The trials of law and literature

Ronnie Warrington died on 28th September 1994.     

The Path to Prosperity

正The teachings of Confucius illuminate the path for achieving our dreams in life,and one key teaching in particular has been illuminating China's path toward becoming a moderately prosperous—or xiaokang—society.It is that taking a moderate approach to building well-consolidated social and economic foundations is essential for achieving prosperity.The concept is far from new,but it is standing the test of time as China enters a new era of development.The Communist Party of China (CPC) has a strong understanding of this notion,and all Party leaders have been demonstrating it in their work.The main result has been the eradication of absolute poverty last year,which completed China's process of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects.     

“To Have Done with Judgment?” Yourcenar’s Hadrian and the Crime Against Life*

Is it possible “to have done with judgment”? This might be a question pondered by victim–offender mediators. The essay at hand explores and contrasts three Nietzschean images of non-judgmentalism, i.e. Friedrich Nietzsche’s, Gilles Deleuze’s, and Marguerite Yourcenar’s. The original model, Nietzsche’s, might perhaps be termed the vital art of Dionysian affirmation. The second, Deleuze’s: the machinic art of rhizomatic deterritorialization. The third, Yourcenar’s (or Hadrian’s): the stoic art of interstitial imperialism. The focus in this essay is, in particular, on one of Yourcenar’s novels, Mémoires d’Hadrien. Conclusions are drawn with regard to the theory and practice of victim-offender mediation.     

Rethinking organizational crime and organizational criminology

Organizational crime and organizational criminology, obviously, are, orshould be about ``organization'. This essay wants to explore what is goingon in contemporary ``organizations'; it wants to think through what iscurrently happening in today's organizations. It will argue thatcontemporary organizational life has arrived in a phase of transition.New forms, and new modalities of organizational morality are taking shape.So is organizational regulation. This, as will hopefully become clear, is ofimportance to organizational criminologists who, inevitably, though oftenimplicitly, have been researching and writing about organizational orbusiness ethics and morality for some time now. This essay suggests analternative way of conceptualizing life and regulation in contemporaryorganizations. It suggests a reading of contemporary organizations as clustersof labyrinthine networks – i.e. the raw materials and again the outcome oflabyrinthine moralities – in which – as Deleuze and Guattari had it – theOutside is always already potentially, though undecidably,Within. To students of organizational regulation, and organizationalcriminologists are amongst them, this essay argues that contemporaryorganizations are gradually turning into highly complex networks (of networks) thatare often inextricably interwoven with surrounding networks. This has aprofound impact on how organizational moralities emerge and develop, onon how these in turn impact on the contents and the orientation oforganizational action. This essay will argue that regulating contemporaryorganizatons is bound to be simultaneously much easier as well as muchmore complex than in a previous, ``bureaucratic' age.     

Viral Contagion and Anti-Terrorism: Notes on Medical Emergency,Legality and Diplomacy

The dominant imagery in current international relations seems to betray the emergence of an imperialist imaginary that differs markedly from an earlier one. This paper traces the main outlines of this emerging imaginary that has left notions of Empire as spheres of integrative production firmly behind, and is now geared towards imagining Empire as a complete, organic body of free-but-organic-and-therefore-orderly flows that however needs to be kept intact by means of epidemiological interventions aimed at excluding or neutralizing viral entities. Dealing with terrorism, or invading states that allegedly breed them, in this imaginary, is first and foremost a matter of medical necessity and urgency. The legal and diplomatic 'logic' of UN resolutions (Resolution 1441 for example), in this imaginary space, can only be imagined as being of secondary importance. Cooperation and `cosmopolitan' negotiation, as alternatives, disappear in this imaginary that projects an imperialist globalism of epidemiological purity.     

Dynamics of collaborative research medicine: the case of glaucoma

This paper inquires into the organizational and spatial dynamics of scientific research by focussing on the evolution of epistemic networks in a specific area of medical practice, glaucoma. As researchers and practitioners struggle to come to grips with this elusive disease, the medical scientific community exhibits a great degree of variety in the ecology of organisations and the associated scientific pathways. Data on scientific publications over a thirty-year period affords a clearer understanding of the changing configurations of a clinical-scientific community, and speaks to the adaptive nature of problem-solving in medicine.     

Mega/City/Crime: Notes on the Cultural Significance of Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

In his “non-narrative” film Koyaanisqatsi (Hopi for ‘life in imbalance’) Godfrey Reggio documents the ecologically disastrous ‘imbalanced’ life in modern, industrialised mega-cities. In the film, he seems to mourn the loss of what he suggests was a more ‘balanced’ form of life, when Man was one with nature. This contribution draws on elements in Hopi culture and reads Reggio’s iconic film as part of a cultural trend in which submission, in all its guises, is no longer accepted. In this cultural trend submission always is submission to code (that is: to a certain structured solidity or ordered coherence), and therefore, to wasteful destruction and to ‘life in imbalance’. This trend has, however, in the course of the decades, also spawned a void of “Luciferian” desires of absolute sovereignty, and has done this to such an extent as to undermine the conditions of possibility for anything like a non-submissive life ‘in balance’ to endure.