7 - Productive Fictions for the Study of the Law

Summary

This chapter concludes by emphasizing the multiple character of the law. Summarizing the multiple beings of the law as they have appeared in this book – the law as a distribution machine, the law as a narrative practice, the law as a matter of shuffling documents, the law as a matter of temporal ordering and folding – this chapter raises the question how we may make sense of this multiplicity. Here, I argue we must refuse to reduce these multiplicities to one preferred abstraction. Instead of such hyper-explanations, I argue we must retain multiplicities in order to justice to law’s multi-scalar, multi-temporal, and non-local character. In order to do so, I suggest we think of the law as a hyper-object. The notion of the hyper-object forces us to situate and account for our collaborations with this strange being, so that we will never be able to claim we have apprehended the law in its totality, yet we need not sacrifice description entirely. Such a conception calls for situated accounts, and remains sensitive to the fact that social and legal life is always ongoing, never not concrete, irreducibly multiple.