Law and Aesthetics in the Anthropocene: From the Rights of Nature to the Aesthesis of Obligations

Abstract

The Anthropocene thesis contends that the earth has entered a new geological epoch, dominated by human action. This article examines the Anthropocene in relation to law and aesthetics, arguing that the concepts of law and the stories of law’s origins that we mobilise in this context play a significant role in rendering us sensitive or insensitive to the multifarious challenges that the Anthropocene poses to social life. In arguing against aspects of Earth Jurisprudence scholarship, which has developed a novel understanding of the ‘rights of nature’, this article argues that it is through an attention to obligations, rather than rights, that a sensitivity to the forces and relations that define the Anthropocene might be fostered. The shift from rights to obligations entails a commensurate movement from aesthetics – where questions of form, integrity and harmony predominate – to aesthesis, the study of the somatic, sensory and affective dimensions of human experience. The article concludes by arguing that it is within the contemporary city, understood as a discrete form of human and infrastructural association, that an aesthesis of obligations in the context of the Anthropocene can be most acutely perceived.

Obligations in the Anthropocene

“…This is fundamentally a moral point, but Weil argues further that it is a crime to refuse those obligations ( 2005 , p. 225) and that any legal system that does not protect them ‘is without the essence of legality’ ( 2005 , p. 226). Matthews ( 2019 , p. 12) does not address these aspects of her thinking but he affirms that the privileging of obligations ‘offers a radically different “legal screen”…to that offered by rights, mediating social relations in a distinct configuration’ (2019, p. 13). I think that this overstates the case and does not engage thoroughly enough with the work on obligations that can be found in positive law 18 and environmental theory.…”

“…To date, the foremost exponents of this shift are Kylee McGee ( 2017 , pp. 117–144) and Daniel Matthews ( 2018 , 2019 ). For McGee ( 2017 , pp.…”

“…221–230) argument for ‘priority of obligations’. While rights and obligations are correlates (Hohfeld 1917 ), Weil ( 2005 , p. 86; Matthews 2019 , p. 13) argues that rights ‘hang in the middle air, and for this very reason they cannot root themselves in the earth’. If rights contribute to the ‘up rootedness’ of the human condition, obligations have the capacity to ground us in place and community.…”

“…One way to do this is through obligations. Following Matthews ( 2019 ) I argue that obligations are prior to rights and fundamental to human plurality and sociality. To help us grapple with this task, I argue that there is value in looking back to past writers like Hans Jonas.…”

Legal Imaginaries and the Anthropocene: ‘Of’ and ‘For’

“…It has more than passing resonance with what happens when communities come together in multiple geo-physically located and digital initiatives and partnerships to co-compose alternative, organic normative relations, indigenous and nonindigenous alike (Bollier and Helfrich 2015). Future normative imaginaries reflecting multi-fibred connections between humans and non-humans of a wide range of kinds in such projects (particularly when 'visioned' next to the coral reef project), hold out rich potential for sympoietic normativities to be generatively co-produced by a wide range of communities (human-non-human), disciplines, and arts of living, shaping a distinctively Anthropocene-facing 'aesthesis of obligation' (Matthews 2019). The fundamental and welcome 'wildness' of such projects (they seem to brim over, rather than be tightly operatively constrained) links them, too, to forms of critical-creative activism such as the 'politics of swarming' that Connolly suggests as a response to Anthropocene planetary injustices (Connolly 2017), and emergent in multiple indigenous and other protest mobilizations against colonizing neoliberal petro-capitalism, climate injustice and long-standing racial hierarchies.…”