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Waste openness, memory and forgetting
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Paterson, John and Webb, Julian (2007) Waste openness, memory and forgetting. In: Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, (ed.) Absent environments : theorising environmental law and the city. Law, science and society . London: UCL, pp. 187-213. ISBN 9781844721542
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Abstract
The past is not present. The use of the present tense ('is') when referring to the past is a construction that attests to the constructed nature of the past itself. The past cannot 'be' in the present without being present. If the past is remembered, relived or re-enacted, it is present. If the past is forgotten, it was past - it no longer is. The past can only be of a system and never collective. If it is collective, it is a multiple present construction, or a construction of the present, and never of the past. The past cannot be constructed as past - only as present. And that construction would, once again, be a construction of a system, which couples and co-evolves with other systemic constructions. The problem with the past, however, is not that it is a construction - there is nothing unique to this. The problem is that the past of a system was only of the particular system and no system has access to it, not even the system whose past it was. The fact that the past is not and can never be means that the system cannot access it. The system expels its past to its systemic environment and refuses to itself any accessibility to it. The expelled past may become part of other systems, not as their past but as their present. As far as the system is concerned, its past is invisible. Except for the past that is, namely the remembered past ( which is already present). This remains part of the system and forms the memory of the system, which, in its turn, facilitates systemic cognition.
The part of the past that is ( memory), is retained in the system in the form of self- and hetero-reference. The part of the past that was ( forgotten), is thrown back into space, and stands little chance of being reselected by the system, because it has been expelled from the system as unnecessary, inoperative, burdensome, obsolete: in short, waste. In this context, waste goes beyond the nonselected and includes a reference to future avoidance. Waste becomes risk. Waste passes in the atemporality of the systemic environment because this is a normal operation of the system. To discard is part of the system's becoming. Not all of the already selected and used is waste - some is retained in the form of memory but what is deemed to be waste is already out there, a cleared cache from the system's capacity.
Waste appears in two forms of interest here: the first is urban waste, which is analysed autopoietically from the legal point of view. Second, the legal waste, or else, the non-selected part of a legal decision, which has been discarded to the systemic environment as obsolete. In both cases, the systems attempt to forget the discarded by consigning it to the environment, thereby alienating it temporally and spatially. While this is a necessary operation of the system's being, I suggest that both systems are too keen on discarding the 'unusable' with a consequent loss of valuable cognitive opportunities. In this chapter, the absent environment appears in yet another guise. Its absence claims an operative position in the definition of the system through the means of cognition, memory, and the concept of becoming. This discussion, however, presupposes an exposition of the autopoietic concept of cognitive openness and systemic evolution, which has been hinted at on several occasions so far and here is the appropriate place to analyse it.
Item Type: | Book Item | ||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law | ||||
Series Name: | Law, science and society | ||||
Publisher: | UCL | ||||
Place of Publication: | London | ||||
ISBN: | 9781844721542 | ||||
Book Title: | Absent environments : theorising environmental law and the city | ||||
Editor: | Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas | ||||
Official Date: | 2007 | ||||
Dates: |
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Number of Pages: | 259 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 187-213 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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