The houses we live in
On canonical texts
I am not a Hannah Arendt scholar, so please, do not @ me. But, as the theme of this Substack suggests, I am interested in the nature of work (international legal work mostly, but also more general classes of work that international lawyering exemplifies, like drafting, research, or teaching). And as well as saying much about totalitarianism and the banality of evil, Arendt also said some things about work. She distinguished it from labour by associating work with the artisanal life of the creative craftsperson. Despite the fact that it is the craftsperson’s subjectivity that gets them to assemble and complete a product in the first place, nonetheless that product takes on an object-ive quality of its own once finished.
In this understanding of the separation of subject and object, Arendt follows Marx’s idea of reification, particularly as we think about the reification of the consumer object as possessing a value far exceeding its use value. Although I have some reservations about the truly separate nature of the crafter and their product, Arendt’s idea of the power of the object got me thinking about the power of the canonical legal text as a house we live in.
The phrasing is not mine, but phenomenologist Dermot Moran’s. In his excellent Introduction to Phenomenology, Moran discusses Arendt’s idea of the object of work. In The Human Condition, Arendt recalled the significance of the objects humans make – whether these are clothes or scholarly texts. She says:
“Viewed as part of the world, the products of work… guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible.”
Objects comprise the human world; they are, to quote Moran, ‘the houses we live in, the roads we walk on’ (Moran, p. 311). This nifty metaphor does a lot of work itself, but I find it particularly eye-opening for appreciating the role canonical texts have for lawyers, including international lawyers and academics. Who, after all, has not found themselves settling down in the house of Brownlie’s Principles, or Koskenniemi’s From Apology to Utopia (FATU), or Anghie’s Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law? These ‘objects’ create their own floorplans, install their own furnishings. Who, for example, has not felt the cramped yet methodical descent down the spiral staircase of FATU? Or Anghie’s time-lapse of a single library: from the Plateresque Salamanca school to the wood panelling of Lorimer’s Edinburgh townhouse to the cold Geneva archives of the UN’s ‘organisation man’? Such texts create worlds for us to inhabit, we walk about them, noticing this and that, before leaving with a sense of how parts and whole fit together.
Other texts have a way of making you watch the edifice as it appears around you, or having you see the changing landscape on a walk through law. Duncan Kennedy’s phenomenology of adjudication is like watching a movie of your inner mind as it engages a legal problem. He makes us experience how it is to judge. Or what about feminist and queer theory, so often wrenched from the day-to-day of invisible yet frighteningly visible lives? Here’s how my queer shoes feel, says Eve Sedgwick, can you feel it too? This, to me, can be the power of the canonical text, the worlds we cannot live without.
But there is a flipside. A house can become too familiar. Over time we fail to notice what once looked fresh and filled with possibility. It is just there, and we navigate its predictable pathways, sometimes bumping into a table-corner or stubbing our toe on the bedframe, forgetting that the house does not bend to accommodate us. The road has the same quality, whether more or less travelled. If we cannot live without such worlds, it remains tricky to live within them.
This is when a house begins to feel more like a ‘prison house’ and in this respect, canonical legal texts can also begin to feel claustrophobic. One grows up within a critical tradition and finds the same key figures peering over one’s shoulder. We hope to pay respect to intellectual authority, or homage to our academic mentors, but find that the floorplan they devised, the furnishings they selected, are all we know. Another blueprint seems unnecessary, even frightening. Why fix what isn’t broken? And so we revert to the architects of the past: as long as we follow their maps, surely we can’t go too far wrong? With this comfortable and comforting solution, the house, the road, the map, takes on a quality far exceeding that of its maker. Reification has set in, and we might have to amputate.
The question here becomes how to visit a house without overstaying one’s welcome? How to use a map to its fullest by doing it the honour of deviating from it? How to sit with (in) a canonical legal text – a Crawford, an Anghie, a Sedgwick – without making them the limit and the lodestar of international legal work?
It increasingly strikes me that possibly the only way to keep the canon alive (if that’s what we want) is to treat it with irreverence and playfulness - which is not the same as lack of care. I’m thinking about how Shakespeare’s texts feel so vital even now in large part because of how fast and loose theatre practitioners and filmmakers have played with the material. How, in other words, do we make these works our own?