Vulnerabilidad social

Carrying out this research gives rise to a further problem of methodology: how to examine ‘the empirical’. From a negative-dialectical perspective, the act of identifying an object of study is seen to cut that object short, leaving an identity that has its truth in relation with what remains non-identical to its conceptualisation. This leaves the empiricist in the most wonderful paradox, suspended in an imaginarium between subjectivity and objectivity: thinking an object as it is, in fact the empiricist thinks the object otherwise; grasping the object as a matter of fact, the empiricist grasps the fact as a matter of theory.

The approach I take to this problem is not to seek to resolve the paradox, but to make it critical to research. To use Adorno’s term, the task is to develop a

and/or irrelevant in everyday life, almost entirely lawless. See UN Doc A/61/PV.107 (13 September 2007), 11. See also Grenfell, Promoting the Rule of Law in Post-conflict States, 54.

more exact imagination: ‘an imagination that remains strictly confined to the material offered it by scholarship and science and goes beyond them only in the smallest features of its arrangement, features which of course it must produce of itself.’74 _{If the critical function of the scholar’s imagination is its productive}

arrangement of research material, this is both negative and positive: negating the given objectivity of things, at the same time giving form to everything as the material of reason. As intellectual labour, this work is what gives the material its scientific value. Without critically engaging the imagination, things would remain in the realm of myth: treating material as purely objective in itself, the rational empiricist remains blind to its subjective conditioning,75 _{just as the relativist who}

treats material as purely subjective remains blind to its objective conditioning. Following Adorno, I approach ‘the empirical’ as the phenomenon that plays out in ways which always defy its rational conception. What is empirical is what the researcher imagines it to be as a conceptual matter and thereby renders imaginary, leaving a concept of the empirical that interpolates the empirical. This is an act of interpellation in that the researcher calls what is empirical to attention by identifying it according to its concept. In this the rational empiricist displaces the object of study twice over, the first time in thinking the concept into existence out of the object, and the second time in affirming the existence of this concept in place of its object. To avoid displacing its object for the second time and to move beyond the pure fiction of rationality, a conceptual schema—whether of law or of a project such as this one—must engage the empirical through the imaginary.76

The lesson for the social scientist is this: rather than approach the object of study directly and try to lay hold of it with the most adequate conceptual schema possible, approach it indirectly, through an arrangement that encircles the object from its points of difference. ‘Solely constellations represent, from without, what the concept has cut away from within, the “more”, which the former wishes to be, so very much as it cannot be the latter.’ Adorno continues: ‘By gathering around

74 _{Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, 131. The translation here is from Shierry Weber Nicholsen,}

Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 4.

75 _{See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 23-24.}

76 _{For further discussion, see Shane Chalmers, ‘Law's Imaginary Life on the Ground: Scenes of the}

the thing to be cognized, the concepts potentially determine its innermost core, thinking to attain what thinking necessarily stamped out of itself.’77

In my appropriation of this constellational approach, the concepts that gather around the object to be cognised and ‘potentially determine its innermost core’ are the object’s negative identities, that is, the ways in which it is other than expressed by its concept. This is not a purely negative result. Again, the point is to bring ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ together in an unholy alliance. To put it one way, the result is a negative position (or to put it another way, a posited negation). For instance, the object of Chapter 6 is ‘the national law of Liberia’, which I present through a constellation of scenes configured to show how the national law is taking non-identical form on the ground. Subverted; perverted; ignored; inverted: viewed from these negative vantage points, from these points of fundamental difference, the image of the ‘the national law’ is seen configured in ways that reveal something more of its true identity. Critically, this ‘true identity’, or ‘innermost core’ of the object, is only ever grasped negatively and partially: as a non-truth—identifying the phenomenon in the ways it is other than conceived; and as a non-whole— without identifying once and for all how it is otherwise.

Thus it is in the refuse of scattered off-cuts that the crystal of the totality is to be discovered; not the totality itself, but in the assemblage of the smallest and least remarkable data, a composite that refracts a dialectical image of it.78 _And

whilst it is a ‘dialectical image’ that is illuminated through this discursive configuration, and not some absolute reality, this is nonetheless real; indeed, by representing the object configuratively, through the imaginative work of the scholar, one might obtain an image of it that is more real than the law of reason would admit on its own.

This is the approach I take to the concept of the rule of law; and this is the kind of portrait that I have attempted to create as a result, portraying through a constellation of scenes the life of law’s rule in Liberia.

77 _{Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 164-166.}

78 _{See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 461, 462. On the metaphor of ‘refraction’, see Manderson, ‘AD}

3

Research design

Beyond the borders of Western nation-states and a few others, the world appears to be a dark place when it comes to the rule of law. Literally dark: on the influential World Justice Project map depicting ‘rule of law around the world’, most non- Western states are several shades darker than the enlightened Western ones, and Africa remains largely a blank space:

Figure 3. ‘Rule of Law Around the World’79

This would seem to make the choice of the west African republic of Liberia an unpropitious site to study the life of the rule of law. But then, the claim that there is ‘no rule of law’ almost anywhere outside of Western states is suspicious. For one, it brings to mind the colonial argument that there was ‘no law’ outside of civilised nations. Whilst that argument has been thoroughly discredited, even if the occasional influential representative still repeats it,80 _{it is remarkable that just}

when the majority of the world’s peoples have finally won recognition of their laws as ‘law’, these laws are deemed inadequate to the task of governing. At the same time, it recalls the racist trope that equates the civilised West as being governed by

79 _{[image omitted from digital version]} 80 _{See note 72 above.}

reason (through the orderly rule of law) and the savage others as being governed by passion (through the arbitrary rule of humans).81

In deciding to study the rule of law in Liberia, I designed my research to challenge both of these distinctions: between the ‘existence’ or ‘non-existence’ of the rule of law, and between ‘the rule of law’ or ‘the rule of humans’. This is not to homogenise the rule of law, to the point that it is simply everywhere. My argument is that the rule of law never ‘exists’ in any case, but rather describes a restless struggle to make law predominant over its subjects at the same time as it is given form, and takes form, in and through those subjects’ lives and interactions. Whilst this is a common experience, and in that sense the rule of law might be everywhere, it takes place in singular ways, and in that sense it would be different everywhere. Nonetheless, on this argument, a research design that aims to examine the life of law’s rule would open up most places in the world, if not everywhere. Why, then, a single case study rather than a multiple or comparative case design? And why Liberia as that single case?