If Schrödinger’s cat miaows in the suburbs,will anyone hear?

Abstract

(As Lewis Carroll says) it is when the smile is without a cat that man [sic] can effectively become cat as soon as he smiles.

(Deleuze and Parnet, 2002 [1977]: 73).

Introduction

By asking the question, ‘if Schrödinger’s cat miaows in the suburbs, will anyone hear?’, I aim to open up issues of non-humans, or the more-than-human, in planning theory and practice. Schrödinger prompts me to ask whether a cat in the suburbs can be both domestic and feral, or both alive and dead, at the same time. It references issues of uncertainty – or rather of indeterminacy – which I believe to be central to spatial planning and how indeterminacy might be recognised in planning law.

Gilles Deleuze has been referred to as ‘the philosopher of the unruly and feral’ (Davey, 2009: 234), a scholar who seeks to ‘undomesticate’ established discourses by opening them up to potentially disruptive energies which demand thinking otherwise. Deleuze is regarded as a process philosopher of immanence and indeterminacy whose thinking was stimulated by a wide range of fields, including quantum physics. With his co-author, Félix Guattari, Deleuze offers us ways to consider complex encounters between human and non-human bodies.

I am particularly interested in what might be termed Deleuze and Guattari’s ecological concepts (Herzogenrath, 2008), such as becoming-animal (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 [1980]), as tools to theoretically and practically investigate the ethical, political and legislative ways in which spatial planners intersect with non-humans. For Deleuze and Guattari, animals are ‘disruptive signs’ which can ‘potentially dislocate our commonsense understandings of the world’ (Young, 2008: 245).

While Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on becoming-animal and other forms of becoming may stimulate changes to planners’ attitudes towards non-humans, such changes remain independent of legal regulation. Ebbesson and Hay (2013: online) suggest that law is generally ‘among the slower drivers of change’, with relatively limited capacity to adapt swiftly. Legal certainty is valued in planning, defining what is expected, permitted and prohibited. Yet, this very characteristic may actually stymie the emergence of more flexible forms of practice able to work with contingency, uncertainty and indeterminacy (see Moroni, 2007a). Law is an anthropocentric social construct. Both Berry (2011) and Cullinan (2011) suggest that current forms of law and governance may be ‘not only very unhelpful, but positively obstructive, … an entirely new philosophical approach is needed’ (p. 43).

As I illustrate below, law impinges on the non-human animal world in the ways in which ‘it marks the earth’ (Halsey, 2006: 3). Yet, as Delaney (2015: 98) points out, it is not ‘the law’ per se, but its practice, which performs legal constitutivity. Law, as practised, not only constitutes space but also invests it with particular valences and possibilities (Blomley, 2003). Law as practised also constitutes animals. A cat miaowing is acceptable if it is a domestic (i.e. owned) cat in a private space (preferably indoors), but not if it is found in certain suburbs and/or is classified as stray, homeless or feral. Feral cats are the constructed, named, constitutive outside of cat legislation. Violence is integral to such construction (Blomley, 2003). However, the legal–spatial nexus in the context of the more-than-human, or of non-human animals, is, as yet, underexplored (Srinivasan, 2013), despite planning-related law having profound influences on the material bodies and lives of animals as well as humans.

In what follows, I offer a brief example of legal regulation pertaining to non-human animals as represented in the West Australian (WA) Cat Act 2011, local authority covenants and the Australian Federal government’s campaign to eradicate feral cats. I illustrate how particular legal imaginaries and representations construct fields of pain and death. I briefly introduce notions of the more-than-human and reference increasing recognition of the importance of the materiality of ‘things’ in more-than-human assemblages. I discern the influence of quantum physics on the thinking of scholars including Karen Barad and especially on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of becoming. I discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-animal with regard to the potentiality of becoming-feral of (planning) law as a process involving dynamic human–non-human assemblages.

Regulating cats: the cat without the smile?

Animal law has tended to be concerned with issues relating to welfare and rights of domestic pets (companion animals) and farm animals. Recently, however, non-human animals are being considered as legal subjects in broader issues of social life. State regulation generally aims to prevent or contain ‘anomic anarchy’ (Blomley, 2003: 121), in this case that of cat predation on other non-human species. Regulation is inevitably violent, as scholars from John Locke (1980 [1690]) to Jacques Derrida (1990) have identified. Blomley (2003) explains that law is supposed to regulate in a humane way. Yet it often appears to fall short, becoming ‘a field of pain and death’ (Cover, 1993: 203 cited in McGee, 2012: 8) as the wild or deviant, whose presence is deemed incompatible with that of others, is delegitimised and ‘weeded out’ (Bauman, 1991).

Recent estimates of feral cat numbers in Australia range from 5 to 23 million. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) (2014) claims that each night a feral cat will kill an average of five native animals (‘native’ is undefined), totalling 75 million across Australia. Other sources claim approximately 30 native animals per cat per night: 450 million in total or over 20 billion a year. Woinarski et al (2014) attribute the extinction of 20 mammal species in Australia to cats, while others claim the loss of up to 80 species in the State of Victoria alone (Ham, 2014). These figures have sparked a national ‘war against cats’. Cats are now regarded as evil and destructive of the ‘proper natural order’ (Franklin, 2014: 140) of Australia¹ – their presence demanding ‘a course of purification’ (Franklin, 2014: 140). Wholesale measures of control, exclusion and extermination are thus planned, from covenants relating to individual properties (Department of Parks and Wildlife (DPAW, 2013), residential estates and entire suburbs to the WA Cat Act and the Federal Environment Minister’s campaign to eradicate feral cats within a decade.

The City of Armadale (WA), for example, has amended its Town Planning Scheme No. 4 so that in Development Area No. 11, ‘no person shall keep any cat’ (City of Armadale, 2014). The WA Cat Act 2011 enacted strong cat management legislation to ensure that responsibility for management of animals is transferred directly to their owners. Regulations include compulsory sterilisation and microchipping for cats aged 6 months and over (i.e. pre-puberty) and compulsory registration with heavy fines of up to AUD$5000 for non-compliance. Cats may be seized from public or private property by pest control companies and taken to a ‘cat management facility’ where the owner might claim it (fine AUD$5000 plus removal and care costs) or the cat will be destroyed and disposed of in 3 days if unidentified, in 7 days if unclaimed or immediately if the facility operator believes the cat to be ‘feral, diseased or dangerous’ (WA, 2011: s3.34). The Federal Environment Minister has announced a 10-year cat eradication plan across Australia (Hunt, 2014). Eradication of feral cats is encouraged by the Department of the Environment (2014) through poison baiting, currently using Eradicat^® 1080.²

What Deleuze would call the planes of reference for such cat regulation include contested statistical data, simplistic classificatory dualisms between ‘native’ species (present in Australia prior to European colonisation) and non-native or ‘invasive’ species (such as cats) and between cats that are owned (registered, sterilised and confined) and unowned (not being under the direct care of humans, unconfined, stray, feral). Domestication and feralisation are effects of socio-material practices, which ‘arrange and produce objects, subjects, people, institutions, and ideas’ (Lien and Law, 2011: 75). Cats are legislated as property to be owned and controlled, subject to land use regulations. ‘Unowned’ cats are universalised as feral, living outside the normal bounds of domestication and any associated animal rights.³

Planning law is concerned with sense-making, for which it is reliant on logical and pragmatic usage of representation, such as categorisation or classification. Classification is essentialist in that ‘objects’ are classified according to certain attributes held to be essential to its identity. Halsey (2006) argues that such an act of ‘naming’ is inevitably violent in that it distinguishes between what is named, drawn to attention, or visible and what remains unspoken, unwritten and unnoticed.

Naming or classification of cats as owned, unowned, domestic, feral and so on is performative. It enacts cats in particular ways (see Lien and Law, 2011, regarding salmon). Such constructed simplifications of non-human life and ecosystem change render cats’ lives precarious, ‘an object of close attention of the designing-engineering-gardening modern powers’ (Bauman, 1991: 69). The body of a feral cat, as a system of signs at the nexus of the immanence of nature and the transcendence of law, becomes both transgression and undecidability, calling into question the categorical transcendence of law itself. Law striates the Deleuzean smooth space of the environment. Law’s task is to differentiate or draw distinctions: between what is ‘significant’ (good, valuable or ‘worth saving’) and ‘expendable’ (bad or undesirable) (Halsey, 2004). As such, it ‘brackets’ (Blomley, 2014), attempts to fix boundaries or draws lines in the sand between classifications and zones – native/invasive, domestic/feral, pet/pest, Feral Threat Abatement Zone and so on – glossing over the highly complex nature of biospherical systems, the mobility of entities (animals, toxins, etc.) across lines or borders and the shifting potential of sand. ‘Interplays between animal-human bodies, taxonomic configurations, and legal norms translate into dynamic interplay between states of stasis and states of flux’ (Braverman, 2013: 3).

As MacCormack (2012) writes, ‘the elimination of bodies for purely discursive or epistemic reasons … involve legal “contracts” for which the other party [the cat] has no agency or is acknowledged for its independent alterity’ (p. 62). We need to consider questions, such as ‘how can a being [humans] take another being [cats] into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and world?’ (Deleuze, 1988 [1970]: 126). Perhaps a way forward might be to reconceptualise law as not an essentialist tick-box of what a ‘thing’ (such as a cat) should be, but as negotiated stories recognising and incorporating alternative forms of thought. Conceptualisations of non-human agency are gradually entering planning scholarship from contemporary science and social theory. They are leading towards a materialist theoretical framework for thinking social organisation (and spatial planning) on an assemblage-based, culture-nature continuum of more-than-human, rather than on dualisms.

On post-humanism: the cat and the smile?

Post-humanist thinking challenges the humanist notion of anthropocentrism and the construction of bipolar categories of human/animal, culture/nature and so on. Scholars advocate more animal-centred approaches which focus on non-human animals as ‘embodied individuals’ whose lives are entangled with human and other non-human species and environments (Taylor, 2012) in new modes of human–non-human animal existence which go beyond those of traditional anthropocentric spatial orderings (e.g. Hinchliffe et al., 2005; Metzger, 2014a, 2014b). Attempts are being made to understand how humans and non-humans are relationally engaged in what Brown (2007) calls a ‘collaborative approach to living’ (p. 261) and Burke et al. (2004) term ‘mutual decision making’ and ‘co-creation of behaviour’: ‘a kind of mutual becoming’ (p. 174). Such attempts enact a breakdown of the anthropogenic machine which would normally classify (our cat) as non-human other. The cat becomes not ‘other’, but a multiplicity of incommensurable differences, too ‘complex to be simply and strictly oppositional, and always already too involved in human culture to be segregated’ (Chisholm, 2007: online). Our concerns, then, would shift from representational thinking to compositional thinking, reflecting Law et al.’s (2014) syncretism or Davy’s (2014) polyrationality.

It is in this vein that Deleuze and Guattari (1984 [1972]) write, ‘we make no distinction between man [sic] and nature’ (p. 5). Such a claim presents a challenge to planning law and its inherent enacting of distinctions. Is it possible, then, to conceptualise a form of spatial planning in which nature is no longer regarded as ‘wilderness’, mentally ‘out there’, to be used or effaced as we wish, but symbiotically ‘in-here’ (see Whatmore, 2002).⁴

Post-human thinking is not confined to animals, however. The more-than-human world insists on the importance of ‘things’ (including energies, artefacts, technologies, etc.) in human–non-human assemblages, understanding matter, or ‘things’, ‘less as passive objects of human actions and more as active parties in the making of social collectivities’ (Braun and Whatmore, 2010: xiii). For Karen Barad (2007), ‘matter is neither fixed and given nor the mere end result of different processes. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative’ (p. 137). Matter is agentive, not a fixed, or pre-given, essence or property of things. Matter may be agentive through encounters or couplings between disparate things (Chisholm, 2007). For example, lightning striking wooden telegraph poles in Australia generates bushfires capable of destroying almost all in their path. In this, ‘vitalist ontology of open-ended becoming’ (Lorimer, 2007: 914) – understanding processes, how things emerge and change and what they do – becomes crucial.

Materialism represents a new way of thinking for spatial planners – one which thinks material immanence and shared existence or worlding. Humans are not completely in charge of assigning identity, significance and value to non-humans. Neither is what we call human ‘knowledge’ as a relation to the world ‘special’ or ‘better’ than the different relations to the world which non-humans have. To date, humans have reigned supreme over ‘nature’ because we have the chemistry and physical technology to mine and explode, the guns and the poison bait to kill. But as global warming, bushfires, floods, earthquakes and pandemic events demonstrate, non-humans can perform significant and powerful agency.

Barad (2007) would describe such events as illustrative of the ‘extraordinary liveliness’ of the world as a scene of agency (p. 91). This is similar to Bennett’s (2010) conceptualisation of vibrant matter or thing-power, Connolly’s (2011) affective power of things and Stengers’ (2010 [1996], 2011a) cosmopolitics. Such a notion of ‘life’ reflects a process or performative ontology which regards ontology and epistemology not as distinct fields of study but as onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007). To engage in processes of knowing is to be part of what is ‘known’. There is no neutral position from which an arbiter can assign or assess rights and obligations (Stengers, 2011b). The ontology of the ‘object’ changes depending upon how it is measured (Barad, 2012). This point derives, as does much recent work on uncertainty and indeterminacy, from quantum physics.

Quantum physics

From about the 1920s, physicists increasingly recognised that the objects and events that they were trying to understand were far less predictable than they had anticipated. Moreover, experiments indicated that matter is unable to be separated, spatially or temporally, from what Hinton (2013: 176) terms its ‘cultural scaffolding’ – the processes (such as measurement) in which it is involved.

In the early 20th century, physicists thought that light is a wave. But some experiments suggested that light manifests particle-like characteristics. Waves and particles are distinct, possessing mutually exclusive characteristics. Which is true? Could light be both wave and particle? Furthermore, Bohr (1958) discovered that electrons can behave as particles in certain experimental circumstances and as waves in other experiments. It became clear that which behaviour they exhibit depends on which type of experimental apparatus is used: the ‘measuring process itself is intrinsic to the way matter manifests’ (Hinton, 2013: 178). In other words, it is agential. The nature of matter is indeterminate and dynamically contingent on its intra-action with the measurement process/apparatus – the ‘agencies of observation’ (Barad, 2007: 114).

The famous thought-experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat questions whether we can know the probabilities of obtaining certain results before an experiment is performed. But even if each possible result can be predicted with some degree of probability, none can be predicted with certainty. The assemblage of possible results in complex situations is inevitably indeterminate.

The Schrödinger’s Cat thought-experiment (Schrödinger, 1980 [1935]) locks a hypothetical cat into a sealed steel box together with a Geiger counter in which there is a radioactive atom, a hammer and a flask of hydrocyanic acid. The cat, the box, the Geiger counter, the radioactive atom, the hammer and flask of hydrocyanic acid are all pre-existing, known entities with a linear cause and effect. The key to the experiment is probability. We know the ‘measured’ states of the cat (alive), the substance and the acid at the beginning of the experiment (t = 0). Using Schrödinger’s equation, it is possible to calculate the probability that, in a given time period (t = m), the radioactive atom will decay and the Geiger counter tube will discharge and release the hammer to smash the flask of hydrocyanic acid, which poisons and kills the cat. Schrödinger gave the experiment a 50:50 probability that the atom would decay in 1 hour. The fate of the cat in 1 hour is, therefore, uncertain. It is entangled with the fate of the atom. If the atom decays, the cat dies. If the atom does not decay, the cat lives. Schrödinger’s equation actually predicts that after 1 hour, the entangled state of the system will be that of superposition – a nondecayed atom with a live cat and a decayed atom with a dead cat – with either being equally probable. The cat is both dead and alive.

Entities thus do not exist in fully determinate states. Schrödinger’s cat, for instance, would be entangled with the radioactive atom both epistemically and ontically. As Barad (2007) explains,

the cat and the atom do not have separately determinate states of existence, and, indeed, there is no determinately bounded and propertied entity that we normally identify with the word ‘cat’, independently of some measurement that resolves the indeterminacy and specifies the appropriate referents for the concepts of ‘cat’ and ‘life state’ (p.170).

Therefore, as Barad continues, the life state of the cat (alive or dead) cannot exist independently of it being measured or defined in some way. Quantum physics deconstructs the belief that ‘things’ are units with inherently determinate boundaries, properties and meanings.

So we can only hear Schrödinger’s cat in the suburb if (a) it is alive and (b) if we define (or measure) its miaow as that of a cat. But ‘measurements do not represent measurement-independent states of being’ (Barad, 2003: 813). If what we measure or define only describes the effects of the interaction between the ‘measuring instruments’ and the ‘things’ measured, then representing and/or modelling urban social and/or environmental systems accurately is impossible. Definitions and measurements can only be applied ‘provisionally’ or in an ‘idealised’ manner (Bohr, 1987: 1: 56–57). We are then left with the question of what is it that we have measured (Barad, 2008: 171). What is a ‘cat’?

It is through the agential intra-action or apparatus of cat and classificatory assemblage (including politicians, animal welfare agencies, local government rangers, pest control officers, reports, regulations and statutes, poison baits, etc.) that the feral cat comes into being and is consequently killed. This illustrates what Barad (1996, 2007) terms agential realism: ‘a way to understand both the temporality and spatiality of regulatory practices and their effectiveness (and lack thereof) in intra-actively producing particular bodies (human and nonhuman) that also have a physical presence’ (Barad, 2001: 89).

‘Human’ and ‘non-human’ thus emerge as entangled agencies which articulate a more-than-human world of differentiated becoming (Haynes, 2014). Agency is a process of enactment rather than a noun that something or someone possesses.

Becoming: the smile without the cat?

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980]: 257–258), becoming constitutes passage towards a new assemblage. It may refer to a process and a noun. As a noun, becoming implies the pathways along which an assemblage may be transformed while retaining some resemblance to its former self.⁵ Becomings undermine the stable frameworks within which we understand and act in our worlds and emphasise the immanence of creativity. Grosz (1994: 173) points out that becomings are never generic, but always become something – becoming-woman, becoming-animal and so on.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980]) explore the concept of becoming-animal: ‘we believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human’ (p. 237). For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal does not consist of playing animal or imitating an animal. Instead, it works through a specific material encounter in which humans accept the alterity of an animal (such as a cat) and introduce the animal’s manner of existence into the way they think and act (Lawlor, 2008). To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out a path of escape or line of flight, to cross a threshold so that forms and codes are challenged, destabilised and undone (deterritorialised) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 [1975]: 12). ‘It is when the smile is without a cat that man [sic] can effectively become cat as soon as he smiles’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002 [1977]: 73). Becoming is a process of creative flight from the strata of what was, to become something new – something that ‘feels oddly feral’ (Urpeth, 2004: 110). Captain Ahab in Moby Dick becomes whale, for instance.

Is a Deleuzean form of becoming-feral as radical displacement possible, however, without it assimilating anthropocentric, colonialist assumptions? I suggest that it can do so by refusing to contain the threat/emergence of wildness and the more-than-human within its own framing.⁶ By recognising that ‘what entraps also offers a line of flight’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014: 171) and refusing to bound rigidly between smooth and striated spaces, instead regarding space as both/and (Deleuze, 1983 [1962]), I think it may be possible for what Williams (2009) terms a ‘creative shift from the anthropocentric spatio-temporal world’ (p. 50) towards a more-than-human world in dynamic intra-action. This involves more than simply having regard of multiple perspectives. Rather, it creates a new plane for political, ethical – and I would add spatial planning – experimentation (Wallin, 2014).

Becoming-feral entails rupturing or breaking from domestication, or molar conditioning of a priori representation and binary thinking. Human versus non-human, law versus crime, domestic versus feral need to be seen for what they are – discrete points on a plane of reference for cat regulation – and replaced by an openness to the multiplicity of the possible which embraces indeterminacy (Deleuze, 1986 [1983], 1994 [1968]; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994 [1991]). The key question for spatial planning is how can planners act in a determinate manner, making decisions and so on, when the world they seek to plan is indeterminate? Deleuze and Guattari (1994 [1991]) advise that the ‘free creation of determined concepts needs a taste for the undetermined’ (p. 78). This involves recognising the ‘being-potential’ of a concept – a ‘what-might-happen-if?’ set of questions (see Hillier, 2011). If the world is messy and emergent, then the methods by which the world is researched and planned need also to be messy and emergent.

Feral law?

Spatial planning practices are characterised by relatively fixed rules and laws, maintained as ‘facts’, which, in Deleuzean terms, striate or stratify the space they address. As such, spatial planning exemplifies what Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980]) term state philosophy, based on representational thinking, law and hierarchy as a rational foundation for order. The linear logic of this arborescent model of thinking and acting is typical of legal practice – ‘that arboreal science of reactionary transcendence’ (De Sutter and McGee, 2012: 1) – with its ‘implication trees’ (Walker, 2007) of substantive rules and the deductive syllogisms of proving ‘facts’ (x or y, x and y, etc).

There is a need to think law otherwise – perform law not as a ‘tree’, but as a horizontally spreading rhizome (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 [1980]) in order to open up a lawfulness that can broaden the field of legality to both go ‘beyond human institutions’ (Colebrook, 2009: 12) and also to engage indeterminacy, being adaptive at the same time as maintaining legitimacy (Armitage, 2013). As such, Deleuze and Guattari offer us ways to envisage law as both striated and smooth space: law as a determinate, contained entity and law as ‘thoroughly illimitable and as responsive to what lies outside its position for the time being’ (Golder and Fitzpatrick, 2009: 2). As I illustrate below, several authors recognise that law is always open to the possibility of its being otherwise and are beginning to work with what is becoming known as ‘emergent law’.

What might planners do?

Recognise, with Deleuze and Guattari (1994 [1991]: 185), that ‘every territory encompasses or cuts across the territories of other species’. Territories are mental as well as physical/spatial. Territories are always-dynamic. As such, I reference Deleuze’s (in Deleuze and Parnet, 2002 [1977]) Neitzschean demand for a ‘dedeification’ of nature in order to ‘eliminate interpretations of nature as the site of divine purposiveness, static essences, and transcendent moral ideals’ (Hayden, 2008: 35). There is no fundamental, or ‘native’, state of nature that can be reclaimed.

Taking from Deleuze and Guattari the notions that it is the relations between elements that constitute things and that relations are themselves material entities which generate affect and perform agency (Barad, 2007), we can see the violence inherent in planning-related practices of regulating cat and other non-human animal populations.

Recognise how planning and planning law confront the future as if it were predictable but that the world does not behave in a linear, mechanistic fashion of ‘before and after’ which permits planning through extrapolation and prediction (see Hillier, 2015).

I have suggested elsewhere (Hillier, 2011) that conceptualisations of strategic spatial planning as ‘strategic navigation’ could address concerns of how to incorporate flexibility for practitioners to cope with emerging issues and objectives and also offer co-ordination for shorter term investor ‘certainty’ within a frame of legal jurisprudence. But how might the concept of the rhizome, rather than the tree, be fruitful (Bruncevic, 2014)? And what might ‘a new, mobile, material and acentric’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2013: 863), undomesticated or feral law involve?

Deleuze (1996, ‘G as in gauche’) advocates processes of jurisprudence in continental Europe. Jurisprudence is concerned not with issues of universal rights but with questions of ‘a situation, and a situation that is evolving’ (Smith, 2003: 315).⁷ Deleuze espouses law as jurisprudence because (theoretically) it is not a foundational body of fixed laws, but a more open, rhizomatic practice of case law which could allow the becoming of law. As Bruncevic (2014) points out, it would also acknowledge the creation of lines of flight from the legal territory, ‘forcing law to come face to face with its movement and non-totality’ (p. 91). ‘Good’ jurisprudence is, therefore, a process-oriented creative practice with a differential, rather than a relativistic, value system (Lefebvre, 2008; Mussawir, 2011).

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2012: 100–101) suggests that a Deleuzean-inspired form of law would have three characteristics:

Law would operate on a Deleuzean plane of immanence that nurtures the possibility of encounters between law and other bodies which alter its potential;

Law would embrace its spatiality;

Law would be post-human.

Advocates of ‘wild law’ or earth jurisprudence, such as Berry (2011), Burdon (2011, 2014), Cullinan (2011) and Murray (2013, 2014), seek to develop a post-human philosophy of law and regulation. Reflecting principles of interconnectedness, immanence, self-organisation and complex emergence (Murray, 2014), earth jurisprudence approaches regard the world as composed of dynamic, intra-acting assemblages of relationships. One of the tenets of earth jurisprudence is environmental protection. Advocates, such as Berry (2011), argue that nature has rights. However, if environmental protection involves, as it often does, the deliberate extermination of some non-human animals, there would appear a contradiction within earth jurisprudence thinking and practice: some animals apparently possess fewer ‘rights’ to live than others.

Murray’s (2013) emergent law builds on the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. Murray urges us to think on a continuum between striation and smoothness. What he terms the ‘vagabond thought’ of emergent law is a hybrid, or both/and, which would follow the flows in an intensive problem space (such as the extinction of mammal species), searching out the singularities, affects and events scattered in that problem space (e.g. actions of humans, dingoes, foxes on the land, reports, legislation and regulations, including their modes of definition and measurement) and looking for the significant intensive points in a problem by which connections can be made to trigger change (Murray, 2013: 51). As Murray (2013) points out, emergent law is not a fixed set of normative laws, but rather ‘continuous processes of know how to organise things in relation to the problematic of legality, organising processes and events through immanent processes and events’ (p. 148).

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987 [1980]) distinction between logos and nomos is helpful for the development of a more emergent form of law. The traditional legal model of law is law as principle of order or logos: of rationality and sovereign/State judgement – Deleuze and Guattari’s striated space. Nomos, in contrast, implies activity. It comprises ‘nonmetric, acentred, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without “counting” it’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 [1980]: 371). This is Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987 [1980]) smooth space – a space of ‘contact’ which can ‘be explored only by legwork’ (p. 371). We should not, therefore, sit in ivory office towers and pass judgement on the basis of statistical reports, but encounter and become enfolded with what is happening.

Like Murray (2013), Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos points out that logos and nomos are intra-active: ‘law is both logic and nomic, both prohibitor and enabler. The space of law is simultaneously striated and full of prescriptions; and smooth and open with possibilities’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014: 57). Yet, even law as logos will offer opportunities for lines of flight or ruptures which stimulate renegotiation and reorientation of legal space.

Moroni (2007b, 2010, 2012, 2014) further develops the idea of nomos into a nomocratic approach to planning regulation. In order to cope with the complexity of urban (and non-urban) systems, he argues the case for ‘abstract, general and end-independent rules to favour a sort of beneficial, spontaneous order – self-co-ordinating and polycentric – of individual actions’ (2007b: 156). Moroni’s ideas for nomocracy or ‘flexible planning’, via urban codes rather than plans, locate planning law at the centre of, but as a non-instrumental framework for, co-ordinating patterns of land use rather than details.

Mussawir (2010, 2011) suggests that interim control orders (ICOs) might offer legal flexibility, as an ICO can be ‘modified, personalised, tailored, customised’ (2011: 152) to suit circumstances. Albrechts and Balducci (2013) similarly attempt to imagine ‘a limited legal certainty’ (p. 14), tied, perhaps, to the time horizon of a statutory plan. Other scholars (e.g. Carmona and de Magalhães, 2009) advocate the benefits of a discretionary system for application of planning law as in Britain, where, as Booth (1996, 2003) indicates, the notion of flexibility in planning control has a distinguished history: ‘flexibility was important in a technical sense in that planning was clearly an uncertain process, and allowance had to be made to accommodate the unforeseen’ (Booth, 1996: 109).

In Britain, the basis for decisions lies in professional judgement rather than in micro-scale pre-determined standards and regulation. This is a case-by-case approach which favours precedent and procedural fairness over substantive regulation (Booth, 2003). British spatial plans contain policies (employing words such as ‘normally’) which may be non-binding and without legal force, but which are required to be taken into account in decision-making (Booth, 1996). Practitioners are afforded discretion to evaluate planning proposals on the basis of the spatial plan and other ‘material considerations’ as they think fit (see Booth, 2003: 102). Development is approved in accordance with specific circumstances as part of an indicative strategy rather than by the application of rules by rote. Emphasis is on what a proposal will do (i.e. performance) rather than what it is.

It may be argued that discretionary decisions are less likely to over-rationalise and simplify complex, multi-dimensional phenomena. They are also less likely to ‘distort processes and outcomes to address the standard rather than the issues’ involved (Carmona and De Magalhães, 2009: 521). Discretionary power stimulates innovation and initiative. It is a space of ‘constant reconstruction, rapid concept formation, applied acrobatics of thought and action … a space where the law is being erected at every moment as if for the first time’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014: 217). For many, this renders it a risky space, ‘emptied of pillared security’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014: 217), yet it may well offer opportunities for planning to keep up with rapidly changing political, social, economic and environmental demands which are being made of it.

Checks and balances are necessary in any discretionary system to ensure that decisions do not become arbitrary (Booth, 1996) and that vulnerable individuals and groups do not lose out. Booth (1996, 2007) discusses issues of accountability via transparency, decision justification, inquiries and appeals, judicial review and so on. Many, if not all, of these methods are anthropocentric, however, and require expansion to incorporate the non-human.

Johnson and Post (1997) call for a ‘decentralised, emergent law’. For Benson (2000, 2005), this could be a form of customary law, in which norms evolve spontaneously from the bottom up and are voluntarily accepted rather than being imposed. The advantage of such a system is that customary norms or rules are flexible, easily and rapidly adapted to new circumstances through negotiation and contractual innovation (Benson, 2000).

I am not a lawyer, so I cannot comment on the practical potential of the issues discussed above. I regard them as a range of possible responses to Portugali’s (2012) question of whether there can be a planning system which will be in tune with spatial areas as complex systems. I leave it to others, better positioned than I, to discuss the implications of these responses in detail.

Where does the above leave my cats? Alive or dead? I suspect that the answer is probably ‘dead’ if they have been heard miaowing. The vision and application of an emergent form of non-anthropocentric, post- or more-than-human law is difficult to formulate. Nevertheless, I think that the interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari, as developed by scholars such as Barad, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Murray, offer somewhere from which to start. A ‘feral’ form of law which emanates directly from the intra-agency of ‘bodies’ of all natures in an assemblage could then perhaps respect the symbiosis between the ‘heterogeneous interests’ (Stengers, 2011b) in response to Deleuze’s (1988 [1970]: 126) question, posed earlier, of respectfully taking other beings into our worlds. Stengers (2011b) suggests that for such questions to be answerable, ‘those you address must be empowered to evaluate the relevance of your interest, to agree or refuse to answer, and even to spit [miaow, hiss] in your human, too human, face’ (p. 63).

Conclusion: on the claws of necessity

I have attempted to discuss two main ideas in this essay. First, as Whatmore (2013: 33) reminds us, it is insufficient to simply include non-humans in planning-related assemblages without thinking through and actualising new modes of relations – of intra-actions – between humans and non-humans or the more-than-human: in other words, bringing the non-human ‘out there’ ‘in-here’. Since questions of non-human animals (feral cats) are my opening to a much larger set of questions about uncertainty and indeterminacy (Schrödinger’s cat), my second idea is to argue that complex assemblages require theories and practices that are not deterministic. As such, planning practices need to become more adaptive. Adaptive capacity is concerned with the tensions between the stabilisation-inducing roles of institutionalisation and the application of law and legal certainty and the capacity to learn from, experiment and innovate in dynamic circumstances (Duit and Galaz, 2008). It reflects the flexibility to experiment and adopt innovative ideas, often associated with discretionary capacity and jurisprudence. There is a need to work through relations between certainty and flexibility to ‘integrat[e] uncertainties into the planning process’ (Jabareen, 2013: 224) and to create regulatory systems with capacity for adaptation.

Both ideas, however, only suggest possibilities. As Deleuze (1994 [1968]) would recognise, they ‘lack the claws of absolute necessity’ (p. 139). The claws, perhaps of a feral cat, which can ‘awaken thought from its natural stupor’ (Deleuze, 1994 [1968]: 139). Deleuze (1995 [1990]) argues that thought is awakened through the contingency of an encounter: with the unexpected, with ideas and concepts, with materialities, such as cats, to ‘free life from what imprisons it’ (p. 143) and to construct new ways of understanding and acting. Barad (2007) suggests that ‘intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us and it flourish’ (p. 396). It involves thinking and making decisions from within the assemblage, rather than from some external god-view.

I have argued the importance of recognising the dynamic vitalism of intra-active agencies of different materialities. Materialities (cats, cities, etc.) should not be treated as ‘closed systems simply subjected to external forces and determinations’ (Ansell-Pearson, 1999: 146), but as open systems in continual flux. The task of planning is to attend to the multiplicity of practices in order to better understand what the assemblages of a cat, a city and so on, are and do. Assemblages are emergent, complex and historically contingent (Lien and Law, 2011), relationally constituted by and constituting non-predictable, intra-active practices. The assemblage of Schrödinger’s cat is defined by intra-activities with potential for sudden shifts which destabilise the assemblage and force violent transformation. Similarly, the ‘feral cat’ assemblage is constituted by the contingent practices of cat (and rabbit) regulation and eradication. The task, then, is not to ‘rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002 [1977]: vii, emphasis in original).

Planning practice is inevitably experimental (Hillier, 2007) since we cannot forecast the future. ‘We do not know in advance which way a line is going to turn’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002 [1977]: 134). Furthermore, the Schrödinger’s cat paradox tells us that an outcome does not exist until a measurement is made and, moreover, that the form of measurement materially affects the outcome. If the material environment, therefore, is a realm of ‘often incalculable, interconnected agencies’ (Alaimo, 2010: 72), then we as planners somehow need to make regulatory decisions in a connected, dynamic and emergent lawscape. If we are to both fix legal certainties and work with indeterminacy (Albrechts and Balducci, 2013), then we may need to explore the potentialities of emergent law.

Traditional arborescent legal logic permits us only to see ‘the world it itself paints’ (Bruncevic, 2014: 368). However, there are other ways of ‘doing planning law’ as Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Murray and others discuss. Planners need to be involved in what Bruncevic (2014) terms ‘nomadic legal methods’ (p. 370) and what Lefebvre (2008) refers to as attentive judgements. An attentive judgement is a creative judgement, initiating inventive movement of the law and lawscape. ‘With every new judgement the law grows and expands, and over time it locally constructs a plane of immanence with ever more parts able to be actualised in ever more judgements’ (Lefebvre, 2008: 254).

I conclude with Karen Barad’s (2011) hope for a practice of science (such as planning) which

focuses on the possibilities of making a better world, a livable world, a world based on values of co-flourishing and mutuality, not fighting and diminishing one another, not closing one another down, but helping to open up our ideas and ourselves to each other and to new possibilities, which with any luck will have the potential to help us see our way through to a world that is more livable, not for some, but for the entangled wellbeing of all. (p. 450)

Perhaps hearing the miaow of Schrödinger’s cat in the suburb may be a start.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Ben Davy and Jonathan Metzger for comments on a previous draft of this essay.

Notes

Author biography

Jean Hillier is Emeritus Professor of Sustainability and Urban Planning at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include poststructural planning theory and methodology for strategic practice in conditions of uncertainty, planning with non-human animals, and problematisation of cultural heritage practices in spatial planning. Recent books include Deleuze and Guattari for Planners (InPlanning e-book, 2013); Complexity and the Planning of the Built Environment (2012) edited with Gert de Roo and Joris Van Wezemael, the Ashgate Research Companion to Planning Theory: Conceptual Challenges for Spatial Planning (2010) edited with Patsy Healey, Critical Essays in Planning Theory (2008) three volumes, edited with Patsy Healey.

References

Alaimo

(2010) Material engagements: Science studies and the environmental humanities. Ecozon@ 1(1): 69–73.

Albrechts

Balducci

(2013) Strategic planning and the quest for certainty. Paper presented at joint AESOP/ACSP Congress, Dublin, 15–19 July.

Ansell-Pearson

(1999) Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetitions of Deleuze. London: Routledge.

Armitage

(2013) Resilience and administrative law. Ecology and Society 18(2): 11. Available at: https://dx-doi-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/10.5751/ES-05611-180211

Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) (2014) Feral cat research. Available at: http://www.australianwildlife.org/field-programs/feral-cat-research.aspx (accessed 20 October 2014).

Barad

(1996) Meeting the universe halfway: Realism and social constructivism without contradiction. In: Hankinson Nelson

Nelson

(eds.) Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science. New York: Kluwer Academic, 161–194.

Barad

(2001) Re(con)figuring space, time and matter. In: DeKoven

(ed.) Feminist Locations. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 75–109.

Barad

(2003) Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28(3): 801–831.

Barad

(2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

10.

Barad

(2008) Living in a posthumanist material world: Lessons from Schrödinger’s cat. In: Smelik

Lykke

(eds.) Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience and Technology. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 165–176.

11.

Barad

(2011) Erasers and erasures: Pinch’s unfortunate ‘uncertainty principle’. Social Studies of Science 41(3): 443–454.

12.

Barad

(2012) Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers. In: Dolphijn

Van der Tuin

(eds.) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open University Press, 48–70. Available at: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/new-materialism-interviews-cartographies.pdf?c=ohp;idno=11515701.0001.001 (accessed 24 November 2014).

13.

Bauman

(1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

14.

Bennett

(2010) Vibrant Matter: A political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

15.

Benson

(2000) Jurisdictional choice in international trade: Implications for Lex Cybernetoria. Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines 10: 3–31.

16.

Benson

(2005) The spontaneous evolution of cyber law: Norms, property rights, contracting, dispute resolution and enforcement without the state. Journal of Law, Economics and Policy 1(2): 269–348.

17.

Berry

(2011) Rights of earth: We need a new legal framework which recognises the rights of all living beings. In: Burdon

(ed.) Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence. Kent Town, SA, Australia: Wakefield Press, 227–229.

18.

Blomley

(2003) Law, property, and the geography of violence: The frontier, the survey, and the grid. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(1): 121–141.

19.

Blomley

(2014) Disentangling law. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 10: 133–148.

20.

Bohr

(1958) Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York: Wiley.

21.

Bohr

(1987) The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, vol. 3. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.

22.

Booth

(1996) Controlling Development: Certainty and Discretion in Europe, the USA and Hong Kong. London: Routledge.

23.

Booth

(2003) Planning by Consent. London: Routledge.

24.

Booth

(2007) The control of discretion: Planning and the common law tradition. Planning Theory 6(2): 127–145.

25.

Braun

Whatmore

(2010) The stuff of politics: An introduction. In: Braun

Whatmore

(eds.) Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, ix-xi.

26.

Braverman

(2013) Animal mobilegalities: The regulation of animal movement in the American city. Humanimalia 5(1). Available at: https://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue09/braverman.html (accessed 7 January 2015).

27.

Brown

(2007) Becoming-animal in the flesh: Expanding the ethical reach of Deleuze and Guattari’s tenth plateau. PhaenEx 2(2): 260–278.

28.

Bruncevic

(2014) Fixing the shadows – Access to art and the legal concept of the cultural commons. Thesis for Doctor of Laws, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg. Available at: https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/35600 (accessed 9 February 2015).

29.

Burdon

(ed.) (2011) Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence. Kent Town, SA, Australia: Wakefield Press.

30.

Burdon

(2014) Earth Jurisprudence. Abingdon: Routledge.

31.

Burke

Bryld

Lykke

(2004) Animal performances. Feminist Theory 5(2): 167–183.

32.

Carmona

De Magalhães

(2009) Local environmental quality: Establishing acceptable standards in England. Town Planning Review 10(4–5): 517–548.

33.

Chisholm

(2007) Rhizome, ecology, geophilosophy (a map to this issue). Rhizomes 15. Available at: http://rhizomes.net/issue15/chisholm.html (accessed 6 January 2015).

34.

City of Armadale (2014) Services and facilities. Available at: http://www.armadale.wa.gov.au/pet-ownership (accessed 6 March 2015).

35.

Colebrook

(2009) Legal theory after Deleuze. In: Braidotti

Colebrook

Hanafin

(eds.) Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 6–23.

36.

Connolly

(2011) A World of Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

37.

Cullinan

(2011) Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice. 2nd ed. Totnes: Green Books.

38.

Davey

(2009) Gilles Deleuze. In: Davies

Higgins

Hopkins

al.

(eds.) A Companion to Aesthetics. London: John Wiley & Sons, 234–238.

39.

Davy

(2014) Polyrational property: Rules for the many uses of land. International Journal of the Commons 8(2): 472–492. Available at: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/viewFile/455/430

40.

De Sutter

McGee

(2012) Introduction. In: De Sutter

McGee

(eds.) Deleuze and Law. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1–14.

41.

Delaney

(2015) Legal geography I: Constitutivities, complexities, and contingencies. Progress in Human Geography 39(1): 96–102.

42.

Deleuze

(1983 [1962]) Nietzsche and Philosophy (trans. Tomlinson

). London: Athlone.

43.

Deleuze

(1986 [1983]) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (trans. Tomlinson

). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

44.

Deleuze

(1988 [1970]) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (trans. Hurley

). San Francisco, CA: City Light Books.

45.

Deleuze

(1994 [1968]) Difference and Repetition (trans. Patton

). New York: Columbia University Press.

46.

Deleuze

(1995 [1990]) Negotiations 1972–1990 (trans. Joughin

). New York: Columbia University Press.

47.

Deleuze

(1996) L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (avec Claire Parnet) Dir. Boutang P-A (trans. Hurth

). Available at: http://www.after1968.org/app/webroot/uploads/ABCDelAnimal.pdf

48.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1984 [1972]) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (trans Hurley

Seem

Lane

), London: Athlone Press.

49.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1986 [1975]) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (trans. Polan

). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

50.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1987 [1980]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Massumi

). London: Athlone Press.

51.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1994 [1991]) What is Philosophy? (trans. Tomlinson

Burchill

). London: Verso.

52.

Deleuze

Parnet

(2002 [1977]) Dialogues II (trans. Tomlinson

Habberjam

). New York: Continuum.

53.

Department of Parks and Wildlife (DPAW) (2013) Nature Conservation Covenant Program FAQs. Available at: http://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/ (accessed 10 October 2014).

54.

Department of the Environment (2014) Feral cats. Available at: http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive-species/feral-animals-australia/feral-cats (accessed 16 September 2014).

55.

Derrida

(1990) Force of law: the ‘mystical foundation of authority’ (trans. Quaintance

), Cardozo Law Review 11: 919–1045.

56.

Doherty

(2015) Feral feast: Cats kill hundreds of Australian animals. The Conversation, 3 February. Available at: http://www.theconversation.com/feral-feast-cats-kill-hundreds-of-australian-animals-35555 (accessed 4 February 2105).

57.

Duit

Galaz

(2008) Governance and complexity – emerging issues for governance theory. Governance: An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions 21(3): 311–335.

58.

Ebbesson

Hey

(2013) Introduction: Where in law is social-ecological resilience? Ecology and Society 18(3): 25. Available at: https://dx-doi-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/10.5751/ES-05750-180325

59.

Franklin

(2014) The adored and the abhorrent: Nationalism and feral cats in England and Australia. In: Marvin

McHugh

(eds.) Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies. London: Routledge, 139–153.

60.

Golder

Fitzpatrick

(2009) Foucault’s Law. Abingdon: Routledge.

61.

Grosz

(1994) Volatile Bodies. Sydney, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin.

62.

Halsey

(2004) Environmental visions: Deleuze and the modalities of nature. Ethics and the Environment 9(2): 33–64.

63.

Halsey

(2006) Deleuze and Environmental Damage. Aldershot: Ashgate.

64.

Ham

(2014) Gone feral: The cats devouring our wildlife. The Age, 11 September. Available at: http://www.theage.com.au/national/gone-feral-the-cats-devouring-our-wildlife-20140911-10fbs1.html (accessed 14 October 2014).

65.

Hayden

(2008) Gilles Deleuze and naturalism: A convergence with ecological theory and politics. In: Herzogenrath

(ed.) An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze/Guattari. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 23–45.

66.

Haynes

(2014) Creative becoming and the patiency of matter. Angelaki 19(1): 129–150.

67.

Herzogenrath

(2008) Introduction. In: Herzogenrath

(ed.) An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze/Guattari. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 1–22.

68.

Hillier

(2007) Stretching Beyond the Horizon: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance. Aldershot: Ashgate.

69.

Hillier

(2011) Strategic navigation across multiple planes: Towards a Deleuzean-inspired methodology for strategic spatial planning. Town Planning Review 82(5): 503–527.

70.

Hillier

(2015) Performances and performativities of resilience. In: Beunen

Van Assche

Duineveld

(eds.) Evolutionary Governance Theory: Theory and Applications. Zurich: Springer, pp. 167–184.

71.

Hinchliffe

Kearnes

Degen

. (2005) Urban wild things: A cosmopolitan experiment. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 23: 643–658.

72.

Hinton

(2013) The quantum dance and the world’s ‘extraordinary liveliness’: Refiguring corporeal ethics in Karen Barad’s agential realism. Somatechnics 3(1): 169–189.

73.

Hunt

(2014) Threatened Species protection. Media Release, 2 July 2014. Available at: www.greghunt.com.au/Media/MediaReleases/tabid/86/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/2881/Threatened-Species-Protection.aspx (accessed 19 October 2014).

74.

Jabareen

(2013) Planning the resilient city: Concepts and strategies for coping with climate change and environmental risk. Cities 31: 220–229.

75.

Johnson

Post

(1997) And how shall the Net be governed? A meditation on the relative virtues of decentralized, emergent law. In: Kahin

Keller

(eds.) Coordinating the Internet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 62–91.

76.

Law

Afdal

Asdal

. (2014) Modes of syncretism: Notes on noncoherence. Common Knowledge 20(1): 172–192.

77.

Lawlor

(2008) Following the rats: Becoming-animal in Deleuze and Guattari. SubStance 37(3): 169–187.

78.

Lefebvre

(2008) The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

79.

Lien

Law

(2011) Emergent aliens: On salmon, nature and enchantment. Ethnos 76(1): 65–87.

80.

Locke

(1980 [1690]) Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc.

81.

Lorimer

(2007) Nonhuman charisma. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 25: 911–932.

82.

MacCormack

(2012) Posthuman Ethics. Farnham: Ashgate.

83.

McGee

(2012) The fragile force of law: Mediation, stratification, and law’s material life. Law, Culture and the Humanities. Epub ahead of print 12 June. DOI: 10.1177/1743872112447144.

84.

Metzger

(2014a) Commentary: Spatial planning and/as caring for more-than human place. Environment and Planning A 46(5): 1001–1011.

85.

Metzger

(2014b) The moose are protesting: The more-than human politics of transport infrastructure development. In: Metzger

Allmendinger

Oosterlynck

(eds.) Planning Against the Political. New York: Routledge, 191–213.

86.

Moroni

(2007a) Introduction: Land-use, planning and the law. Planning Theory 6(2): 107–111.

87.

Moroni

(2007b) Planning, liberty and the rule of law. Planning Theory 6(2): 146–163.

88.

Moroni

(2010) Rethinking the theory and practice of land-use regulation. Planning Theory 9(2): 137–155.

89.

Moroni

(2012) Why nomocracy? Structural ignorance, radical pluralism and the role of relational rules. Progress in Planning 77(2): 46–59.

90.

Moroni

(2014) Complexity and the inherent limits of explanation and prediction: Urban codes for self-organising cities. Planning Theory. Epub ahead of print 12 February. DOI: 10.1177/1473095214521104.

91.

Murray

(2013) Deleuze & Guattari: Emergent Law. Abingdon: Routledge.

92.

Murray

(2014) Earth jurisprudence, wild law, emergent law: The emerging field of ecology and law – Part 1. Liverpool Law Review. Epub ahead of print 18 May. DOI: 10.1007/s10991-014-9148-1.

93.

Mussawir

(2010) Jurisdiction of control – Judgment and procedural forms in Thomas v Mowbray. Griffith Law Review 19: 307–329.

94.

Mussawir

(2011) Jurisdiction in Deleuze: The Expression and Representation of Law. Abingdon: Routledge.

95.

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

(2012) Law, space, bodies: The emergence of spatial justice. In: De Sutter

McGee

(eds.) Deleuze and Law. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 90–110.

96.

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

(2013) Actors or spectators? Vulnerability and critical environmental law. Oñati Socio-Legal Series 3(5): 854–876. Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2247835 (accessed 24 November 2014).

97.

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

(2014) Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere. London: Routledge.

98.

Portugali

(2012) Complexity theories of cities: First, second or third culture of planning. In: De Roo

Hillier

Van Wezemael

(eds.) Complexity and Planning. Farnham: Ashgate, 117–140.

99.

Schrödinger

(1980 [1935]). The present situation in quantum mechanics (trans. JD Trimmer). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124: 323–338.

100.

Smith

(2003) Deleuze and the liberal tradition: Normativity, freedom and judgement. Economy and Society 32(2): 299–324.

101.

Srinivasan

(2013) The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: Dog control and care in the UK and India. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38: 106–119.

102.

Stengers

(2010 [1996]) Cosmopolitics I (trans. Bononno

). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

103.

Stengers

(2011a) Cosmopolitics II (trans. Bononno

). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

104.

Stengers

(2011b) Comparison as a matter of concern. Common Knowledge 17(1): 48–63.

105.

Taylor

(2012) Animals, mess, method: Posthumanism, sociology and animal studies. In: Birke

Hockenhull

(eds.) Crossing Boundaries: Investigating Human-Animal Relationships. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 37–50.

106.

Urpeth

(2004) Animal becomings. In: Atterton

Calarco

(eds.) Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. London: Continuum, 101–110.

107.

US Supreme Court (1926) Village of Euclid, Ohio v Ambler Realty Co. 272US365. Available at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/365/case.html (accessed 6 March 2015).

108.

Walker

(2007) Discovering the logic of legal reasoning. Hofstra Law Review 35(4): 2. Available at: http://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/hlr/vol35/iss4/2 (accessed 9 February 2015).

109.

Wallin

(2014) Dark pedagogy. In: MacCormack

(ed.) The Animal Catalyst. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 145–162.

110.

Western Australia (WA) (2011) Cat Act 2011. Available at: http://www.slp.wa.gov.au (accessed 14 October 2014).

111.

Whatmore

(2002) Hybrid Geographies. London: Sage.

112.

Whatmore

(2013) Earthly powers and affective environments: An ontological politics of flood risk. Theory, Culture and Society 30(7–8): 33–50.

113.

Williams

(2009) Haraway contra Deleuze and Guattari: The question of the animals, communication. Politics and Culture 42(1): 42–54.

114.

Woinarski

Burbidge

Harrison

(2014) The Action Plan for Australian Mammals 2012. Melbourne, VIC, Australia: CSIRO Publishing.

115.

World League for Protection of Animals (WLPA) (2010) 1080 Poison. Available at: www.wlpa.org/1080_poison.htm (accessed 21 October 2014).

116.

Young

(2008) Deleuze and Guattari: The animal question. In: Herzogenrath

(ed.) An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze/Guattari. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 245–265.