M&D-related: Mechanickal Duck & Legal State

Mon Jul 15 12:04:45 CDT 2019

Hm ...

"The Man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,--- to be remember'd only for having trespass'd  so ingeniously outside the borders of Taste, as to have provided his Automaton a Digestionary Process, whose end result could not be distinguish'd from that found in Nature." (M&D, p. 372)

That the crap was fake - in one container food was collected, in a second pre-stored feces were processed - is not really important (especially since Vaucanson "hoped that a truly digesting automaton could one day be designed", as Wikipedia puts it). What's significant is the construction as such which became kinda Icon of modernity. As this it pops up in novels (not only in M&D, but also in books by Peter Carey, Lawrence Norfolk, & Lavie Tidhar) and in the present case the author makes use of its metaphorical dimension in context of legal theory.

For Pynchon, spinning the story beyond its authentic historical content, the expansion of the inanimate (& this is one of his key motifs since V!) and the corresponding entropy on side of intimate human culture - the duck's "strange Metamorphosis, which has sent it out the Gates of the Inanimate, and off upon its present Journey into the given World" (p. 372) - seems to be a crucial aspect. Can nowadays' Robocracy be traced back to the 18th century?

For Kiesow, the mechanical duck is a metaphor for the naive idea that there could ever be a tight coupling between the abstract law (dt. Gesetz) and the concrete juridical decision (or judgment or verdict or sentence; dt. Urteil) in the actual legal practice. Rereading young Carl Schmitt's "Gesetz und Urteil" from 1912, Kiesow emphasizes that the concept of the legal state which imagines that the judge's verdict can be a direct outflow from the politically programmed law is an illusion. Schmitt opens his book with the sentence: "The decisive question is this: When is a judgment correct?". And in the fourth chapter the following answer is given: "Today a juridical decision [or judgment or verdict or sentence] is correct when one can assume that an other judge would have decided the same way. 'An other judge' here means the type of the modern 'jurisprudentially educated' [? - dt. rechtsgelehrt] jurist". So the practice of law itself generates the adequate criteria. And this means for Schmitt that the question for the correct judgment mustn't be immediately identified with the one for the correct interpretation of the law. The necessity to decide cannot be reduced to a mechanical application of rules. In contrary to this, a common understanding of the legal state claims that completeness (dt. Lückenlosigkeit) is a quality of the legal order & that the will of the legislator can always unmistakenly be identified. This standard interpretation forgets about the multidimensional social conflicts in the modern practice of law & about its enforced politicization in times of crisis, --- which Schmitt later thematized under the formula State of Exception (or State of Emergency; dt. Ausnahmezustand). These shortcomings of the standard interpretation lead Kiesow to his take on Vaucanson's automaton. The formulation "'duckification' of the legal state" (dt. Verentung des Rechtsstaats) refers exactly to that idea that there's nothing outside the law and that the body of law simply needs to be applied mechanically in order to always get correct results on the level of concrete decisions. I consider this to be a fine & funny use of metaphor, and it's interesting to see that Vaucanson's mechanical respectively mechanickal (as Pynchon has it) duck is humorously used also in non-fictional literature.

Later on in his essay, Kiesow, leaving the Schmittian terrain (C.S., see The Nomos of the Earth", emphasizes the concrete unity of law which he defines as "unity of order and local orientation", dt. "Einheit von Ordnung und Ortung [literally: locating]"), states that the practice of law means processing multidimensional binaries, not only Law/Non-Law as the basic autopoietic distinction in the sense of Niklas Luhmann, but also regarding conflicting opponents inside & outside the courtroom (which includes not only natural but also juridical persons). Like, for example, creditor & debtor. Here logic never rules and - as it is put with a paradox formulation - every case is a border case and a normal case at the same time. In this context, Kiesow doubts the fruitfulness of Schmitt's distinction between regular legal practice & the State of Exception. Can the rights of ALL be respected & met when we consider the law to be a contingent form and fight for its openness in every single case?

In the last paragraph of his essay, Kiesow draws a parallel between the early Schmitt and a writer whose influence on Pynchon is well known. Franz Kafka, an insurance jurist, wrote not only the novel "The Trial" (orig. Der Process) yet also the short but very intense story "The Judgment" (orig. Das Urteil). In this story the judgment stands in no rational relation to the things that happened. Kafka wrote it in --- 1912, the year Schmitt's "Gesetz und Urteil" got published. The traditional hermeneutics of law is dead.

What Pynchon & Kiesow share is a decided critique of a one-dimensional affirmative understanding of so-called progress & the historical enlightenment aka the 'Age of Reason'.

Am 14.07.19 um 18:50 schrieb Jochen Stremmel:
»die Verentung des Rechtsstaats, die Digestion mittels Enten« – an intellectual feat only for and from Dösbaddel.
(Did he even know that Vaucanson's duck couldn't digest?)

Am So., 14. Juli 2019 um 17:43 Uhr schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de<mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>>:

Nichts für Dösbaddel ...

Am 14.07.19 um 11:41 schrieb Jochen Stremmel:
+ ... Man sieht hier, in seiner Kritik an der Methode, an den herrschenden Theorien über die juristische Entscheidung und die Rolle des Richters, man merkt hier, in seinen Sarkasmen über den Glauben daran, man könne qua Deduktion aus gesetzlichen Prämissen zu einem unbedingt sicheren Urteil gelangen, man begreift bereits hier die tiefen Vorbehalte Carl Schmitts hinsichtlich der Möglichkeit eines Rechtsstaats, der nichts anderes als eine Technik wäre, ein Verfahren zur Erzielung von Ergebnissen, eine vaucansonsche Rechtsstaatlichkeit, die Verentung des Rechtsstaats, die Digestion mittels Enten, wie sie Jacques Vaucansons weltberühmter Automat aus dem 18. Jahrhundert zeigt, kurz gesagt, dass es nichts als das Gesetz geben würde, dem man nicht entkommen kann, denn es wird als geltend ausgeführt, angewandt, und diese Anwendung ist nichts anderes als eine Mechanik ... +

kurz gesagt: duckshit.

Am Sa., 13. Juli 2019 um 06:14 Uhr schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de<mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de><mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de><mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>>:

"A mechanickal Duck that shits?" (p. 372)

+ ... Man sieht hier, in seiner Kritik an der Methode, an den herrschenden Theorien über die juristische Entscheidung und die Rolle des Richters, man merkt hier, in seinen Sarkasmen über den Glauben daran, man könne qua Deduktion aus gesetzlichen Prämissen zu einem unbedingt sicheren Urteil gelangen, man begreift bereits hier die tiefen Vorbehalte Carl Schmitts hinsichtlich der Möglichkeit eines Rechtsstaats, der nichts anderes als eine Technik wäre, ein Verfahren zur Erzielung von Ergebnissen, eine vaucansonsche Rechtsstaatlichkeit, die Verentung des Rechtsstaats, die Digestion mittels Enten, wie sie Jacques Vaucansons weltberühmter Automat aus dem 18. Jahrhundert zeigt, kurz gesagt, dass es nichts als das Gesetz geben würde, dem man nicht entkommen kann, denn es wird als geltend ausgeführt, angewandt, und diese Anwendung ist nichts anderes als eine Mechanik ... +

https://www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/2019/06/24/zwischen-gesetz-und-urteil-gibt-es-keine-hermeneutik-oder-wie-1912-die-traditionellen-auslegungsmethoden-ihr-ende-fanden/

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Kiesow

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