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Mariana Valverde: Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and


Governance

Article  in  Journal of Law and Society · December 2015


DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00732.x

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09reviews 22.9.15 10:56

CHRONOTOPES OF LAW: JURISDICTION, SCALE AND GOVERNANCE


by MARIANA VALVERDE
(Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014, 198 pp., £85.00)

Mariana Valverde's new book is an important one. It does something that


only recently has been systematically attempted in legal theoretical research:
it tries to think of time and space together.1 It reclaims a role for time within
the ambits of legal geography, but it does not do so at the expense of space.
Valverde is a committed spatio-legal scholar who has regularly, whether
explicitly or not, included temporality in her work, and in this book she
addresses these considerations in a variety of discussions, ranging from a re-
reading of early feminist scholarship, to courtroom analysis, to the Canadian
justice system.
The book is pitched at an audience of socio-legal scholars and students,
and can be read in chapter bites, since each chapter is followed by an indivi-
dual bibliography. What links them all is the idea of the spatio-temporal. The
title of the book, Chronotopes, refers to a neologism employed by Mikhail
Bakhtin in his literary criticism work (mainly 1981).2 Bakhtin defines
chronotopes as:
the intrinsic connectedness of spatial and temporal relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature . . . Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh,
becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive
to the movements of time, plot, and history.3
This fleshy formulation, full of affects, sensoriality, and movement, is
Bakhtin's analytical tool for the various literary works he tackles, from
ancient Greeks to contemporary Russians. Valverde `borrows' (her term)
chronotopes, along with two other Bakhtinian neologisms, namely, hetero-
glossia and dialogism, referring to the multiplicity of utterances constituting
the world through interaction, and transposes them to socio-legal research.
This book comes at a time where an interest in the spatiality of law is
becoming relatively established (although still by no means the norm) and
where a vivid interest in materiality, affectivity, and the politics of resistance
are claiming the spot of the vanguard. The intention to bring the temporal
together with the spatial is pivotal, and the case this book makes for it is
eloquent and erudite. It leaves open, however, a question of timing, as it
were. Valverde (p. 26) writes:
While scholars associated with geography tend to fall into spatial determinism,
or else add a historical layer of analysis to the more thorough study of
spatialization, those whose reading habits and institutional locations lean

1 See I. Braverman et al. (eds.), The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal
Geography (2014).
2 M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr. by C. Emerson and M.
Holquist (1981).
3 id., p. 84 (quoted in Valverde, pp. 9±10).

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toward philosophy have paid far more attention to temporality than to space.
This can be seen in Elizabeth Grosz's otherwise highly sophisticated analyses
of the governance of bodies and sexualities, which is not inattentive to spatial
questions, but which privileges temporality.
It is regrettable that Grosz's spatial credentials are dismissed a little too
swiftly in this book, since, I would argue, some of her work has managed to
bring up a notion of spatiality outside the usual Euclidean paradigm, and
closer to post-Deleuzian architectonics. But if we were to put this aside for a
moment, Valverde's quote underlines what is, I think, common knowledge:
that time has received much more attention than space. This applies across
disciplines (with the obvious exception of geographers), and specifically in
law: it is a historical fact that law's natural bedfellow is considered to be
time and not space. This is why a `spatial turn' was needed, because law has
always been turning to the melody of time. This is true on a theoretical,
applied, and professional level (legal history can get you a job more easily
than legal geography, as Valverde admits). Space is a recent and still hesitant
addition to law's preoccupation with time, whether as time of the essence or
time as history. In other words, the undisputed trend across disciplines is that
time takes priority over space. This is largely because space remains a threat
to the law's abstract, universal, disembodied (and thus neutral) description.
As Doreen Massey, to whom Valverde refers, has shown, space is much
more than a container or the place where things happen. Rather, space is a
fundamentally unknowable movement that lends itself much less to
theoretical taming than time. This is why, when Valverde maintains that it
is space that has been given priority in law rather than time (`a more
widespread tendency to treat space as more philosophically interesting than
time' (p. 41)), I feel constrained to disagree. Time has monopolized both
Western and some non-Western thought, while space has seriously emerged
only with phenomenology, and then always filtered by human consciousness.
I am not convinced that it is time for time yet as Valverde seems to be
arguing throughout the book ± not, at least, in legal theory, where a much
more concerted effort on behalf of spatially-aware scholars needs to be made
in order for space to be understood legally.
What does it mean to understand space legally? It means to embrace its
complexity, multiplicity, unpredictability, and non-linearity. It means avoid-
ing the usual legal mechanisms of understanding space merely as a mani-
festation of `the field', a parochial localism, or even the most juridical of
concepts: jurisdiction. There is potentially a great deal to be done with all the
above, and especially jurisdiction, as law's current tools of understanding
space. Indeed, Valverde addresses jurisdiction, although leaving its spatio-
legal dimension somewhat underexplored. As it is currently understood by
mainstream legal theory, jurisdiction simply allows the law to carry on its
business of chopping up and adjusting space in manageable bits that have
little to do with the reality of space. Our work as spatio-legal theorists is not
over, and temporal discussions have to be made in a way that do not

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encourage the law to lapse into its habitual prioritization of time over space;
nor to content itself with a legally manageable understanding of space,
namely, a Euclidian, measurable, definable, and jurisdictionally bounded
space. Space is much more complex and obstreperous than that. We have not
yet understood the input of space in law. A return to time can only mean a
parallel, deeper engagement with space, if we want to avoid the politically
suspicious and problematic consequences that could come from accepting
that space has been given priority over time in law.
I would not want to detract from the merits of the book, but I feel it is
necessary to address some issues here which, in my reading, impeded the
book from reaching its potential. As I said, this is an important book because
it attempts something exigent, namely, going against the habitual
disciplinary separation between space and time. However, and possibly
because of the book's avowed belief in law's transformative potential and its
ability to address concrete situations, there is an unresolved tension in the
core of the book. The greatest source of tension is the book's anti-theoretical
stance. This is so ferocious that has allowed a defensive tone to permeate the
argument. Valverde is keen on siding with concreteness and applied think-
ing, as opposed to abstraction and general theoretical thinking, and her quest,
as well as her argument, is something with which I would intuitively agree.
However, the opposition between the two is made into the central tenet of the
book. As a consequence, a polarization emerges that has one very important
outcome: the marginalization of a burgeoning number of scholars
(occasionally thought of as critical socio-legal scholars but even that label
needs to be resisted for obvious reasons of categorization) that have emerged
in the last decade or so, who have remained unscathed by such hard lines as
concreteness versus abstraction. This new scholarship has produced work
(some of which is referred to below) that theorizes practice and applies
theory, if not in equal measure, at least without falling in an old-fashioned
binary. Valverde does engage with some of this literature. She does not,
however, discuss it in terms of its potential effect on the position of the book,
and, indeed, towards a realization that the initial polarization between
concreteness and abstraction is no longer an issue. In that sense, perhaps the
most interesting question that could come out of this book is whether and in
what way can theory contribute to an applied understanding of the law as
evinced in concrete cases.
The underlying tension of the book can be located in the author's
ambivalence towards on the one hand, what she calls `high' theory (and
defines as `world-scale' theories) and, on the other, neologisms, for which,
perhaps quite rightly, she has little patience. The former would not be of
concern if the author did not systematically engage with what one could
easily take (or mistake) for `high' theory: big masculine names such as
Derrida, Foucault, Nietzsche, and to some extent Kant, are quoted approv-
ingly, and only occasionally critically, in the book. This ambivalence is
never confronted, and the reader is expected to understand why, say, Derrida

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is not high theory, whereas Luhmann is. In the brief passages where the
author discusses this, it emerges that `high' theory is world-scale theory,
given to classification and issues of true definition of concepts. `World-scale
theories are static' writes the author, using Luhmann as an example and
sadly ignoring the proliferation of radical writing in all disciplines, law
included, that have co-opted stasis for its resistant and even revolutionary
potential, and embraced the world in a scale unlike the usual enlightenment
rhetoric.
Likewise, Foucault is mentioned as a good theorist because his definitions
are productively unfixed, but Deleuze (whose definitions are equally, if not
more, productively unfixed) is rejected summarily as `high' theory. Finally,
Bakhtin's theory is not labelled as `high', but again without a great deal of
explanation. Rather, the author quotes approvingly that Bakhtin `actually
pursues a much loftier objective: namely, a new method for ascertaining
what makes each genre what it is' (my emphasis). The same contradictions
emerge with neologisms. As it is clear from the choice of title for her book,
Valverde knows the power of neologisms. The fact that she did not invent
the term `chronotopes' means nothing. She transposed the neologism in an
entirely novel context where very little was known about chronotopes. After
this book, for socio-legal scholars chronotopes are Valverde's, not
Bakhtin's. Yet she attacks David Delaney for using a neologism: `to engage
in concrete analyses of spatialized power relations, do we need a neologism
that takes the grammatical form of a noun (`nomosphere'), and thus
constantly risks reifying sociolegal relations?' (p. 40).
The odd thing is that reading this book made me think: this is what good
theory could look like. But it also made me think, once again, of the futility
of characterizing theory as `high' versus whatever its opposite might be.
While there is no doubt that there is a lot of theoretical research that does
not pay attention to how theory is translated into practice, and how indeed
theory can make a difference (and, likewise, a lot of applied research that is
not interested in the benefits that theorization might bring in terms of
lateral, imaginative thinking), a judicial use of polemics is necessary in
order for socio-legal and legal theoretical work to remain productive. Let
us get this right: there is no high and low theory. There is good theory that
is aware of its potential effect in reality and works on this in order to give
direction to its theoretical development. And there is not-so-good theory
which remains unconnected to reality and ignores its own transformative
potential. This means that theory is not just the text in which it unfolds, but
also its readers, its critics, and its endorsers. This is why the tension within
the book remains unresolved. Valverde knows theory and engages with it
(both in this book and in her previous work) with often striking results ±
namely, results that reflect reality, just as they formulate reality. She
demonstrates a clear passion and affinity for theory, and she does it well
and with humour. Yet, in a self-annulling gesture, this recent book
castigates anyone who does that.

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Allow me to point out some more specific issues before returning to the
important contribution of the book. First, I would take Valverde's quote on
neologisms literally in the context of her book, and ask: why use the term
`chronotopes'? What does her analysis of the concept offer to a spatio-
temporal analysis? What use does she make of Bakhtin's theory? Indeed, I'd
say, why draw on Bakhtin? The way I understand it, Bakhtin's theoretical
trajectory embodies the necessity of combining world-making on the one
hand, and the conditions of embedded reality of literary production on the
other. No doubt pushed by her commitment to the concrete and the imme-
diate, Valverde decided to provide little information on Bakhtin's wider
approach, nothing on the context of his theory (which, being partly literary
criticism, opens broad avenues for legal discourse), and nothing on his socio-
political context. On the positive side, this made me go back and re-read
Bakhtin and marvel at the immense potential that his theory still holds. On
the more problematic side, however, the absence of the above can be con-
sidered grave for a scholar who advocates the importance of time (and
historical context is certainly a temporal consideration). This becomes more
important in view of the extraordinarily productive analogies between
Bakhtin's politically unstable times of crisis with its intellectual and
religious repression (he was accused of being anti-establishment because of
his religious interests), and our crisis-ridden era characterized by global
instability, neo-liberal repressions, ecological extremes, and humanitarian
disasters. Second, why engage with `high' theory (or in any case, theory by
dead white men) such as Derrida and Nietzsche, and not engage with the
extraordinary literature that has been produced on space, time, and law (see,
indicatively, Bottomley, Cooper, Grabham, Keenan, and Layard).4 Or,
indeed, why Bakhtin as the main inspiration, and not Blanchot, Fanon, de
Sade, Arendt, Braidotti, Haraway? All these (and many more) have talked
about space and time, some in literature, other in terms of bodies, other in
terms of politics.
On the whole, this book extends an invitation to a further and deeper
understanding of the legal spatio-temporal by setting the foundations for a
spatio-temporal approach to the law. We can look forward to further legal
spatio-temporal explorations by critical and sociolegal scholars. It is antici-
pated that future research will build on Valverde's more or less measurable
and linear spatio-temporal analysis, and engage with new, daring, and

4 See respectively: A. Bottomley, `A Trip to the Mall: Revisiting the Public/Private


Divide' in Feminist Perspectives on Land Law, eds. H. Lim and A. Bottomley (2007);
D. Cooper, Governing out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging (1998);
E. Grabham, `Doing Things with Time: Flexibility, Adaptability, and Elasticity in UK
Equality Cases' (2011) 26 Canadian J. of Law and Society 485±508; S. Keenan,
Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging (2014); A.
Layard, `Drawing Out the Elements of Territorial Cohesion: Rescaling Spatial
Governance' (2012) 30 Yearbook of European Law 358±80.

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radically interdisciplinary conceptualizations. Particularly welcome would


be new research on issues of differentiated spaces, affective chronotopes (to
which Bakhtin amply points with his fleshy descriptions), quantum spatio-
temporal foldings, and new ontological and phenomenological spatio-
temporals. These are not just of theoretical importance but have a direct
effect on the kind of law produced by the spatio-temporal. Issues such as
parallel spatio-temporal legalities are intimately connected to legal
pluralism; geological stratification (that is, questions of ecological legal
responsibility) and spatio-temporal repetition (that is, precedent) are shown
to operate differently in folded space and time, which is the chronotope of
global constitutionalism. Finally, the differentiated way in which law's
chronotope operates in relation to other disciplines (that is, the constant here
and now produced by the law) allows us to understand the slowness with
which the much-hailed transformative potential of the law takes hold, if
indeed it ever does. All these are `concrete' questions that could be informed
by Valverde's analysis, opening up to `the world' without fear of falling in
the theory-versus-practice binary. We are in the epoch of the Anthropocene,
where all disciplines are consciously converging, in an attempt to understand
the greatest issue that this planet has ever had to deal with, namely, the
ramifications of human presence. Intense, supradisciplinary, empirical
theorization is not just necessary but inevitable in order to address the
unimaginably serious consequences of our actions. These actions are not
confined to the vaguely `ecological' but bear a direct imprint on everyday
socio-legal practices. In this epoch, it is important not to be afraid of the
world but, rather, to embrace it.
This book is characterized by an intense passion for a spatio-temporal
understanding of the law. If one manages to put aside Valverde's ambival-
ence towards theory, one will be rewarded by a host of important insights.
The final chapter on security revisits questions of risk and safety and sheds
thoroughly useful new light; the chapter on scale in feminist legal theory is
so refreshing and passionate (well, the whole book is passionate but this
particular chapter is also thoroughly consistent) that it compares to a good
crime novel; the analysis of the spatio-temporality of the courtroom is
imaginative, although I would so have liked Valverde to take that extra step
towards spatial/spatio-temporal justice; and the overview of temporality is
useful for legal scholars more familiar with space than time.

ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS
Westminster Law School, Westminster University, 309 Regent Street, London
W1B 2HW, England
andreaspm@westminster.ac.uk

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