Introduction

Excerpt

The intellectual inspiration for this collection has been a flourishing, over recent years, in critical, socio-legal scholarship on law’s temporalities. Such scholarship has begun to take seriously time’s effects on law and social ordering. Yet legal scholarship also has shown a tendency to naturalise time. As Renisa Mawani puts it: ‘law’s time has too often been assumed rather than problematized’ (Mawani, , p. 69). Through the temporal operation of precedent in common law, commencement dates and sunset clauses in legislation, and even through horizons of time created through legal doctrine and discourse (e.g. constitutional originalism, foreseeability in tort), law has proved to be particularly open for temporal analysis. And whilst socio-legal scholarship has been adept at delineating the subjectivities, institutional arrangements and cultural expectations that shape legal engagements more generally, Mawani’s argument is that much of this research has relegated time to a role as the background or container for social action or, at most, as a subjective experience that shifts depending on one’s social or historical positioning. As she puts it: ‘time is often assumed to exist as though it were a natural phenomenon, unfolding effortlessly and inconspicuously as the backdrop to social and political life’ (Mawani, , p. 70). The approach has been to overlook law’s production of time, instead exteriorising time as something distinct from law itself (Mawani, , p. 71). This continued attachment to the idea of time as a container for social life has been maintained alongside the law and geography movement’s very well-established commitment to following the co-production of law with space, place and jurisdiction, denaturalising law and following the co-articulation of temporalities with spatial mechanisms (Braverman et al., ; Mawani, ; Valverde, 2015). It has also survived the curiosity about time that anthropologists — including legal anthropologists — have brought to the study of social ordering (Engel, ; Fabian, ; Greenhouse, , ; Richland, , 2008) and scholars of history have brought to periodisation (e.g. Davis, 2008) and historical time (Koselleck, 1985).

In bringing together this collection on law’s relationship with time, our concern has been to register an increasing commitment among scholars across disciplines to shift such patterns of engagement. Our own research over the past few years has been preoccupied with the question of law’s temporalities, drawing on a range of critical resources to investigate, through empirical research, the co-production of legal and temporal norms, subjectivities and political ontologies. In our related efforts to create an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on law and time, we have noted a distinct openness to questions of law, regulation and legality from social sciences and humanities scholars working on temporality, on the one hand (e.g. Adkins, ; Amoore, ; de Goede, ; Mitropoulos, ; Opitz et al., 2015), and an incisive conceptual and methodological interdisciplinarity among critical and socio-legal scholars, on the other (e.g. Cooper, ; Cornell, ; Craven et al., ; Douglas, ; Fitzpatrick, ; Keenan, ; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ; Valverde, ; van Marle, 2003). Critical approaches to linear time and attention to law’s shaping of time in diverse forms and through multiple techniques have animated research across disciplines. We hope that the present collection will highlight these shared concerns, fostering the cross-fertilisation of ideas and methods and further developing conversations on law and time between socio-legal scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, historians and others.

Our contribution is to hone in on questions of the ‘making of time’ through a focus on law, time’s knotted relationship with matter, material processes and technologies. Attempts to understand time and change in the study of social life have been preoccupied by Newtonian continuity, what Karen Barad terms a ‘tidy affair’ in which: ‘(e)ffects follow causes end on end and each particle takes its preordained place with each tick of the clock’ (Barad, , p. 233). Within this story, time is eternal and non-material (‘Matter is discrete but time is continuous’, Barad, , p. 233) and, moreover, the status of time as distinct from nature and matter is foundational of objective views of the world. Regular, eternal, container time has played a significant role in constituting scientific objectivity, yet these ideas of time and objectivity can be refigured (Barad, , p. 233). For example, the advent of quantum physics disturbs the notion of container time and its associated objectivity. Time’s crumpling and fluid qualities work beyond strictly linear approach to objects, events, human action and history (Serres and Latour, 1995), replacing the ‘rolling unravelling stasis’ of Newtonian physics with dynamic processes of mattering (Barad, , p. 233).

In registering the call to move beyond notions of time as always naturally linear, containing of social action and progressive, we are interested in developing approaches to time that explore law’s ambivalent, yet constitutive, roles in broader social and political processes of temporal ordering and in forming distinct temporal ontologies. If time can be plural and non-linear — if it can consist of ‘polytemporalities’ (Haraway, 2016) or ‘chimneys of thunderous acceleration’ (Serres and Latour, , p. 57); if, crucially, time can be a participant or an effect in processes of social and material formation and not always the driver (Barad, 2007) — then we might investigate how law participates in the creation of temporal ontologies just as much as reflecting on how law itself is shaped by dominant temporal assumptions.

Setting aside the notion of linear container time is associated with assaults on received notions of objectivity by the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in social theory (Barad, ; Mol, 2003), challenging distinctions common to modern thought between the natural world and human social action, between cause and effect and between discourse and matter (Haraway, 1991) that sustain an idea of time as exterior and exceptional (e.g. Latour, 1993). Refiguring time has been central to black quantum futurism (Phillips, 2015) and feminist new materialism (Coole and Frost, 2010), as much as it has animated studies broadly collected under the term ‘actor network theory’ and in wider social theory. Richard Tutton advocates conceptualising the future as an ‘entanglement of matter and meaning’ and ‘enacted through particular material-discursive practices’ (Tutton, , pp. 485, 488). It is thereby possible to understand many temporalities as being created through mutual articulations between matter and meaning: as materialised, in other words (Tutton, 2017) in a move that brings time closer, denaturalising it along the way. For those interested in law, such an approach brings with it the potential for a multidirectional process of co-production between law, temporalities and other elements of social and political life (Valverde, 2015).

In particular, we would like to view law in creative juxtaposition with time’s unsteady contingency on processes of mattering: what Barad terms the ‘making/marking’ of time through ‘lively’ processes of ‘enfolding’ (Barad, , p. 181). As such, we are interested in ‘praxiographic’ accounts of law and time (Grabham, , following Mol, 2003), which open up unexpected alignments, as well as non-linear movements and which follow law’s relationship with material and political intra-actions (Davies, ; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ; Pottage, 2014). Our argument, then, is for an approach to law, regulation and time that conceives of time (just as much as law) as made or co-produced, not pre-existing and separate, and which is engaged in dialogue with concepts of time emerging across disciplines.