Entangled Rights and Reproductive Temporality: Legal form, continuous improvement of living conditions, and social reproduction

Abstract

This chapter reads law and time scholarship through social reproduction theory in arguing that the right to the continuous improvement of living conditions (CILC) could work as an entangled legal form that reproduces temporality. Such rights-work thinks about the legal reproduction of time as a necessary dimension of this right, in order to flesh out the temporal infrastructure which is socially necessary to make a right to CILC thrive. The right holds out a fruitful lifeline that may provide a sheltered path away from the violence and could be thickened into a sturdier care infrastructure of soothing time, but could also become an overwhelming and frustrating tangle. Entangled rights are porous legal forms which reproduce time by selecting in the people and things that make law sustainable and restorative, even as they may also become exhausting and depleting. The right to the continuous improvement of living conditions could be such an entangled right through the legal reproduction of normative timeliness, material time and felt temporality.