The paper reflects on the theory of material cognition the advent of 3-D printing arguably calls for, pointing to the topology implicit in additive fabrication that invites a vision of the world in which the environment is no longer outside, but inside material structures that envelop in a self-referential manner and that work by aggregating and assembling, much like the layers of an onion. The questions that additive technology invites are not just technical and material in nature but chiefly concern (...) the question of how the mind will inhabit this material technology that calls for and creates structures of internally held, manifold relations. The challenge additive technology poses to us is examined in this paper by turning to the maritime cultures of Oceania, where the wrapping of objects and of physical bodies in composite, iterative shapes, internally held and additive in fabrication is a chief way to secure the distinctiveness of the social body in the face of pervasive connectivity in a world in which perpetual movement and a conception of relation at a distance is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. The paper uses ethnographic data from Oceania to question the difference additive fabrication will make to the conceptualization of connectivity by directing us away from a network oriented approach informed by communication systems to a localised and immanent system which replicates internally relational elements in a simultaneously enfolding and expansive manner. (shrink)

It was originally suggested that the Anthropocene began in 1784, the date of James Watt’s patent for the rotative steam engine. Patent dates are interesting artefacts. They owe their existence to the chronopoietic technique of patent jurisprudence, which generates temporal sequences out of synchronous states of knowledge. This may not be geological time, but it informs the experience of time that is proper to the culture whose deposits of Pu-239 now mark the onset of the Anthropocene. Patent jurisprudence makes a (...) crucial contribution to what might be called the ethos of the Anthropocene: the sense of society as having an inexhaustible capacity for innovation, for endless self-renewal. And, as it turns out, the steam engine yields some interesting insights into this mode of enchantment. (shrink)

Anthropological scholarship after Marilyn Strathern does something that might surprise lawyers schooled in the tradition of ‘law and society’, or ‘law in context’. Instead of construing law as an instrument of social forces, or as an expression of processes by which society maintains and reproduces itself, a new mode of anthropological enquiry focuses sharply on ‘law itself’, on what Annelise Riles calls the ‘technicalities’ of law. How might the legal scholar be inspired by this approach? In this article, I explore (...) one possible way of approaching law after anthropology, which is to find within law’s own archive a set of resources for an analogous representation of law itself. Drawing on the historical scholarship of Yan Thomas, I suggest that the Roman conception of law as object offers an engaging counterpart to the anthropological take on law as a specific set of tools or, technicalities, or as a particular art of making relations. (shrink)