ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the usefulness of Bakhtin's assemblage-like conceptual architecture for studies of law and governance 'in action'. Bakhtin's work was innovative in breaking with the structuralist, Saussurian interest in documenting the static structural relations that constitute not only the meaning of specific words but also the parameters of speech. Bakhtin's chronotopes are analytically distinct; but they do not amount to classificatory labels, and before it is important to discuss why it is that chronotopic analysis does not amount to a classification exercise. The chapter therefore explicate Bakhtin's notion of 'hybridity', which has thus far received no attention from sociolegal scholars despite its obvious affinity with legal pluralism. Thus, the argument of the chapter is not that Bakhtin gives people the one true theory that tells people how meaning is constituted and how time and space coexist and interact in legal mechanisms.
