Spatial Justice

Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317702757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

There can be no justice that is not spatial. Against a recent tendency to despatialise law, matter, bodies and even space itself, this book insists on spatialising them, arguing that there can be neither law nor justice that are not articulated through and in space.

Spatial Justice presents a new theory and a radical application of the material connection between space – in the geographical as well as sociological and philosophical sense – and the law – in the broadest sense that includes written and oral law, but also embodied social and political norms. More specifically, it argues that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. Seen in this way, spatial justice is the most radical offspring of the spatial turn, since, as this book demonstrates, spatial justice can be found in the core of most contemporary legal and political issues – issues such as geopolitical conflicts, environmental issues, animality, colonisation, droning, the cyberspace and so on. In order to ague this, the book employs the lawscape, as the tautology between law and space, and the concept of atmosphere in its geological, political, aesthetic, legal and biological dimension.

Written by a leading theorist in the area, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere forges a new interdisciplinary understanding of space and law, while offering a fresh approach to current geopolitical, spatiolegal and ecological issues.

Chapter 1

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Law’s spatial turn

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1.1 Points of turning

In the last couple of decades, the law has been discovering its own spatial credentials. This can mean many things. One is that the law understands its spatial relevance. Another might be that the law understands its spatial provenance. On another level, but related to the above, the law as a discipline has been constructing its own space, carving out chunks of disci plin ary materiality and piecing them together to simultaneously become more relevant and more interdisciplinary. This means that ‘the law’ has fleshed out its multiplicity, making the whole endea vour of talking about ‘the law’ an impossible feat. Through space, the law has discovered its own situatedness, and with this its own fragmented terrain. These are much more than simple metaphors, although they are often perceived as just that. The law now constructs itself as a location in a biopolitical net of spaces, awakening to what Michel Foucault in his oft-quoted 1960s lecture Of Other Spaces, called the ‘relations of proximity between points’.¹ Legal theory is progressively more comfortable with con cepts such as mapping, scale, territory, boundary, and other geo graphical terms. More specifically, sociolegal and critical legal scholarship have turned to concepts and practices of emplacement, consideration of local conditions, geographical peculiarities of the case in question, and so on. We have reached a point where we can comfortably say that the law has turned spatial.

This last sentence sounds deliberately grand. If it has grabbed your attention, then it has achieved its goal. We can now proceed to the sobering caveats: first, that the law can indeed turn; second, that the space towards which law has turned remains adequately spatialised; and third, that this might mean something, not just for legal theory but for law’s connection to actual spaces, in their material and embodied dimensions. I shall refrain from passing judgment on the first caveat until later; but let me say here that for the law to turn, an understanding of law as spatial through-and-through is required. This understanding must take place both internally, that is in the way law sees itself, and externally, that is in the way others see law. Nothing short of a U-turn, in other words. Whether this has taken place in law, it remains to be seen. Let me also reserve opinion on the third caveat, namely whether law’s spatial turn might have an actual impact on spaces, objects and bodies, rather than its being a merely theoretical advance ment. An answer to this can only be given in the course of this book, and only in relation to what I consider the most important yet most neglected aspect of law’s spatial turn, namely spatial justice.

What I can do here, however, is focus on the second caveat, namely whether law’s spatial turn is sufficiently spatial. In order to answer, it is important to take into account the genealogy of law’s spatial turning, and examine, however briefly, some vantage points through which the connection between law and space has been introduced. Emphatically, this is neither a quest for the origin of legal spatiality, nor an exhaustive history of the turn.² On the contrary, it is an attempt to show that there is no single origin, no single turn, and that the turns are refracted in space. It is very important, I think, not to essentialise the connection and to resist treating the below as originary moments for law’s spatiality. One way to avoid doing this is by presenting the various vantage points in an unprioritised order. Indeed, I do not consider any one more decisive than others, even if some have appeared temporally prior to others. Another way is to offer a non-exhaustive list, which is indeed what the below is intended to be. Resisting award ing originary or exhaustive status to the below is faithful to the understanding of space that this book adopts. While I return to this, it is relevant here to mention, somewhat axiomatically, that the space of law’s spatial turn is non-Euclidean, non-measurable, non-directional, non-unitary, non-linear and non-metaphorical. This does not mean, however, that it is a negative space. This space is perfectly actual, walkable, equally available for picnics and imprisonment, appropriations and exclusions, colonisations and decolonisations. It is a manifold space open to opportunities and control led by compul sions, arranged by emotions and constrained by senses; it contains various orientations but not always prescribed directions; it is relational but accommodates differentiated power balances between the various bodies that circulate in it; it is not fully relational in that it allows for bodies to withdraw ontologically; it is reversible yet cannot easily be controlled; and it is fully material, confident with the use of spatial meta phors but going deeper than them.

Before we begin, let me offer a brief contextualisation. Although instances of space and law’s mutual production have been consistently even if not always explicitly recognised, they have been historically kept apart. There are several reasons for this: the prioritisation of time over space, largely due to the pure abstraction of the latter;³ the not-so-well concealed necessity to dissimulate the specific geography of the origin of the law, for otherwise the law could not claim its placeless uni versal applicability; or, conversely, the need to disengage law from any spatial geographical (imperialistic, nationalistic, colonialist, supremacist, capitalist) bias. But here, in this book, I begin in bidisciplinary trauma. Now (and here) we know that law and space are consistently folded into one another resulting in hybrid epistemologies,⁴ simultaneously unfolding onto ontological positions. It is not an exaggeration to say that, epistemologically speaking, law’s spatial turn is now an established mainstream socio legal, interdisciplinary and critical field of research, branching out on a multiplicity of applied and theoretical perspectives, and constantly evalu ating the law from various view points that are linked to critical and human geo graphy, embodiment, globalisation and localisation, ecology, popu lation movements, climate change economies, asylum seekers, human rights geographies, natural resources and environmental justice, rights to the city, monuments and memorials, and so on. In short, law’s spatial turn has managed to involve a considerable volume of sociolegal, critical and generally contextualised legal theory. A final caveat before I go through some of these points: the criterion for inclusion is that they are movements in after space, contained yet both incorporating and exceeding the space of their unfolding. None of the below, at least at its better manifestation, unfolds itself with space as mere background or container. Rather, they all engage with space in more or less successful ways, and attempt to perform spatiality by producing their own spatial positionings. From these, I shall be extracting some notions and movements that in turn inform a great deal of this book.

Arguably the most immediately relevant vantage point is the feminist understanding and use of urban space as an instance of critique of a specifically gendered sexual reality.⁵ The relation between space, place, bodies and the law has been explored by feminism as part of a greater identity project that reverses the usual prioritisations of the male, the mind, the public domain, time and reality, in favour of new semiologisations of their relation with the female, the body, the private, space, place and the imaginary. The feminist vantage point has contributed to law’s spatial turn a long list of valuable possibilities for thought and action. Not without a certain productive hesitation, I would suggest that one of the most important and personally formative element is the bringing forth of ontological vulnerability.⁶ Both as self-awareness and as a condition of existence, ontological vulnerability opens up a new legal space that transcends the distinction between private and public and establishes a demand for the law to face and protect the vulnerable. Although originating in and inti mately connected to gender studies, it is not an exclusive female predica ment, nor necessarily connected to gender differences. For, at the same time, the space of ontological vulnerability places the awareness of human acentrality and the subsequent species vulnerability squarely within the legal space of turning. Vulnerability is what in new materialist terms has been called fragility of things.⁷ This is the beginning of the posthuman, with imme diate connections to a new understanding of space, denuded from its usual familiar quality of measurability.

Intimately connected to the feminist interweaving of law and space is the queer theoretical and applied understanding that privatises and/or sexualises the public in ways that radically challenge the law and its own conceptual and geographic boundaries.⁸ While queer spatial reading has also contributed to the bringing forth of vulnerability, what perhaps has been the single most important contribution to law’s spatial turn is the process, or perhaps the play, of dissimulation. Queer spatialities begun with layering and mapping the infravisible routes of desire, affording the reader access to spatial codes and corridors that were constructed precisely to escape the heteronormative gaze. This necessity of dissimulation has often been performed as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Law’s spatial turn
• 2 Welcome to the lawscape
• 3 From lawscape to atmosphere
• 4 A change of air
• 5 The rupture of spatial justice
• 6 The islands
• Bibliography
• Index