitated by the accretion of the earth and the other ensued by the determination of the territory. Whilst the former trauma lies in the consolidation of the earth as a planetary ark for terrestrial life against the cosmic backdrop, the latter is brought about by a combined geographic and demographic determination of a territory against the exteriority of the terrestrial plane and fluxes of populations of all kinds.46

These two traumas, distinctly anthropocentric and a direct effect of the Anthropocene, are also specifically legal. They both require an intervention that guarantees limits, while at the same time allocating responsibility. This is an anthropocentric legality that chops up the surface of the earth in territorial modes that include other populations as resources (rather than allowing for multiple territories in terms of animal populations); and then delegates the whole earth to the status of resource (‘ark’) for the human future. A geophilosophical position, and indeed a responsibility of indistinction, attempts to mend these traumas through the only way possible. Colebrook writes: the anthropocene thought experiment also alters the modality of geological reading, not just to refer to the past as it is for us, but also to our present as it will be without us. We imagine a viewing or reading in the absence of viewers or readers, and we do this through images in the present that extinguish the dominance of the present.47

In other words, the responsibility in the era of the anthropocene is one of rupture: rupturing the present in order to read it as nonhuman future; rupturing centrality while retaining omnipresence; rupturing ourselves in observer and observed, in order to read our traces. Rupture of the continuum, therefore, is a spatiotemporal move, fully embodied (rather than metaphorical), brimming with understanding of situatedness (rather than retreating haphazardly), and constantly repeating itself in difference. We have reached the continuous rupturing of the continuum.

5. CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW Where does this leave us in relation to environmental law and human rights? Rather than engaging with the debate on whether rights are the appropriate mechanism for environmental protection,48 I would like to offer here a short description of what I have

46 Reza Negarestani, ‘Triebkrieg’, at 5, unpublished manuscript, cited in Ben Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (Punctum Books 2013) at 14. 47 cf Colebrook, above n 45 at 30. 48 For a comprehensive review, see Conor Gearty, ‘Do human rights help or hinder environmental protection?’ 2010 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 1(1): 7.

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42 Research handbook on human rights and the environment called critical environmental law.49 This is an attempt to put together the new understanding of human as posthuman, within a ruptured continuum that accepts no centre, yet at the same time is aware of its own limits and limitations. I am not offering this as a programmatic description of how things should be solved, but as a way of conceptualizing environmental law that circumvents the usual distinctions between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism with their quest for centre and power; environment and human (rights) as differential values; and epistemology and ontology as access to knowledge and, consequently, to ‘solutions’. Critical environmental law is not a solution but a continuous renegotiation of rupturing. It is not geared towards solutions because it is clear that there are no such things. There are only mere ruptures en route to dealing with the continuum. The traditional and overly prescriptive nature of environmental discourse, even in its legal theoretical aspect, urges towards a rushed search for short-term solutions that misunderstands the continuum complexity of ecological protection. Critical environmental law is immanent to the continuum, emerging from within, yet attempting to assemble itself as a body, in full awareness of its dispersion. Critical environmental law knows that there is no higher ground from which to judge. Not unlike Walt Whitman’s solar judgement, as read by Jane Bennett,50 critical environmental law does not succumb to the ‘falsifying logic of either/or, good/evil, friend/enemy’ but rather judges, as Whitman puts it in the preface to Leaves of Grass, ‘as the sun falling around a helpless thing’. Critical environmental law folds itself between bodies, thus constantly becoming-other. Just as environmental law cannot refrain from being law, it can also not refrain from not being law. Its identity crisis offers the perfect platform for its continuous becoming-other, becoming-science, becoming-animal, becoming-economy, becomingEarth. This is not a theoretical point. The regular moot point of whether the law is disconnected from ‘reality’, also seen on an epistemological level as legal closure with regards to other disciplines, is largely misplaced: in practice, law has never been more than an interdisciplinary or even postdisciplinary snapshot of a heady mix including geography, history, psychology, chemistry, physics, economics, the media, religion and so on. Even a simple case in a lower court necessitates a disciplinary outing that analyses visual data, takes a psychological perspective on witness’ statements, listens to experts’ opinions on medicine, biology, technology, and so on. More than any other legal discipline, environmental law has the potential of leaving representation behind, of throwing itself in the ontological event of exposure: no longer a law that only deals with discourses, but a law that violently unearths the materiality of the discourse; further, that unearths the matter beyond discourse; even further, that exposes its own materiality on the same plane as the materiality of its object. Critical environmental law is a law frank about its material presence: through its own folds of embodiment, critical environmental law spreads the body of its judgement across the continuum. 49 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘Towards a Critical Environmental Law’, in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed.), Law and Ecology: New Environmental Foundations (Routledge 2011). 50 Jane Bennett, ‘The Solar Judgment of Walt Whitman’ in John E. Seery (ed.), A Political Companion to Walt Whitman (University of Kentucky Press 2011) 131.

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Epistemologies of doubt 43 In order to do this, critical environmental law must adopt the same level of vulnerability as its object of protection, namely ecology in its expansive sense of human/natural/artificial. In beginning in the middle of the continuum rather than from a vantage point, environmental law, first, relinquishes the illusions of control of nature; secondly, abandons the search for a centre; and thirdly, takes on the exposure needed in order to create the appropriate conditions for its own materiality. For it is one thing to talk about how the law needs to engage with the material continuum between human and nonhuman, and another to seek and promote the materiality of the law itself. While the former begins by carving a boundary between itself and the material world, equipping itself to confront it; the latter does not differentiate between the materiality of ecology and that of the law itself, bringing thus forth the mobile matter of the law. As Austin Sarat writes, ‘the law is all over’:51 this is a call to claim law’s spatial, corporeal, emotional, sensory presence that has been subsumed to the critique of discourse. Critical environmental law can no longer hide behind the usual legal logocentric panoply that insulates it from the influx of materiality. More than other legal disciplines, environmental law is exposed to its own materiality: dealings with scientific thresholds, ecological catastrophes, urban poverty, sick bodies and polluted atmospheres. These are relatively recent encounters for the law and from such encounters law can muster the power to change itself. As Halsey writes, law’s encounter with the majestic in nature has the potential of impacting ‘in ways not immediately amenable to preassigned or preconceived categories’.52 And, one has to add, while maintaining the structures of legal decisions as the calculations towards justice. This is precisely the meaning of ruptured continuum: exposed yet protected; in the middle, yet at the same time taking refuge in existing legal structures. In view of the responsibility in the Anthropocene, the dualism between anthropocentric and ecocentric legal protection must be relinquished for a much subtler understanding of a ruptured continuum, where the blurring between the ‘natural’, the ‘human’ and the ‘artificial’ is extended in line with biopolitical readings that point to precisely this kind of fragmentation and reinstitute a posthuman form of continuum/ rupture, referring variously to human/non-human nature, and to the way in which these differences are conceptualized.53 This has been transposed into ecological thinking, with a pioneering ecofeminism, especially through the writings of Val Plumwood54 and Catherine Merchant,55 whose ecocriticism of pre-existing binarisms has had a measurable effect on feminist theory as a whole. Donna Haraway has famously declared that 51

Austin Sarat, ‘“… The Law is All Over”: Power, Resistance and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor’ 1990 Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 2(2): 343. 52 Mark Halsey, ‘Majesty and monstrosity: Deleuze and the defence of Nature’, in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed.), Law and Ecology (Routledge 2011) 275 at 283. 53 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Clinic (Routledge Classics 2003); Susan Ruddick, ‘Domesticating Monsters: Cartographies of Difference and the Emancipatory City’ in Loretta Lees (ed.), The Emancipatory City (Sage 2004); Alex Sharpe, Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law (Routledge 2010); Rosie Braidotti, Transpositions: on Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press 2006). 54 Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Routledge 1993). 55 Catherine Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (Wildwood House 1980).

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44 Research handbook on human rights and the environment ‘the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached’56 and cyborgs, oncomice and coyotes are posthumanist dimensions of more traditional feminist bodies that transcend the natural/cultural, organic/mechanical, physical/non-physical divides. Bruno Latour talks about ‘hybrid networks’ between social, informational and ecological systems, and the ‘pluriverse’ consisting of collectivities of humans and non-humans that redefine democracy as something that can be found either side of the boundary.57 Katherine Hayles’s digital subjectivity is built on a discontinued and inherently unpredictable conception of the human.58 Anna Grear’s new corporate identity departs from the technocratic and augurs new conceptual spaces of understanding responsibility and vulnerability, as well as this new, perennially perplexing lack of distinction between the human and the non-human.59 In a critical environmental legal perspective, there is no question on whether trees should have standing.60 The question, rather, becomes how to deal with the continuum, where the singularity of the tree is equivalent to the singularity of the cyborg. The question – what is more, is how not to put aside the anthropocenic responsibility of the human in connection to its omnipresence across the continuum. Critical environmental law requires a rearticulation, every time, of the jurisprudential problem as a rupture of the continuum that reinstates the responsibility while maintaining the continuum of indistinction. This means that traditional reliance on immobile rules about standing and legal harm and interest is often mistaken. To mention an example: it is not an exaggeration to say that environmental law’s uncontested reliance on the concept of harm is one of its foundational problems. A critical environmental legal task is to continue with disengaging legal action from harm, thereby acknowledging the interconnectedness of the continuum. In more general terms, critical environmental law is expected to move away from the traditional articulation of the legal problem in terms of existing structure/new problems, and turn against itself, in an immanent critique, of its very own adherence to structure. The result is not the absence of structure, but structure as a rupture that does not stand apart from the continuum. Finally, critical environmental law is itself a body, namely an assemblage of various materialities, spaces, disciplines. Critical environmental law is both singular and part of the continuum. As a body, it affects and is affected by other bodies. Environmental law must be thought critically, as a multilayered, global, fragmented discipline, characterized by links that follow the transboundary nature of pollution while retaining the disciplinary rupture of singularity. Differentiated velocities of connections, however, make this a complex affair: the connection, for example, between law and science is one of progressive convergence of very different temporalities (science is faster, law 56

Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (Routledge 2004) at 32. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Catherine Porter tr., Harvard University Press 1993); Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature (Harvard University Press 2004). 58 Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago University Press 2005). 59 Anna Grear, Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). 60 Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (William Kaufmann 1974). See also the recent debate in the special issue ‘Should Trees Have Standing? 40 Years On’ 2012 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 3(0). 57

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Epistemologies of doubt 45 takes longer to deliberate) and as such there can be no facile impression of direct influence and control. To be a singularity amidst a plane of other singularities entails a radical acentricity and an understanding that various perspectives operate on the same concept at the same time, with different and not necessarily predictable effects on it. This is more than a call for the inclusion of uncertainty in environmental law. Rather, it is, once again, an invitation to a praxis-oriented, spatially specific, material approach that considers every problem in its singularity. While this sounds commonplace, it is actually radical. Its radicality lies in the constant destruction of existing structures in order to reconstruct them, every time once, every time as first time, in the face of the inexorable demands of the continuum in which we find ourselves.

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