ECO-TECHNE: LAW, LEGAL CATEGORIES, AND WHAT TO MAKE OF THIS WORLD IN WHICH WE ARE LIVING?

Abstract

Protectionist migration discourses and limited employment protection manifest a belief that community, nationhood and citizenship need to be contained and maintained. This article considers firstly what is prohibiting, or obstructing, openness to categories of migrants and work by focusing on the tenacity of the nation-state. Drawing on feminist labour law and ecology scholarship, I then explore what exceeds being technologised into ‘nation’ or ‘community’ to open onto an anarchic onto-epistemology, as creative presence. The article provides a glimpse into a larger project that explores thinking of the limits of law and legal categories, in particular labour migration in the United Kingdom (UK), as ecotechnical. Ecotechnics refers to the circulation of techne, technologies, of capital, of law, of intelligibility, that circulate at the same time as we are existing in eco-: the sense that sustains and maintains being in the world. To diagnose the world as ecotechnical is to say that everything, everyone, every being, moves as techne (overwhelmingly experienced as capital) and eco. Focusing on the nexus of ideas of law, ecotechnics – in particular in labour, migration, as well as what it means to be in the world, as ostensibly ‘global’ – presents a challenge to the fallacy of the nation as a place of belonging. Ecotechnics illuminates an underlying facet of law, which is the very coming together of beings to form a sociality and a limit.