TEARING tears tear!
… if you are not allowed to cut with a blade or a scissor, you tear the paper with your hands and then you glue it together … and something different appears – some ~~ thing ~~ you never pre(prior) planned – common plain planes – and you cannot really explain what this face you made said – it just happened.
#1 Searching
#2 Expression
#3 I am many
#4 This is the hand that takes
#5 Pop(f)art
#6 Whoman
#7 Synthetic zero
#8 Blood
#9 Blossoms flying
#10 Félix
#11 Kindred
from Azania via Australia via Brazil to the FACE
Still from Stereoscope, 1999, animated film, 35 mm film, video and DVD transfer, 8’ 22’’. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery New York (via http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/Timeandphotography/vancaelenberghe.html)
I shall look into faces, and I shall see them seek some other face (Virginia Woolf, The Waves).
Introduction
Judicial adjudication affords the individual and collective bodies an alternative / additional space in the event of a possible rights infringement, to challenge enacted laws, policy and the action of the sovereign. Although constitutionalism in modern liberal democracies has opened up a previous enclosed space for courts in the form of judicial adjudication to possibly creatively deal with rights alongside traditional forms of democratic participation, courts remain trapped within institutional boundaries when they rely on interpretative approaches, legal convention, legal culture, and legal history. Courts often defer a situation of rights-infringement to the legislature or executive branches of government as a macro-political matter. As such the concept of human rights grounded in the notion of a supposed fixed identity and judicial interpretation grounded in presupposed values confines movement or change. An underlying reason for this confinement is the artificial blockages created by our current knowledge apparatus and the overemphasis on medico-legal considerations on the issue of the right to passage.
In this post, I focus on two recent cases in two different domestic jurisdictions, Canada and South Africa that concerned the sensitive and controversial issue of the right to passage (euthanasia, assisted dying or assisted suicide). I argue that courts functions as a faciality machine producing both the concrete face and the landscape insofar the judge as faciality machines, manages decisions about health including decision-making between the messy borders of life and death on behalf of micro-political agencements (arrangements or assemblages). I focus on the most general function of facialisation that of biunivocalization function arguing that courts functions as normality computers and deviance detectors. Continue reading
Burned Out by Urs Fischer
When individuals face a decision to end their life in their own way an in their own time, they attempt to overcome established ways of acting and being acted upon by forming micro-political arrangements or becomings challenging the established position of the prohibition to end their life. This micro-political movement however, encounters the macro-political when they approach a court and question the established order. Hanafin (2009: 56) explains that these agencements (arrangements/assmblages) or becomings ‘call for another politics, a politics of becoming beyond the time of the political’. These micro-political becomings calling for another politics forces thinking law to become other than it presently is. It opens questions of bioethics calling for a focus on actual desires and interests in relation to the ending of life and the nebulous borders between life and death. However, courts assign a molar identity to these arrangements and I hope to explain this by working with Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract faciality machine.
Furthermore, the law perceives such a request, as a treat to the legal order which requires that the law through prohibition in legislation manage and prevent the action of the subordinate individual to end their life (Hanafin 2009: 47). Braidotti, Colebrook and Hanafin (2009: 5) argues that
What is at stake here is a politics beyond the bureaucratic rights-giving or rights-depriving state, which remains after the word has been said. This is the self declaring itself not in response to the call of the state or as the subject matter of rights, but as an active participant in political affairs. It is a self which exceeds fixing.
In this and the followings post, I intend to work with Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract faciality machine as an attempt to think intensively and to investigate the possibility of exploring the leakages or lines of flight out of the confined spaces in which courts operate as explained in previous posts (here and here). By firstly focussing on the most general function of facialisation that of biunivocalization or binarisation, I illustrate that courts functions as a faciality machine producing both the concrete face and the landscape when addressing the possible infringements of human rights (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 180-181).
Although these posts only focus on the operation of biunivocalization, I hope to explore the judge faciality machine in subsequent posts in the context of limit judge faciality machines. The biunivocalization function merely illustrate how courts function as normality computers and deviance detectors and as such I argue that possibilities of leakages or lines of flight will only be presented when working with the court as a limit machine.
This post aims to provide background on how the faciality machine operates. The following post, focuses on two recent cases in two different domestic jurisdictions, Canada and South Africa (that is so to speak worlds apart) that concerned the sensitive and controversial issue of the right to passage (euthanasia, assisted dying or assisted suicide).
Judicial adjudication within our current knowledge apparatus, affords individual and collective bodies an alternative and additional space in the event of a possible rights infringement, to challenge enacted laws, policy and the action of the sovereign. Although constitutionalism in modern liberal democracies has opened up a previous enclosed space for courts in the form of judicial adjudication to possibly creatively deal with rights alongside traditional forms of democratic participation, courts remain trapped within institutional boundaries when they rely on interpretative approaches, legal convention, legal culture, and legal history where courts often defer a situation of rights-infringement to the legislature or executive branches of government as a macro-political matter. As such the concept of human rights grounded in the notion of a supposed fixed identity and judicial interpretation grounded in presupposed values confines movement or change.
In this post I hope to illustrate that when rights are perceived beyond institutional expression, a supposed fixed identity (subject) and presupposed values, it may possibly be of assistance in identifying different ways of ‘becomings’ that goes beyond the majority standard.
Lisa Venticinque Photography http://www.lisa25blog.com/blog/2010/10/21/recent-work-movement.html
The possibility of thinking law as thinking life
Deleuze in a conversation with Foucault, suggested that a new relationship between theory and practice is emerging. Deleuze explains the relationship between theory and practice was considered to be a process of totalisation where practice was either perceived as the application of theory or practice inspired the development of theory to oppose practice. Colebrook elaborates on the relationship between theory and practice in the context of law. Law is grounded in the ‘terror of the signifier’ and is still very much subjugated to the linguistic paradigm. This means that law assumes that life is ‘necessarily experienced as mediated or constituted through a symbolic system of language’. She argues that theory relates to law, because theory assumes that ‘there must be some lawful process through which such a world is constituted’ insofar ‘as we experience a world as having a certain being that is other than ourselves’.
Abstract for Daughters of Chaos: Practice, Discipline, A Life – 8th international Deleuze Studies conference, Sweden, 29th of June and the 1st of July 2015.
Thinking law, doing jurisprudence: A continued creation of a system of rights
‘If Deleuze and Guattari parse out the potential for thinking into these three styles – art, science and philosophy – where would we place law?’ (Colebrook 2009: 14-22).
