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In recent years, many Queer and / or Indigenous, Black, and other racialized artists, writers, and scholars have exposed the relationship between colonialism, climate change, and environmental issues around the world. These discourses point to the need for highlighting and resisting the colonial undertones and structures embedded in climate change policy or future environmental planning. Some artists have even stepped outside of conventional ways of thinking through climate change and colonialism, bringing together seemingly disparate themes in their practices and work. Dr Léuli Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan / Persian curator, artist and scholar whose research and work explores artistic themes of sexuality, queer kinships, relationality, ancestral knowledge(s), and gender identities from a decolonial and Indigenous lens. [1]  In their chapter, ‘Rimming Islands: Fa’afafine-Fa’atane Pleasure and Decoloniality’, from the 2022 book Sex Ecologies , Eshrāghi speaks of a Sāmoan Ancestor, referring to them by their pronoun i’a, to offer a gentle yet provocative way of exploring ancestry in relation to sexuality and queerness:   To me, this Ancestor holds a tender, but firm gaze, daring us to remember our ways from before the fall of colonization and domination. Rather than embodying shame, would i’a giggle as we gossip about the meagre offering on Grindr or Tinder in the village? Would i’a regale younger queers with hxstories of sex in the forest with cousins, with neighbours from a far-off village who have come for ceremony and exchange?   While Eshrāghi’s work has been considered within the context of Indigenous, queer scholarship and artistic practice, very little has been written about Eshrāghi’s thoughtful consideration of land, water, and other elements of nature as it relates to these themes. What is the significance of the forest that hold those hxstories of sex?[2] Why would Eshrāghi evoke an image of full, lush green trees that cover the bodies and experience pleasure with each other? Why does nature, or the environment more broadly, matter in their work? The answers to these questions can be found in Eshrāghi’s many performance video works, specifically Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk (2015), SOGI MAI (2016), and re(cul)naissance  (2021). Through an analysis of these works, I argue that Eshrāghi’s artistic practice circumvents colonial and gendered relationships with the environment and with their human kin. My framework of analysis for these works comes primarily from Eshrāghi’s own notion of ‘rimming islands’ and ‘rimming time’. C entral to Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming is a projection of Queer and Indigenous relationships. In this article, I will draw out the significance of water and time using this conceptual practice of rimming to argue that Eshrāghi’s work disrupts colonial and gendered relationships with various environments.   Rimming is a sexual act performed between lovers when one uses their tongue to pleasure another’s anus. Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming follows the work of many Queer scholars, artists, and writers who consider anal sex, the buttocks, or ‘ass-play’ as a site of conceptual engagement to make (non)sense of Queer sexuality, intimacies, representation, or community experiences. [3]   Throughout, I will demonstrate the significance of Queer and/or Indigenous perspectives that have the potential to disrupt colonial discourses around the climate and the environment, especially important during our current climate crisis. Moreover, I will situate Eshrāghi’s practice within the context of their own Sāmoan diasporic experience, as well as the colonial oppression of global Indigenous gender identities. My framework of analysis purposefully leans on Eshrāghi’s own ideas because their scholarly and artistic practices all arise from these themes of pleasure, sexuality, Indigeneity, and relational thinking, and my own positionality as a non-Sāmoan, non-Indigenous scholar can limit my understanding of their work. In other words, this paper takes cues from Eshraghi’s own theoretical concepts to analyze their work, offering a new way of thinking through climate change which considers sexuality, queerness, and colonialism.   Rimming: Pleasure, desire, and relationality   Eshrāghi has written extensively on Indigenous pleasure and how capitalism, colonialism, and Christianity across the Great Ocean [4]  have repressed genders, desires, and sexualities, resulting in gender-based violence against non-binary and Trans-Indigenous bodies. In pre-colonial Sāmoan culture, those who adopted other Indigenous gender identities were accepted as part of the community and sexual relations with the same sex were never shamed. In fact, there existed and continue to exist terms for those who do not experience gender as ‘women’ or ‘men’: fa’afafine  (becoming woman, or the way of the woman) and fa’atane  (becoming man, or the way of the man). [5] Sāmoan scholar Johanna Schmidt explains that historically Sāmoans have had a collective idea about culture, and that during pre-colonial times gender markers of any kind were established as a way to contribute labour ‘for the good of the group’. [6] Because of this relationship between gender and labour, fa’afafine  were not necessarily marked by behaviour or appearance. Schmidt explains that this might be the reason why fa’afafines  are relatively invisible within early colonial documentation of Sāmoan culture, [7] in addition to the fact that, as Eshrāghi points out, European missionaries did not consider fa’afafine  and fa’atane  human beings. [8] However, fa’afafine  had a constant presence in Sāmoan cultural hxstories and were integral parts of their communities and villages. For example, fa’afafine and fa’atane  had nurturing and housekeeping roles in village performances and ceremonies but their existence was threatened by colonialism. [9] Anyone who exhibited any expression or behaviour that did not conform to heteronormative relationships or the colonial gender binary was punished, killed, or experienced other forms of gender-based violence.   Eshrāghi suggests that the non-colonial action of rimming explores pleasure as emancipatory and part of both chosen kinships and actual bloodlines. [10]  For Eshrāghi, pleasure is a conduit for Indigenous ‘cumlines’, the sexual and spiritual genealogies that assert desire as the foundation for kinships. [11] Eshrāghi evokes the body as part of kinship-making, writing, such that ‘our bodies are the skins, waters, airs of the nations where we come from’. [12] Eshrāghi also considers the physical aspects of sexuality and pleasure, asking how ‘antics with lovers’ can resist colonial legacies in the form of feeding, licking, eating, devouring, pouring, furrowing, and rimming. [13] They consider the last point of rimming to think about movement and intimacy and to centre pleasure as part of community-building. Within the context of water and the islands, the concept of rimming offers a way of freely flowing relationships across the Great Ocean, centring water as part of that relationality between different people. As it relates to time, rimming suggests that time moves back, forth, and around. Though water and time both flow, I analyse them in isolation to draw out the meaning of both water (as part of islands) and time (as disrupting time) within this broader notion of rimming. I argue that by isolating the rimming of time and the rimming of water, we can more fully understand the concept of rimming that manifests in different ways throughout Eshrāghi’s works.   Eshrāghi highlights Queer, Indigenous experiences to reclaim repressed gender identities and advocate for the safety of those who experience gender-based colonial violence within their communities. However, these acts of reclamation are not referential to the heteronormativity and binaries that are established by colonial powers. Rather, they rebuild communities in a way that embraces the integral roles that are possible within a community. The relationships that are established between the participants and environments in Eshrāghi’s works build kinship within and beyond communities—kinship that does not exist through the exclusion of oppressed people such as fa’afafine or fa’atane. This is reminiscent of Cree / Métis / Saulteaux scholar Jas M Morgan and Cree scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt’s conversation about Queer Indigenous ethics, where they explicitly highlight a ‘relational way of being’. [14]  As Belcourt explains, differently gendered Indigenous peoples often ‘seek and/or perform alternative sites of political action and community building’, further signifying relationality as part of Queer Indigenous ethics and aesthetics. [15] They even suggest that Queer Indigenous ethics connect the past, present, and future of Indigenous communities where enactments of care and ‘relational transformation’ take precedence. In many ways, Eshrāghi’s practice works through this Queer Indigenous aesthetic considers Indigenous Queer and trans pasts and futures. In the following sections, I will separately analyse time and water to explore how Eshrāghi rims both throughout three video works: Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk , SOGI MAI , and re(cul)naissance . Through these works, I argue that by rimming water and time, Eshrāghi disrupts gendered and sexual relationships to the environment.   Rimming time: Projecting futures   Eshrāghi introduces rimming time as a way to circumvent what they call ‘Gregorian shame-time’, which was imposed upon Indigenous peoples across the Great Ocean with the arrival of colonizers. [16] Eshrāghi’s use of ‘shame’ points to how other Indigenous gendered peoples of the Great Ocean are cast within a ‘backward, whiteward trajectory of annihilation’ that sees their existence hinging on pain, death, and unbelonging. [17] Instead of aligning kinships and Indigenous pleasure to the linear process of Gregorian calendrical time, Eshrāghi suggests that rimming time allows for hxstories that move backwards and forward, where relationships are based on Indigenous pleasures. [18] Eshrāghi’s idea of Gregorian shame-time resonates with settler-scholar Mark Rifkin’s explanation of settler-time, a white, western framing of time that asserts linear temporal experiences and the ‘orderings, articulations and reckonings of time’. [19] Settler-time emphasizes settler-futurities: that is, the survival of settler societies and ideologies, often excluding Indigenous communities, Queer communities, and differently gendered peoples.   Non-linear temporal explorations can resist settler-time, especially when Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC), Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans artists employ non-linear temporal formations that foreground their own communities’ futures. [20]  I argue that rimming time embraces a non-linear temporal formation that is rooted in both pleasure and Indigenous formations of time. In Punā’oa ‘Upu Mai ‘O Atumotu / Glossaire des Archipels (2022), Eshrāghi mentions rimming to define the Sāmoan word taumamuli taking cues from Sāmoan scholar Leali’fano Albert Refiti. They state   that taumamuli  is the ‘realization of Indigenous time through acts of rimming or surrounding butts or the end of the world’ (fig 1). Taumamuli  denotes Indigenous formations of time and implies a futuristic perspective in thinking about the end of the world. I argue that the use of futurism in Eshrāghi’s practice points to the forward-looking perspective of rimming that does not exist at the expense of Indigenous, Queer, Trans, or non-binary bodies. Fig 1. Punāʻoa o ʻupu mai ʻo atumotu / Glossaire des archipels (Léuli Eshrāghi 2019, inkjet print on heavyweight paper, 33 x 46 inches). Edition of 20. Collection of the artist. Image taken from < http://leulieshraghi.art/punaoa-o-upu-mai-o-atumotu >. © Léuli Eshrāghi The use of rimming time considers the past, present, and future of Queer, Indigenous peoples, resisting a colonial narrative that might situate them in the past or render them nonexistent, by reimagining relationships with the environment, now and into the future, as including or even underscored by pleasure. This suggestion of new relationships is timely considering the current climate crisis; it resists the feeling of isolation from the environment with intimacy and pleasure. The result is that the rimming of time can encourage us to care for the environment in times of climate crisis.   Rimming water in/of/around islands   In Eshrāghi’s performance videos, participants construct relationships with each other through different actions like touching and breathing while engaging with their environments. In addition to creating relationships between themselves, participants construct relationships with the various environments. Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming islands acknowledges their own Great Ocean context and the significance of water in the various environments presented in the performance videos. Water complements Eshrāghi’s curatorial, scholarly, and artistic practice that references ways of knowing or relating across the Great Ocean. Many scholars, such as Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa and Sāmoan scholar Lana Lopesi, have explained that water, seas, and oceans is a significant part of the cultural heritage and ways of relating across different communities around the Great Ocean. These bodies of water flow freely, transcending political borders to connect communities across the Great Ocean. The Great Ocean context and holds weight in Eshrāghi’s practice as well.   Similar to white settler feminist and scholar Astrida Neimanis, I strive to think with water to understand rimming as fluid, moving freely, slipping, spreading, flowing in no particular direction, and connecting bodies to each other, including more-than-human ones. [21]  In this way, thinking with water can disrupt anthropocentrism in research or conversations about the environment and climate. As Eshrāghi writes, Western knowledge systems are typically centred around human life, a result of colonial epistemologies hailing from Europe that sever relationships and ‘responsibilities to rivers, lakes, fields, mountains, and deltas’. [22] White settler Australian scholar Val Plumwood describes how European colonization has resulted in colonial relationships between humans and more-than-human, like nature and animals, where the former come to control and dominate the latter. [23] This ideology insists that land is unused, underused, and empty, which then justifies the colonial domination of nature and non-human life. Nature and animals are othered, their differences are ignored, and they are not seen as independent. This othering of nature and animals directly follows the othering of Indigenous peoples. Plumwood argues for a decolonization of relationships with nature by affirming the presence of the other’s difference ‘as an independent presence to be engaged with on their own terms’. [24]   Referencing Refiti, Eshrāghi explains that many Indigenous communities across the Great Ocean experience kinships with different beings as described in the concept of vā , the ‘relational space between all things, a spatiality that is visual, emotional, political, and in constant flux’. [25] Refiti describes vā  as the ‘great tension that pushes the world outwards and gathers it inwards in its totality’. [26]   Vā  thus seeks to establish kinships beyond the human, existing outside of human-centric notions within colonial ways of being and living. As Refiti further outlines, oceanic perspectives include lalolagi , a holistic worldview where   nothing is unrelated, everything has a relation. Mountains, rivers, rocks, celestial movements, and people form a contiguous fabric, a network drawn in and out, thus always in tension, spreading, to māvae and regathering/reordering – tōfiga . [27]   I argue that Eshrāghi looks to Refiti’s scholarly and written work to think through Sāmoan knowledge, such that water is not only part of rimming but part of lalolagi  and vā . Thinking with water in Eshrāghi’s works resists a colonial relationship to the environment as a resource. Water, here, furthers the importance of care and meaningful relationships to the environment. This confronts the climate crisis by establishing better relationships between humans and the environment, rather than one of isolation.   In the following section, I will analyse three of Eshrāghi’s performance video works. First, I analyse Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk , one of Eshrāghi’s earlier works, that shows three individuals interacting with each other and the Merri Yaluk Creek. I analyse how the participants rim time and water by interacting with each other, touching, caressing, and greeting each other, while curiously exploring the different nooks and crannies of the creek. After, I explore SOGI MAI , a performance video that shows participants greeting each other through sogi (so-ngi)—a Sāmoan practice of greeting where individuals share breath to affirm each other’s presence. The participants perform this greeting on top of a snowy, cold mountain framed by the sound of rapids, contrasting with the warmer climates in Eshrāghi’s other works. I consider how the practice of sogi establishes an intimacy with different people that resists settler-time and reinforces relationships with and through water. Finally, I explore Eshrāghi’s most recent body of work at the time of writing, re(cul)naissance . This work is an installation that includes a video-work. In re(cul)naissance , Eshrāghi explores Indigenous pleasures and non-colonial Indigenous actions with different participants through intimate actions of gentle caressing and other forms of tactile pleasure. As will be seen, re(cul)naissance  offers the most obvious examples of rimming time and water compared to the other videos.   Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk   Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk  is the earliest work by Eshrāghi analyzed here. In it, Eshrāghi and two other individuals, Joe Joe Orangias and Darcy Jones, explore the waters of a creek called Merri Yaluk (figs 2-4). This creek is known to be a ‘sacred source of life for the Wurundjeri people’, who are Indigenous to the area of so-called Australia known as Melbourne. [28]  As Eshrāghi mentions, this creek is a place for ‘liminal, Queer’ ways of relating, and the video’s participants accordingly explore the environment and their relationships. [29] Simply put, desire underpins all the actions of these individuals. They engage in a relational practice of rimming by gently and consensually wiping and caressing each other’s bodies, marking them with liquid as they explore the creek. Eshrāghi notes that these actions can resist the ‘pressure…to assert title over Indigenous territories in the marking of space’. [30] One of the ways European colonizers established control over lands was by naming them, erasing Indigenous names and ways of knowing about places. Part of this naming is the intention of removing the hxstory of a place, in this case, the hxstory and ancestral knowledge held in a place, in order to bring about a settler-colonial futurity at the expense of Indigenous lives. Gregorian shame-time then is rimmed by the actions of the participants, who use desire to relate with the environment and with each other. Equally significant in this rimming is the non-linear flow of the video. The beginning of the video establishes a kind of greeting between Eshrāghi and one of the participants, but then another participant joins and, from there, the scenes shift from one to another completely outside of chronological order. This hints at a future that makes space for other kinds of relating beyond shame-time.   Eshrāghi notes that the creek itself is ‘a secluded space where young and old interact in liminal, Queer ways unbeknownst to heteropatriarchal society’. [31] It carries great meaning as the waterway that surrounds and holds these non-colonial actions. Eshrāghi chose the creek to highlight another way of engaging with the environment that is rooted in desire and pleasure. Hau’ofa has written that waterways and seas are part of the cultural heritage of many communities across the Great Ocean, calling places like Sāmoa existing as part of a ‘sea of islands’ instead of an island in a vast sea. [32] Furthermore, Eshrāghi has likely come across the literature and research on Queer ‘cruising spots’ that point to green spaces, like forests or parks, as safe places for sex because Queer sex and intimacies are stigmatized within heteropatriarchal society. [33]   I argue that Eshrāghi enacts these liminal actions in the space with the participants in the video, to realize those actions rooted in pleasure. However, I do not believe the intention is to normalize those actions in the space. Instead, Eshrāghi and the individuals rim the waters, acting within and around the creek which comes to symbolize a flow of connections, meetings, and intimacies between each other. Indeed, the golden fluid is clearly part of the creek, as suggested in the title of the work: Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk . Eshrāghi rims the waters of the creek, not literally but as a method of relating, to highlight the creek’s waters that hold these pleasures and intimacies. Figs 2-4. Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk   (Léuli Eshrāghi 2015, single-channel HD video, 9 minutes, 54 seconds). Collection of the artist. Screenshots taken from < http://leulieshraghi.art/goldenflow >. © Léuli Eshrāghi SOGI MAI   Sogi   SOGI MAI  is a performance video that Eshrāghi created during their 2016 Indigenous Visual & Digital Arts Residency at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, in Mihrpha [34] (‘Banff’), Treaty Seven Territory. Sogi  (so-ngi) is a Sāmoan practice of greeting where individuals share breath to affirm each other’s presence, or ‘mana, cumulative energy’. [35]  In the video, Eshrāghi and one individual gently touch their foreheads against each other and deeply inhale the air between them. Eshrāghi performs this greeting with seven participants, including one greeting Eshrāghi with a young baby perched on their back (figs 5-6). [36] The participants perform their greetings against a wintry backdrop, with tall green trees and snowy ground. What is interesting here is the sharing of breath, visible as condensation in the cold air, and the crunch   of the participants’ footsteps on the snowy land as they walk to meet each other. At different points in the video, water flowing as rapids can be heard, sometimes harshly and loudly, sometimes gently and faintly. Through the residency, Eshrāghi was a guest on the Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain in Mirhnpa. This area also comprises the oral practices of the Îyârhe Nakoda (‘Stoney Nakoda’), comprised of the Bearspaw, Chiniki, and Goodstoney Nations, the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and nations part of the Blackfoot Confederacy: The Siksika, The Piikani, and The Kanai. This territory is home to the Shuswap Nations, Ktunaxa Nations, and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. [37] Eshrāghi’s employment of the practice of sogi is a careful and thoughtful practice to consider how to respectfully greet different people on different lands. It is significant that an Indigenous artist from relatively isolated parts of the world, The Great Ocean and so-called Australia, can engage in this deep, intimate relationality with others from different cultural backgrounds or nationalities in a faraway place. The effect of colonialism globally is often felt as isolation from other communities, even Indigenous communities who have once had relationships with each other, but which were disrupted by colonial and imperial practices of geopolitical border-making. [38]   Sogi Mai can be seen   as an extension of rimming, not only as a way of relating that can disrupt time and centre pleasure but establishing relationships beyond one’s own immediate, local communities.   Though it might not be readily apparent, water forms the foundation of Sogi Ma, especially considering Eshrāghi’s cultural heritage around water, and experiences and connections to islands in the Great Ocean. Looking closely at Sogi Mai , water is seen as the snow covering the mountains and the trees around the participants, but it is also heard as the crunch   under their feet as they walk towards each other and the quick flow of rapids in the background. Eshrāghi chose to include the snowy scenery, the sounds of walking on the snow, and the sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh movement of the rapids. I see Eshrāghi trying to make the environment familiar to them, as the water they have learnt from and through in their life has likely been warm and flowy. However, they emphasize the snowy, cold landscape, acknowledging how water in diverse forms can hold these connections to people in different kinds of places. That being said, the practice of sogi  generates some level of warmth, seen in the condensation of breath when the participants breathe in the air between them. Condensation, here, is still water, simply in the form of liquid vapour or steam, when warm air is exposed to cold air. Sogi  is a traditional Sāmoan greeting and would not usually be practised in cold weather, but the warm breath hints at Eshrāghi’s lessons from water from their own Great Ocean context. Eshrāghi then, engages in rimming here in the sense of moving freely and respectfully around a new, unfamiliar place, establishing a connection that is literally fluid at times or speaks to a kind of fluidity in how to create a connection with others in a new environment.   Eshrāghi also rims time in the video, but once again it might not be readily apparent. The artist notes that sogi  is undertaken as a way to consider fleeting, temporary connections, or meetings between people from various kinds of backgrounds. [39]  The fragmented sounds of the rapids indicate that the video is entirely non-linear. Moreover, it is difficult to tell who Eshrāghi meets first and last, perhaps suggesting that a linear chronology of relationality between the participants does not matter. The temporality of the video resists a settler time, insisting on the relationships above all else. The intimate act of sharing breath signifies that these connections, while fleeting, are deep and meaningful. Time, then, does not necessarily matter within those relationships, resisting any sense of Gregorian shame-time. Water and time may not be clear as elements of the video, but Eshrāghi does rim both to engage in relational practice. Figs 5-6. Sogi Mai (Léuli Eshrāghi 2016, single-channel HD video, 1 minute, 20 seconds). Collection of the artist. Screenshots taken from < http://leulieshraghi.art/sogi-mai >. © Léuli Eshrāghi re(cul)naissance   In re(cul)naissance , Eshrāghi and four other participants touch, caress, and wipe water on each other, set against tall green trees, branches, and stacked stones, with the sound of a river and rain gently flowing on Obelisk nude beach on Eora Nation territory  (figs 7-8) . [40] Throughout the video, the participants look as if they are in a state of pleasure, and at some points, they stare back at the camera, almost to involve the viewer in their actions. Their gazes could imply defiance, as many Indigenous artists have used this as a tactic to resist a colonial gaze from anthropological photographs that have often rendered Indigenous peoples as stuck in the past, primitive, or victims. [41] But based on Eshrāghi’s practice of pleasure, it feels more appropriate to think of the gaze as an invitational one—a gaze that asks how we can all engage in a relationality with others from a place of pleasure and desire. Eshrāghi mentions that this video is meant to think through kink practices and Indigenous pleasures as part of non-colonial actions that imagine futures after Gregorian shame-time. This figures ‘softness, hardness, fluid states, openness, closedness’ as a key part of those futures. [42] Eshrāghi has discussed that the title of the work re(cul)naissance  comes from the French word ‘renaissance’, meaning rebirth or stepping back, and ‘cul’, a French slang word for ‘ass’. [43]  Of all works in this essay, re(cul)naissance most fully captures Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming islands and time.   The environment in re(cul)naissance is more similar to the warm ones that Eshrāghi experienced living across the Great Ocean. In fact, the performance took place in an area that experiences relatively mild temperatures year-round. The ancestors of many Indigenous First Nations are known to have lived on the island, particularly the nations who are descended from the Eora People. [44]  As a contested site that has been altered by colonialism, the Indigenous, Queer, gender non-conforming, and / or non-binary participants, engage with the island through non-colonial actions, resisting the present state of the island which distorts the diverse Indigenous hxstories of the place and the people who inhabited it. These actions are framed by water in the form of rain and the river that lubricates the bodies as they caress and massage each other. While viewers might feel like voyeurs intruding in an intimate, sexual act, these actions do not only signify actual sexual intimacies. This performance video demonstrates that a relationship between individuals is meant to be fluid, soft, hard, or wet, where different people are meant to feel comfortable and good in their bodies and acknowledge those bodies through affectionate touch. Through their non-colonial actions, all the participants assert a Queer Indigenous presence and futurity based on pleasure.   Like Eshrāghi’s previously discussed works, this performance video does not follow a chronological order. However, what is more indicative of the rimming of Gregorian shame-time is the combination of cul and renaissance  in the title, which suggests that Eshrāghi projects a desire for a future that actively centres the relationships based on pleasure and desire between Queer Indigenous peoples. Eshrāghi uses the word cul to   evoke Queer pleasure and sex in the video. On the one hand, Eshrāghi suggests a reclamation of Queer relationships that were forcibly lost through assimilation and genocide at the onset of colonialism. On the other, the artist suggests a rebirth of those relationships that now look different because of the effects of colonialism on differently gendered Indigenous and Queer people. The title of the video suggests that Queer, Trans, and non-binary Indigenous peoples must work through their cumlines and bloodlines to move forward into the future. The term cumlines is reminiscent of Queer notions of ‘chosen family’, when Queer people seek acceptance and belongingness outside of their family, or bloodlines. However, cumlines is an Indigenous practice that circumvents the Western whiteness that is pervasive within practices of Queer chosen families. [45] Cumlines likewise disrupt the colonial practice of blood quantum:, that is, the amount of Indigenous blood that one might have in them. Generally, settler-colonial states globally used blood quantum as an attempt to assimilate Indigenous peoples into settler society. [46] But re(cul)naissance  circumvents blood quantum by demonstrating the deeply intimate relationships that could arise from exploring cumlines as well as bloodlines. Cumlines is not positioned as a binary to blood quantum or bloodlines; it encompasses all of these things and, as seen in this performance-video, a way to rim both is through pleasure. Figs 7-8. re(cul)naissance (Léuli Eshrāghi 2021, single-channel HD video, 3 minutes, 29 seconds). Collection of the artist. Screenshots taken from < http://leulieshraghi.art/reculnaissance >. © Léuli Eshrāghi Pleasure and / in the environment   While each performance video seemingly emphasizes the relationships between Eshrāghi and the participants, my focus on time and water points to the need for understanding human relationships with the environment. The water covers or surrounds the participants’ bodies and intervenes in these relationships to remind the viewer of the spaces, places, and hxstories that have held and will continue to hold some form of greeting and exchange between people. Though colonial relationships with the environment are premised on domination, extraction, and use, they are not the only ways of relating to the environment. Indigenous scholars stress the need for reciprocal, respectful relationships with the environment through such concepts as rimming time, rimming water, vā , and lalolagi . These views assert connections with everything, including the more-than-human world, challenging the colonial ideologies that have resulted in the current climate and ecological crises. [47]     Within the context of the current climate and ecological crises, Eshrāghi’s practice is extremely important because it implicates relationships between peoples and their surrounding environments. Eshrāghi offers a tangible way of establishing those relationships, like gently wiping or massaging waters onto each other, frolicking around a creek, or breathing and taking in the air no matter how cold it might be. These actions are non-colonial, in that they do not seek to extract from the land or people. Furthermore, taumamuli  or rimming considers the ‘end of the world’, suggesting an exploration into what the ‘end’ of the world could mean. I have written elsewhere that mainstream discourses around climate change always seem to delve into ideas of environmental apocalypse rooted in Judeo-Christian notions of Judgement Day, but Indigenous formations of time would not consider the end of the world in this way. [48] Eshrāghi would agree with this in re(cul)naissance , which proposes a kind of rebirth of ways of relating with others. Moreover, Eshrāghi’s work suggests pleasure as part of how we respond to climate environmental apocalypse and climate change by re-establishing respectful relationships with the environment. Their performance videos ask how we can ensure that respect and pleasure are part of ecological restoration projects, or how we can state climate disaster policies and future planning in ways that do not infringe upon Indigenous sovereignties. How can centring pleasure insist upon listening to, working with, and following the leadership of 2SQTBIPOC climate and environmental activists? And how does pleasure allow us to ensure the health and well-being of those whose lives are deeply and intimately affected by climate disasters? Pleasure and rimming might seem as though they have nothing to do with climate change, but Eshrāghi’s work shows that they have everything to do with it.   Conclusion: What’s to cum?   In this essay, I draw out themes of water and time within Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming to analyze their performance video works. As a scholar working around the arts, climate change, and the environment, I am particularly interested in the presence of the environment through water across Eshrāghi's works. I see immense potential for these videos of pleasure to offer another way of relating to the environment—a necessary pursuit considering the climate crisis. I consider the importance of Queer and Indigenous perspectives and ways of thinking or relating within the climate change discourse without overshadowing how Eshrāghi makes space for Queer, Trans, Non-binary, Two-Spirit, and Indigenous peoples. By assessing these works, we gain an understanding of the importance of spaces created by and for Two-Spirit, Queer, Trans, non-binary, and differently gendered Indigenous peoples. They ensure safety and belonging within a heteropatriarchal   society that enacts violence on those who do not conform, underscored by better relationships with the environment. The relationality between the participants in all of the works suggests a desire for relationship-building and solidarity across various communities and environments. Vulnerable groups like 2SQTBIPOC will be the most disrupted by climate disasters and will make up a large percentage of climate refugees’ populations.  [49] Therefore, as we continue to move into difficult climate futures, meaningful connections, relationships, and solidarities might prove to be key for the survival and well-being of all. In light of Eshrāghi’s analysis, I argue that we can only survive if we are brave enough to rim—both literally and figuratively. Jasmine Sihra Born and raised in Tsí tkaròn:to (‘Toronto’), Dr. Jasmine Sihra is a Punjabi researcher and curator. She completed her PhD in Art History at Concordia University in 2026. Her career and research focus on how the arts can contribute to planning for inevitable climate disasters and environmental pollution, particularly for underserved and underrepresented communities. [1] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Rimming Islands: Fa’afafine-Fa’atane Pleasure and Decoloniality’ in Stefanie Hessler (ed), Sex Ecologies  (MIT Press 2021) 108. [2] Hxstories is a term used by queer and feminist scholars to interrogate the commonly told histories of places and people from a mostly White, male, cisgender, straight perspective, which are typically taken as fact. Hxstories creates space for different kinds of narratives, accounts, and perspectives, especially marginalized ones. [3] See Leo Bersani,  Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays  (University of Chicago Press 2009); Chris A Eng, ‘Apprehending the “Angry Ethnic Fag”: The Queer (Non) Sense of Shame in Justin Chin’s “Currency” and “Lick My Butt”’ (2020) 26(1)   GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 105; Jennifer C Nash, ‘Black Anality’ (2014) 20(4) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 440. [4]  Eshrāghi uses the phrase ‘the Great Ocean’ to refer to the area known as the Pacific Islands, likely to point to the cultural exchange, migration flows, and shared hxstories across these areas. [5]  Eshrāghi (n 1) 103. [6] Johanna Schmidt, ‘Samoan fa'afafine’ in Howard Chiang (ed),  The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History  (Charles Scribner’s Sons 2019) 1408. [7]  ibid 1408. [8]  Eshrāghi (n 1) 101. [9]  Léuli Eshrāghi and Lucreccia Quintanilla, ‘Trueno tropical / Faititili a motu / Tropical thunder’ (2013) 1(2) Writing From Below Journal 94. [10] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Privilégier le plaisir autochtone / Priority to Indigenous pleasures’ in Jessyca Hutchens, Brook Andrew, Stuart Geddes, and Trent Walter (eds),  NIRIN NGAAY  (Biennale of Sydney 2020) 2. [11]  ibid 2. [12]  ibid 6. [13]  ibid 8. [14] Billy-Ray Belcourt and Lindsay Nixon, ‘What Do We Mean by Queer Indigenous Ethics?’ ( Canadian Art Magazine , 23 May 2018) < https://canadianart.ca/features/what-do-we-mean-by-queerindigenousethics/ > accessed 1 June 2024. [15]  ibid. [16]  Eshrāghi, (n 1) 103. [17]  ibid 104. [18]  ibid 104. [19]  Mark Rifkin, ‘One: Indigenous Orientations’ in Mark Rifkin (ed), Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination  (Duke University Press 2017) 3, 5. [20] Jasmine Sihra, ‘She Falls for Ages and Imagines Future After Apocalypse’ (2021) 3(1) Tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture 228. [21] Astrida Neimanis,  Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology  (Bloomsbury 2017) 2. [22]  Eshrāghi (n 1) 105. [23] Val Plumwood, ‘Decolonising Relationships with Nature’ (2002) 2(2) Pan 9. [24]  ibid 15. [25]  Albert Refiti, ‘Vā Moana swells within a global sea of islands’ in Alexandra Chang, Charlotte Huddleston, and Janine Randerson (eds),  2020 Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange Aotearoa: Ngā Tai o te Ao: the global tides  (St Paul St Gallery AUT; Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU 2021) 1. [26]  ibid 6. [27]  ibid 6. [28] ‘Walking Tours’ ( Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation ) < https://wurundjericulturaltours.com.au/ > accessed 1 June 2024. [29]  Léuli   Eshrāghi, ‘Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk (2015)’ ( LÉULI ESHRĀGHI ) < http://leulieshraghi.art/goldenflow > accessed 1 June 2024. [30]  ibid. [31]  Eshrāghi (n 29). [32] Epeli Hau'ofa, ‘Our Seas of Islands’ in We are the Ocean: Selected Works  (University of Hawai’i Press 2008) 31. [33]  Gavin Brown, ‘Ceramics, clothing and other bodies: affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters’ (2008) 9(8) Social & Cultural Geography 916. [34]  Translated from Stoney Nakoda as ‘the waterfalls’. [35] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘SOGI MAI (2016)’ ( LÉULI ESHRĀGHI ) < http://leulieshraghi.art/sogi-mai >. [36]  ibid. [37] ‘Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’ ( Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity ) < https://www.banffcentre.ca/ > accessed 1 June 2024. [38] Lana Lopesi, False Divides (Bridget Williams Books Limited 2018) 8. [39]  Eshrāghi (n 35). [40] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Re(cul)naissance (2020)’ ( LÉULI ESHRĀGHI ) < http://leulieshraghi.art/reculnaissance >. [41] Julie Nagam, ‘Deciphering the Digital and Binary Codes of Sovereignty/ Self-determination and Recognition/Emancipation’ (2016) 27(54) Public 78. [42]  ibid 78. [43]  Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Untitled Lecture on Artistic, Curatorial, and Scholarly Practice’ (presentation in Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim’s Graduate Seminar ARTH 649 Curatorial Studies: Theory and Practice in the Department of Art History, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, October 2022). [44] ‘Cockatoo Island’ ( Cockatoo Island ) < https://www.cockatooisland.gov.au/en/our-story/first-nations/ > accessed 1 June 2024. [45]  Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form  (Duke University Press 2022) 10. [46]Annette M Jaimes, ‘Some Kind of Indian: On Race, Eugenics, and Mixed-Bloods’ in Naomi Zack (ed),  American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity  (Rowman & Littlefield 1995) 138.  [47]  See also eg Joanna Barker, ‘Confluence: Water as an Analytic of Indigenous Feminisms’ (2019) 43(3) American Indian Culture and Research Journal 2; Cutcha R Baldy and Melanie K Yazzie, ‘Introduction: Indigenous peoples and the politics of water’ (2018) 7(1) Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 10; Zoe Todd, ‘Fish, Kin, and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in Amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory’ (2017) 43 Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 102. [48] Sihra (n 20) 229. [49] Kirsten Vinyeta, Kyle Whyte, and Kathy Lynn, Climate change through an intersectional lens: gendered vulnerability and resilience in indigenous communities in the United States  (United States Department of Agriculture 2015) 3.

After fifteen years spent debating its scientific potential, and despite claims of procedural irregularities and a challenge to the validity of the vote, in March 2024, twelve of the twenty-two members of the international sub-commission on quaternary stratigraphy chose to reject the applicability of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to signal a new geological epoch. For some geologists and Earth System Scientists, the point of such a designation would have been to signal a determinate epochal boundary, a golden spike in terms of residues and remains in the lithosphere, that could signal a chronostratigraphic shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. They wanted, or some of them at least wanted, a clear boundary marker. In this case, the mark in question was set at 1952, located in the mud in Lake Crawford, Canada, and coterminous with what many environmental historians have long considered the proximate origins of the Anthropocene, the period of the Great Acceleration following the Second World War. [1]   If that place and time was rejected as marking a new geological epoch, what difference does it make to the Anthropocene more broadly, which has already long moved beyond the bounds of the geological? Innumerable histories have shown, whether written by climate scientists or not, that human beings have been geological and planetary agents for aeons. [2] Though perhaps it is only more recently, however, that they have become self-conscious of the fact. If so, the point is not to find a singular spike or boundary marker that would tip Holocene climatic stability into the crises that have been part of an increasingly public political discourse about climate for at least seventy years. Instead, the issue is more about intensification and process. [3]  This would still be focused geologically (the Anthropocene as an ongoing, intensifying, planetary ‘event’ rather than epoch). But it can also be focused historically and politically (as an ongoing, intensifying engagement with the path dependencies of modern capitalism, grounded in regimes of extraction and violence, that have shaped the modern world and its climatic catastrophes), or epistemically (as an ongoing, intensifying, understanding of the conceptual shape of a world often dubbed ‘after nature’).   This latter point in particular is crucial to understanding the politics associated with the Anthropocene. Scientists often refer to those intensifications that have transgressed several of the nine ‘boundaries’ within which a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ might be found (viz climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss). [4]  But historians and political theorists just as often refer to the need to break down false oppositions between politics and nature. The latter, in fact, is something that has always been constructed and framed by very real human interests and powers. Jed Purdy’s recent histories, considering the dynamics through which modern politics and law has self-consciously adopted different visions of nature and environmentalism according to different needs, show this clearly. Whether the racialised forms of environmentalism through national parks, underpinned by the political actions of Teddy Roosevelt’s government, or a long lineage of settler-colonial claims about land seen as terra nullius , through to more recent disputes over land and energy in the Appalachian coalfields, for Purdy and others one thing is clear: America has ‘always been Anthropocene’. [5]  If modern America, modern politics, modern history even, has always been ‘after nature’, then it has never really been ‘modern’—in the sense that there never was an objective, human-independent ‘nature’, even though human beings have cleaved to such a conception for centuries to make sense of their politics and their boundaries. [6] If the Anthropocene allows us to see this sort of ideological co-constitution in new ways, that is because it focuses attention on those intensifications of human effects on the environment. Now, the boundary lines and intensifications across what is ‘planetary’ and what is ‘global’, rather than what is political as opposed to what is natural, seem set fair to fix the terms of any future engagement.   For political theorists and historians of political thought, this raises several pointed questions about the relationship between time, history, and politics. And here, Dipesh Chakrabarty has done more than most to suggest how the attempt to construct such an Anthropocene ‘regime of historicity’ might be a productive intellectual challenge for those working in these areas. The term, ‘regime of historicity’, is borrowed from François Hartog, and provides a heuristic to frame a society’s overlapping ways of relating past, present, and future at particular moments. Such regimes might last generations, even centuries, depending upon the dominance of particular understandings of the world. But for Chakrabarty, any Anthropocene-focused regime of historicity has to begin by taking seriously the arguments of Earth Systems Science (ESS). And these, as already noted, typically consider the Anthropocene as a series of planetary processes (tracking changes to the atmosphere and biosphere, as well as to the technosphere, and the climate). Nevertheless, according to Chakrabarty, ‘What we see in the history of ESS’, is ‘not an end to the project of capitalist globalization but the arrival of a point in history where the global discloses to humans the domain of the planetary’. [7] This has upended not only those histories premised upon a distinction between human and nature, but geological agency makes bio-political histories of globalization and capitalist crisis management, on their own, redundant. [8]  Because of this, in turn, the Anthropocene opens up various spaces for rethinking histories, and therefore positing alternative futures, to the fatalistic narratives that underpin most political discussion about climate today, at least in wealthy democracies.   The Anthropocene that is coming into view here pushes for more than the optimistic fatalism of a world where planetary futures are salvaged by human ingenuity, and a ‘good Anthropocene’ might be had through modernist technologies of politics and geoengineering. [9]  It also demands more than the pessimistic fatalism of the ‘eco-miserabilists’ associated with the Dark Mountain Collective  and the manifesto of Uncivilization. On the latter view, human civilization is already lost. The Anthropocene shows us that this, and precisely this idea of civilization is what needs to be reckoned with, mourned, and moved on from. Roy Scranton has suggested that the tools of ancient Stoicism might have some purchase in this regard, in helping us learn how to die in the Anthropocene. In a different fashion, Matthias Thaler salvages something of this eco-miserabilist position from the teeth of critics who see it as nothing more than pessimistic fatalism. Thaler finds in their critique the foundations for radical hope of a new beginning, a new world brought into being by an appropriate mourning of that which is lost. [10] Jonathan Lear is the source for such thinking, first, in writings about the possibility of renewing ethics and meaning by communities compelled to live through cultural devastation, using the example of the Crow Nation and its Chief, Plenty Coups. More recently still, Lear has updated his own rendering of this prospect, by offering a new imagining of what ‘mourning’ entails. Now he presents mourning as a form of practiced imagination, and looks to the many worlds lost to climate change, for a focal point to an argument that takes him back to Freud (another student of ancient Stoicism). There, Lear (and Freud) ask us to think about what it means to actively reject something one has been part of, and benefited from, something destructive precisely because its lustre and its seeming naturalness and permanence was little more than a transient illusion. For Freud, this meant (among other things) rejecting the ideological veneer of a particularist and hierarchical model of European civilization and progress, which had been unmasked and undone by the First World War and numerous war neuroses. As the barbarism underneath the civilizational façade was made clear to Freud, and once the mourning over what was lost has been undertaken, he invested hope (akin to the sort of ‘radical hope’ that Lear had earlier conceptualized), in human capacities for restoration, to build back better, in the current argot, and move past failures. To help them do so, new sorts of histories and exemplars and models need to be found. [11]  Now the question becomes whether a boundary politics of radical hope in the Anthropocene might help avoid the twin poles of an optimistic, or a pessimistic, form of fatalism about the future by rethinking the past. Could such a move avoid binaries and epochal overstatements, leaving space for imaginative possibilities and events?   Well, one thing that interpreting the Anthropocene as a form of boundary politics does do is offer the possibility of seeing  the world, earth, or globe differently, opening up more possibilities than it closes down. Here, things might take a ‘poetic’ (and agentic or vibrant form), where the Earth is Gaia, pulsating with ‘things’ and ‘actants’. [12] And because the Anthropocene also challenges narratives of ‘global’ history, by forcing them to confront a dissonant relationship with the planetary, it pits human dynamics of sustainability and development against planetary dynamics of habitability. For Chakrabarty, new forms of philosophical anthropology will be needed to interpret human attempts to experience these new-old times of the planetary, and which will allow for a reckoning with the processes of productivist globalization that have thrust awareness of this planetary perspective upon the human species. By so doing, new questions are raised about whether such lineages can really support a move towards a political economy robust enough to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, as opposed to a Green New Deal, for example. [13]   The fact that so much current discourse about climate politics and the Anthropocene is fixed with reference to wartime, and particularly the wartime of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt, now becomes a little more understandable. The mobilizing metaphors and rhetoric are obvious manifestations of a call to action, bearing an implication that governments, agencies, corporations, and citizens are to see themselves as all in it together. Yet when wartime is, and who decides so, and where it matters, are precisely the questions at issue. For some, most obviously anti-liberals like Carl Schmitt, the capacity to decide upon such issues is the foundational building block of the concept of the political itself. Determining friends and enemies, making war and peace, and deciding upon the extremes fixes the political through the actions of sovereignty; events help to determine boundaries and thus to divide epochs. But who, amid the boundary politics and fissiparous sovereignties of climate crises, can, or will, determine the shape of the political within the scale of the planetary? That the effects of climate change already affect unequally those whose histories were already unequally affected by myriad forms of exploitation is glaringly obvious. Such history augurs inauspiciously for a more progressive form of collective politics moving forward, and suggests a likelier prospect of doubling down on conventional politics grounded in old models of sovereignty, dividing the world along the lines of national interests into increasingly uninhabitable futures. [14]   Of course, the temporalities of planetary habitability or the Anthropocene also have their own complex cycles and timeframes, whether understood as units of abstract time (geochronology) or through the material units of chronostratigraphic time, through which different material deposits (radioactive residues, pollutants, polymers) can be measured, like those found in Lake Crawford. Rather than seeking a singular golden spike, such complex temporalities also allow us to reimagine the world and its interwoven global and planetary histories, by tracing ‘slow’ histories of environmental violence visited upon the planet by those who live upon it, as well as the defiant response of the planet to intensified human activity. [15] And they allow us to do so as part of a longer intensification and acceleration of human impact on the planet. Carbon in fact shows the complexity of the problem well. Its overall lifecycle is stabilizing for the planet, while its climate cycle is massively de-stabilizing, particularly for life on the planet, while its explosive potential is part and parcel of the history of modern imperial and democratic politics. [16] The mineral has a complex agency, just as do nuclear isotopes, bacteria, microbes, and fungi, something the recent Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us of. [17]  And the timescape analogy, which sees time more as a landscape than a series of measurements, perhaps in turn offers new ways of seeing the politics involved. [18]   In any case, rejecting the linear chronologies of breaks or epochs or ‘-cenes’, as much as the Anthropos prefix, is a prerequisite. Such a claim connects with critiques of the so-called ‘singular’ Anthropocene narrative (where the Anthropos, rather than the political economic ‘system’ of capitalism erected by human beings, becomes the problem). This is why the question of temporality is so vital—perhaps it is only possible for humans to conceive this in terms of deep time at most, that is to say, the time of human life upon the planet. But whether the timescapes that matter most to the Anthropocene are versions of deep time, or democratic time, or the accelerated time of the nuclear era, is a matter of serious contention. [19]   How  then has the planetary resonated and been incorporated into historically-informed accounts of political theory or the political predicament of the Anthropocene thus far? And how is it possible to see such perspectives as attempting to chart the dissonance of planetary and global, as part of the new boundary condition of the Anthropocene? William Connolly finds in the planetary a challenge to what he calls ‘sociocentrism’. Sociocentrism is the attempt to analyse structures by discerning humanly legible patterns with reference to other humanly legible and constructed patterns. It thus presumes a human exceptionalism. The political challenge of the planetary therefore becomes a question of how to re-connect active human freedom with the impersonal scale of the planetary, in the form of what Connolly calls ‘entangled humanism’. While this suggests that ‘generic responsibility [for climate change amid the Anthropocene] must be replaced by regionally distributed responsibilities and vulnerabilities’, who exactly constitutes the ‘we’ of these entangled assemblages and their ‘temporal force fields’ is never clear. [20]   Equally, we might wonder when  the planetary emerged into political thinking? Not in any obvious way, for sure. One claim concerns a human stumbling towards this new recognition with the planetary as a product of globalization. It exists in an older idiom, particularly for Marxist-inspired writers, for whom the confrontation with the planetary was equally a confrontation with permanent forms of capitalist-inspired catastrophe, given most obvious embodiment in the carnage of the First World War. Then, through such figures as Walter Benjamin, the epic scale of the struggle for human liberation from capitalist globalization suggested that only radical hope, libertarian revolution, or messianic redemption were appropriate to the task. Reverting to the same moment, Latour has suggested that new forms of diplomacy, rather than moralized conceptions of politics, are required to navigate this terrain, though whether this smooths over otherwise intractable political disagreements about the impact of the planetary upon the global, remains a live question. [21] For some critics of ‘planetary politics’, the ‘deep-rooted political-ideological divisions and structures of thought reproduce themselves anew [even] within discourses that declare them redundant’. [22] Nevertheless, pioneering figures in the development of environmental and indeed planetary thinking, like Vladimir Vernadsky, built on these foundations in important ways. His work on the biosphere, central in turn, to the new historical renderings of the atmospheric politics of the Anthropocene era, thought about planetary systems precisely because they related to very real, very worldly, problems. From his first research in 1917 in Russia for the Committee for the Study of Natural Productive Forces , which tried to understand how the state might gain better access to its rich mineralogical resources, Vernadsky moved to Ukraine in 1917, Paris thereafter, to research planetary and earth-systems-science. His work framed a world made already, it seemed, ‘after nature’, in the sense that human beings had evolved, and thus transformed the world, to such an extent that it seemed obtuse to him to think blocs of people on one side, and nature on the other. [23] For Vernadsky, understanding a transition from the biosphere to what he called the ‘noösphere’—analogous to what I have tried to discuss as the Anthropocene here—required a recognition of the long-term effects of human beings and their histories, as well as their physical and conscious development and capacities, which together rendered them into geological agents. Here, Vernadsky could construct a new boundary (the noösphere) where the planetary and global intersected as a space of intensified human agency and consciousness, and where progressive politics, just as much as, say, the ‘war ecology’ underpinning major conflicts such as those in the Ukraine today, could be found. [24]   Where  then do we locate the planetary? Here, one further answer has been that the location of the planetary into the predicament of politics occurs wherever the ‘war’ for what constitutes the earthbound, or ‘geo-’, takes place. More prosaically, this means that the planetary is found in the ‘critical zone’ of earthly habitation. Latour and others have argued that because the prefix geo- has no stable meaning, the battle to control this language is analogous with a war for the planet, or for planetary survival (the two can be separate or interconnected). The power or authority to describe and define here is crucial because multiple, incommensurable worldviews about where the tensions between local and global and planetary reside exist in states of deep conflict. This leads to variously implied (or threatened) trajectories, from deepening processes of globalization to austere conceptions of planetary security; from those that seek some sort of escape from the planet, to a radical new politics for the terrestrials that remain, those whom Latour calls the earthbound. [25] Here, once again, the human politics of globalization has brought the planetary and the Anthropocene into view, forcing a reckoning for politics across scales and imaginations (global and planetary) that are not reconcilable, but which are nonetheless deeply imbricated. This is the climate parallax that Chakrabarty has referred to recently, of a single planet which contains within it many worlds. [26] And as the global and the planetary are continuously misaligned, it is in the boundary spaces of such misalignment that new forms of politics can take place.   What if any human politics, though, can only realistically focus on the global, with the planetary more a background noise than structuring condition? As Julia Nordblad suggests, perhaps ‘the temporal characteristics of the Anthropocene concept renders it unhelpful for thinking critically about how the current environmental crisis can be addressed and for forging political action’. [27] In their accounting, what present generations owe to future ones is the possibility of an open future itself, which means leaving open the space for future self-government without closing down options. Such an open, or optimistic model of the future, configured through climate change, is not only ‘prospective’, but asks a telling empirical question. How much resource are current people willing to leave to future generations? Here, the question of discounting remains crucial, but newly structured around a question of how to value an ‘open’ future itself, as well how to value future goods or future peoples. Seeing the future as a finite resource in this way might make it a new ‘tool’ for galvanizing action over population as much as decarbonisation. [28]   Finally, for Achille Mbembe, the challenge posed by climate crisis and the planetary scales of the Anthropocene is to be found in the need for a more radical rethinking of democracy itself. So, the question of who constitutes the planetary is raised again, in the hope of engendering a planetary consciousness that can be more democratic than not. While infrastructures and technospheres transform, it seems less and less likely that such infrastructures as have contributed to the current predicament will be plausible contenders to act as transmission mechanisms for a more bio-symbiotic future, the sort of thing Haraway talks of as making kin, and which Mbembe pursues with reference to a sort of shared heritage of alternative ways of seeing human and non-human connectivity. [29] This time, the point that unites is a shared capacity for agency, the breath of life, as it were, which animates any kind of motion or even consciousness for living matter. The right to life, as in the right to breathe, takes on many layers of meaning in the midst of climate crisis and histories of racialized violence and oppression, and is itself a form of consciousness raising about the need for anti-racist and anti-imperial forms of politics to align once again under the banner of democratic climate politics.   It is unlikely that there will be any easy reconciliation here, but forms of irreconcilability could demarcate political futures in some important ways that are themselves radically hopeful. In Mbembe’s calculus, if the ‘interfaces of life’ and ‘structures of provisionality have expanded well beyond what we have long been used to’, then certainly democracy as a theory and practice will have to develop, and in ways no longer bounded by their European presumptions. [30] Thinking of the earth as a global commons, for example, might suggest the need to revisit older arguments again about the unjustifiability (at the bar of democracy) of territorial borders, and a recognition of the limits of contemporary thoughts on freedom grounded in extractivist and racialized histories of affluence and abundance for some, at the expense of others. Freedom of movement (for all who have a right to live on the planet) without the fear of a loss of rights that has historically been the corollary of statelessness signals one side of this challenge. Can a brighter democracy be both rights-bearing and not conceptually meaningless, when uncoupled from its conventional mooring within the territorial bounds of a discrete political entity? How, too, to connect with forms of language that humans recognise but don’t fully understand, not just within and between peoples, but between peoples and others forms of life that clearly communicate, from the microbial and viral, to the tubular and fungal, as well as the animal and mineral. These can so often sound like academic questions only, or sometimes a sort of perverse focus on a proliferation of agents and actants designed on the one hand to ‘reconstitute’ the social for the new ‘terrestrials’, but also simultaneously to invalidate any more structural forms of political analysis and agency (particularly Marxist) associated with class or economic exploitation. [31] The work of mourning and hope through the intense and intensifying boundaries of the Anthropocene takes place alongside other forms of intellectual conflicts within and between different forms of political theory—informational, theoretical, historical—concerned with grasping meaning and interpreting trajectories and tracing evidence. Whether this kind of intellectual struggle has any chance of moving the dial on the depressingly more familiar forms of war and war ecology taking place all across the world right now remains very far from obvious. [32] Were we not to try, however, that would surely be the worst of all possible worlds. Duncan Kelly Professor Duncan Kelly teaches in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His latest book is Reconstruction: The First World War and the Making of Modern Politics (Oxford University Press 2025). His previous works include Politics and the Anthropocene  (Polity Press 2019). [1]  John R McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945  (Harvard University Press 2016). [2]  Lucas Stephens and Earl Ellis, ‘The Deep Anthropocene’ ( Aeon , 1 October 2020) < https://aeon.co/essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepest-possible-anthropocene > accessed 31 September 2024. [3]  Phillip Gibbard et al, ‘The Anthropocene as an Event, not an Epoch’ (2022) 37(3) Journal of Quaternary Science 395-9. [4]  Johan Rockström et al, ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’ (2009) 461 Nature 472-5. [5]  Jedediah Purdy, After Nature  (Harvard University Press 2015); Jedediah Purdy, This Land is Our Land  (Princeton University Press 2019); Katrina Forrester, ‘The Anthropocene Truism’ ( The Nation , 12 May 2016) < https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-anthropocene-truism/ > accessed 31 September 2024. [6]  Alison Bashford, ‘The Anthropocene is Modern History: Reflections on Climate and Australian Deep Time’ (2013) 44(3) Australian Historical Studies 341-9; Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Genealogy of Terra Nullius’ (2007) 38(1) Australian Historical Studies 1-15. Cf. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern  (Harvard University Press 1991). [7]  Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Planet—An Emergent Humanist Category’ (2019) 46(1) Critical Inquiry 1-31, esp 17-9; more broadly, J Zalasiewicz et al, ‘The Anthropocene: Comparing its Meaning in Geology (Chronostratigraphy) with Conceptual Approaches Arising in other Disciplines’ (2021) 9 Earth’s Future . [8]  Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories’ (2014) 41(1) Critical Inquiry 1-23. [9]  Jonathan Symons, Ecomodernism: Technology, Politics, and the Climate Crisis  (Oxford University Press 2019). [10]  Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization  (Open Media 2015); Matthias Thaler, ‘Eco-miserabilism and Radical Hope: On the Utopian Vision of Post-Apocalyptic Environmentalism’ (2024) 118(1) American Political Science Review 318-31; cf. Mathias Thaler, No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-Changed World  (Cambridge University Press 2022) ch 5. [11]  Jonathan Lear, Imagining the end: Mourning and Ethical Life  (Harvard University Press 2022), 37ff, 56ff, cf. 110ff; Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation  (Harvard University Press 2008). [12]  Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia (Polity 2019). [13]  Jeremy Green, ‘Greening Keynes: Productivist Lineages of the Green New Deal’ (2022) 9(3) Anthropocene Review 324-43. [14]  See Ajay Singh Chaudhary, ‘We’re Not in this Together’ ( The Baffler , April 2020) < https://thebaffler.com/salvos/were-not-in-this-together-chaudhary > accessed 14 March 2025; now expanded in The Exhausted of the Earth  (Repeater 2024). The various options canvassed by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future  (Verso 2018), continue to look like plausible extrapolations. [15]  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor  (Harvard University Press 2013); see also Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Polity 2017). [16]  Cf. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil  (Verso 2011); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, ‘Rethinking Time in Response to the Anthropocene—From Timescales to Timescapes’ (2019) 9(2) Anthropocene Review 206, 211, 212, 213-5.  [17]  Adam Tooze, ‘We are living through the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene’ Guardian  (London, 7 May 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/we-are-living-through-the-first-economic-crisis-of-the-anthropocene > accessed 31 September 2024. [18]  For a succinct critique of Anthropocene narratives in favour of what has become known as the Capitalocene, see Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind: A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’ (2014) 1(1) The Anthropocene Review 62-9. [19]  Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ (2009) 35(2) Critical Inquiry 197-222; cf. Duncan Kelly, Politics and the Anthropocene  (Polity 2019) ch 1. [20]  William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming  (Duke University Press 2017) 16, 18, 20, 33-4. [21]  Adam Tooze, ‘After Escape: The New Climate Power Politics’ (2020) 114 E-Flux < https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/367062/after-escape-the-new-climate-power-politics/ > accessed 14 March 2025. [22]  Peter Osborne, ‘Planetary Politics?’ (2024) 145 New Left Review 103; cf. Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics  (Polity 2021). [23]  Etienne Benson, Surroundings  (University of Chicago Press 2018) 105ff, 118f, 122f, 132f. [24]  Vladimir Vernadsky, ‘The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere’. Excerpts from Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon (1938). Translated by William Jones’ (2012) 21st Century 18-9 < https://21sci-tech.com/Subscriptions/Spring-Summer-2012_ONLINE/04_Biospere_Noosphere.pdf > accessed 14 March 2025. [25]  Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Critical Zones—The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth  (MIT Press 2020). [26]  Dipesh Chakrabarty, One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax  (Brandeis University Press 2022). [27]  Julia Nordblad, ‘On the Difference between Anthropocene and Climate Change Temporalities’ (2021) 47 Critical Inquiry 330. [28]  ibid 342, 343, 345, 347. [29]  See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene  (Duke University Press 2016); developed in Adele Clark and Donna Haraway (eds), Making Kin, not Population  (Prickly Paradigm Press 2018). [30]  See the interview with Achille Mbembe, ‘How to develop a planetary consciousness’ ( Noma , 11 January 2022) < https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-develop-a-planetary-consciousness/ > accessed 31 September 2024; and his earlier essay ‘Planetary Entanglement’, in Out of the Dark Night  (Columbia University Press 2019) 7-41. [31]  For a helpful recent overview of how Latour combined these positions, often with a Catholic-inspired agenda, see Alyssa Battistoni, ‘Latour’s Metamorphosis’ ( NLR Sidecar , 20 January 2023) < https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/latours-metamorphosis > accessed 31 September 2024; Dominique Routhier, ‘Reactionary Ecology’ ( NLR Sidecar , 26 February 2024) < https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/reactionary-ecology > accessed 31 September 2024. [32]  For a little more detail here, see Duncan Kelly, ‘Wartime for the Planet’ (2022) 20(3) Journal of Modern European History 281-7.

Professor Judith Butler is a world-renowned philosopher and theorist whose writing has made them a household name. Their work has shaped and continues to shape how we conceive of gender, post-structuralism, embodiment, sexuality, and language. This interview is centred around Butler’s recent work Who’s Afraid of Gender?  (Allen Lane 2024), which addresses the cultural and political anxieties surrounding gender and gender nonconformity. The following discussion dissects the rise of anti-gender ideology and explores the possibilities provided by psychoanalysis, feminist coalitions, the law, language, and art in counteracting this ideology in order to achieve liveability.   This interview was conducted on 15 July 2024 . The views and opinions expressed by Judith Butler in this interview are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the interviewer or CJLPA . The interviewer assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the interviewee’s statements.   CJLPA : Who’s Afraid of Gender,  as the title suggests, is centred around various fears surrounding gender. The ‘anti-gender’ movement encapsulates multiple fears, whether of a destabilisation of norms, of invasion, inversion, regression, or also progression. Why is it that gender has become the site on which these fears have been projected? And what is it about gender that makes it so potent?   Judith Butler : It’s an excellent question. First, let me say that the anti-gender ideology movement does identify gender as a particularly dangerous and fearsome enemy. This anti-gender movement is largely part of broader right-wing movements, which target critical race theory, sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and migration studies as well. The teaching of race, gender, and sexuality tend also to be anti-migrant and/or subscribe to the Great Replacement theory. So, there are racial, sexual, gendered dimensions of this right-wing, psychosocial constellation, and gender can’t be easily or fully extricated from these other matters.   Secondly, I think it’s fair to say that potentially everyone is afraid of gender—that is, gender understood as gender identity or as a set of norms that convey both expectations and possible punishments. Gender and gender identity are, of course, distinct. Gender can be for some a way to establish a place in the world, who experience their body in a certain way, many of whom take gender for granted at the same time that they value its social operation. For some, gender anchors their experience and as such, when certain questions about gender get raised, they feel that anchor loosening, and fear a destabilisation or going adrift in directions that are unknown and possibly frightening.   That’s an abstract way of saying that many people don’t want to hear questions about how others can and do change their sex assignments or how the complexity of gender identity is lived. This fear also attends to the new vocabularies, including new pronouns, that have been developed to recognise that complexity of gender experience, not just among young people, but across generations, and which generally exist alongside political claims for equality and freedom, for protection against violence, and for protection against discrimination and pathologisation.   So, I ultimately think it is destabilising for those who hold the worldview, sometimes a religious view, that male and female are to be taken not only as naturally given or God given (divinely given through natural law) but also given for all time. That is, sex, or binary sex is considered to be an immutable thing we should not be debating—something that should not be subject to change or reinterpretation, something that is what it is for the time of life without alteration.   CJLPA : I wish to expand on the links you mentioned between race, gender, and sexuality a little later. However, prior to this, I wanted to focus more explicitly on some of the book’s terminology. The book ubiquitously refers to gender being construed as a ‘phantasm’ with purported destructive powers and draws on Jean Laplanche’s formulation of the ‘phantasmatic scene’. For the benefit of our readers, could you explain what it means for gender to be a ‘phantasm’ in the context of anti-gender ideology?   JB : One of the regrets I have about this book is that I didn’t spend enough time distinguishing the phantasmatic scene articulated by Laplanche from the adaptation I make of his theory for critical and political purposes—an appropriation that Laplanche himself or his followers would not have appreciated. The phantasmatic is invariably a structured scene where various elements come into a dynamic interplay. It has its own syntax governing the ways that elements can be related to one another. There are fantasies that we have that are more or less conscious. According to Susan Isaacs, ‘Phantasy’ with the ‘ph’ should designate unconscious processes. The phantasmatic is the syntactically organised scene in which phantasy plays out.   I was drawn to thinking about Laplanche’s phantasmatic scene because it gives us a way of understanding the psychosocial elements involved in what Umberto Eco identified as the ‘jumbled character of fascism’. Eco pointed out that those who are drawn to fascist movements are very often enticed by the fact that they don’t have to reconcile certain fears they’re living with. They are not governed by any standard of consistency or non-contradiction.   In other words, the enemy—in this case ‘gender ideology’—can stand for the acceleration of capitalism and hyper-individualism at the same time that it is taken to be a sign of an oncoming totalitarianism or state communism. Alternately, gender could represent the incarnation of the devil in our time, one which will destroy Biblical law and its mandates regarding men, women, and the family: its heteronormativity, heterosexuality, and the specific meanings of feminine and masculine. Is it an excess of freedom, of individualism, or is gender state control, a dogma, a campaign of indoctrination? It is said that gender is a doctrine of radical determinism. It is said that gender supports a totalitarian regime that will take people’s sex assignment away with the consequence that no one will any longer be able to be a man or woman. Supposedly, you will no longer be able to be a mother or a father as well! Gender is going to strip people of established sex identities. Those who fear the phantasm of gender can easily hold all these views at the same time, and land upon a ‘cause’ for their anxiety about what is happening to the world they once knew. And then we also have a different version of problems: gender permits for trans women to enter prisons and take over the place or invade it or do harm.   So, there are many different kinds of phantasmatic elements that are held together in one place or by one people, and that means they’re under no obligation to reconcile them. There’s no consistency mandate. There’s no coherency mandate because this ‘ideology’ collects them all and promises a relief from every point of anxiety or fear. There is something nearly religious in that promise which most fascists make. They’re going to restore order. They’re going to restore society to the way it used to be—in the case of anti-gender fascists, it is often patriarchal order or heteronormativity that needs to be restored. In this way, a promise of the restoration of order tends to also be part of the promise of fascism.   There’s one more point I would like to add. Freud’s interpretation of dreams was important to Laplanche, but also to me in thinking through the appropriation of Laplanche’s theory here. This is because in a dream sequence, as opposed to a logical one or most conscious ones that take a straightforward narrative form, there are elements that hold together different psychic issues—they could include an anxiety, a desire, or a fear. When one looks at how a dream is organised in terms of the characters, the landscape, the transitions, and the ambient feeling, it seems as if the psyche of the dreamer is, in fact, distributed in a certain way across the scene. It is, as we know, sometimes difficult to understand that the dream scene is the scene of one’s own psyche. It may well be informed by a profound residue from everyday life or infantile histories, or impressions from others. It’s never freed of the environment or social interaction—it carries those traces as well.   The phantasmatic scene is a particular way of rearranging those elements that doesn’t necessarily correspond in any mimetic way to reality; rather, it gives us a refraction of reality of a certain kind. I think that this way of thinking about phantasmatic scene helps us with Eco’s idea that here are these apparently disparate issues that are somehow brought together in a scene without having to be reconciled according to conscious, logical measures—criteria that we might usually seek to use.   CJLPA : That’s a very helpful framework. When you referenced Freud in the context of dreams, the first thing that came to me was his idea of Verschiebung  (displacement) which brings to mind how gender has been distorted in order to accommodate disparate, often conflicting, elements of anti-gender ideology.   JB : Yes, Freud’s ideas of both displacement and condensation are at play, but so too is externalisation. I continue to think that we can’t do an ideology critique of the critique of gender ‘ideology’ without Freud.   CJLPA : Building on the aforementioned fears surrounding gender, the book also identifies that one of the consequences has been a rise of trans exclusionary feminism. The politics of fear, here, is generally centred around a fear of replacement and/or of violation. How seriously should this fear be taken? Additionally, I wonder whether over-engaging with these concerns risks dominating the discourse, allowing this fear to have primacy over the right to existence for trans women?   JB : Well, first of all, the fear of violation when stated should always be taken seriously. I think we all have a fear of violation. I don’t know anyone who belongs to a vulnerable community—whether that’s gay, lesbian, bisexual people, travestis in Latin America, trans people, or Black and Brown people, especially migrants—who doesn’t fear violation. But how we define who or what is threatening to violate us is a different matter. If we decide that members of other vulnerable communities are the real threat, then we have forgotten to ask what makes any of us vulnerable. The answer to that involves knowing the broader map of power, including extractivism and exploitation, abjection and effacement.   If many of us live in fear of violation, harassment, harm, rape, and murder, then we need to think clearly about the conditions under which those fears are rightly registered, and those in which they are incited and magnified to serve a fully different political purpose. I find it especially hard these days when countries who had earlier signed the Istanbul Convention are now unsigning that convention that did seek, for instance, to protect women against marital rape and gay and lesbian people against discrimination and harm. It mandated various kinds of social policies to help people understand the harm of homophobia and misogyny, and these are mocked and distorted by the political right as totalitarian educational projects.   Indeed, we have leaders now who mock feminist aims or misuse them for their own purposes. Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, in their debate preceding the general election, debunked trans claims in ways that I found profoundly disrespectful and politically regressive. And Giorgia Meloni, who now fashions herself as a centrist despite her prior affiliations with fascism, promotes the restriction of reproductive rights, including access to reproductive technology. She also has begun the process of nullifying trans rights and challenging the legitimacy of gay and lesbian parenting rights. There are many people on the loose in positions of power who make us all feel the fear of violation, because it’s not just that we are losing legal protection, but violation is being renamed as something normal, and this discourse gives permission for a certain kind of violation.   There seems to be no recourse when the laws that are supposed to protect us actually harm us. Protection is itself a problematic notion, since it assumes a ‘protector’ who has power over us, and without whom our safety is put in question. Equally, when the laws that protect us are withdrawn or mocked or rendered inoperative, we are left even more vulnerable, having to find resources and support in extra-legal networks and communities. So, I understand the fear of violation, and I don’t blame any of the trans exclusionary women from voicing the fear of violation, but I do hold them accountable for making trans people, who suffer that same fear, into the paradigmatic abusers. This move is painful, unknowing, and unjust, amplifying prejudice rather than destroying it.   I have suggested several reasons for the fear of violation. These fears are multiplied for Black and Brown women, trans people, non-gender conforming people, and migrants. One question I have is how did it come to be that trans women, who have historically broken with certain notions of manhood to embrace an identity necessary for their lives—an identity that puts them at greater risk of discrimination, harm, and even murder—are now the targets of feminists who understand what it is to be vulnerable and courageous? Why wouldn’t we object to rape, violation, harm, and discrimination against all vulnerable communities? Identifying another vulnerable community as the true enemy, the one with all the power to hurt us, not only breaks solidarity but also misreads the map of power in our times. That is a perilous error and plays into the Right’s plan of action.   Unfortunately, many trans-exclusionary feminists use rhetoric similar to that of the new fascists and neo-authoritarians. I’m not saying they are, therefore, fascists or neo-authoritarians, but it remains remarkable how rarely they have stepped forward to distinguish their criticism of trans people from a right-wing eliminationist discourse. I wish they would, because if they don’t like being called fascists, they should show that they aren’t.   Feminists need to consider what alliances we want to be part of. In Latin American feminism, trans people are at the centre of the battle against fascism and state violence. Even the emerging left in France, although fragmented, shows how quickly people can overcome deep divisions when they see the necessity of opposing right-wing, white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic forces. Our alliances need to be as deep or deeper than their hatreds. We make a grave mistake when we become hyper-sectarian or separatist, identifying other vulnerable communities as the true danger to our lives.   CJLPA : This brings up several important points. You pointed out that many people understandably fear violence, and you also mentioned the lack of recourse when protective laws are rescinded. Additionally, you touched on how shifting political landscapes influence this situation. Given this context, how do you view the law’s potential: is it still effective, or is it too closely tied to shifting politics, making its protections inherently unstable and prone to change?   JB : I think the law is really important. I appreciate left legal scholars and organisations—especially those who take on lost cases to make a point. I don’t share the deep suspicion of the law that some people on the left have. However, I believe it would be terrible if legal frameworks became the ultimate political frameworks. We need a larger framework for politics that includes the law and allows it to serve broader political and social aims. The law cannot effectively support goals like freedom, equality, or justice without a political movement and a firmly built vision of politics that provides the aspirations, ideals, and principles guiding our legal activism.   CJLPA : Practically speaking, how can we leverage the law to achieve these desired changes?   JB : Some years ago, I was on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, and now I am excited to see how they use legal strategies to advance progressive politics. They have an extraordinary way of thinking about the law. There’s also the National Lawyers Guild in the US, and I’m sure there are UK equivalents that I’m not familiar with, which are committed to political aims that drive their decisions about cases to take, how to argue them, and which precedents to establish in order to support our political struggles. This dynamic is happening, and as academics we might need to engage more deeply with these legal organisations to understand how they work and perceive the relationship between law and politics, allowing that to inform our own efforts to distinguish and ally the two.   CJLPA : I now want to turn to the audience of the book. In the work, you describe experiences encountering individuals who are unwilling to engage in debate, some of whom even view your work and ideology as demonic. Moving beyond this group of people, I wonder how you navigate discussing the issues raised in this work with those who are willing to engage but who are outside of academic contexts? I noticed that this book, unlike your previous works, was published by a non-academic publishing house. Is there a deliberate shift in the audience you aim to reach with this book?   JB : There is often a difference between the audience you wish to reach and the one you actually reach. According to Amazon, my work reaches people in gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies, and those interested in the critique of fascism, which isn’t surprising. There has been some mainstream crossover, which I’m glad about. Even though I conceived this book as a non-academic one and deliberately published it with trade presses, it may still be a bit dense and lengthy for a broader public. Non-academics can get certain things from it, based on my conversations with many readers.   I wasn’t trying to defend my former positions in this book; I didn’t revisit my previous works like Gender Trouble  or Bodies That Matter  to clarify or defend past ideas. It wasn’t an academic self-defence or clarification. The concept of performativity is mentioned only a few times and in passing, which was deliberate because the book is not about me or my work.   Additionally, I dispute the idea that I have an ideology or that gender is an ideology. For me, self-criticism is important as I embark upon a new project. Often in my scholarship, I end up questioning presumptions from my earlier work. I appreciate the living character of theoretical work, where you can write a book with full conviction and then revise it based on people’s responses that you found persuasive. Academic humility is important. We shouldn’t hold positions over time and defend them against all opposition. Instead, we should listen to those who have good criticisms, or feel excluded or misunderstood by our positions, and be willing to change if we want to be responsive and overcome our own blind spots and unwitting prejudices.   Regarding the performativity of gender, I’m no longer sure how I feel about it. Other issues seem more important to me now. I became interested in talking to people who are unsure about what’s going on with the contemporary discourse on gender. For example, are women in prisons truly threatened by trans women? Or is the real threat from guards, or the prison system itself? The same people who threaten women in prisons often threaten trans people as well. What do we make of that? The violence of the prison system should be a focus, not just individual violent acts, but the harm inflicted by largely unsupervised guards, psychiatric personnel, and sentencing protocols.   Similarly, are women (AFAB) truly threatened by trans women using the same bathroom? Understanding the challenges trans people face when deciding which bathroom to use is crucial. Trans women and trans men face significant vulnerabilities and violence in these situations. For example, I have a friend, a trans man, who was thrown against a wall by police for choosing to use the women’s bathroom because he didn’t feel comfortable or safe in the men’s room. He was trying to avoid a potential scene of harassment by using the women’s bathroom. He figured he could be taken to be a very masculine lesbian butch. Why should such a person be in an imperilled situation no matter which bathroom they used? We should be identifying these vulnerabilities and sharing strategies and forms of resistance in a collective fashion rather than viewing each other as primary enemies, and letting the larger structures of oppressive power fade from view. This also applies to trans people who see feminism as their enemy. What a terrible and unnecessary division! The issue isn’t feminism as a whole but the broader transphobic world, with some feminists engaging in transphobia in horrific ways. Let us keep those larger structures in mind. We are more easily gathered together as a right-wing phantasm than by ourselves, in the interests of solidarity.   CJLPA : I would like to hone in on the importance of listening to those who feel excluded and allowing our own perspectives to be shaped by the lived experiences of others. I also appreciate you sharing your friend’s experience. With this in mind, I’m wondering whether you see a clear distinction between scholarship and activism, and if so, how would you define that distinction?   JB : I think there is a distinction. I think this book tries to show a not fully scholarly audience what scholarship actually does—that the false things that are said about gender can be defeated or debunked in a patient and informed way. For instance, I discuss biology at some length because people often wrongly say that gender denies the materiality of the body. That’s simply not the case. Look at the incredible work in feminist biology and feminist science studies—it is an extraordinarily rich field.   There are different ways to debunk or to oppose the false things that are said about gender. That’s important to do, but I’m also trying to deflate the fears that have become prevalent in the public discourse. People believe that their traditional households will be disrupted or destroyed by some gender ideology that’s let loose into the world. That’s not the case. A trans or queer couple living next to you won’t disrupt your traditional heteronormative marriage with your children and a dog. They won’t come rushing into your home to take your sexed identity away.   Many feel that their sense of being natural, necessary, and universal is profoundly challenged by the existence of queer kinship and trans folks trying to find reproductive technology that works for them. They feel deeply threatened. But are they truly threatened? What is it they’re actually at risk of losing? The only thing a traditionalist who’s afraid of gender ideology is losing is the sense of being superior, exclusive, and universal. My advice to them is to mourn that loss. You still get to have your life. It’s the same thing you’d say to a white supremacist: yes, you’re losing that sense of supremacy. That’s good. You’re going to live in a better world governed by equality, and that loss is necessary to live in that better world.   I don’t expect the most avid proponents of anti-gender ideology to be convinced by me. I suppose I am trying to talk to people who are confused in the political centre or who don’t know how to adjudicate some of the claims that are circulated without support on social media and news outlets. I looked at the Sex Matters internet site, for instance. They take established scientific journals and reject their claims without offering evidence to the contrary. This is bad scholarship and bad journalism. We need to listen carefully and distinguish between informed and ill-informed views.   I had someone come to a talk in San Francisco recently; she was a member of a trans-exclusionary feminist group. She and her cohorts leafleted the event in advance, and some of them came inside and then lined up to speak after the presentation concluded. One of them asked a question, and I thought that was good opportunity to see whether dialogue is possible. That person spoke about her fear of violation, identifying trans women as the threat to her personal safety. My approach was to have provisional empathy with that fear and then to open it up, and to ask if what you say you’re fearing is indeed the source, the reason for your fear. Are there other sources of this feeling that many of us share that something is, in fact, threatening our lives? I said, ‘like you, I fear violation. But unlike you, I understand its sources and instruments differently’. If we had been able to pursue a conversation, that would have been a starting point. It’s important to understand the kind of fear trans exclusionary feminists feel, and to offer them another way of understanding how widely shared that fear is, what might be accounting for it, and to let them know that trans and queer people share that fear. That can lead to a potential solidarity. Maybe we could overcome what I take to be a lamentable division among some feminists—a very minority view within feminists—that is trans exclusionary, creating a division between them and trans and queer allies.   CJLPA : In the book, you propose a form of coalition wherein all those targeted unite effectively, despite their differing viewpoints, leveraging their power in numbers. You note that a coalition, at its best, is not comfortable. However, beyond discomfort what do you think are the primary obstacles standing in the way of achieving this coalition? And how do we go about minimising these?   JB : I think it’s perfectly possible to ally without overcoming obstacles. To accept that there are, at least for now, irresolvable differences, and at the same time, to realise that an alliance is necessary in order to fight off a form of power—whether it’s fascist, neo-fascist, or authoritarian—that is going to strip people of their rights.   Here I am talking about women of all kinds, trans people, gay and lesbian people, queer people, migrants, vulnerable people, especially Black and Brown people, and indigenous people. We really identify and document who is involved in the attacks on such people and what powers are undermining the economic futures of those who are most precarious, including workers whose unions have been weakened or disbanded. We would be very foolish not to see the larger picture.   People ask me, ‘How would we get along? There’s so much vitriolic antagonism. How could we ever make an alliance?’ Ultimately, there are times when that vitriol and antagonism are not resolved but are understood to be secondary when threats are more appropriately identified as coming from fascist or right-wing sources of profit and power, both state and non-state powers. Ecologically speaking, we don’t have time for these internecine conflicts or, if they are necessary, we can accept the unresolved character of those conflicts as we join in the fight against fascism. When the question becomes, ‘How are trans and feminist people going to get along?’, we need to ask: What is the framework in which you’re asking that question? It’s very small and has narrowed into this little fight. What’s the background for that fight? What happens if we open up the frame to understand the background of that fight?   To what extent are we having that fight in order not to see ecological catastrophe, the true damage of hyper-capitalism, whose trace is in fascist discourse, or the true damage of amplified state power, whose trace is also in fascist discourse? What would a left, feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist alliance look like that could identify these issues given all the resources we have from socialist history and theory and from ecological criticism? What could we do if we understood those internal differences as persistent but secondary?   CJLPA : Looking at the bigger picture is clearly essential in the context of this coalition. However, some might be concerned that within a diverse and pluralistic feminist coalition, marginalised voices could risk being overshadowed by more dominant perspectives. What is your view on this potential issue?   JB : The form of coalition that I advance is one that Black feminists have articulated. I think that Black feminism is the future of feminism, and that it should indeed lead the way. Feminism from the Global South that has been building coalitions knows how to do it. These are the most important points of reference for thinking about coalition. It’s from that hard-won understanding that the rest of us need to learn. In that sense, those who emerge fighting from a history of subordination are leading the way.   CJLPA : I fully agree that intersectional feminism is the way forward. This also ties in with a discussion of language, as the book mentions how Eurocentric fictions have organised language into fixed and normative binaries. Therefore, while there is power in putting oneself into discourse (through the use of pronouns, for example), not everyone is given this power. What, then, does a decolonial approach to understanding gender look like, and how do we go about widening the ambits of discourse?   JB : This is one of those moments that Naomi Klein refers to as a ‘doppelgänger issue’. The Vatican claims that gender is an ideology seeking to colonise  the Global South, asserting that gender is another imperialist export and will undermine local cultures, especially the culture of the poor. Of course, if you’re on the left, you recognise the left version of this argument: ‘Oh no, we don’t want a feminism that’s imperialistic. We want an anti-colonial feminism. We want a decolonial feminism. We want a feminism that thinks seriously about white supremacy and colonial power and how feminism has been deployed to support those forms of objectionable power’. Of course, we want to deploy feminism against those colonial powers. There’s just no question about that. So, we could be taken aback or even taken in by the Vatican’s claim. But here is where we need to make a distinction.   What the Vatican would like to impose on the Global South is a Christian missionary view of the natural family: white, heteronormative, and anti-feminist. This view re-subjugates women and challenges the notion of gay and lesbian marriage or gay and lesbian forms of intimate association or kinship that are not necessarily marital or conjugal. So, we see a different kind of colonial imposition, the one that the Church has always been imposing, acting as if it is the protection against colonial domination. Now that needs to be exposed and analysed in detail. It’s not easy because we do know that there are colonial forms of feminism, and that feminism has been deployed in a pernicious and horrible way to wage wars against Muslim and Arab peoples, for instance. Such ‘feminist’ war tactics fail to recognise both Muslim feminist networks and anti-colonial feminist movements. The US has used feminism to advance war and colonial occupation, as we see in the mainstream coverage of the war against Palestine. But Palestinian women and children have been the ones to suffer most in that war.   So, we do need very strong criticisms of colonial feminism, but we also need to understand how versions of colonialism can be furthered by the right-wing appropriation of left arguments and the creation of a kind of confusion among people who cannot see the difference. It cannot be the case that we conclude, ‘Oh, the anti-colonial thing to do is to accept the Church’s teachings!’ No, that’s to accept a different version of colonialism, or sometimes the same version that the Church says is imposed by the Global North as they themselves impose it (from the Vatican, part of the Global North). I do think the Global North imposes ideas of gay rights, lesbian rights, and feminism that are very often smug, arrogant, and destructive, assuming what forms resistance and liberation should take for all people, imposing local norms as if they are, or should be, universal. That is actually a critique I have made alongside many others, and I continue to make it. Unfortunately, it rhymes with the Vatican view. Here again drawing distinctions is crucial, marking off the critique of colonial feminism and the one that’s being advanced by the Church as a subterfuge for the amplification of its own colonial power. I do try to address that a bit in the book. It’s not a large section, but I point to the scholarship that is doing that and should surely be read.   CJLPA : Who’s Afraid of Gender?  also explores ‘monolingual obstinacy’ and the productive potential of translation. Could you explain these concepts briefly, so that those readers who may not have read the book yet have a sense of how this ties in with our discussion.   JB : Well, one way of entering that question is autobiographical. I wrote Gender Trouble  in 1987 and 1988. It came out in late 1989. Suddenly that book took off in the US and the UK, Australia as well, and was translated into twenty-something languages in the following years. I was invited to various places, met those translators who were working with my language in Latin America but also in Eastern Europe. Those translators were also scholars. They were, and remain, scholars of the topic and they knew things about gender, sexuality, law, social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis that I didn’t know. I ended up learning from them not only about theory and the problem of translation, but the asymmetry of translation, how English floods non-English markets, how scholarship from an array of languages rarely finds its way into English unless the scholars master academic English. I also had to confront the limits of English, the arrogance of anglophone theory, and the importance of attending to the non-translatable.   Indeed, exposed to other languages through the translations of Gender Trouble  actually allowed me to learn different ways in which gender—as a term, a concept—is and is not translatable. Gender produced a disturbance in the so-called ‘target language’—I hate that military word, but that’s how translation theory works. I learned all kinds of things about why it doesn’t work. For instance, many people in South Africa explained to me why the term gender doesn’t work because there are all sorts of local ways in different African languages for designating what we call gender positions in kinship and community. Many people in East Asia explained why it was so hard to translate and the various political debates about translation. Even in Germany, where it seemed like ‘Geschlecht’ was the only thing you could use, it was too biological, related more to ‘species’ than to difference or identity. Maybe we should just say ‘gender’, or in French, could you really say ‘genre’ given the literary traditions that distinguish among them with such enthusiasm? So, I learned a huge amount as a consequence of being translated and actually came to be able to read in Spanish, which I never could do before, even though I live in California—and should have, much earlier. My own first-worldism was appropriately challenged, if not shattered. I became very interested in all the examples of why gender does not work. And I made friends with my translators, many of whom are among my most important interlocutors. My views on the importance of multilingualism to any theory of gender were established only after being translated.   Perhaps one insight I have now is the result of translation: gender sometimes works in ways we don’t anticipate and is sometimes feared in ways that are completely different from what it means in the scholarship or even in law and social policy. But sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s not the term; sometimes it needs to be forfeited for another vocabulary altogether. Those of us who’ve been working in that framework of gender, or gender studies, need to listen and learn and revise what we think according to what folks who are grappling with the issue of translation tell us.   Even though I haven’t been strictly monolingual as an adult, I still think every English language speaker and writer has to deconstruct their monolingual obstinacy, take apart the assumption that English is the language in which theory takes place or English is the language in which things become most clear. It’s not the case. Theory is not produced in the Global North, or in English, and then applied to the South. For those who work with that unexamined assumption, they operate with an arrogance that has to be undone. Embracing the practice of translation is a knowledge-seeking activity. It is, in fact, one of the main ways to learn about the world, that is, how the world is organised differently. It is also one of the main ways to learn how to speak across languages with greater care and openness, letting another language enter and transform one’s thought. I am a strong supporter of a transnational and multilingual forms of coalition. Those are both enormously important for any global movement that addresses the conditions of destruction, exploitation, extractivism, and domination.   CJLPA : It is crucial to go beyond one’s own perspective, rooted in one’s language, to understand how gender is currently understood by others and how it possibly could be understood looking forward. With this in mind, it is interesting that some feminists or gender theorists advocate for a post-gender world. Yet, your approach emphasises making diverse social embodiments more liveable.   Within the transgender community you acknowledge that while the binary framework works for some to articulate their gender identity, it is unworkable for others. Specifically, for those for whom the binary is unworkable, there is a form of hermeneutical injustice when it comes to the intelligibility of non-normative expressions of gender identity. There seems to be a tension between the flexibility to self-describe and this social intelligibility—I wonder what you make of this tension.   JB : Well, look, there are those who say to me, don’t we want to simply abolish the gender system? And I generally respond, from what position would we, or could we, do that? I accept that we’re historically formed and that we act from a distinct situation. I would not say that we are historically determined in a deterministic sense by all kinds of norms. We can, and do, break with them. But the conditions of that break? How do we understand that historically, as evidence of the open-ended and nondetermined character of history and historical formation? I don’t think we can leap out of history or our own historical formations to simply get rid of gender. We can do that in a play or a film, or maybe a dream, and dreams are important for politics, to be sure. But what precisely is the practice of abolishing gender?   We could start by saying, ‘Okay, hospitals shouldn’t assign sex’—which is a very interesting idea, one that Monique Wittig proposed, and I liked it when I first heard it, but I took it as a thought experiment. If we seized power in hospitals and banned sex assignment, then we would be accused of being those totalitarians who are going to strip people of their sexed identities. Is that what we want? Or are we on the side of freedom, wanting to expand the domain of gender freedom? Of course, that threatens the Right from another side, but so be it. If we want to abolish gender through law, then through what state power would we act? And would we then be aligned with the State, or would we be State powers? Is that what we want?   I think of sex assignment as iterable, meaning it happens not just once, but throughout life. It happens again and again. I suggest that that’s true for people who stay with their original sex assignments, who effectively say ‘I was assigned female. I like being female. Female is great. I’m assigning myself female all the time. I am in my life living out that assignment and repeating it and reproducing it’. No one simply has a sex assignment. It is being renewed all the time, or broken with, recommenced with another category. So we might say there’s an iterable or performative dimension to sex assignment (which does not mean it is fake or an artifice). No, it’s part of the temporality of a life. Sex assignment happens when we rely on observations about what sex someone is. There are chains of such acts, and those chains can be broken by those who actually need to break the chain to live, and to start another sequence as a way of living, if not flourishing.   I think that takes us away from the idea of a punctual and definitive sex assignment, which I don’t think does justice to the way that assignment works in a lifetime over the course of a life—and how it can change.   CJLPA : I find this approach highly compelling. I am also curious to hear what role you think art—especially visual art which transcends language—has in this venture of ‘curating’ one’s self-expression and broadening the remits of how gender is perceived.   JB : I think art is crucial. I think we need a new imaginary or, rather, counter-imaginary. The right wing is filling the world with these phantasms. They appeal to passions like fear and anxiety, longing for a different world, mainly an ideal of a former way of life. And what do we on the Left offer? What passions are ours? And how do we appeal to them imagining a future in a different way—not the imagined future in which patriarchy and racism is restored, but an imagined picture of greater liveability, equality, justice, and freedom?   I do think that liveability has to be included as a goal. It sounds like a very modest goal, but it’s not. It actually includes survival and flourishing. And it assumes equality and universality, since I cannot achieve a liveable life if the conditions for that life are not accessible to everyone else. At the same time, it is not easy to stipulate for everyone what constitutes the ‘liveable’. I published a short book with Frédéric Worms on this.[1] For instance, I’m not going to say from the outset that anybody who stays in the binary gender system is not living a liveable life—who would I be to say that? That’s just wrong. However, if they live in that binary system and say that no one can live outside of it, then I’m going to oppose them. So, I think we need to accept from the outset that people find liveable very different ways of naming and practicing embodiment. Affirming that complexity is important with the caveat that certain ways of practicing sexuality can be coercive and violent and must be categorically opposed.   I understand that Gender Trouble  was taken by some readers to license self-expression as a value. Although that is certainly important, I’m less interested in self-expression than in establishing modes of liveability that includes the affirmation of complexity. Once we go back to self-expression as the core of our aesthetic practice—focusing on issues such as self-crafting, we’re also implicitly or explicitly subscribing to individualism. And then we’re forgetting that what we need to do is fight for a world in which liveability is achieved by affirming complexity and difference. So, I want a common, if not collective, vision, and not simply an individualistic one.   CJLPA : Finally, I’m aware that you have put off writing a book on Kafka to write Who’s Afraid of Gender?  I’m curious about whether you believe Kafka’s writings offer any insights into countering anti-gender ideology.   JB : I always have—there might even be a brief reference to Kafka in Gender Trouble . I had read Derrida, I’d seen Derrida give a talk on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’   as I was writing Gender Trouble , and I’ve been teaching Kafka for many years. I love his humour, and I appreciate his ways of seeking to flee a world that is fundamentally unliveable. There are fundamental questions in Kafka about the ways that legal life confounds human existence, extending key legal concepts like judgment and prison to everyday life. He lets us to see that the promises of law to deliver justice, for instance, are very often broken, or that some legal systems built on property relations and racism, break their promise of justice at the moment of making it. As a result, we have to reconceive our way of understanding law as bound up with that broken promise and the way that promise works in our lives, inspiring the very hope that it tends to destroy.   It is easier to think about the false promises of authoritarian and fascist leaders than the ones we live within democracies governed by the rule of law. Of course, there are false promises that are made by fascist leaders right now, but we would be wrong to think that the fascism at issue is not produced in the midst of democracies that are supposed to be their opposite. The false promise is exciting and blinding, and some people would rather have the promise, regardless of its falsity, than not have it at all. Very often in these cases, the promises of a restoration to a former time are fuelled by a restoration fantasy.   Kafka exposes how that works. In his short fiction, mainly parables, but also the novels, the narrative expectation is established that law will deliver justice, that liberation is at hand, that a way out can be found. And then, in The Trial  for instance, it turns out that sentencing and punishment precede the trial that never arrives. This destruction of a narrative expectation relates, for instance, to the work of Ruth First’s 117 Days . That work speaks, of course, to questions of indefinite detention under South African Apartheid, but it also speaks to the scrambled sequences that now govern our lives. So, I would argue that there are temporal and fictive dimensions to fascist passion and fascist promise that would benefit from a reading of Kafka.   CJLPA : What strikes me most about Kafka’s writing is the quintessential narrative manipulation of time and space. To me, it seems that this disfiguration and disorientation from conventional coordinates also prompts readers to reimagine the status quo and to consider different realities which easily extends to gender.   JB : For sure, if you think about developmental narratives—‘oh, you’re born a girl, you’re supposed to become a woman’, many ways of blocking freedom and complexity are taking place. The detour, the error, the ‘failure’ are all constitutive of the scene of gender, as are new beginnings and persistent modes of ambivalence. This temporal elaboration within which we seem to live, almost unconsciously, is generally accompanied by great disturbance, and that is significant. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in forward motion of any kind; I am in favour of forms of hope that can be shared and grounded in workable solidarities. Kafka disturbs the temporal developments that are often assumed or expected in literature, law, and life, so one question is how such expectations inform promises of a political or legal kind, or even religious expectations of fulfilment. That disturbance does open up a different kind of imaginary, one perhaps that we don’t know how to expect, but which will change the course of our political expectations of justice. Or so I hope—see, I do hope. This interview was conducted by Helena de Guise. Helena graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2022. She remains academically interested and personally engaged in feminism, law, German literature, and postcolonial theory. [1] Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms, The Liveable and the Unliveable  (Fordham University Press 2023).

Art has been part of our being for millions of years—possibly even before the beginning of our genus Homo—without being understood as what we now call art. From the beginning, it was simply another way of knowing, probably our first, of coping with what confronted us in our environment as a necessary way of surviving in it and sharing that knowledge with others. It sprang from an emotional reaction to what existed outside of us and how we translated that feeling to pass it on. Often that shock was significant enough for our ancestors to know instinctively to communicate it wordlessly, since it predates language, and to do so with the limited means at their disposal. They did this by creating sounds, movements, or things to represent those emotions—symbols, through things found or made, to pass on those feelings subconsciously. This is what we have come to call art.   We were not put on earth to master it as many religions and political systems espouse. We are a product of the earth and to continue that existence we must know our environment, the earth in all its dimensions. The ‘purpose’ of life is to know, to learn, and through knowing ensure its survival. To live is to learn, to learn is to live. The need to know our environment in order to survive in it is something we share with all living things. Each manifestation of life, from the simplest to the most complex, has evolved means of interacting with its immediate environment in order to find in it sustenance, protection, and whatever is needed to survive. We, as humans, have one of the most complex such manifestations, which has evolved to provide us with both our instinct and our intellect as ways of interacting with our surroundings and knowing in our own limited way.   Henri Bergson defined the two, instinct—feeling, emotion—and intellect—memory and reason—along with intuition, which he calls the instinct educated by the intellect, meaning that instinct is also something which evolves.[1]   As we did eventually with art, our species continued to split knowing into other categories, whether religion, philosophy, or science. This has been effective to some extent by focusing more deeply on different aspects of human behaviour, but it has also created boundaries to knowing. Because those categories are relatively recent human creations, they provide insights useful to understanding how humans express the different dimensions of their being, how they are communicated, and how that communication becomes expressed socially. That first way of knowing is through feeling, the response most living creatures have to their surroundings. In our case, it was a pre-intellectual reaction to those experiences which collectively evolved into symbolic thought and symbolic representation and eventually manifested as art.   The need to know, to which art is one response, is at the heart of existence, something we share with other species, each of which has its way of knowing and sharing. We started, as all living organisms do, by having an emotional reaction to something, whether positive or negative for our survival, and storing that memory as a mental sign, the root of instinct. As the genus Homo evolved, the accumulation of emotionally provoked memories became our intellect and retained knowledge passed on through generations, which in turn coloured our emotional responses to our environment and allowed us to eventually communicate them through speech.   In a long career in art, I often asked artist friends which came first in their minds, speech or art. They all responded, as if a given, that we had art in the way I have defined it before speech as a way of communicating our feelings to others.   The first ‘good or bad’ response to situations in nature was the primal emotional reaction to external stimuli. Is it something dangerous or useful to my survival? Is it something I can eat or will it eat me? That response and the memory of those responses is what allowed us to survive. It is seeing from another part of ourselves, our instinctive side, internal, founded on experience and memory, in an attempt to understand the world around us, survive in it, and share that knowledge with others. Sentient before intelligent.   That emotion and memory are located in the amygdala and the limbic system, this most primal part of our brains, is significant in understanding how ancient this process must be. We can almost see our ‘lizard’ brain’s head darting back and forth in response to possible pleasure or potential danger. That emotional response, a reaction between the individual and the external stimulus, is recorded in the memory as an image, a sign, a seed of a symbol, what Gilbert Simondon called a symbole-souvenir  or memory-symbol. [2] When one or another of those reactions enter our memory, the grounding of the intellect, we have the very primitive beginning of symbolic thought—one might say instinct. What we understand as art today is rooted in this early beginning; it was always there from the start and evolved in complexity and capacity as everything involving life and humanity did. As we embarked on that Bergsonian two-step, an emotional reaction to a confrontation, positive or negative, to something outside of us, we started building up experiences to guide us further. The fact that the amygdala is involved in memory gave our perception the information accumulated through experience to help decide what was good or bad by recalling reactions to past encounters. One might call this the evolving intellect.   Neuroscience has confirmed that role of the amygdala as proposed by James McGaugh several years ago:   The findings of human brain imaging studies are consistent with those of animal studies in suggesting that activation of the amygdala influences the consolidation of long-term memory; the degree of activation of the amygdala by emotional arousal during encoding of emotionally arousing material (either pleasant or unpleasant) correlates highly with subsequent recall. The activation of neuromodulatory systems affecting the basolateral amygdala and its projections to other brain regions involved in processing different kinds of information plays a key role in enabling emotionally significant experiences to be well remembered.[3]   This beginning of symbolic thought in embryonic form evolved to become art—founded on artists’ emotional reaction to the ‘real’ in their time and space, developed with the action of the intellect, and then communicated to others through their own emotional reactions to it.   When we are confronted with something we don’t know, something not already clearly part of our memories, we make up an answer, inventing something to explain what is in front of us from our limited experiences. This is essential to our being able to move forward. Edwige Armand and I propose that creativity is provoked by a crisis in perception caused when the givens we possess for understanding what we are experiencing are insufficient to explain it. When we don’t understand what we are confronting, we will make up an answer, linking things not necessarily related, but with an internal logic of its own through invented relationships with things already believed. British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has described this as ‘sensing the lack of fit between perception and cognition, and using this as a stimulus to shift the way we both see and think’. [4]  That stimulus is what we proposed as the crisis-provoked call to creativity in which our intuition dips into what Armand named ‘forgotten memories’ to find or invent a suitable explanation. [5]   The same process is what creates mythologies, the mental shorthand used to transmit an understanding our world: a solution pulled from our unconscious through reinvention that changes forever our perception, how we see, think, and imagine. Perception is what artist Robert Irwin calls the subject of art [6]  and why Marshall McLuhan called artists educators of perception. [7]  That being so, artists generally sense a change in perception before the rest of the population, which is why society takes time to digest and understand their proposals, sometimes as long as a century. It is also why artists have always been interested in what we’ve come to know as science, how we understand the world intellectually, knowledge which feeds our imaginations. If science defines our reality as is the case in our society, it becomes a major subject of art, in both its intellectual proposals—structures—and the technologies it produces—tools.   Bergson’s understanding of perception, its limitations and potential, led him to recognise the special relation between perception and the artist:   For hundreds of years there have been men [and women] whose function has been precisely to see and make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists. What is the aim of art if not to show us, in nature and in the mind, outside of us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness […] The great painters are men [and women] who possess a certain vision of things which has or will become the vision of all […] Art would suffice then to show us that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible.[8]   That communication is triggered by the emotion of the creator connecting through the emotion of the receptor. Art is about emotion and emotion is about the body and the body’s encounter with the exterior. It is the other way of knowing, long before the evolution of our intellect pushed it aside, touting reason as the only way of comprehending, a limiting inheritance from the Enlightenment. Our emotional response to an artwork is our connection to the emotion of the artist who created it. That response literally incorporates it into us and makes it part of our being. Learning in depth must be more than intellectual to become truly part of us.   Art is born out of our curiosity toward our environment and an effort to engage with it and understand it on a first level, knowing it with the whole self. Art is an emotional engagement with our surroundings and calls on an emotional response from the receiver to complete the effort. Those emotions, even though overlapping, are as unique to the artist who created it as they are to each of us, a result of our life experiences, our physical make-up, a product of our embodied minds, as Varela put it. [9] Emotions cannot exist without a physical body to experience them. They can be communicated intellectually but not completely, which is what makes the artistic experience sometimes difficult to explain in words. Each person’s emotional response to someone else’s emotions is coloured by their own. Emotions can be imitated, which we have ritualised and even made into an art form. In theatre, in cinema, the performing arts, we have what we call ‘suspension of disbelief’, a convention by which we accept the imitation as temporarily real and offer our emotional selves to the spectacle to mix with the simulated emotions of the players.   Parenthetically, this seems also to apply to politics, which are never very far from theatre. It is in syncing our emotional experiences with others that a bond is made between humans and is how society functions. Our emotions can fool us and many societies have mistrusted them, often for good reason. When the emotions are faked it can cause confusion and a skewed response. We seem to be up to our eyes and ears in that today, in our contrived and manipulated communication space. If the shared emotions are negative the resulting pact will be negative, if not flat-out evil. We have seen many examples of the evil it can cause throughout human history, particularly in movements appealing heavily to emotion, as the twentieth-century authoritarian regimes— whether Fascist, Nazi, or Communist—did very effectively. In art the Italian Futurists demonstrated how precarious that borderline can be. That danger is present today with emotion gaining over reason in the public domain, as we at the same time add more and more dimensions to our communication space. The resulting social networks are full of fascist tropes of hatred for the other. They grew in an unregulated fashion, creating a media free-for-all focused on the violent and the shocking for financial gain through increasing the number of online users exposed to advertising.   I define communication space as the sum of all means we have of transmitting and receiving information as individuals and collectively. I have a personal communication space. My social group or nation has a collective communication space. It is made up of what we exchange with others, our education in its broadest sense, what we read and learn, and, in our time, mass communications and the media. It is where a society sees itself and where its members learn how to function, where we find our models of comportment.   My emphasis on emotion in art is not to dismiss the importance of the intellect to the artist’s search for solutions to the self-imposed problems—perceptual crises—leading to a work’s final form. That finality is a question of feeling, both an emotional and intellectual satisfaction with the work, and the artist’s first audience is the artist him- or herself. Art is not made in the first instance to communicate but to satisfy the personal need to record that feeling. In much prehistoric cave painting the images are often in obscure and inaccessible parts of the cave, limiting who saw them. Art is a very private thing until the moment when the artist dares to put it before a public. When does one arrive at the satisfaction of work completed, the solution to that self-imposed problem? One of hardest things for an artist is to know when to stop, when the work is finished, simply because there is no predetermined finality in art. Giorgio de Chirico used to sneak into museums to continue working on some of his paintings, which were still evolving in his mind.   In general, we give, consciously or unconsciously, an emotional weight and symbolic significance to what we perceive, another dimension depending on our reaction to it. Some of that might be based on new intellectual givens we have discovered, some uniquely on feelings derived from our culture and the need to fit what we see into our belief system. The new and the old are often in conflict. Some might eventually become superstitions. Many millennia ago, if I killed an albino bear and the next day a volcano erupts, I would never kill an albino bear again. We are always looking for links between things, patterns, and making up why things are related. This we share with every culture which ever existed. It is what we call culture and our first way of knowing together. Later, we try doing this in an objective and logical way, supposedly eliminating the emotional aspect, and we call that science.   Christianity as the dominant European philosophical, psychological, and moral guide throughout the Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance exhausted itself in the Thirty Years’ War of the early seventeenth century. The way was opened to fill that vacuum through the Enlightenment which codified the changed worldview wrought by the Renaissance, proposing a clockwork paradigm, the Mechanical Universe. It gave Western society a new model of how things work based solely on reason. The excess of emotion witnessed during those years of slaughter provoked an understandable mistrust of that side of humanity. What became the governing paradigm was founded uniquely on the material and measurable. The Mechanical Universe was invented as the ultimate explanation of how the world worked and reason the only accepted method for understanding. That gave birth to Positivism and its banning of emotion and total reliance on science. That mistrust exists to this day among ‘serious’ people, but as long as emotion is suppressed it will always find a way out and when it does the results are not usually beneficial. We ignore it at our own risk.   Eliminating emotion in the scientist is an illusion and a distortion of what science is, an unfortunate fallout from Positivism. Cogito ergo sum —I think, therefore I am— was a useful but limited approach to how humanity is defined . René Descartes’ formula helped promote the idea of individual agency, one of the defining elements of modernity, but its focus on reason as the only way of knowing ignored the other half of the human to the detriment of the model of how humans actually function. Sentio ergo sum —I feel, therefore I am—is how most people first react to sensory input. Recognising that aspect of humanity not only allows us to understand the whole human by recognising the other half, but also connects our species with the rest of the living world which reacts principally through feeling. Objectivity is a tool, an important one, but to imagine that scientists manage to eliminate their emotional side is a distortion. The scientists operate as all of us do with their fullest selves—indivisibly—but recognise when emotion colours the scientific search for answers. Peer review is the method developed to guard against just that.   In western history, Positivism, evolving from the debates of the Enlightenment, tried to deny the emotional side by declaring rationality the only approach to true knowledge, such that all else must be rejected. Anything coming from feeling was unreliable, even dangerous, and excluded from a mechanical quantifiable view of how things work. It has created a distorted perception for many human beings, a worldview based on a diminished idea of the human. That may work for understanding material processes but not how human beings function. Reason helps curb emotion’s excesses but emotion modifies reason’s rigidity. The interaction between Sentio…  and Cogito…  defines us and may be the space of Bergson’s élan vital , where life grows. Dualisms are useful only if we understand them as two points of a triangulation leading to a deeper understanding of what they address , the third point. In Bergson’s case his dualism of instinct and intellect defines understanding.   For over 40 years I have promoted the idea that we are living a new renaissance based on the premise that, historically, when art and science fundamentally change the definition of reality and its representation, we are confronted by a profound transformation which demands a reinvention of the institutions by which we interact and govern. Those new structures will eventually replace the older ones which no longer work or function in a degraded and decadent mode, a distortion of their original mandate. The new institutions will be based on a different operational schema, a new paradigm, which for me is the interactive network replacing the mechanical model which has dominated since the Enlightenment. That reinvention brings front and centre the relationship between individual and society and the foundation of the authority to govern—sovereignty, redefining both and their interaction. We are once again confronted by that need today.   The machine model recognised and credited the person, individuals as distinct parts operating together through opposing parts—friction between gears. The network model again recognises the individual as a singularity but as connected, cooperating members—the person and his or her network of others. The distinguishing fundamental definition of the new renaissance is the difference between opposition and cooperation.   A renaissance is always a violent period with the old order stubbornly defended by those that profit from it most and the so-called new often being promoted with equal energy. A renaissance takes time to move from destruction to construction which is the frontier we now inhabit. The new paradigm which replaces the clockwork of the mechanical universe is, I proposed, the interactive network, whereby everything is understood as connected and interdependent. Art and science, because they represent broadly the two principal ways of how human beings interact with their environment in trying to understand it, are our evolved tools for doing so, instinct and intellect. Both have pointed to that new schema for well over 150 years. [10]   In 2001, I organised a conference on art and science with Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry, at the Rockefeller Conference Centre in Bellagio, Italy. [11] We brought together a small group of people from both fields to talk freely over several days about how we understand human creativity, which came up consistently during our five days together. One of the participants, Margaret Boden, a founder of cognitive science and an early explorer of AI and creativity, described creativity in an analysis as profound, complete, and intellectual as science would demand. Mandelbrot objected strenuously, proclaiming that ‘no, no, no, creativity was like a hand coming down from heaven touching you with inspiration’. The dispute between the two scientists was, of course, the core argument which still exists today, the pull between cogito  and sentio  in understanding humanity.   The capacity for symbolic thought, as I have explained above, has always been part of our makeup in its earliest primitive forms since the beginning of our genus and most probably well before. It comes from an instinctive and unintellectual operation of that curiosity which is part of every living being’s functioning as a way of exploring the environment. With our ancestors it often led to finding and keeping objects, stones, fossils, organic or inorganic, which excited that curiosity by whatever made the objects exceptional. We can also imagine sound as being a found object in that our earliest ancestors were very alert to the sounds in nature, imitating them in hunting and possibly as a beginning of articulated communication among themselves. When the found object, the first overt manifestation of what we now know as art, was kept and shared with others it acquired a symbolic sense for the group as well as the individual who found it, an unarticulated meaning but something felt to be important. We still have traces of this today when we come home from the beach with a bag of stones and shells which we found fascinating and decided to keep. Our keeping them gave them a personal, thus human, value, intangible but real. With the evolution of our intellectual capacity this process became more elaborate in providing a ‘why’ to that selection giving those objects an explanation of their symbolic value as a means of communicating it and the beginning of what can be seen as a belief system—the root of religion. In the beginning, this was not an intellectual exercise; the choosing came from feeling rather than understanding. It became more intellectually elaborated in time through the need to be communicated, probably diluting the experience of the first person to experience it but making it transferable to others and incorporating other reactions to it.   The found object is one of the first forms of artistic experience, going back some millions of years to when our ancestors were attracted to an object by its unusual appearance or whatever made it stand out for them. That attraction was instinctive, more feeling or emotion, not because it had any obvious utility. Keeping it and sharing it with others made it art.   Fig 1. This pebble was discovered in Makapansgat, South Africa, an Australopithecus site dated to three million years ago. The mineral matches a site several kilometres away where it was found, transported and kept. It is naturally worn and not sculpted. Duchamp resuscitated the objet trouvé  for our times and it has been a major motivation in art ever since. Just as Duchamp used the found object in his ready-mades, other twentieth-century artists did the same with sound. John Cages’s 4’33”  prepares people to listen to music and then presents them with silence, directing them to hear the other sounds around them. Max Neuhaus, the inventor of sound installations, always worked at the threshold of sound perception and his intricate sound weavings became found objects for the small percent of the public alert enough to engage with them. It is not hard to see this process in art using new technologies. They were designed for a specific reason and to accomplish a certain task. The encounter with artists took them somewhere else and changed their role. That also explains why the public has often reacted negatively to that work as not doing what the technology was designed to do. That has been the history of twentieth-century art, as wave after wave of artistic invention has been met with scandalised reactions, only to become canon a generation or two later. It underlines what McLuhan identified as the artist’s role, the education of perception in action.   The earliest toolmaking was never totally utilitarian; we can often see that artistic manifestation, the extra added to it which makes it art. One of the best ancient examples I know is a biface brought to my attention by paleo-anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, dating from between a quarter- to half a million years ago.[12]   The maker recognised a shell fossil in the stone and shaped it to emphasise it—an aesthetic act. Many of those early tools were never used physically and tool making always went beyond the utilitarian to include the symbolic. We have consistently assigned that kind of meaning to our technologies ever since, seeing them as symbolically representing something prideful about ourselves. Fig 2. Handaxe knapped around a fossil shell, located centrally on one face, identified as the Cretaceous bivalve mollusc Spondylus spinosus. Found in West Tofts, Norfolk. Between 250 to 500 thousand years old. © Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. This is the root of artistic creativity—an individual act of symbolic expression—and its eventual integration into culture, socially communicated. For most of human history, art was the external expression of religion and its means of communication. This process can be seen clearly in the elaborate cave art found world-wide. It was the symbolic representation of a group’s belief system, produced with enormous effort underlining its importance to the group. That role lasted for millennia and became the principal reason for making art.   As another end result of the Enlightenment, art broke from religion to express the symbolic sense of the individual artist rather than the collective belief of the group. Still, during the symbiotic relationship between art and religion there were certainly individuals who created for themselves and even in religious art the expressiveness of the individual artist is present, as more obviously so in the Italian Renaissance.   The symbolic is very much part of us and ignoring it or pretending it is less important or something to be overcome demonstrates a dangerous misunderstanding of how humans function. All of us operate under a mythology of sorts, recognised or not. Myths are shorthand symbolism of how things are, how people expounding them think the world works. We’ve eliminated myth as beneath our human intellect but in this we fool ourselves. Myths can actually unite people in a common emotional understanding of who we are and how we are connected. They are fundamental to any group, a kind of code expressing a shared and necessary value to its members. In the publication cited above, Edwige Armand and I proposed a new myth for society given what we know today, a kind of neo-animism whereby we understand that everything is alive and connected. [13] It was edited out of our chapter by the science publisher.   ***   Art, as mentioned above, is the very ancient way our species interacted with the world. What we understand as art today already lay in our lineage millions of years ago and evolved. It eventually became the symbolic recreation of an emotional response to the exterior before we had the intellectual resources available to explain what we were experiencing. We still act in that way when confronted with something we don’t understand by making up an explanation, by expressing in some way our feelings toward that experience, creating patterns and links which we alone imagine. That eventually became symbolic thought and its expression and, shared, grew in sophistication as our species evolved. The symbolic has always played a major role in our world view and art expresses a good part of it. It is an essential element to our survival in aiding our understanding even when that understanding is misplaced or erroneous. It is the emotional response, feeling, that colours what we know for good or for bad. This makes it a major field for human conflict, your symbol verses mine. It is not an unconscious reaction on our part, but a response coming from somewhere else in us but as important, and sometimes more so, as our intellect. If we ignore it in any human enterprise we witness or undertake we deprive ourselves of a fuller understanding.   Artistic exploration has been a manifestation of that need and produced the actual symbols in our cultures. For that reason, art has for many centuries and in many cultures been subservient to religion, since religion provided that symbolic content which art interpreted and a degree of its emotion impact. This is ironic since the symbolic sense of the world proposed through art predates religion by many millennia. Religion is a derivative of art as that symbolic sense increased in complexity, was codified and communicated to larger numbers, and became institutionalised.   Humanity always seems to search outside itself for some literal deus ex machina solution for guidance, some imagined or proposed superior force to which we bend the knee to a greater or lesser degree depending on our tolerance for superstition. We have seen in the West alone various gods, religions, and related divine-right sovereignties, science with Positivism, the market and its invisible hand, some automatic system into which we must put our full faith as something above us and accepted as infallible, the source of authority. To turn the bible around, our Gods, Golems, and Frankensteins are usually made in a misunderstood or limited image of ourselves. They have also been a convenient way to avoid personal responsibility for our actions and have been used as such often in history.   Artificial Intelligence is the latest saviour to be promoted to that role, as if algorithms came down to us from the mountain as a gift from who knows whom. This attitude is directly traceable to Norbert Wiener’s horror of the Second World War and the Holocaust which ‘proved’ to him that humanity was incapable of governing itself, a parallel to the reaction to the Thirty Years’ War. The pure logic of the machine was to provide a disinterested guide to our actions and we were supposed to accept it as neutral and just. No questions asked of course, about who built it and why, just as in previous ‘infallibilities’. Wiener himself saw the dangers in the blind trust in such mechanical solutions and warned against it. [14]   Art is never neutral. The goal of art doesn’t change over time but the means for making it do. The expression of our emotional reactions to our world is still central to art but the move from religious to the personal expression as its principal source is another product of the Enlightenment and relatively new in history. The tools that artists choose have always evolved and had an impact on artistic practice, whilst the resulting work starts a cycle of the effect of the technology on the artist and the artist on the technology. They help explore the world in a new way, to see new dimensions of it, and tell us much about ourselves who invented them. As the technologies of communication continue to expand at an ever increasing speed, artists will respond. Experimentation with their new possibilities and how they change our perception will continue. They will use them to express something more than an exchange of information, going beyond the ‘objective’ to a personal, emotional, and symbolic response to our changing environment and our place in it. In changing the way we think we see the world, artists open up other ways of imagining, thinking, and seeing.   The close analyses now possible of stone bifaces produced a half a million years ago reveal much about our ancestors and how they thought and acted. Sites have indicated that they organised production demonstrating how they interacted and communicated and has even pushed further into the past the development of language.[15] The tools, as in the case of artisans or anyone using tools to achieve their end, become an extension of the body, the technique a reflection of the mental process producing the work.   What was used to create art was what was at hand, from a found object in the beginning to sophisticated computers today and a long list of everything in between. Whatever is needed will be taken or invented to respond to that artistic drive which, because it is emotional and intellectual, is doubly compelling. With our expanded intellect, we eventually named it art to distinguish it from other forms of making and knowing.   Artistic experimentation was and is part of that process as each new technology appeared and expanded our communication space with the usual mix of information or entertainment. But artists were often taking it in a different direction, which is why society had such a difficult time dealing with the new work and the ideas it proposed. The belief that the image mirrored what was seen began to change artistically long before our era and continued to do so with the evolution of communication technologies. Man Ray’s filming in the 1920s with the camera on its side or upside down revealed that this was a tool to be manipulated and not a window on reality; it was rather a new proposed reality invented by art or whoever dominates its production.   There are four artists, two couples, whom I know personally, who exemplify the artistic exploration of new technologies. Steina and Woody Vasulka[16] began with video, analogue and digital, in the late sixties and spent their entire careers experimenting with its artistic potential in both tape and installations. Their work is finally being recognised in the depth it deserves more than two generations later, as more and more of the population lives in the mental space they created with the new tools. Fig 3. ‘The Maiden’, one of the five interactive installations of ‘The Brotherhood’, each containing a bit of artificial intelligence. Woody Vasulka, ICC Tokyo, 1998.   Steina Vasulka playing her midi violin interactively with ‘The Maiden’, one of the many ways of interacting with the five pieces. Another couple, Maria Barthélémy and René Sultra,[17] have been doing the same with newer technologies, especially photogrammetry, creating images, fixed and moving, from multiple photos of a situation from several angles. They create new spaces which challenge the habitual Euclidean space we inhabit and help us see differently. All four have demonstrated how artists in a highly personal and subjective manner open a novel means of expression to new and different levels of understanding. They set a pattern for exploring new potentials in the new tools in a non-objective open-ended way learning and teaching at the same time. This exploration is essential to any new means of expression and very pertinent to AI today. Fig 4. Photo of a woven fibre glass rug, 11 meters long, built by Barthélémy and Sultra as a screen for streaming images. Video of an apartment using photogrammetry, photographed from several points of view, in this case over 400, recreating a Euclidean space acting in a non-Euclidean manner, 2024-5. The idea of total art has been with us for centuries, as different artistic endeavours attempted to unify all forms of creativity into a coherent whole. This was especially so in music and architecture in the nineteenth century, becoming more common in the twentieth. Evolving technologies made experimenting with it possible and, in spite of different ingrained habits and market pressures, it has never stopped. Many gatekeepers of traditional artistic expression try to keep the arts in their habitual spaces, but they tend to leak out naturally. In virtual space, total art is a given, where visual arts approach performance and the performing arts become recorded images in time. It is challenging in many ways, particularly in how we bring the public into the work—a question throughout the history of art. I have always proposed that prehistoric caves were our first multi-media spaces where image, music, and dance were performed together. Artists carry within themselves that total space as they create.   The previous century witnessed an explosion of possibilities that were more than ways of making art, which changed the practice of it fundamentally. First, we had duration added to the image with cinema and all the other image technologies to follow. This brought it closer to performance. Adding time made it easier to involve the spectator and bringing in the spectator’s reactions to the work became an early ambition. New technologies made it possible to reach out to people instead of waiting for them to show up in some designated space. Kupka, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, said in the 1940s that wireless transmission was the future of art anticipating the so-called media arts. [16]  Each new wave (tool) was open for artistic exploration which needs to be increased exponentially as the technologies play an even bigger role in our lives. But support for that is drying up in both public and private domains. We have actually accomplished Plato’s goal of barring artists and poets from the Republic by making them irrelevant and marginal. Plato saw them as people who create imagined ‘realities’ disturbing and dangerous to the dominant world view and therefore necessarily banished. What is lost is the understanding that that is the role of art and often those ‘realities’ reflect coming changes and help us adjust to them, once again a change in perception.   The art world is now dominated by the market; the saleable object is what counts, and this is usually not the experimental. Monetising art, as we have, kills it, making it a carcass, a shadow of itself, devoid of the life it is supposed to reflect. Monetising anything to make it more ‘pertinent’ reflects a society whose dominant value is money. Art no longer informs but simply exists and its importance is determined by marketing. We no longer have gatekeepers, no connoisseurs, for good or for bad, who give their lives to trying to understand what artists are saying. We may agree or not, but at least they were operating from human judgement and not some artificially neutral mechanism, yet another ‘invisible hand’ divorced from human interference. Even art institutions no longer fulfil that role, taking their direction from the market on who is and isn’t an artist. The ‘stars’ are stars because they say so and people buy it. Museums will inevitably defend it as art to justify their purchases, and the game of smoke and mirrors goes on. Art stars like J eff Koons are to art what Donald Trump is to politics, devoid of all sense, spectacle without meaning. In that regard they are, unfortunately, a reflection of contemporary society: as Macbeth lamented, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.   It is time our society understands that art is not the plaything of the rich or the raw material of financial markets and finally acknowledges how absolutely essential it is to us and our survival, which should make its exploration of our social evolution a priority. When governments cut budgets, the first thing to go is the no-longer affordable ‘luxury’, art and culture. Why is it then that when governmental institutions rescue children from traumatic situations, they give them materials to draw, to express the emotions they cannot put in words. Art is our essential emotional educator.   A friend, a Parisian galeriste , opened a branch in New York. In his many meetings with other gallery owners there he would ask questions about meaning and was usually mocked for being philosophical, French, and not business oriented. His response was, ‘You want to make money. I want to make sense’.   Art using AI and the overhyped world its creators propose cannot operate through Sentio —feeling. It can only do so through being understood as the tool it is in the hands of a human where the necessary feeling exists. On its own, it can trigger emotions by appealing to emotional memories, rehashing the past, but it cannot itself create new emotional reactions since a body is needed to do so. That is how we respond to newness, provoked by something never before experienced which calls on our creativity to respond accordingly by pulling an explanation from our subconscious. AI must still be explored by art as a communications tool to better understand it, how it interfaces with us, and if it has the potential for kind of creativity we understand as art. It remains a tool but the tools artist uses affect the artist as much as the artist affects the technology, exposing dimensions of it not anticipated by the developers.   ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is an oxymoron, since intelligence is a living thing and anything artificial an imitation and not the real thing. Intelligence is informed by bodily experiences, the emotional responses to outside stimuli, which is key to how the memories, good or bad, are coloured and stored. A key part of intelligence is the memory of those experiences recalled when needed, usually when a similar emotional reaction is provoked. AI is based on massive past memories, plus pattern recognition drawn from that pool but without the emotional responses which triggered the retention. The bigger the memory, the bigger the base for identifying patterns, but the missing values which memories have for us become a product of programming and cannot evolve in a situation the way humans do. If it does, it is reacting with programmed responses—but whose responses and whose values? Even stocked with thousands and thousands of human emotional responses, they will be responses from the past and not something new.   Emotion demands a body capable of feeling. Would AI be an imitation of the perfect emotional response based on an averaged ideal system of values—statistical emotions? Averaged emotions would belong to everybody and nobody. Even when we know something intellectually it has an emotional dimension to it based on who we are. And when we know emotionally it becomes a little bit more than simply knowing and more a part of our value system which evolves through both reason and emotion.   With humans, pure reasoning usually happens within a set of established parameters and is an attempt to overcome the emotional associations, making it more objective and communicable to a greater number, which we consider rational. Yet rationality is an attempt to overcome subjectivity by removing those emotional dimensions, a nearly impossible task because of the intricate reaction between emotion and values, more a goal than an achievement.   The need to know, what might be popularly referred to as curiosity, is something shared with all living creatures. Every living thing continually pokes, smells, probes into all corners of its surroundings to assure its survival. We need to know our environment in order to survive in it. Human beings share that with all other life forms but with an abundance which has taken us further than most living creatures. The depths of our consciousness, memory, and feelings have allowed us to advance further and we have developed several directions in which to apply them: art, science, religion, and philosophy. All are answers to the need to know and to understand and explain. That abundance is apparent in both art and science as elaborate manifestations of that curiosity in operation, two important ways of trying to probe what is out there, what we understand as real, how we fit into it, and how it can serve us. What we, as a culture, are finally beginning to understand is the ancient wisdom of serving it in exchange.   Art and science each bring to a situation their own methods of looking—or rather seeing—and from each comes something new to understanding. The experiences and practices of each prepare them in different ways to ask questions and propose solutions. A work of art is a proposed solution as much as any scientific proposal, albeit coming from the personal perspective of the individual artist. Science operates from a generally accepted worldview applied to specific examined situations and artists from a personal worldview expressed through specific works. Both change and evolve and that evolution results in change, which affects the world view of us who experience them.   We need both and in situations where both are operative that approach provides better, richer, and more complete answers. They are complementary like two legs for walking or two eyes for depth. They are the two angles of a triangulation, as mentioned, where together they give a more complete understanding of what is being pursued, the third point, our being in the world.   Communicating information is one form of fundamental communication. Another, central to art, is communicating emotion. Art was probably our first effort in trying to pass on an experience, before language, the emotional reaction we had to something, good or bad, which gave it an urgency, the need to be transmitted to others. Today, when our many forms of communication manage to transmit emotion we react to them with a higher degree of attention, recognising something special in itself.   Bergson, as mentioned, called intellect and instinct the two sources of how we know and evaluate our exterior and our place in it.   This fuller way of knowing is by becoming one with what we perceive. It is the opposite of standing outside as a disengaged observer, but means incorporating what is perceived by joining with it for the duration. That demands the fullest participation of the person. This is what the artist does which does not mean that others don’t. But for art it is the metier. Art is perhaps the most misunderstood activity of the human being and, in our highly educated society, that misunderstanding, as profound as it is, is incomprehensible. Art is a way of knowing in order to survive.   We live in a time of necessary experimentation to reinvent ourselves and the institutions which represent us. Art has always been a major way of doing so, particularly in the last 200 years, the sine qua non  of the new renaissance I propose. It evolved from representing the powers that be and became the expression of individuals who made it from their interaction with the world.  The collection of those individual expressions is an important part of that experimentation taking place and fundamental to it.   Art is a proposition coming from the individual and sum of those individualities is what we call culture. The open-ended approach of art is essential now as we rebuild our institutions on a new model of interactivity and without hype, without self-serving salesmanship, without the conviction that we hold the truth but with openness and honesty in building back the trust essential to any social order.   ‘Aux arts citoyens’. Don Foresta Don Foresta, Advisory Editor to CJLPA 4, is a research artist and art theoretician in art and science and new technologies. His 1990 book in French, Mondes Multiples , is considered a landmark on the relation between these subjects. He holds a Sorbonne doctorate in Information Science and is a Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. [1] See Henri Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion  (Félix Alcan 1932). [2] Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et Invention, 1965-1966  (Presse universitaire de France 2014) 4. [3]  James L McGaugh,  ‘The amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing experiences’ (2004) 27 Annual Review of Neuroscience 1-28. [4]  Private correspondence (2015). [5]  Edwige Armand, Don Foresta et al, Sapiens : métamorphose ou extinction?  (Humensciences 2022) 176 [6]  Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin  (University of California Press 1982) 184. The title of the book is an expression of the reverse of the operation, a necessary step to really ‘see’. We must forget the name of something, its intellectual designation, to ‘know’ it in another way. [7]  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media  (Signet 1964) xi. [8]  Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Citadel 1998) 135. Translation has been lightly altered based on original at La perception du changement : conférences faites a l'université d'Oxford les 26 et 27 Mai 1911  (Oxford 1911). [9] Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind  (MIT Press 1993). [10]  Don Foresta, Mondes Multiples  (Edition BàS 1991). [11] See ‘Bellagio Report and Conclusions’ ( Don Foresta , 21 December 2015) < https://donforesta.net/conferences/bellagio/start > accessed 23 September 2025. [12] See image at < https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/art/exhibitions/object/id/3147-535 > accessed 23 September 2025. The biface handaxe was found in West Tofts, England in the nineteenth century and is in the collection of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge University. [13] See Armand, Foresta et al (n 5). [14] Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc  (Boston 1964). [15] Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts, Fairweather Eden (London 1997). [16] See < https://vasulka.org/ > accessed 23 September 2025. [17] See < https://www.sultra-barthelemy.eu/ > accessed 23 September 2025. [18]  Pascal Rousseau,   Le Rêve de Kupka: La vérité nue de la peinture  (Institut national d'histoire de l'art 2022) 21.

Introduction   Governments have launched a series of ambitious digital strategies over recent decades to improve how they operate and interact with citizens. However, many of their anticipated benefits have yet to be achieved, leaving governments ill-equipped to respond effectively to a growing array of social and economic policy challenges, both domestic and international. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee recently expressed concerns at:   T he number of complex, large-scale digital programmes we continue to see fail […] Departments have failed to understand the difference between improving what currently exists and real digital transformation, meaning they have missed opportunities to move to modern, efficient ways of working. [1]   These setbacks come despite nearly three decades of digital initiatives in which the UK was a pioneer: its first pan-government website launched in 1994 and within a few years brought together information from 180 separate public sector organisations. [2]  By 1996, the UK government was exploring ‘the opportunity to transform the whole operation of government’. [3] And in 1998, work was underway to exploit technology to ‘facilitate fundamental changes in the relationships between the citizen and the state […] with implications for the democratic process and structures of government’. [4] By 2002, the ambition was ‘to enhance our democratic structures […] to give individuals more choice about how they can participate in the political process’. [5] Technology was increasingly seen as integral to the creation of a more participative, transparent, and collaborative form of democratic governance and citizen empowerment. [6]   However, between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. As futurist Alvin Toffler predicted over fifty years ago, governments’ industrial era institutions and practices have proved ill-equipped to cope with the pace of technological change. [7] In place of a democratic renaissance, subsequent decades have seen the mass digitisation and automation of governments’ industrial-era institutions and practices, creating often undesirable results. [8]  Technology has all too often become synonymous with processes that undermine the rule of law [9] and democracy. [10] It’s used to industrialise surveillance, [11]  erode legal but ‘offensive’ free speech, [12]  and automate injustice and inequality in the name of bureaucratic ‘efficiency’. [13]   These outcomes are the opposite of what was originally promised. They stifle democratic reform and disadvantage the most vulnerable members of society. [14] In parallel, governments exhibit a near-perpetual state of panic about all things digital—artificial intelligence, AdTech, the gig economy, hybrid warfare—and provide inadequate and lethargic political responses to proven harms, including the toxic impact of social media. [15]  No wonder many democracies ‘are experiencing serious institutional debilities and weak public confidence’, [16] with over half the world’s democracies reported to be in retreat. [17]   Western governments’ failure to exploit technology as a strategic asset stands in sharp contrast to its exploitation by authoritarian regimes. From China [18] to Iran, [19] North Korea, [20] and Russia, [21] autocracies have integrated technology deep within their policies and plans, from pervasive national surveillance and suppression of free speech and civil society, to disrupting the affairs of other nations using everything from bot-driven false information to deepfakes and cyber-attacks. [22]   Failing to harness technology as a means of democratic renewal has left our governments ill-placed to tackle an increasingly complex and challenging political landscape. If democracies are to survive and prosper, they need a more effective and principled approach to technology—rooted in a vision of what they stand for:   A n affirmative, persuasive, secure and privacy-preserving, values-driven, and rights-respecting view of how technology can enable individual dignity and economic prosperity, and also what they will stand against—the misuse and abuse of technology to repress, control, divide, discriminate, and disenfranchise. [23]   Rethinking government   The use of technology to digitise policy and administrative silos within and between central government departments and local, regional, and national administration, creates painful—and sometimes deadly [24] —divisions in people’s lives. These boundaries prevent governments from working across their historical organisational structures to become more effective in how they learn, plan, adapt, and respond to domestic and international challenges.   Ed Vaizey, a former UK government minister, commented in 2017 that he ‘would completely re-engineer government. I would abolish government departments, I would have government by task’. [25]  His remarks echo the earlier political desire to use technology as a force for good in the modernisation and reform of government, and to:   P rovide better and more efficient services to businesses and to citizens, improve the efficiency and openness of government administration, and secure substantial cost savings for the taxpayer. (1996). [26]   M ake sure that public service users, not providers, are the focus, by matching services more closely to people’s lives […] [and] deliver public services that are high quality and efficient. (1999). [27]   Such sentiments reveal an enlightened political interest in harnessing the positive potential of science and technology, one memorably expressed in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech when he asserted that ‘The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry’. [28] However, the subsequent failure of successive governments to modernise their ‘outdated methods’ and ‘industrial era institutions and practices’ has become a contributory factor to the decline in democracy and our public institutions. [29]   Technology’s policy implications   Digital technologies and practices can help governments access, analyse, and model information within and between the silo boundaries of current public administration. They offer new opportunities to engage communities and individuals in shaping and co-creating their own futures. They can inform the evidence base, continuously enlightening policymaking to deliver better outcomes. And they have an essential role in helping to reshape, redesign, and optimise organisational structures and practices to deliver better outcomes that escape the outdated methods prevalent in both public and private sectors. [30]   However, the political perception of technology is stuck in the web-centric mindset of the late twentieth century. Digital government programmes focus on creating elegant website veneers over industrial era processes, [31] marginalising the citizen/state relationship into a transactional one between ‘customers’ and ‘services’. This digitisation of point-to-point online transactions comes at a high cost: it displaces the role of technology in transforming governments’ ability to better understand and solve complex and interweaving social and economic problems. And it prioritises bureaucratic structures and processes over the radical overhaul of public policymaking and administration. [32]   The customer/service mindset is in part a toxic hangover of new public management (NPM), the private sector concepts parachuted into the public sector during the 1980s. Digital government strategies adopt the language and mindset of NPM in their ideological emphasis on ‘users’ and ‘services’. They often lack formal mechanisms to assess whether digital initiatives are legally compliant: developers can make decisions and write code that creates or breaks policy, bypassing policymakers, legislators, and voters—a problem described by Lawrence Lessig, an American academic and attorney, as ‘code as law’:   The code regulates. It implements values, or not. It enables freedoms, or disables them. It protects privacy, or promotes monitoring. People choose how the code does these things. People write the code. Thus the choice is not whether people will decide how cyberspace regulates. People—coders—will. [33]   The mass digitisation of paper-era transactions has become the primary output of many digital programmes. Yet governments knew as early as 1996 that ‘applying technology to existing working practices, or at the customer interface, will not achieve the full benefits that information technology has the power to deliver’. [34]  The result is that digital strategies all too often fail three critical tests. The ‘Toffler test’—modernising governments’ industrial era institutions and practices. The ‘Wilson test’—tackling outdated methods. And the ‘Vaizey test’—reorganising government and public policy around outcomes.   The digitisation of government’s historical configuration presents a major impediment to progress. It makes the public sector harder to redesign and integrate around citizens, cross-cutting policies, better policy outcomes, and improved administration. The failure to modernise governments’ internal capabilities, data, structures, processes, policies, and operations undermines their ability to anticipate, react, and respond in more timely, appropriate, and effective ways to an increasingly challenging and volatile world. As a former UK Permanent Secretary, Jonathan Slater, recently commented, ‘Whitehall’s remoteness from the public and frontline results in policymaking which is fundamentally inadequate to address the challenges we face’. [35]   The threat   Technology itself is not inherently good or bad, but neither is it neutral, as historian Melvin Kranzberg reminded us. [36]  A relentless focus on the positive applications of technology is essential to protect and advance democracy. However, the absence of guiding democratic principles for the design, development, and implementation of technology leaves many digital government programmes serving less altruistic short-term goals. [37]   This democratic deficit has economic and societal ramifications that reach well beyond governments’ domestic political programmes. When former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared Russia to be on ‘the path of democracy and not of empire’, [38]  followed by the dissolution of the USSR in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed as if the citizen centred freedoms and practices of the West had triumphed. For a moment in time an opportunity existed to reforge a global democratic renaissance, to reaffirm technology as a force for good, rooted unashamedly in the principles of liberty, justice, and the rule of law proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   However, as with Russia’s own subsequent retreat into autocracy and militarism, many democratic governments have chosen a very different path. At their worst, they mirror the behavioural traits of technology corporations and authoritarian regimes. They deploy often unproven technologies that automate inequality and undermine human rights and the exercise of justice in the pursuit of their own political goals. Many of the artificial intelligence governance principles belatedly being implemented by governments and businesses, for example, make no mention of human rights. [39]   These failings need an urgent fix: the number of countries in the world with full democracies remains low, at just 14.4% in 2022. [40] Most people live in flawed democracies, or hybrid or authoritarian regimes. The latter represents the largest group: 36.9% of the world’s population endures the diktats of a privileged, and often brutal, controlling elite. Across the categories assessed by The Economist Intelligence Unit —electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties—technology can play an essential beneficial role in re-asserting and protecting fundamental democratic rights, rather than accelerating their demise.   The opportunity   Today   Since the late 1990s, technology has been used to streamline citizens’ transactional interactions with government, from obtaining a new passport, to completing self-assessment tax returns, or making an appointment with a GP. Yet policymaking is little changed, and neither are governments’ associated structures, practices, and administration.   Citizens’ digital experiences of the public sector mimic the siloed, organisation-centric processes and forms that preceded them. Inside government, Ministers and officials lack timely access to basic information and insight about how their department is performing, what’s going well, what’s broken, what citizens think, or insight into the impact of their policies, short- and long-term, across departments and national, regional, and local government.   To paraphrase computer programmer Melvin Conway, any organisation that designs a system will produce a design that mirrors the organisation’s existing structure. [41]  In large-scale, siloed organisations like government, digital initiatives reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies and silos. It’s the opposite of what’s required: as Conway also noted, ‘flexibility of organization is important to effective design. Ways must be found to reward design managers for keeping their organizations lean and flexible’. [42]  Yet governments are well behind the curve in using technology to provide such flexibility, despite the long-known benefits of networked forms of organisation:   Networks are ‘lighter on their feet’ than hierarchies. […] [they involve] discrete exchanges [not] by administrative fiat, but through networks of individuals engaged in reciprocal, preferential, mutually supportive actions […] the parties to a network agree to forego the right to pursue their own interests at the expense of others. [43] Tomorrow   The UK government recognised over two decades ago that:   Many of the biggest challenges facing Government do not fit easily into traditional Whitehall structures […] [We need] a comprehensive package of measures to improve and modernise the way we handle cross-cutting issues […] the role of leadership; improving the way policy is formulated and implemented; the need for new skills; budgetary arrangements, and the role of external audit and scrutiny. [44]   Technology can help governments transition from their industrial era policy boundaries and rigid operational and financial hierarchies towards more effective, networked, and collaborative ways of working. Doing so will help officials work beyond ‘the boundaries of their agencies to accomplish the broad mission, rather than simply managing the more narrow activities within their agency’s walls’. [45]  It will improve the way policy is developed and informed, and provide more joined-up approaches to complex issues like intergenerational poverty and homelessness.   These changes will also have implications for administrative law. Departmental and process boundaries, funding, and accountability are often stipulated in legislation, including the naming of departmental Secretaries of State in Acts of Parliament. Redesigning policymaking and public administration around outcomes will require changes to existing processes, oversight, and accountability. Funding models will need major reform so that resources flow more effectively to where they have maximum beneficial impact instead of perpetuating silo organisational structures and processes.   Making it happen   To reset digital government onto a better track will require political vision and affirmative action on multiple fronts, including: Leadership   Technology’s strategic role in helping renew democracy and our public institutions needs to be understood at the most senior political and official levels. Governments will need to break the habit of handing digital political portfolios to junior, transitory politicians who lack the insight or experience to exploit technology as a tool of strategic improvement. If governments are serious about modernising the public sector, they need a Cabinet-level politician with the authority to deliver improvements across government’s policy and structural silos.   The political challenge of harnessing technology to reinvigorate democratic values and institutions is significant. David Freud, a former Minister for Welfare Reform, accurately pinpointed why digital programmes frequently fail: ‘We’ve been looking at this as a technology issue. It is much more than that, [it’s] a major cultural change in the relationship between the state and the people it needs to support’. [46]   Capabilities   To improve their capabilities, governments need to ditch the tactical, low-level ‘digital training’ of the past [47]  and move to education programmes [48] built around improved citizen engagement and the transformation of policymaking and policy outcomes, including the organisational structures, administrative processes, funding, and technology needed for their delivery. Similarly, technology leaders should have access to education programmes that develop their understanding of democratic principles, policymaking, and legislative processes to inform and guide their work.   Governments need to adopt more systems thinking to better understand how different policies, organisations, and processes interact with and influence each other. [49] For transformation to succeed, politicians and senior officials will need to work in more collaborative, participative, and outcome-based ways. This has major implications for Ministers and Secretaries of State: their portfolios will increasingly focus on cross-cutting issues rather than current departmental structures and need to be supported by updated processes for citizen engagement, policymaking, legislation, resourcing, and funding.   Open government   Governments need to open up their policy and administrative silos—and their associated systems, data, and processes—to liberate citizens from the experiences that William Beveridge, pioneer of the UK’s welfare state, criticised as long ago as 1941. He found that seven different government departments were involved in providing cash benefits. [50]  This was not only inefficient and costly but also created a dehumanising, demeaning, and fragmented experience for benefit claimants.   Similar citizen experiences still abound today. Duplicated functions and processes operate in hundreds of places, both within and between departments and across local, regional, and national administration. They frustrate public sector employees too, who find themselves caught in a web of contradictory policies, funding, processes, systems, and structures. An open government mandate will provide opportunities for modernisation and innovation inside and outside of the public sector.   However, an open government initiative that delivers solely at a technical level will not in itself encourage citizen participation and improve transparency and trust:   Technology does not drive anything. It creates new possibilities for collecting and analyzing data, mashing ideas and reaching people, but people still need to be moved to engage and find practical pathways to act. [51]   Governments should encourage a nationwide open architecture to support and inform systems thinking, and to provide opportunities for improved collaboration, evidence, and research into social and economic issues and better policymaking. This open architecture will let civil society and others add significant value, helping get important things done by letting people take the initiative, with government responding ‘in the here and now’. [52] Identity   For many of our interactions with government, proof of who we are is irrelevant, such as when we access online welfare or tax guidance. Other interactions, however, require a high level of assurance that we are who we claim to be and that the information we provide is accurate. High levels of assurance are needed not just for citizens and businesses, but public sector employees too.   Instead of emulating the state-dominant identity systems of authoritarian regimes, our governments need to create democratic exemplars that are citizen centred, private, and secure. The Estonian government, for example, lets citizens see when public officials have accessed their personal information, helping provide transparency and build trust. [53]   Good identity design protects and enhances democratic rights. It preserves citizens’ anonymity and pseudonymity, and lets them prove something about themselves, such as being ‘Over 18’ or their right to work, without disclosing unnecessary information or facilitating state monitoring and surveillance. David Birch, a digital finance and identity expert, points out that ‘we need a digital identity infrastructure that supports our transition to a new economy, not one that stutters along digitising the relics of the post-industrial revolution’. [54]   To protect and enshrine democratic principles, identity needs to be developed around the citizen and not the state. Government initiatives must adhere to high standards of privacy and security, tapping into initiatives such as the Decentralised Identity Foundation (DIF) [55]  and Solid, [56] together with ICAO digital travel credentials [57]  and ISO mobile driving licences. [58]   Personal data   Personal data safeguarded in departmental silos is often blamed for preventing governments from taking a holistic view of citizens and their circumstances to design and deliver integrated policies and processes that better meet their needs: ‘Currently, the information that government holds is scattered across disparate systems and saved in a variety of formats, making it difficult for policy makers to find what they need when they need it’. [59]   From a citizen’s perspective, we want more effective policies and better outcomes, but we don’t want officials and governments accessing and misusing our personal data. We need to improve public administration through smarter information management without invading citizens’ right to a private life or risking an increase in fraud. But transitioning public administration from a departmental responsibility to a government-wide one risks creating insecure and invasive approaches to our personal data, and the creeping extension of the state into citizens’ private lives.   In 2013, the UK Government’s Technology code of practice  stated that ‘Users should have access to, and control over, their own personal data’. [60]  Although the policy commitment has yet to be delivered, the principle remains sound. And effective regulation and technical and legal enforcement must accompany these rights. Just as Open Banking lets consumers manage their financial information across multiple organisations today, [61]  tomorrow citizens should be able to manage their information and experiences across public, private, and voluntary sectors, creating ‘new forms of citizen and state co-operation and dialogue for the 21st century’. [62]   Reduce and remove transactional interactions   Governments should question why so many paper-era interactions are still needed in the digital age. What prevents public administration operating without online forms? How can technology deliver better outcomes by working across silo organisational structures, processes, and data? And how can governments design better and less dehumanising and fragmented experiences for citizens?   As governments make better use of data and involve citizens and businesses directly in its curation and maintenance, they will be able to reduce or even remove many of their existing transactional interactions, and become more efficient and effective in the process.   Algorithmic injustice and the rule of law   Governments need to prevent the misuse of technology products and services across both private and public sectors. They also need to guard against replacing the prevailing New Public Management transactional ‘user/service’ mindset with the equally problematic pathologies of New Public Analytics (NPA), with their data-driven, automated injustice:   For those in positions of vulnerability who lack the skills, competences and ready internet access, and whose encounters with the state are now mediated primarily via digital systems rather than frontline human officers, their experience of the state has become increasingly and shamefully Kafkaesque, dehumanising and unjust. However, the capacity of these systems to function automatically and at scale enables the collective violation of the rights of affected individuals, including the presumption of innocence, producing serious injustice at scale […] there is an urgent and serious need for lawyers and legal scholars to work with policymakers and technical experts in order to ensure that systematic, practical and effective constitutional safeguards are in place . [63]   Digital government initiatives need immutable constitutional safeguards, public oversight, and design principles founded on the rule of law, human rights, privacy, and security—to defend and protect democratic values and ensure positive social and human outcomes. Although some promising work has taken place with algorithmic transparency in government, [64]  mandatory transparency is required of all algorithms with social and economic impacts, including those hyped as ‘artificial intelligence’. Routine algorithmic audits and impact assessments during the design, development, and deployment of new systems will help check for bias and regulatory compliance. [65]   Conclusion   The ambitious ideals of digital government will not be delivered until politicians and political parties weave the democratising potential of technology into the fabric of their thinking, their public consultations, their manifesto promises, and their policies, using it as an immutable force for good. As the US initiative to advance technology for democracy observes:   The first wave of the digital revolution promised that new technologies would support democracy and human rights. The second saw an authoritarian counterrevolution. Now, the United States and other democracies are working together to ensure that the third wave of the digital revolution leads to a technological ecosystem characterised  by resilience, integrity, openness, trust and security, and that reinforces democratic principles and human rights. [66]     Our governments need a radical rethink and reset of their digital initiatives if this third wave of digital revolution is to succeed. They need to commit to the open, participative, collaborative, and cross-cutting uses of technology to deliver fundamental and much-needed improvements to democracy and the relationship between citizens and the state.   The upsides of doing so are clear: technology can protect and improve democratic processes and institutions; make policymaking and public administration more accessible, more collaborative, more transparent, more accountable, and more effective; and deliver better, more just, and more enduring social and economic outcomes.   After three decades of unfulfilled promises, digital government stands at the crossroads: for the health of democracy and our democratic future, it’s clear which road it needs to take. Jerry Fishenden   Dr Jerry Fishenden FIET FRSA is a technologist, writer, and composer, with a career that spans both public and private sectors. Former roles include National Technology Officer at Microsoft UK; Senior Executive, Business Systems at the City of London’s financial regulator; Network Planning Officer of the House of Commons; and IT Director in the NHS. Jerry was the Specialist Adviser to two House of Commons Committee inquiries into digital government, and advises governments, businesses, and other organisations on the effective design and implementation of technology. His latest book, Fracture: The collision between technology and democracy—and how we fix it (2023), explores technological opportunities and challenges for the future of democracy and our democratic institutions. [1]  House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, ‘Challenges in implementing digital change’ ( House of Commons, 10 December 2021) < https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/8146/documents/83439/default/ > accessed 1 July 2023. [2]  Jerry Fishenden, ‘Remembering government direct - the first interactive green paper’ ( New Technology Observations from the UK , 20 March 2019) < https://ntouk.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/remembering-government-direct-the-first-interactive-green-paper/ > accessed 1 July 2023. [3]  ‘The Government IT Strategy: Annex E’ ( Central IT Unit, Cabinet Office, June 1996) < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/uk-government-it-strategy-1996-from-the-ntouk-digital-archives.pdf > a ccessed  1 June 2023. [4]  ‘Electronic Government’ ( Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology , February 1998). < https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/post/pn110.pdf > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [5]  ‘In the service of democracy. A consultation paper on a policy for electronic democracy’ ( HM Government / UK Online , 15 July 2002)  < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/e-democracy.pdf >   a ccessed 1 June 2023. [6]  Creative Research, ‘e-Democracy. 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[11]  Heather Brooke, ‘States haven’t stopped spying on their citizens, post-Snowden-they’ve just got sneakier’ The Guardian (London, 6 June 2023)   < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/edward-snowden-state-surveillance-uk-online-safety-bill > a ccessed 1 August 2023. [12]  Ross Anderson and Sam Gilbert, ‘The Online Safety Bill. Policy Brief’ ( University of Cambridge and Bennett Institute for Public Policy , October 2022)  < https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Policy-Brief-Online-Safety-Bill.pdf > a ccessed 1 May 2023. [13]  Ed Pilkington, ‘Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor’ The Guardian (London, 14 October 2019)  < https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/14/automating-poverty-algorithms-punish-poor > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [14]  ‘India’s high-tech governance risks leaving behind its poorest citizens’ The Economist (London, 16 October 2021)  < https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/10/16/indias-high-tech-governance-risks-leaving-behind-its-poorest-citizens > a ccessed 1 August 2023. [15]  Jean M Twenge, ‘Increases in Depression, Self‐Harm, and Suicide Among U.S. Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Technology Use: Possible Mechanisms’ 2020 2(1) Psychiatric Research & Clinical Practice 19-25. [16]  Thomas Carothers, ‘Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy’ ( Carnegie Endowment for International Peace , 3 June 2015)  < https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/06/03/why-technology-hasn-t-delivered-more-democracy-pub-60305 > a ccessed 1 January 2023. [17]  Yasmeen Serhan, ‘Half of the World’s Democracies Are in Retreat. Here’s What to Expect in 2023’ Time (New York, 21 December 2022) < https://time.com/6242188/global-democracy-report-2022/ > a ccessed 1 March 2023. [18]  ‘China’s digital dictatorship’ The Economist (London, 17 December 2016) < https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/12/17/chinas-digital-dictatorship > accessed 1 April 2023. [19]  ‘Iran’s cyberwar goes global’ The Economist (London, 14 September 2022) < https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/09/14/irans-cyberwar-goes-global > accessed 1 June 2023. [20]  ‘North Korea’s hackers are after intel, not just crypto’ The Economist (London, 7 July 2023) < https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/07/07/north-koreas-hackers-are-after-intel-not-just-crypto > accessed 1 August 2023. [21]  ‘ Russia is trying to build its own great firewall ’ The Economist (London, 19 February 2022) < https://www.economist.com/business/russia-is-trying-to-build-its-own-great-firewall/21807706 > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [22]  ‘FACT SHEET: Advancing Technology for Democracy’ ( The White House Briefing Room, 29 March 2023)  < https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/29/fact-sheet-advancing-technology-for-democracy-at-home-and-abroad/#:~:text=From%20AI%2Dpowered%20mass%20surveillance,critics%20at%20home%20and%20abroad . > a ccessed 1 October 2023. [23]  ibid. [24]  Linda Geddes, ‘Child deaths are linked to social deprivation in England—NHS report’ The Guardian (London, 13 May 2021)  < https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2021/may/13/child-deaths-are-linked-to-social-deprivation-in-england-nhs-report > a ccessed 1 February 2023. [25]  Nicola Hughes, ‘Ed Vaizey reflects on his time in government for the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect project’ ( Institute for Government , 8 December 2016)  < https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/ministers-reflect/ed-vaizey > a ccessed 1 May 2023. [26]  ‘Government Direct. 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[30]  Jerry Fishenden, Mark Thompson, and Will Venters, ‘Appraising the impact and role of platform models and Government as a Platform (GaaP) in UK Government public service reform: towards a Platform Assessment Framework (PAF)’ 2017 34(2) Information Quarterly 167-182. [31]  ‘Design your service using GOV.UK styles components and pattern’ ( GOV.UK Design System , March 2023)  < https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ > a ccessed  1  July 2023. [32]  Mark Thompson, ‘UK voters are being sold a lie. There is no need to cut public services’ The Guardian (London, 12 February 2015)  < https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/feb/12/uk-voters-cut-public-services-amazon-spotify-uber > a ccessed  1  August 2023. [33]  Lawrence Lessig, ‘Code is Law’ ( Harvard Magazine , 1 January 2000)  < https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html > a ccessed  1  July 2023. [34]  ‘The Government IT Strategy’ (n 3).   [35]  Jonathan Slater, ‘Fixing Whitehall’s broken policy machine’ ( The Policy Institute, King’s College London , March 2022) < https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/fixing-whitehalls-broken-policy-machine.pdf > a ccessed  1  April 2023. [36]  Melvin Kranzberg, ‘ Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws”’ (1986) 27 (3) Technology and Culture  544-560. [37]  Janna Anderson and Lee Raine, ‘Concerns about democracy in the digital age’ ( Pew Research Centre , 21 February 2020)  < https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/21/concerns-about-democracy-in-the-digital-age/ > a ccessed 1 September 2023. [38]   Graeme Gill ,   Symbolism and Regime Change in Russia  (Cambridge University Press 2013 ). [39]  Kate Jones, ‘AI governance and human rights’ ( Chatham House , 10 January 2023)   < https://www.chathamhouse.org/2023/01/ai-governance-and-human-rights > a ccessed  1  May 2023. [40]  ‘Democracy Index 2022’ ( Economist Intelligence Unit )   < https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2022/ > a ccessed  1  June 2023. [41]  In 1968, Melvin E Conway created an adage now popularly known as Conway’s law, namely that ‘ Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure ’ . [42]  Melvin E Conway, ‘How do committees invent?’ ( Datamation magazine , April 1968)   < http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html >   ac cessed  1  July 2023. [43]  Walter W Powell, ‘Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organisation’ (1990) 12(1) Research in Organisational Behaviour 295-336. [44]  ‘Wiring it up. Whitehall’s management of cross-cutting policies and services’ ( Cabinet Office , January 2000)  < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/wiring-it-up-2000.pdf > a ccessed  1  May 2023. [45]  Donald F Kettl, The Next Government of the United States: Why Our Institutions Fail Us and How To Fix Them  (Norton  2009). [46]  David Freud,   Clashing Agendas: Inside the Welfare Trap (Macmillan 2 021 ). [47]  ‘GDS Academy’ (GDS Academy, November 2021)  < https://web.archive.org/web/20181130230208/https:/gdsacademy.campaign.gov.uk/ > a ccessed  1  August 2023. [48]  ‘Written evidence submitted by Dr Jerry Fishenden, Professor Mark Thompson, and Assistant Professor Will Venters’ ( House of Commons Public Accounts Committee , 6 December 2023)  < https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/39203/pdf/ > a ccessed  1 October 2023. [49]  ‘Systems thinking: An Introductory Toolkit for Civil Servants’ ( Government Office for Science , 2022)  < https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6290d241d3bf7f036cb7a09f/GO-Science_Systems_Thinking_Toolkit_2022_v1.0.pdf > ac cessed  1  March 2023. [50]  Jose Harris,   William Beveridge: A Biograph y (Macmillan 1997) 365-412. [51]  Rakesh Rajani, ‘Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy’ ( Carnegie Endowment for International Peace , June 2015)   < https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/06/03/why-technology-hasn-t-delivered-more-democracy-pub-60305 > a ccessed  1  January 2023. [52]  Audrey Tang, ‘Inside Taiwan’s new digital democracy’ The Economist (London, 12 March 2019) < https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/03/12/inside-taiwans-new-digital-democracy > a ccessed  1  April 2023. [53]  Jaan Priisalu and Rain Ottis, ‘Personal control of privacy and data: Estonian experience’ (2017) 8(1)   Data Protection Journal 441-451. [54]  David Birch, ‘Doing Something About Digital Identity’ ( Substack , 25 August 2021)  < https://dgwbirch.substack.com/p/doing-something-about-digital-identity > a ccessed  1  February 2023. [55]  ‘Decentralised Identity Foundation’ ( Minutes of the Decentralised Identity Foundation , June 2023)  < https://identity.foundation/ > a ccessed  1  October 2023. [56]  ‘Solid: Your data, your choice’ ( New Think Tank , February 2023) < https://solidproject.org/ > a ccessed  1  October 2023. [57]  ‘Digital Travel Credentials’ (ICAO, March 2023)  < https://www.icao.int/Security/FAL/TRIP/PublishingImages/Pages/Publications/Guiding%20core%20principles%20for%20the%20development%20of%20a%20Digital%20Travel%20Credential%20%20%28DTC%29.PDF > a ccessed  1  May 2023. [58]  ‘ISO/IEC 18013-5:2021. Personal identification—ISO-compliant driving licence—Part 5: Mobile driving licence (mDL) application’ (ISO/IEC, March 2023)  < https://www.iso.org/standard/69084.html > a ccessed  1  May 2023. [59]  Lewis Lloyd, ‘Policy making in a digital world. How data and new technologies can help government make better policy’  ( Institute for Government , 2020) < https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/policy-making-digital-world.pdf > a ccessed  1  October 2023. [60]  ‘Technology code of practice’ ( Cabinet Office , 2013)  < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/technology-code-of-practice-e28094-government-service-design-manual-2013.pdf > a ccessed  1  February 2023. [61]  ‘What is Open Banking?’ ( Open Banking Ltd. , June 2023) < https://www.openbanking.org.uk/what-is-open-banking > a ccessed  1  June 2023. [62]  Tang (n 52).   [63]  Karen Yeung, ‘The New Public Analytics as an Emerging Paradigm in Public Sector Administration’ (2002) 27(2) Tilburg Law Review. [64]  ‘Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard Hub’ ( Central Digital and Data Office , 5 January 2023)  < https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/algorithmic-transparency-recording-standard-hub > a ccessed  1  October 2023. [65]  ‘Examining the Black Box: Tools for assessing algorithmic systems’ ( Ada Lovelace Institute , 29 April 2020)  < https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ada-Lovelace-Institute-DataKind-UK-Examining-the-Black-Box-Report-2020.pdf > a ccessed  1  April 2023. [66]  (n 22).

Blue and white, occasionally with touches of yellow, ceramic tiles adorn not simply the façades and interiors of countless Portuguese buildings, but also the design imaginary of the nation. Spanning abstract and geometric patterns to illustrative figurations in engrossing detail, azulejos tiles are a firm fixture of Portuguese design. Their distinctive palette misleads many into locating the etymology of azulejos in azul , the Portuguese word for blue, which tidily frames the ceramic tiles within their popular discourse as an aesthetic of Portuguese monumentality—an ornament of national identity and strength. However, the term finds its origins in al-zulayj , the Arabic term for a small, smooth polished stone, which twofold troubles categorizations of the ceramic tiles—both highlighting their complex function as an architectural material and illuminating a complex and often forgotten period of Portuguese history and identity. Since the eighth century, when al-Andalus Muslims sailed from North Africa, occupying the Iberian Peninsula and in so doing introducing their ceramic compositions, azulejos have stood Janus-faced at the complex intersection of utility and ornament. They have solidified as a distinct aesthetic of Portuguese national identity while simultaneously gesturing at the assemblages of influences which constitute the nation.    It was precisely this reflective quality, this hybrid language of azulejos, that stood as a threat to the Second Portuguese Republic. Under controversial dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, the Estado Novo (New State) fascist regime sought to create a so-called modern image and so saw the brief disappearance of the ceramic tiles from Portuguese design. The resulting architectural style of Português Suave (Soft Portuguese) articulated in concrete a national identity without memory. This period of absence, and the re-emergence of azulejos following the Revolução dos Cravos  (Carnation Revolution), brings into stark relief the politics that underscore the unique design qualities of the ceramic tiles. Indeed, the Portuguese struggle against the Estavo Nuovo  fascist regime is a struggle of memory against forgetting, of azulejos against concrete.    Hybrid Materiality   Azulejos fall somewhere between decorative art and architectural material. This hybrid position of ornament and design is reflective of the more complex politics which underscores the ceramic tiles. Azulejos are an ornamental art form with a specific functional capacity: their composition of porous clay covered by a protective glaze reflects light and insulates against humidity and corrosion from salty air, making them an ideal design material for Portugal’s Mediterranean climate. [1]  Scholars are unanimous in their praise for the sleek efficiency of the material, accrediting its function as the source of its widespread and ubiquitous presence in the Portuguese design imaginary. João Miguel dos Santos Simões, one of the first and only scholars on azulejos and the founder of the Museu Nacional do Azulejo (National Azulejos Museum), describes how the ceramic tiles transcend their utilitarian function as a protective parietal finishing, taking on a monumental spirit as a ubiquitous part of Portuguese culture. [2] Indeed, the ceramics can be found in all realms of Portuguese life: lining the walls of secular sites like train stations, restaurants, bars, fountains, and murals with triumphant historical scenes; composing the political sphere in the contours of monuments and parliamentary buildings; enclosing the domestic sphere in geometric and floral motifs which adorn the fa ç ades of homes; and articulating sacred space, composing altars and icons for Catholic worship. Yet these expressions of Portuguese monumentality are not a Portuguese invention, but rather a vestige of the al-Andalus Muslim occupation. In this way, the azulejos are always gesturing as much away as towards Portuguese national identity—serving as a testament to the past as it builds the future. The concept of hybridity illuminates the genesis of the aesthetic and conceptual layers of the ceramic tiles, illuminating the complex relationship of medium and message. The azulejos represents not only the fusion of ornament and design, but also embodies the memories of strength and weakness in Portuguese history.    The history of the azulejos illuminates not simply their hybrid and complex language, it also exists as a politically urgent practice of memory. Azulejos are vestiges of the al-Andalus Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, which lasted over five hundred years, from the eighth to the thirteenth century (711-1492 CE). Currently, there is a lack of English-language scholarship discussing this period of Portugal’s design history, especially concerning the al-Andalus occupation of the Iberian Peninsula and its influence, and particularly regarding azulejos ceramic tiles. Also notable is that most English-language Portuguese scholarship avoids the mention of the al-Andalus within discussions of azulejos. It is therefore necessary for scholarship to explore this forgotten history and unpack the politics of memory. While the precise genealogical evolution of the azulejos is underexamined, and is not the subject of this paper, through the assemblage of visual analysis with the historical records which do  exist, it is possible, and indeed urgent, to locate the azulejos within its al-Andalus Muslim origins.    Materiality of History Azulejos are a composite material. They are composed of a porous clay-based ceramic body, the terracotta, covered by a protective glassy phase, the glaze, which operate together to form a larger pattern or image. The term azulejos describes their function as smooth polished stones operating within a mosaic composition, many of which have the interlocking curvilinear, geometric, and floral motifs characteristic of Islamic art and design. [3] It is possible to surmise that Portuguese azulejos find their lineage in zellij  (الزليج), a form of Islamic mosaic tilework characteristic of Islamic architecture from the end of the first millennium. Zellij are a mosaic composition where an ‘architectural surface is entirely covered by a pattern arrangement of small pieces of tile which have surface glazes of different colours’. [4] A precise historical visual analysis of al-Andalus zellij  tile against the azulejos is not possible, as al-Andalus architecture and art were either completely destroyed or whitewashed and appropriated after the Reconquista, the period of military campaigns waged by Western European Christian kingdoms in order to retake the Iberian territories. In fact, scholars note that nothing remains from the al-Andalus period of occupation or the first Portuguese kings. [5] However, a comparison of traditional Portuguese azulejos with traditional Islamic zellij  can illuminate their shared genealogy.    Some of the earliest azulejos can be found in the Palácio Nacional de Sintra (The Palace of Sintra), a site which is not only replete with ceramic tiles but also the nationalistic gestures which obscure their history. The Palácio Nacional de Sintra  was originally the residence of the al-Andalus Taifa of Lisbon, set up as the palace of the Islamic kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula. The interior walls of the palace are still adorned with ceramic tiles, but critically they are not the original zellij  tiles from the tenth century, rather being azulejos from the fifteenth century. Most scholarship on azulejos locates their origins during this period, citing this palace as one of the first instances of the ceramic design and attributing their introduction to King Manuel I of Portugal (r. 1495-1521 CE). The azulejos stand as an import of luxury within this national narrative—a whim of a monarch’s visit to Seville, Spain and the Alhambra palace in Granada as an exercise in national taste. Indeed, the palace is celebrated as a testimony to the Portuguese reconquest and early affirmation of nationality. However, a comparison of decoration choices accredited to King Manuel I with traditional architectural Islamic tile design hardly illuminates the beginnings of a national tradition and aesthetic of strength, rather gesturing towards the unshakable influence of 500 years of occupation.  Sala dos Brasões, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias One of the earliest examples of Islamic tile decoration is the Qubbat al-Sakhra  (قبة الصخرة or ‘The Dome of the Rock’). The edifice sits atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is a holy site for Muslims, enclosing the Foundation Stone that lies at the heart of the structure, which is believed to be the location of the miraji (ascension) of the Prophet Muhammad. The Qubbat al-Sakhra historically functioned and continues to serve as a shrine and important site of pilgrimage since its construction in 692 CE. [6] It is therefore reasonable to surmise this site would have held great importance and influence for the al-Andalus Muslims, making it a suitable site for comparison through which to examine the Islamic influence of the Palácio Nacional de Sintra .    The Qubbat al-Sakhra encloses the Foundation Stone in two ambulatories and an exterior wall. The exterior wall has an octangular structure with a raised circular platform that is capped with a golden dome. There are four entrances, each aligned with a cardinal direction. Marble clads the lower register of the exterior of Qubbat al-Sakhra , while faience, or tin glazed ceramics tiles, form a zellij  composition on its upper registers. The glazed tiles, which dazzle in hues of blue with accents of green and yellow, are composed of precise shards of ceramic placed together to form abstract geometric and floral patterns, as well as calligraphy. This aniconic imagery is characteristic of Islamic design, which avoids direct reflections of sentient beings in art which decorates religious and holy sites. [7] The placement of the tiles on the upper registers of the exterior structure function to draw the eyes towards heaven, urging an ascent of vision and thought which echoes the journey of the Prophet Muhammad. Each tile seems to gesture in kind with one another towards the creator of such sites of beauty, speaking in glistening rays a reflection of gratitude and wonder.    The interior of Qubbat al-Sakhra is similarly ethereal, as the light from the windows which line the octagonal wall illuminate the ceramics which grace the interior of the dome. Golden zellij compositions shimmer atop supporting columns with corinthian capitals. Swirling vegetative motifs compose two rows above the columns and seem to swirl upwards towards the glistening golden and bejewelled dome interior, itself comprised of a geometric rhythm of gilded teardrops contoured in a deep red, which seem to fall from the eyes past the body and towards the rock which the Qubbat al-Sakhra houses. The ceramic tiles crowd together like the pilgrims who come to admire the site they adorn. Ibn Battua, a fourteenth-century travel writer, described the Qubbat al-Sakhra  as ‘a building of extraordinary beauty, solidity, elegance, and singularity of shape […] Both outside and inside, the decoration is so magnificent and the workmanship so surpassing as to defy description’. [8] Here, the zellij  composition works in harmony with the architecture of the building to accentuate the excellence of either, and articulate a beautiful testament to the Islamic faith.   The Palácio Nacional de Sintra  has perhaps less lofty goals despite its similar use of ceramic tiles. Here, despite their kindred function, the azulejos gesture not towards the divine, but rather towards the Portuguese body politic as articulated by King Manuel I, and reflectively towards the Islamic kingdom who occupied the territory and its people for half a millennium. Originally constructed by the al-Andalus, following the Reconquista  and subsequent forceful expulsion of Muslims from Portugal, the Palácio Nacional de Sintra was quickly vandalised, its walls whitewashed by King João I (r. 1385-1433). The history of the palace during the reigns of successive kings is unknown until the reign of King Manuel I, who refurbished the Palácio Nacional de Sintra in the early sixteenth century with ceramic tiles. Importantly, these azulejos would adorn the very walls whitewashed of their previous al-Andalus zellij compositions—a gesture widely considered to be the origins of the azulejos tradition must thus be seen as a move to obscure their history. Most scholars cite the waiting room to the palace meeting chambers (known today as Sala dos Árabes,  or in English, the Arab Room) as an iconic origin of the Portuguese tradition of azulejos, making it an important site of consideration of the hybrid gesture inherent in them.   Sala dos Árabes, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias The  Sala dos Árabes  is a primary site of reception for the Palácio Nacional de Sintra , and the nation whose monarchs it houses. As a waiting room for the palace’s meeting chambers, the Sala dos Árabes offers itself as a vital impression to visiting guests as well as a reminder to ruling monarchs, seeking to communicate the national identity of the Kingdom of Portugal through its design. Similarly to the Qubbat al-Sakhra , Sala dos Árabe s has multiple entrances, showcasing the splendour of the interior to multiple wings of the palace. Different from the Qubbat al-Sakhra  is the availability or accessibility of the space, as the palace was reserved for visiting monarchs and other dignitaries; its design articulates a projection of national identity among a selected audience. As a site of reception, one was invited into the space by Portuguese monarchs in a political gesture echoed on the walls. The Sala dos Árabes  has a low ceiling, accentuated by its wooden material which works together with the white walls to further visually narrow the space. At the centre of the room is a marble fountain, which rises from an abstracted star based into a bronze sculpture of cherubs holding an acorn, a symbol of growth and expansion. This sculpture emerges from a blue tile segment on the floor which is echoed on the room’s walls. Interestingly, in opposition to Qubbat al-Sakhra , it is the lower register of the Sala dos Árabes  which is adorned in ceramic tiles while the upper register remains empty.  Sala dos Árabes, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias  Blue, green, and white, with accents of yellow, glazed ceramic tiles adorn the Sala dos Árabes  in undulating geometric patterns. The principal pattern has an interplay of quadrilateral shards which create a three-dimensional effect of cubes, which together seem to form the waves of an abstract ocean. This motion, however, has little place to go as the tiles are reserved to the lower half of the room and trapped by the wooden ceiling. Through their shared use of blue ceramic tiles, the azulejos seem to gesture towards the foundation, highlighting the water as a site of reflection instead of the sculpture as a site of projection into the future. Atop the wall azulejos are accent ceramic tiles which secure the building in an arrangement evoking the top of a fence, protecting or perhaps entrapping the occupants of the Sala dos Árabes . These ceramic tiles are cut and arranged into fleur-de-lys, which were often used to mark the north direction on a compass rose by Portuguese cartographers. [9]  This reference to exploration seeks to celebrate Portugal’s growing colonial empire during the Age of Discovery, where the azulejos function as a medium of this national identity as a thalassocratic empire. Importantly, the resulting trading empire from Portugal’s imperial maritime network funded the voyage which inspired King Manuel I as well as his import of the ceramic tiles, yet this projection of power is undercut by the medium of their articulation. The projection of strength King Manuel I intended for the ceramic tiles is simultaneously a humble gesture, attesting also to voyages of the al-Andalus in their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula—a history hidden just beneath the surface of the azulejos of Palácio Nacional de Sintra .   Sala dos Árabes, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias Many scholars fondly note the journey of King Manuel I to Seville and Granada, Spain, admiring his excellent  taste and financial prowess as the introduction of the azulejos tile tradition to Portugal. The resulting history of the azulejos is significantly better documented, and in virtually all scholarship the fifteenth century is regarded as the origin of the ceramic tile tradition. As this history is more easily accessible, it will be quickly summarised. In the sixteenth century, expedited by the Spanish Expulsión de los moriscos  (Expulsion of the Moriscos), the decree of King Philip the III which forced all remaining Muslims in Spain to either convert or leave the country, Portugal took off in earnest as not only a consumer, but a producer of azulejos. As Christian Portuguese tradesfolk began creating the ceramic tiles, the subjects of azulejos increasingly tended towards naturalistic artistic creations, becoming a visual language of Portuguese national identity, depicting its history, influences, and exploits for the next five centuries. This is the monumentality Simões speaks of—the ubiquitous presence as a uniquely Portuguese quality—which dismisses the politics and history of the medium itself.   Materiality of Erasure   As important as it is to uncover the past of the azulejos, it is equally valuable to examine their erasure. Chiefly, the whitewashed walls upon which King Manuel I introduced what many scholars refer to as the first use of ceramic tiles in Portugal function astutely as a metaphor for the history of the ceramic tiles they obscure. Indeed, the practice of whitewashing, a principle means of the erasure and destruction of the visual legacy of the al-Andalus occupation of Portugal, emerges—through a consideration of the work of the Swiss modernist architect Le Corbusier—not simply as the forgetting of past subjugation but an exercise in the purification of a national identity.   Le Corbusier first discusses the need for a ‘loi du blanchiment’ (law of whitening) as a cleansing moral act which expunges decorative art in favour of a ‘purity’ of body, sight, and mind, during a 1923 interview early in his career. [10]  For Le Corbusier, whiteness is both the effect and means of cleanliness, against a surface making disease and impurity visible. This measure of control was characteristic of his career in international design, characterised by the recurring gesture of an eradication of difference and a particular disdain for ornamentation. Art historian Mark Wigley argues that Le Corbusier’s whitewash ‘exposes every dimension of life in front of it to judgement’. [11] Yet another necessary dimension of gesture is concealment; it is necessary to consider that which is behind  the whitewash. The projection of cleanliness requires not simply a clean exterior, but the erasure of the material which previously stood where the whitewash now resides. Le Corbusier’s logic of purity emerges as a rejection of tradition, articulating a hyper-presence which requires not simply that one constantly attend to the present moment so as to maintain the aesthetic of cleanliness but also that one obliterates any indication of a past.    The whitewashing of the Palácio Nacional de Sintra , and doubtlessly countless other sites yet unexplored, stands as an attempted cleansing of the Portuguese body politic. Following the logic of Le Corbusier, the whitewash stands as an attempted purification of national identity through the obfuscation of the al-Andalus tiles. Yet this venture is incomplete, as the resurgence of azulejos, despite any nationalistic intentions to project strength and obscure origins, still gestures towards their Muslim origins and therefore the diversity of influence and experience which constitutes Portugal’s national identity. Unfortunately, however, the calls of modernists like Le Corbusier would be answered in earnest, the call for a sleek international style and its implications of national purity zealously executed within Portugal’s own modern period, as administered by the Estado Novo regime. This period oversaw the disappearance of azulejos from Portuguese architectural design, cited by the regime as a movement towards simplicity and efficiency and against ornamentation. However, it is precisely the hybrid language of the azulejos—the paradoxical message of national strength articulated in the medium of historical vulnerability—which made their continued use during the Estado Novo  period an impossibility. Estado Novo  (New State) was one of the longest surviving authoritarian regimes in Europe. It began with the military coup d’état of 28 May 1926, then declared the Revolução Nacional (National Revolution), now known simply as the 28 May Revolution, which ended the unstable República Portuguesa (Portuguese Republic). Also known as the First Republic, República Portuguesa was the complex 16-year period which followed the end of the Portuguese monarchy. The First Republic attempted and ‘fail[ed] to democratise and modernise the country’, [12] instead fostering growing unrest and distrust formed between the ideals República Portuguesa  espoused and their failed political materializations, caused in part by and coupled with the economic instability resulting from the First World War. Historian José Miguel Sardica describes how ‘within a few years [of the turmoil of República Portuguesa ], large parts of the key economic forces, intellectuals, opinion-makers and middle classes changed from left to right, trading the unfulfilled utopia of a developing and civic republicanism for notions of “order”, “stability” and “security”’, [13] which paved the way for the coming authoritarian regime. The 28 May Revolution established the Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship), which predicated itself on a ‘deep scepticism regarding the effectiveness of parliamentary democracy’, [14]  later crystallised in the 1933 constitutional referendum which institutionalised the Estado Novo  one party state led principally by António de Oliveira Salazar. [15]  The so-called ‘New State’ was an authoritarian regime concerned with enforcing the nova ordem  (new order) of a modernised Portuguese nation. [16]   From the moment Salazar seized power, he committed himself to the construction and promotion of ‘new public buildings as achievements that were in stark contrast with the inertia of the previous parliamentary regime’. [17] The resulting architectural style originally promoted as Estilo Português  (Portuguese style), now known as Português Suave  (Soft Portuguese),   sought to articulate a ‘future-orientated modernity’ [18] for the Christian fascist state, which included the discontinuation of the azulejos as a design material in all realms of Portuguese design and life. Português Suave  sought paradoxically to articulate a ‘more international language and a national style’, [19] achieved through the displacement of traditional techniques, materials, and styles in favour of a somewhat anonymous, austere, and efficient modernist style. Ponorama: Revista Portuguesa de Arte e Turismo ( Portuguese Magazine of Arts and Tourism ), a publication overseen by the Estado Novo  regime, described in a 1941 article entitled ‘Campanha do bom gôsto’ (‘Campaign for good taste’) the kind of modern design identity the Estado Novo  promoted:    Good taste is imposed even in technical areas. […] Experience teaches scientists, engineers, architects, builders, that the artistically and scientifically correct solutions are always the simplest, the most elegant, the most attractive [ O bom gosto impõe-se mesmo nas áreas técnicas. […] A experiência ensina aos cientistas, engenheiros, arquitetos, construtores, que as soluções artística e cientificamente corretas são sempre as mais simples, as mais elegantes, as mais atraentes .] [20]   Modernist Portuguese architects responded to this imperative, designing sleek buildings which adhered to the principles of simplicity of form and material. These calls can be understood in relation to the modernist architectural movement more broadly, as architects and designers who worked for Salazar’s regime were encouraged to attend international fairs, subscribe to foreign journals of design, and maintain acquaintances and professional relationships with foreign designers. [21] The resulting fierce rejection of the past must be understood not simply within a Portuguese context, but alongside an analysis of International Design and the implications of its implementation.   The Salazarian regime was preoccupied, like other European fascist regimes, with newness. During a 1940 commemoration of the Estado Novo  he stated: We are not just because we were, we do not live just because we have lived, we live to carry out our mission and claim to the world the right to do it. [ Não somos só porque fomos, nem vivemos só por termos vividos; viver para bem cumprir a nossa missão e perante o mundo afirmamos o direito de cumprir-la ]. [22] This sentiment resonates with Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture , which itself is an appeal to ‘disdain the work of so many schools, so many masters, so many pupils, and to think thus of them: “they are as disagreeable as mosquitoes”’. [23]  The modernist identity emerges for both as a rejection of the past, which resulted in a nova ordem  (new order) or l’esprit nouveau  (new spirit) of a hyper-present orientation. For Português Suave , this impulse lived not only in the architecture but the design materials; principally, in the exclusion of the azulejos.   The fall from grace the azulejos experienced during Português Suave  is typically associated with the material’s ornamentation, framed within modernist discussions of efficiency of material. Concrete instead became a favoured material, [24] constructing buildings which stood in austere, lacklustre silence compared with the ceramic tiled buildings which preceded them. The Praça do Areeiro (Areeiro Square), constructed in the midst of the Estado Novo regime from 1938-1949 by architect Luís Christino da Silva, stands as a testament to this forgetting—its edifice seeming to yearn for memory, for azulejos. Typical of Português Suave , the buildings of Praça do Areeiro utilise reinforced concrete as their primary medium, and highlight its smooth form in large, looming, plain walls. A marble base of archades evoke a robust sense of uniformity and strength, accentuated by a slight horizontal stripe which emphasises the scale of the buildings. The upper register of the buildings has uniform rows of square windows against a plain concrete facade, which upon close analysis reveals itself to be made of evenly placed rectangular concrete panels. This style is both a representation and trace of the lost contours of traditional Portuguese architecture which maintains similar structure but crucially maintains a stripped down, simple aesthetic. During the 1940s, Salazar sought to restore  much of the capital’s architecture through ‘sharpening’ or ‘correcting’ their facades as a testament to his commitment to restore the values of Portugal’s past and future. [25] Importantly, this restoration of Portuguese identity omitted its most perhaps monumental medium: the azulejos replaced by concrete panels.   The Português Suave decision to retire the azulejos functions as a complex political gesture to not simply modernise Portuguese design but also purify Portuguese identity. The azulejos function as a design structure which builds other structures, a story with which other stories are told; they are a complex hybrid language that remembers aspects of Portuguese history and identity which the Estado Novo regime in particular would like to forget. In particular, the azulejos attest to the presence and significance of the al-Andalus Muslim occupation of the territory for 500 years. The erasure of ceramic tiles from the so-called modern Portuguese nation functions as a politics which seeks to kill politics; an eradication of difference, of time, and of history. The urgency of uncovering the history of the azulejos, of not letting it be lost in false nationalistic narratives, and of maintaining their place within Portuguese design history and practice, is a struggle precisely against a fascist regime which seeks to eliminate opposition in service of power.   It is important to note the countless historic azulejos are visible in Portugal today. Despite their distaste for the ceramic tiles, the Estado Novo  regime did not remove azulejos from all historic buildings. In fact, regardless of their lack of favour during Português Suave  and the imperative to be modern delivered by the regime, many Portuguese architects such as Raul Lino maintained a strong affinity for the ceramic tiles. Interestingly, Lino maintained a close personal relationship with Salazar, and did not use the ceramic tiles in his work, though he wrote passionately of their possibilities. Lino took issue with the increasingly ‘amorphous, spiritless, faceless aspect of the Western metropolis’ that was taking over Portuguese design and felt the azulejos stood as an integral articulation of the ‘eternal spirit of the Portuguese people’. [26] Soon after the Revolução dos Cravos (Carnation Revolution), which ended the near 40-year rule of the Estado Novo  regime, the azulejos returned as a design material; a triumph not of will, not of determination or power of a fixed national identity, but an embrace of a democratic, fluid, and hybrid nation.    The urgency of memory does not end with a singular recollection nor the fall of one fascist regime, but rather requires constant attention and care for history. Currently, the azulejos are under a different threat of disappearance: commodification. The manufacture of contemporary azulejos is principally for tourist markets which covet the ceramic tiles as aesthetic objects, often disregarding their design value and history. The implications of the commodity fetishism of azulejos are yet unexplored. Likewise, an inquiry into how this reflects the contemporary national identity of Portugal remains unwritten. There is an urgency to attend to this emerging history, as the lust for azulejos has grown so strong that numerous historical sites in Portugal are filled with gaping holes, thieves having removed the ceramic tiles for sale on the black market. The commodification of the azulejos appears to be eradicating its history twice, removing both the idea and the object. As more scholars emerge to build robust histories of the movement and design of these ceramic tiles, further questions and knowledge can be gleaned about the nature of Portuguese identity.[27] Caroline DeFrias Caroline DeFrias (CDF) is an artist-academic, currently operating in Mi’kma’ki territory in Kjipuktuk (so called Halifax, Canada). Their work, through a variety of mediums and disciplines, seeks to explore the construction of gallery space and the encounter of the art object, notions of inheritance and identity in relation to immigration and (re)settlement, as well as the ethics and pathos of the archive. They hold a Combined Honours with distinction Bachelor of Arts from the University of King’s College in Social Anthropology and the Historiography of Science, with a certificate in Art History and Visual Culture, and are pursuing a Masters of Fine Art in Art History from Concordia University. [1]  Catarina Geraldes, ‘The Integration of Azulejos in the Modernist Architecture of Portugal as a unique case in Europe’ in Marluci Menezes, Dória Rodrigues Costa, and J Delgado Rodrigues (eds), Intangibility Matters: International Conference on the Values of Tangible Heritage (LNEC 2017) 139-147. [2]  João Miguel dos Santos Simões, Estudos De Azulejaria  (Imprensa Nacional Casa Da Moeda 1956) 268. [3]  Oleg Grabar, ‘What Makes Islamic Art Islamic?’ in Islamic Art and Beyond, volume III, Constructing the Study of Islamic Art  ( Routledge 2006), 247–251, 248. [4]  Donald N Wilber, ‘The Development of Mosaic Faiënce in Islamic Architecture in Iran’ (1939) 6(1) Ars   Islamica 16. [5]  See eg Mark Cartwright, ‘Portuguese Empire’ ( World History Encyclopedia , 21 July 2021) < https://www.worldhistory.org/Portuguese_Empire/ > accessed 1 July 2024.         [6]  Erdal Eser, ‘The First Islamic Monument Kubbet'üs-Sahra (Dome of the Rock): A New Proposition’   (2017) 23 Pesa International Journal of Social Studies 135-147. [7]  Grabar (n 3) 250. [8]  Quoted in Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, ‘The Dome of the Rock (Qubbat Al-Sakhra)’ ( Khan Academy ) < https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/west-and-central-asia-apahh/west-asia/a/the-dome-of-the-rock-qubbat-al-sakhra#:~:text=The%20Dome%20of%20the%20Rock%20is%20a%20building%20of%20extraordinary,surpassing%20as%20to%20defy%20description > accessed 1 July 2024. [9]  Maria Fernanda Alegria, Suzanne Daveau, João Carlos Garcia, and Francesc Relaño, ‘Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance’ in David Woodward (ed), The History of Cartography, Volume 3, Part 1: Cartography in the European Renaissance  (University of Chicago Press 2007) 956-1068, 1033. [10]  Le Corbusier quoted in Guillaume Janneau, ‘L’Exposition des arts techniques de 1925’ (1923) Le Bulletin de la vie   artistique 64. [11] Mark Wigley, ‘Chronic Whiteness’ ( e-flux Architecture , November 2020) < https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/sick-architecture/360099/chronic-whiteness/ > accessed 1 July 2024.   [12] José Miguel Sardica, ‘The Memory of the Portuguese First Republic throughout the Twentieth Century’ (2011) 9 e.Journal of Portuguese History 63. [13]  ibid 67. [14]  Raquel da Silva & Ana Sofia Ferreira, ‘The Post-Dictatorship Memory Politics in Portugal Which Erased Political Violence from the Collective Memory’ (2018) 53(1) Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 26. [15]  ibid. [16]  Fernando Rosas, ‘O salazarismo e o homem novo: Ensaio sobre o Estado Novo e a questão do totalitarismo’ (2011) 35(157) Análise Social 1033. [17] Rita Almeida de Carvalho, ‘Ideology and Architecture in the Portuguese ‘Estado Novo’: Cultural Innovation within a Para-Fascist State (1932–1945)’ (2018) 7(2) Fascism 146. [18]  ibid 155. [19]  ibid 154. [20]  ‘Campanha Do Bom Gôsto’ (1941) 1 Ponorama: Revista Portuguesa de Arte e Turismo; my translation. [21]  De Carvalho (n 17) 159. [22]  António de Oliveira Salazar, Discursos e Notas Políticas: 1938-1943 , vol 3 (2nd edn, Coimbra Editora 1944) 259; my translation. [23]  Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture  (14th edn, Dover Publications 1986) 84. [24]  De Carvalho (n 17) 170. [25] Ellen W Sapega, ‘Image and Counter-Image: The Place of Salazarist Images of National Identity in Contemporary Portuguese Visual Culture’ (2002) 39(2) Luso-Brazilian Review 47. [26]  De Carvalho (n 17) 163. [27] Possibilities for future research include the exploration of the ceramic tiles within Portugal’s own imperial project; and the complex meanings and evolution of the azulejos in Brazil, India, the Philippines, East Timor, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea. Attending to the history of the Portuguese export of the ceramic tile will further critical studies into the nature of Portuguese imperialism and colonialism, as well as the national identity that fostered them.

The largest protest movement in Iraq’s history, Thawrat Tishreen of 2019, shouldn’t have achieved so little. The movement pursued well-tested tactics, which had succeeded elsewhere, against a weak Iraqi regime for months on end, refusing to be swayed by brutal repression, token concessions, or elite co-option. [1]  Despite the sustained mobilisation of a massive, cross-sectarian, cross-class coalition around a core set of clear demands, Thawrat Tishreen resulted in incidental, though not entirely insignificant, political gains, but failed to change its primary target, Iraq’s Muhasasa system of sectarian power sharing. In this piece, I will argue that this failure is best explained by the decentralised, diffuse character of the Muhasasa system, the weakness of which engenders opposition by failing to deliver robust governance, but, paradoxically, also enables its durability. Other factors did contribute to Thawrat Tishreen’s failure: the protest movement suffered from some organisational weaknesses; the political machinations of different factions in Iraq like the Sadrists undermined the cause; and exogenous factors such as foreign intervention and the COVID-19 pandemic played a role. Nonetheless, these obstacles acquired causal force because of the dynamics of the Muhasasa system and would not have otherwise created such significant difficulties for the opposition.   This essay will proceed as follows: (1) I will contextualise and analyse the salient features of Thawrat Tishreen, especially its organisation, its demands, and responses to the protests; (2) I will argue that, despite limited political successes, the movement should be coded a failure; and (3) I will establish that, above all else, the intractability of the Muhasasa system made failure very likely. I demonstrate this argument (3) by (a) pursing a deeper analysis of why the nature of the Muhasasa system made success unlikely; (b) outlining ways in which the protest movement was deficient, while linking the significance of these deficiencies back to the Muhasasa system; and (c) accounting for exogenous factors, which played a role, but are not of primary significance. Conversely, I will not attempt to fully explain the historical development of Iraq’s Muhasasa system or its subsequent trajectory, but rather focus on why Thawrat Tishreen failed to bring about its demise.   Thawrat Tishreen has attracted attention from scholars, analysts, and practitioners focused on the MENA region both because of its significance to the domestic politics of Iraq and its occurrence alongside the other protest movements of the ‘Second Arab Spring’ of 2018-19. [2]  Scholarly attention has broadly sought to situate the protest movement in Iraq’s post-2003 politics, assess its aims, and suggest reasons for its failure. I draw on these academic interventions to a certain degree but also rely heavily on articles published by think tanks, newspapers, and NGOs during and after the crisis. I also utilise polling data, protest datasets, and analyses of social media posts. Furthermore, I have drawn inspiration from informal conversations with academics, diplomats, activists, and citizens of Iraq. To situate my piece, then, in the emerging discourse on Thawrat Tishreen, my main goal is not to contribute new primary material, but rather, as the dust settles, to take stock of contemporaneous data and analyses of events. I focus on (1) the extent to which Thawrat Tishreen should be coded a failure and (2) the determinants of failure, because these two questions are still the main objects of contention in both academic and quotidian discussion around the uprising.   1. Context, Events, Organisation, and Responses   Thawrat Tishreen did not come out of nowhere. Since the US-led invasion of 2003, Iraqi politics has been characterised by violence, instability, and elite infighting, breeding widespread discontent. Iraq’s 43 million strong population is composed of three main sectarian groups: Shi'i Arabs (c. 61%), Sunni Kurds (c. 20%), and Sunni Arabs (c. 15%). [3]  The 2005 Constitution attempted to resolve the sectarian question, which had been a thorn in the side of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime and the main priority of the Shi'i-dominated Iraqi opposition, by introducing a consociational sectarian power sharing agreement, the Muhasasa system. The word ‘Muhasasa’ comes from the Arabic for ‘apportionment’ and, in political terms, stipulates that the Iraqi government is divided among sectarian groups in an informal quota system. In institutional terms, the Presidency is reserved for a Kurd, the position of Prime Minister for a Shi'i and the Speaker of Parliament a Sunni. Cabinet positions are allocated roughly in proportion to the share of the population made up from each group, and a certain level of representation is guaranteed for Iraq’s Assyrian and Turkmen minorities. [4]  In practice, this results in a system of political economy in which the Iraqi state is divided by deeply entrenched patronage networks, political advancement depends on factional loyalty rather than competence, systemic corruption based on sectarian affiliation is rampant, and foreign interference through political parties and non-state armed groups is widespread. [5]   The Iraqi government formed in 2005 took over the reins of a very weak state. After wars against Iran in the 1980s and the US-led coalition in 1990-91, as well as severe sections and multiple uprisings in the 1990s, the Iraqi state was all but dismantled by the US-led invasion of 2003 and the Coalition Provisional Authority’s campaign of ‘De-Ba'athification’. Institutional fragility, the US occupation, and the dysfunctional politics of post-2003 Iraq led to major civil wars from 2006-8 and 2013-17. This weakness was compounded by a reliance on oil, which makes up 99% of Iraqi exports, 85% of government budget, and 42% of total GDP. [6]  While Iraq’s oil wealth is considerable, it is largely siphoned between different factions as part of the Muhasasa arrangement, leading to acute governance failures. Especially after 2011, Iraqi citizens began protesting against government dysfunction, corruption, foreign influence, and the excesses of the Muhasasa system. [7]  These protests increasingly acquired a non-sectarian character despite the sectarian nature of Iraqi politics.   The outbreak of massive protest in Iraq in 2019 can be traced to several domestic drivers but must also be contextualised in regional and international terms. The 2010-11 Arab Uprisings ‘missed’ Iraq in the sense that no major, sustained protests broke out and the Iraqi system was never threatened by popular mobilisation. Nonetheless, like other states in MENA, Iraq was experiencing the demographic pressures of a youth bulge in the 2010s, with 67% of its population under 30 years old by 2019. [8]  Indeed, major protest movements also broke out in Sudan, Algeria, and Lebanon in the 2018-19 period. While there were strong links between the protests in Iraq and Lebanon where a similarly ‘sectarianised’ political economy exists, the eruption of protest in Sudan and Algeria was largely incidental. Overall, though, the 2010s was a particularity ‘revolutionary’ period for the MENA region as a whole.   In the context of rising corruption, economic problems, unemployment, sustained US and Iranian foreign penetration, and appalling governance failures—road, electricity, water, and sewage systems in much of the country are not functioning—government legitimacy in Iraq was steadily decreasing through the 2010s, with lower and lower turnouts at elections. [9]  So why 2019? On a basic level, Iraqi society has spent most of the post-Saddam Hussein period either recovering from the trauma of 2003 invasion and 2006-8 civil war or facing down the threat of Daesh up to at least mid-2018. Thus, these critical existential challenges to Iraq as a unified country precluded the formation of such a large-scale protest movement. Two immediate triggers, moreover, precipitated the extraordinary protests that began on 1 October 2019. First, the security forces’ violent suppression of a protest by holders of advanced degrees in Basra on 25 September generated widespread outrage on social media. Second, the demotion of Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi from the prestigious Counter Terrorism Service to a position in the Ministry of Defence on 27 September stoked anger against perceived Iranian influence in Iraq. The demotion of Saadi, who was celebrated as a war hero in Iraq’s defeat of Daesh, was interpreted by many as another capitulation by Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to Iran-aligned factions in the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), who opposed Saadi.   Nothing, however, could have predicted the scale, intensity, or duration of the protest movement, which lasted from October and petered out by early March. [10]  Berman, Clarke, and Majed’s dataset (fig 1) of weekly protests coded by main demand usefully elucidates the goals of the protestors and separates the protests into four main phases: escalation, dispersion, resuscitation, and demobilisation. [11]  A few key events are worth reflecting upon in this narrative. First, the ‘escalation’ phase was fuelled both by the protests’ original demands and by anger at the violence of state and state-affiliated actors, including the PMF and other non-stated armed groups. With the resignation of Abdu-Mahdi, the escalation phase came to an end, however protests were sustained through December by calls for more systemic reform. Massive protest was resuscitated in January, first by reactions to the assassination of Qasem Souleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the head of the PMF; and second by anger at the failure of the political elite to form an alternative government to Abdul-Mahdi by the so-called ‘Nasiriyah deadline’. The final demobilisation of protest was the result of several interlinked factors, which will be the focus of part (4). Fig 1. Thawrat Tishreen Graph. © Asa Breuss-Burgess The decentralised, non-hierarchical leadership structures of Thawrat Tishreen make it difficult to definitively ascertain its goals, but the bottom line is that protesters wanted an end to the Muhasasa system’s institutional division of the state along sectarian lines. Protestors also demanded fresh elections, accountability for regime violence, the technocratic improvement of public services, better employment opportunities, and the erosion of foreign influence by the USA and Iran. Berman, Clarke, and Majed’s dataset (fig 1) utilises local, Arabic-language newspapers to categorise both non-violent and violent popular mobilisation according to their primary demand. As the figure shows, protests were overtly political in character, calling for new elections and changes to the political system. Chants such as ‘No to Muhasasa, no to political sectarianism!’ and ‘The people want the fall of the regime!’ were widespread. [12]  Large scale analysis of protestor signs found on social media provides another effective mode of delineating Thawrat Tishreen’s main goals. Numan’s research employs exhaustive research on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to identify and code 2113 distinct protestor signs; his findings sustain the assertion by most commentaries on the movement that Thawrat Tishreen was overtly anti-sectarian and cast itself strongly in terms of Iraqi nationalism, with about 50% of all protestor signs containing the uniting symbol of the Iraqi flag. [13]   In organisational terms, Thawrat Tishreen was characterised by massive, spontaneous youth mobilisation, initially organised through local networks and social media, but later coordinated by committees of activists. Like the first phases of the 2011 Arab Uprisings, leaderlessness was a defining feature of the protests. [14]  Crucially, protestors did not mobilise according to class or sectarian identity, but rather Shi'i and Sunnis united across sectarian lines around Iraqi nationalism, even if some political parties were more energetic than others in sending their supporters to protest. [15]  It is worth noting, however, that protest was concentrated in Baghdad and the Shi'i-dominated South, and a majority of protesters were working class. [16]  Action was overwhelmingly and intentionally nonviolent, manifesting through demonstrations, sit-ins, the occupation of squares, and the construction of barricades. In many activist spaces, an air of ‘fun’ and ‘communitas’ emerged, a feature of Iraq’s protests that was shared in Lebanon. [17]  Still, the use of nonlethal violence on the part of protestors was not uncommon, for example, with the burning of Iranian consulates or attacks on buildings. Attacks on security forces were sporadic and usually in response to state or state-affiliated violence.   In contrast to the avowed nonviolence of the Tishreen protesters, regime and especially regime affiliated forces meted out considerable repression, resulting in the death of at least 600 protesters, the injury of over 20,000, and incalculable trauma. [18]  This ranged from internet blackouts and curfews on the one hand to the intimidation, beating, torture, kidnapping, and killing of protestors on the other, often by hidden snipers overlooking occupied public squares. Repression inflicted by non-state actors, primarily non-state armed groups and anti-Tishreen political parties, was generally more violent and brutal than that of the regime. [19]  The facelessness of repression by non-state and state-affiliated armed groups further shielded the government from accountability.   2. Political Successes, Failed Revolution   Thawrat Tishreen failed to realise its core aims, even if it did not accomplish nothing. Following Chenoweth and Stephan, I define success as the ‘full achievement of its stated goals within a year of the peak of activities and a discernible effect on the outcome such that the outcome was a direct result of the campaign’s activities’. [20]  It has been noted that the organisational form of Thawrat Tishreen prevented the coalescence of a single, definitive list of aims, but it has also been shown that certain core demands were common across the entire movement—better governance, the reduction of foreign influence in Iraqi politics, the improvement of the economic situation, and, centrally, the end of the Muhasasa system of sectarian power sharing. In this section, I argue, contrary to some commentators, that Thawrat Tishreen had some significant successes before reflecting that, despite these successes, the revolution should be considered on the whole a failure. [21]   In direct response to sustained pressure from the Tishreen protests, Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi resigned on 29 November despite repression and attempts behind the scenes to keep him in power. In addition, the Council of Representatives passed a significant electoral reform law on 24 December, which responded to the demands of protestors by eroding the power of the political establishment in picking candidates and establishing an independent High Electoral Commission. Early elections were scheduled for July 2021. Furthermore, when he was finally able to form a government in May 2020, the new Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi formed a more technocratic cabinet than Abdul-Mahdi, compensated the families of killed protestors with 10 million dinars each, better mitigated foreign influence, and held several meetings with Tishreen activists. [22]  Since Thawrat Tishreen, moreover, a new ‘culture of perpetual protest’ has emerged in Iraq. [23]  Largely rooted in the legacy of Thawrat Tishreen, this holds Iraqi politicians more accountable to some degree, but also has been coopted and instrumentalised by many political factions that are deeply tied to the Muhasasa system. [24]  The longer term effects of Thawrat Tishreen on Iraqi political culture remains to be seen.   Overall, however, public opinion data and a more thorough analysis of political developments demonstrate that Thawrat Tishreen ought to be considered a failure. While the revolution forced Abdul-Mahdi to resign, the Muhasasa system remains in place. Prime Minister aspirants Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi and Adnan Zurfi both failed to form governments during the protests because they did not command the support of the Muhasasa political class, and Kadhimi only succeeded because he did. [25]  Kadhimi succeeded because he was able to balance different sectarian factions against each other as well as placate both the USA and Iran. Government formation witnessed the same costly and corruption-ridden ‘horse-trading’ of previous ministries. The ‘early elections’ of 2021 brought about a political crisis that lasted over a year and was emblematic of everything the Tishreen protestors had rallied against. To make matters worse, only 36% of eligible voters turned out to vote in 2021, demonstrating a lack of faith in politics. [26]  While Kadhimi was perhaps more skilful at mitigating the power of non-state armed groups, the actions of non-state actors during the protests remains unpunished and these groups retain a powerful role in Iraqi politics. For example, while both Kadhimi and his successor, al-Sudani, were temporarily able to restrain violence between non-state armed groups like Kata’ib Hezbollah and US forces, the Israeli assault on Gaza that followed the 7 October attacks has led to several fatal exchanges between the US and Iran-affiliated groups. In addition, the Iraqi economy remains dependent on oil markets, having been hit hard by COVID in 2020 with a contraction of 10% and an 18.5% devaluation of the Iraqi Dinar against the dollar. [27]   Polling data, moreover, evidences the widespread perception that Thawrat Tishreen failed to change the Iraqi system. In 2021, Arab Barometer found that just 22% of Iraqis trust the government. [28]  Only 3% believe corruption is ‘not at all’ a problem, 68% felt corruption was ‘to a large extent’ prevalent, and, perhaps most worryingly, just 27% believed the government was working to crack down on corruption. Negative perceptions of democracy have increased since 2019; 72% of Iraqis link democracy to their country’s poor economic performance and 67% link democratic government to indecision and problems, even if 68% of Iraqis still believe that, despite democracy’s problems, it is a better system than others. [29]  Nonetheless, 37% of Iraqis expressed a desire to emigrate, with the figure rising to 48% for 18-29 year olds. [30]  This widespread discontent reflects the underlying problems that drove Iraqis to protest in 2019. At the same time, it demonstrates that Thawrat Tishreen failed to bring about systemic change.   3. Strength through Weakness: Muhasasa as the Primary Cause of Failure   The fragmented character of the Muhasasa system caused Thawrat Tishreen to fail. Not only does the nature of the system make meaningful reform very difficult, the structures of Muhasasa gave causal force to other factors which would not otherwise have undermined the revolution. I will demonstrate this part of my argument by (a) dissecting the aspects of the Muhasasa system that make reform so difficult; (b) explaining how the organisational structure of the protests contributed to failure—not because of inherent deficiencies per se, but as a result of their relationship to the Muhasasa system; and (c) outlining the role of exogenous factors, while also pointing out the ways in which their causal significance was enhanced in the context of Muhasasa.   a. The Intractability of the Muhasasa System   The last two decades have shown Muhasasa to be a poor system of government in Iraq, and yet its very frailty became a lifeline during Thawrat Tishreen. The system of factional bargaining and internal division is rooted in an elite pact model whereby disparate, mutually antagonistic elites representing distinct sectarian groups share an interest in the continuation of the system of rule, even if they are perpetually in competition over how the spoils of government are allocated. [31]  As a result, the resignation of individual politicians does not precipitate systemic change because, unlike the (temporarily) successful 2010-11 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, there is no Ben Ali or Mubarak to remove and replace with a democratically elected executive. [32]  In short, there is no king whose head the revolutionaries can cut off. Furthermore, Muhasasa’s system of power sharing means that any attempts to bring about meaningful reform are likely to be interpreted by some political actors in sectarian terms, which risks the outbreak of violence and, in the worst case, civil war. Non-state armed groups are another source of its durability; they pressure the state to do their bidding, advance the interests of foreign powers, coordinate illicit economic activity, and intimidate, abduct, and assassinate opponents. [33]  To provide a visual analogy, Muhasasa operates like a chain of people holding hands in a circle, leaning back away from one another. It is hard for the ring to move in any single direction, but also nearly impossible for one hand in the chain to pull away without being pulled back into the fold or precipitating total collapse.   Strong financial incentives exist for the continuation of the Muhasasa system. [34]  Competition over state resources, primarily derived through oil rents, has defined post-2003 Iraqi politics from the beginning. [35]  Indeed, between 2005 and 2018 the government payroll expanded from $3.8 billion to nearly $36 billion. [36]  Although corruption is very difficult to measure, through confidential interviews with high ranking members of the Iraqi political elite Dodge has estimated that around 25% of government resources are lost through contractual fraud. [37]  Non-state armed groups and affiliated political parties benefit directly from access to these resources, but also use their elevated position to extract tolls at checkpoints and attract foreign patronage, mainly from Iran. As Majed forcefully argues, Muhasasa is intimately bound together with a system of political economy of corruption by design. [38]  Factions have consciously fought ‘over’ the state with this system in mind. As one PMF affiliate, Mohammad al-Basri, put it: ‘Do they really think that we would hand over a state, an economy, one that we have built over 15 years? That they can just casually come and take it? Impossible! This is a state that was built with blood’. [39]  Ultimately, the nature of the political system, financial incentives for its perpetuation, and a perception by groups of having ‘won’ control over portions of the state make the Muhasasa system extremely difficult to reform.   b. Deficiencies in the Organisation of the Protests   The organisational structure of the Thawrat Tishreen protests weakened the movement, but primarily because of the correspondent form of its target, the Muhasasa system. As a result of the targeting of opposition figures by non-state armed groups, as well as the protesters’ rejection of mainstream politics, the protests were largely leaderless, preventing them from offering clear alternatives to the political elite. [40]  Much like the first wave of the Arab Uprisings, the protestors demanded that the political class reform itself. Unlike the 2010-11 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt where protestors had a single, unified state to rally against, the internal fragmentation of Iraqi institutions into siloed sectarian groupings made it more difficult to effect change. Furthermore, at the 2021 elections Tishreen activists failed to set up political parties that could attract widespread support. Scholars have noted that revolutionary movements in democracies often face this obstacle because they arise from diverse, negative coalitions. [41]  The non-hierarchical organisation of Thawrat Tishreen is a case in point.   It must be noted, however, that non-hierarchical, negative coalitions have succeeded in regime change elsewhere, with the uprisings of 2010-11 being the most obvious example. [42]  With this in mind, Thawrat Tishreen’s organisational patterns must be understood as deficient primarily in relation to the system they were targeting. First, the demand that the Iraqi political elite reform itself was precluded by the strong incentives for elite collusion. Second, no alternative ‘pacted-transition’ option existed; in Grewal’s comparison of the 2018-19 uprisings in Sudan and Algeria, he suggests that the opposition in Sudan (temporarily) succeeded because an organised civil society arranged a transitional pact with the regime under the aegis of the Sudanese Professionals’ Association. [43]  In contrast, the target system of oppression in Iraq is diffuse and hard to pin down, which makes a packed transition impossible.   c. Exogenous Factors: Political Contingency, Foreign Interference, and COVID-19   Prevailing narratives often suggest that Thawrat Tishreen was brought down by exogenous factors such as Iranian influence, the political machinations of Muqtada al-Sadr, the assassination of Qasem Souleimani by the USA, or the COVID-19 pandemic. While all of these factors were relevant, they—like the organisational form of the protests—acquired causal significance primarily by affecting the operation of the Muhasasa system.   Iraq is so vulnerable to foreign interference to a large degree as a result of the Muhasasa system. Indeed, this is partially by design. The Coalition Provisional Authority approved the system of sectarian power sharing proposed by Iraqi Shi'i exiles in the 1990s because the US envisioned future influence being channelled through these structures. The actual result has been the massive expansion of Iranian influence in Iraqi politics. For example, Iran controls several political parties and non-state armed groups to a considerable degree, using them to assault Tishreen protestors and as part of its ‘Axis of Resistance’ against American forces. Despite its often radical rhetoric, Iran should be understood as a counterrevolutionary actor, especially in Iraq where Tishreen reforms threatened its interests. [44]  Partially as a result of Iranian penetration of Muhasasa, respect for Iraqi sovereignty by external powers like the USA or Türkiye is lower than for most states in the world—hence the Trump administration’s decision to conduct a drone strike on an Iranian government official, Qasem Souleimani, and Iraqi citizen Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis on 3 January 2020 without any prior Iraqi authorisation. The effect of these attacks was to rally many Iraqis against America, taking some of the pressure off Iran.   Another direct result of the assassinations was the split between the Sadrists and the Tishreen movement. [45]  Muqtada al-Sadr leads a broad-based political movement in Iraq that emphasises Shi'i Islamism as well as social justice. From around 2015, Sadr became increasingly willing to ally himself with secularist protest movements and supported the Tishreen protests in autumn 2019. After Tishreen organisers refused to join Sadr’s 24 January anti-American protests, however, the powerful cleric withdrew his support for the movement and directed his ‘Blue Helmets’ to join the attacks on protestors. With the PMF leader Mahdi al-Muhandis assassinated, Sadr saw an opportunity to bolster his leadership credentials among the various anti-Tishreen Shi'i groups that compose the PMF. [46]  The Sadrist reversal had far-reaching effects—many of the millions of Sadrists who had protested as part of Thawrat Tishreen were now violently attacking its protesters—but it did not kill the revolution by itself. Instead, it must be recognised that the decision of one faction to change sides could only have been so pivotal in the context of, first, a political system as convoluted as Muhasasa and, second, a decentralised, non-hierarchical, negative coalition like the Tishreen movement. [47]  Foreign interference and political machinations played such a significant role primarily because of their interaction with the highly intractable Muhasasa system. By the time Iraq introduced COVID-19 response measures in March 2020, the durability of Muhasasa had broken down the bulk of Thawrat Tishreen’s support. [48]   4. Conclusion   I would like to end by restating my two main contentions: (1) Thawrat Tishreen achieved certain important political successes but ought overall to be considered a failure; and (2) the movement failed primarily because of the intractability of the Muhasasa system. Although other factors, including the character of protest mobilisation, foreign intervention, the political machinations of the Sadrists, and the COVID-19 pandemic played a role, the decentralised and entrenched Muhasasa system endowed causal agency to these factors, which would otherwise have been less important. It must be noted that the full effects of Thawrat Tishreen remain to be seen. As Iraq’s post-Saddam Hussein, post-civil war political trajectory continues to unfold, time will tell whether the foundations laid down by Thawrat Tishreen prove central to future attempts at establishing a more just and robust system of government in Iraq. Asa Breuss-Burgess Asa Breuss-Burgess is a researcher, writer, and geopolitical risk analyst based in London. His work focuses on the intersection energy, climate change, and power politics in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. He holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in History and Politics from the University of Oxford.  I would like to express my sincere thanks to Professor Killian Clarke for his guidance and support throughout my research. In addition, I am immensely grateful for the counsel and inspiration of Yehya Abuzaid, Haley Bobseine, Dr Aaron Faust, Mustafa Afif Abdulazeez al-Nuwab, Dr Angeline Turner, and Dr Joseph Yackley. Of course, all opinions expressed in this piece, and the mistakes therein, are entirely my own. [1]  For successful cases that used similar methods to Iraq, see Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works   : The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press 2011). [2]  Leonid Issaev and Andrey Korotaev (eds), New Wave of Revolutions in the MENA Region   : A Comparative Perspective  (Springer 2022). [3]  The remaining 4% identify with various other minorities, including Christians, Yazidis, Assyrians, and Turkmen. Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Iraq’ in The World Factbook 2021 (Central Intelligence Agency 2021). [4]  Toby Dodge, ’The Failure of Peacebuilding in Iraq: The Role of Consociationalism and Political Settlements’ (2020) 15(4) Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 460. [5]  ibid 459-75. [6]  The World Bank , ‘The World Bank in Iraq’ ( The World Bank , 1 June 2022) accessed 16 June 2025. [7]  Hafsa Halawa, Iraq’s Tishreen Movement: A Decade of Protests and Mobilisation, (Istituto Affari Internazionali 2022) 7. [8] Maria Fantappie, ‘Widespread Protests Point to Iraq’s Cycle of Social Crisis’ ( International Crisis Group , 10 October 2019) < https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/widespread-protests-point-iraqs-cycle-social-crisis > accessed 16 June 2025. [9] Turnout reached a low point of 10% in Basra at the 2018 election. Renad Mansour, ‘Why Iraq’s Elections Were an Indictment of the Elite’ ( World Politics Review , 18 May 2018) < https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/why-iraq-s-elections-were-an-indictment-of-the-elite/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [10] Halawa (n 7) 7. For the inherent unpredictability of a revolutionary episode, see Charles Kurzman, ‘Can Understanding Undermine Explanation? The Confused Experience of Revolution’ (2004) 34(3) Philosophy of the Social Sciences 328-51. [11]  Chantal Berman, Killian Clarke, and Rima Majed, ‘Theorizing Revolution in Democracies: Evidence from the 2019 Uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq’ (2023) 15 < https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2023/359-8 > accessed 16 June 2025. [12] Arwa Ibrahim, ‘Muhasasa, the political system reviled by Iraqi protesters’ ( Al Jazeera , 4 December 2019) < https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/4/muhasasa-the-political-system-reviled-by-iraqi-protesters > accessed 16 June 2025. [13] Haitham Numan, ‘The Multimodal Framing Demands by Protesters’ Signs in Social Media: Meaning and Sources of Visual and Textual Messages: The Case of Iraq’ (2022) 15(3-4) Contemporary Arab Affairs 19. [14] Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press 2017) 153. [15] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 9. [16] Fanar Haddad, ‘Perpetual Protest and the Failure of the Post-2003 Iraqi State’ ( MERIP , 22 March 2023) < https://merip.org/2023/03/perpetual-protest-and-the-failure-of-the-post-2003-iraqi-state/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [17] Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press 2013) 129-150; Rima Majed, ‘“Sectarian Neoliberalism” and the 2019 Uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq’ in Jeffrey G Karam and Rima Majed (eds), The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution  (Bloomsbury 2022) 85. [18] UNAMI and OHCHR, ‘Human Rights Violations and Abuses in the Context of Demonstrations in Iraq October 2019 to April 2020’ (August 2020) < https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/human-rights-violations-and-abuses-context-demonstrations-iraq-october-2019-april-2020 > accessed 16 June 2025. [19] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 16. [20] Chenoweth and Stephan (n 1) 14. [21] Higel, for example, significantly downplays the achievements of the movement in Lahib Higel, ‘On Third Try, a New Government for Iraq’ ( International Crisis Group , 8 May 2020) < https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/third-try-new-government-iraq > accessed 16 June 2025. [22] Andrey Mardasov, ‘Revolutionary Protests in Iraq in  the  Context of Iranian-American Confrontation’ in Issaev and Korotaev (n 2) 95. [23]  Haddad (n 16).  [24] Renad Mansour and Benedict Robin-D’Cruz, ‘The Basra Blueprint and the Future of Protest in Iraq’ ( Chatham House Blog , 8 October 2019)   19 < https://www.chathamhouse.org/2019/10/basra-blueprint-and-future-protest-iraq > accessed 16 June 2025. [25]  Raad Alkadiri, ‘Can Mustafa Kadhimi, the Latest Compromise Candidate, Repair Iraq’s Broken System?’ ( LSE Blogs , 21 April 2020) < https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2020/04/21/can-mustafa-kadhimi-the-latest-compromise-candidate-repair-iraqs-broken-system/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [26] Lahib Higel, ‘Iraq’s Surprise Election Results’ ( International Crisis Group , 16 November 2021) < https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/iraqs-surprise-election-results > accessed 16 June 2025. [27] Arab Barometer, ‘Arab Barometer VI: Iraq Country Support’ (2021) 6 < https://www.arabbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/Iraq-Arab-Barometer-Public-Opinion-2021-ENG.pdf > accessed 16 June 2025. [28] ibid 10. [29] Arab Barometer. ‘Democracy in the Middle East & North Africa’ (2022) 4-9 < https://www.arabbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/ABVII_Governance_Report-EN-1.pdf > accessed 16 June 2025. [30] Arab Barometer (n 27) 9. [31]  Haddad (n 16).  [32] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 6. [33] UNAMI & OHCHR (n 18) 27-36. [34] Haddad (n 16).  [35] Zahra Ali, ‘Theorising Uprisings: Iraq’s Thawrat Teshreen’ (2023) Third World Quarterly   1–16.  [36] Dodge (n 4) 469. [37] Toby Dodge, ’Iraq’s Informal Consociationalism and Its Problems’ (2020) 20 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 148. [38] Majed (n 17) 76; Ali (n 35) 4. [39] Quoted in Fanar Haddad, ‘Iraq protests: There is no going back to the status quo ante’ ( Middle East Eye , 6 November 2019) < https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/iraq-protests-there-no-going-back-status-quo-ante > accessed 16 June 2025. [40] Majed (n 17) 83-4. [41] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 2. [42] Chenoweth and Stephan (n 1);   Bayat (n 14). [43]  Sharan Grewal, ‘Why Sudan Succeeded Where Algeria Failed’ (2021) 32(5) Journal of Democracy 102. [44] Danny Postel, ‘The Other Regional Counter-Revolution: Iran’s Role in the Shifting Political Landscape of the Middle East’ ( New Politics , 7 July 2021) < https://newpol.org/the-other-regional-counter-revolution-irans-role-in-the-shifting-political-landscape-of-the-middle-east/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [45] Mansour and Robin-D’Cruz (n 24) 6. [46] Benedict Robin-D’Cruz & Renad Mansour, ‘Making Sense of the Sadrists: Fragmentation and Unstable Politics’ ( Foreign Policy Research Institute , March 2020) < https://www.fpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/iraq-chapter-1.pdf > accessed 16 June 2025. [47] Don Jacobson, ‘Millions rally in Iraq to demand removal of U.S. military forces’ ( United Press International , 24 January 2020) < https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2020/01/24/Millions-rally-in-Iraq-to-demand-removal-of-US-military-forces/7411579868399/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [48] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 10.

In a 1967 interview, Marcel Duchamp, one of the key figures of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and an artist who drew extensively on contemporary science, declared that ‘the public always needs a banner; whether it be Picasso, Einstein, or some other’.[1] In naming these individuals, Duchamp was responding to the emergence during the 1940s-60s of the popular perception of Picasso and Einstein as the archetypal modern artist and scientist of the twentieth century. Picasso’s Cubism and Einstein’s Relativity Theory had first been linked in the early 1940s and that fallacious association continued to figure in discussions of the style well into the 1980s and, occasionally, beyond. In 1943, for example, Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr had claimed in his highly influential primer What is Modern Painting?  that the ‘introduction of a time element into an art usually considered in terms of two- or three-dimensional space suggests some relationship to Einstein’s theory of relativity in which time is thought of mathematically as a fourth dimension’.[2] Barr was seeking to explain the multiple viewpoints in Cubist paintings, such as Picasso’s 1910 Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (fig 1) or his 1932 Girl Before a Mirror (fig 10), and here he echoed the first major source to promulgate the supposed Cubism-Relativity connection, Sigfried Giedion’s 1941 Space, Time and Architecture . For Giedion, Barr, and those who followed them, connecting modern architecture or Picasso’s Cubism to Einstein was a means to validate new and unfamiliar forms of artistic expression for a sceptical public.[3] Fig 1. Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Pablo Picasso 1910, oil on canvas, 100.4 x 72.4 cm). Art Institute of Chicago © 2025 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. What disturbed Duchamp in 1967 and should trouble anyone interested in the cultural history of modernism was this trope’s oversimplification of a complex art world (made up of a variety of artists, including Duchamp himself) and its ahistorical characterization of the physical science known to the general public in the years before and during World War I. In France, for example, Einstein and his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity were barely noticed and, even then, only in a few scientific journals. Only in 1919 would Einstein be catapulted to world celebrity, when a November 1919 eclipse expedition confirmed the bending of light rays by the mass of the sun, as predicted in his 1916 General Theory of Relativity.[4] Instead of Einstein and Relativity, in the prewar and wartime years the attention of the general public was focused on a series of developments from the mid-1890s onward that had transformed contemporary conceptions of matter and space. Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of the X-ray (1895), Sir JJ Thomson’s identification of the electron (1897), Marie and Pierre Curie’s isolation of radioactive elements (1898), Ernest Rutherford’s subsequent work on the structure of the atom, and the emergence of wireless telegraphy via the electromagnetic waves Heinrich Hertz had identified in 1887—all pointed to an invisible reality beyond the reach of sense perception. Science in this period was not distant from daily life, since its applications, such as medical X-rays and wireless telegraphy, were radically transforming modes of seeing and communicating. Rather than Einstein or Hermann Minkowski, the architect of Relativity’s 1908 space-time continuum, the scientific heroes of pre-World War I France, for example, were Henri Poincaré, the Curies, Jean Perrin, and scientific popularizer Gustave Le Bon. From abroad, names such as Röntgen, Rutherford, Tesla, Sir William Crookes, and Sir Oliver Lodge—rather than Einstein—appeared regularly in popular coverage of physics.[5]   In addition to the specific discoveries that captured the popular imagination in the prewar era, two other concepts were central to the public’s altered conception of the nature of reality in the first two decades of the century. First was the ether of space, which was understood to suffuse all space and matter, serving as the necessary medium for visible light and the various invisible vibrating electromagnetic waves that now fascinated the public. What was new about the ether in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century was the considerable expansion of its hypothetical functions. While Lord Kelvin in the 1860s had proposed that atoms might be whirling vortices of ether, at the end of the century Joseph Larmor and Oliver Lodge propounded the ‘electric theory of matter’, grounded in the newly identified electron and its interaction with the ether.[6] Lodge also celebrated the ether as the fundamental source of continuity in the universe, quoting Maxwell’s assertion that ‘no human power can remove [the ether] from the smallest portion of space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity’.[7] Hopes were high for the ether among scientists and occultists alike. Sir William Crookes declared in his 1898 presidential address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science that ‘ether vibrations have powers and attributes equal to any demand—even to the transmission of thought’.[8]   The second issue characteristic of the early twentieth-century worldview was the widespread belief in the possible existence of a suprasensible fourth dimension of space. If such a dimension existed, our familiar world might then be merely a three-dimensional section of it, akin to the shadow world in Plato’s allegory of the cave. The highly popular ‘Fourth Dimension’ was an outgrowth of the formulation of n -dimensional geometry earlier in the nineteenth century.[9] Following its initial popularization in the 1870s and 1880s in sources such as EA Abbott’s Flatland  of 1884, the fourth dimension quickly took on multiple philosophical and mystical / occult significations as well. Higher dimensions could also be linked to the ether, as in the theories of Balfour Stewart and PG Tait, along with the British hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton. Stewart and Tait argued in the revised 1876 edition of their book The Unseen Universe  that the three-dimensional world might be ‘merely the skin or boundary of an Unseen whose matter has four  dimensions’ with the ether as a bridge between them.[10] Hinton proposed that electrical current might be created by particles of ether in four-dimensional rotation.[11]   Both the ether and the spatial fourth dimension—central themes in early modernism—were largely displaced by the popularization of Relativity Theory after the November 1919 eclipse. Just as Einstein in 1905 dismissed the ether as having no mechanical properties and hence unnecessary to his theory, Minkowski’s four-dimensional space-time continuum of 1908 posited time instead of space as the fourth dimension.[12] By the 1930s and 1940s, the ‘space-time’ world of Einstein had triumphed in popular culture: a temporal fourth dimension reigned and the ether, the prior sign of universal continuity, had largely faded from view. However, as discussed below, the ether did not go easily—and the spatial fourth dimension survived underground to emerge gradually in the second half of the century and reach its current prominence in string theory, computer graphics, and popular culture more broadly.[13]   The year 1920, then, stands as a watershed between an early modernist phase in art and literature and a quite separate postwar milieu, in which Relativity Theory and space-time did indeed become major cultural determinants. This essay examines these two phases of artistic response to contemporary science—recovering the place of ether physics and the spatial fourth dimension in the first phase and sampling artists’ reactions to the new world of Einsteinian space-time during the 1920s through 1940s, particularly that of American painter Stuart Davis. Fundamental to this discussion is the contrast between the pre-World War I Cubist style of Picasso and Georges Braque (fig 1) and the later, very different variation on their subsequent planar-oriented Synthetic Cubist style made by Davis in the 1930s-1940s in direct response to the popularization of Relativity Theory (eg his Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors  of 1940, fig 14). As a complement to early Cubism, the essay also considers briefly three other artists of the prewar / wartime period: Duchamp (the modern artist most engaged with science), the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and Russian-born Expressionist Wassily Kandinsky—all three of whose writings provide crucial evidence of the kinds of science that stimulated early twentieth-century artistic invention. Before considering Davis’s Cubism in the post-1919 era, the essay briefly addresses alternative artistic responses to Relativity Theory, ranging from kinetic art to the paintings of Salvador Dali.   1900-20: ‘The Fourth Dimension’ and the Ether of Space   Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler  exemplifies the style known as Analytical Cubism, which he developed in Paris, working along with Braque, between 1909 and 1912. Here the geometrical faceting of the seated figure suggests a more complex reality beyond immediate perception, and the interpenetration of figure and space makes it impossible to read the image as three-dimensional. Although the stylistic roots of Picasso’s Cubism lie in Cézanne and African art, his move beyond the solid volumes of Cézanne he was still exploring into 1909 would have been encouraged by the contemporary fascination with the possible existence of an invisible fourth dimension of space. Picasso later described his goal as ‘paint[ing] objects as I think them, not as I see them’,[14] and his friend the critic Guillaume Apollinaire found in the fourth dimension a specific rationale for the Cubist artist’s freedom to reject three-dimensional perspective and to reconfigure objects according to a higher law. ‘It is to the fourth dimension alone that we owe a new norm of the perfect’, Apollinaire declared in his 1913 volume Les Peintres Cubistes .[15] The insurance actuary Maurice Princet, who was a member of Picasso’s circle, is thought to have shared with him the pioneering geometrical diagrams in Esprit Jouffret’s 1903 treatise on four-dimensional geometry (fig 2).[16] In both Picasso’s monochromatic painting and the Jouffret drawing, the image is opened up and its complexity suggested by means of multiple partially shaded angular facets that fluctuate in an indeterminate space. Fig 2. Perspective cavalière of the Sixteen Fundamental Octahedrons of an Ikosatetrahedroid. From Esprit Jouffret, Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (Gauthier-Villars 1903) fig 41. If there is a sense of time and process here, as Barr suggested, time is not the goal, but only the means to gather information about higher dimensional space—just as Poincaré in his 1902 Science and Hypothesis had suggested that one might represent a four-dimensional object by combining multiple perspectives of it.[17] We know that Jean Metzinger and his co-author Albert Gleizes drew directly on Poincaré’s writings about perception using senses other than vision, ie tactile and motor sensations, and they and others were undoubtedly encouraged by Poincaré’s bold prediction that ‘motor space would have as many dimensions as we have muscles’.[18] Indeed, in Cubist theory, vision is deliberately downplayed in favour of other sensations, such as touch and muscular movement, and conception is clearly privileged over perception.   There was a strong impetus for early twentieth-century artists to downgrade both vision and visible light in this period: Röntgen’s discovery of the X-ray (fig 3).[19] X-rays had demonstrated definitively the inadequacy of the human eye, which detects only a small fraction (ie visible light) of the much larger spectrum of vibrating electromagnetic waves then being defined. Indeed, the spatial fourth dimension might well have remained the province of philosophical idealists and occultists but for this discovery, which made it impossible to deny the existence of an invisible reality simply because it could not be seen. In Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler —on the model of the X-ray—matter becomes transparent as the artist penetrates the skin to reveal the figure’s substructure. There is also an unprecedented fluidity between figure and ground, with the figure’s contour dissolving like the flesh in an X-ray. Fig 3. Photographs taken with Röntgen rays and with ordinary light (Albert Londe). From Charles-Edouard Guillaume, Les Rayons X et la photographie à travers le corps (Gauthier-Villars 1896) plates 5, 6. The interpenetration of matter and space in Picasso’s painting would also have been supported in this period by widespread popular discussion of radioactivity, as well as the ether. In contrast to the traditional image of matter as stable and constant, radioactive substances emitted particles, suggesting a vibrating realm of atomic matter in the process of transformation. In his best-selling books, such as L’Evolution de la matière (1905), Le Bon argued that all substances were radioactive and that matter was dematerializing into the ether-filled space around it by means of its radioactive discharges.[20] Le Bon was a friend of the philosopher Henri Bergson, a figure important for Cubists as well as Futurists, and both men’s world views were, in fact, grounded in ether physics.[21] Bergson cited Michael Faraday and Lord Kelvin in his 1896 book Matière et mémoire , and there—as well as in his 1907 L’Evolution Créatrice —he argued that the essence of reality was flux.[22] Bergson’s heading for one section of Matière et mémoire —‘All division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division’—would have been highly suggestive for artists. The same is true for his remarkable assertion later in that chapter, that ‘matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body’.[23]   In addition to their X-ray-like transparency and fluidity, Picasso’s prewar Analytical Cubist paintings, with their surfaces activated by shimmering Neo-Impressionist brushstrokes, suggest an ethereal realm of continuous cohesion and diffusion as evoked in the writings of Le Bon and Bergson. Matter and space of whatever dimensionality are here reconceived as degrees on a continuum. Picasso need not have read Le Bon’s best-selling books himself, since his close compatriot Apollinaire owned a 1908 edition of L’Evolution de la matière —along with such books as Commandant Louis Darget’s text on photographing invisible fluids and ‘V-rays’ as well as a personally inscribed copy of Gaston Danville’s 1908 study, Magnétisme et spiritisme. [24]   Like the fourth dimension, the ether was a concept on which the interests of science and occultism converged in this period—as in the regularly drawn links between telegraphy and telepathy or electromagnetism and the still-extant practice of animal magnetism. Picasso’s photography in this era documents his cultivation of unusual photographic effects, suggestive of invisible phenomena. And in comments decades later about the nature of the ‘reality’ in his Analytical Cubist paintings, he resorted to terms such as ‘smoke’ and ‘perfume’, two of the numerous metaphors for the immaterial ether.[25]   In most cultural histories of the twentieth century, the ether of space barely survives to the end of the first decade of the century. If not banished by the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment’s failure to detect an ‘ether wind’ resulting from the earth’s motion, the ether is said to have died in 1905 with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. But the story is not that simple. As is suggested by active publishing on the ether by Lodge and others through the 1920s, the ether hardly disappeared in 1905. Not only did the general public not hear of Einstein’s theories until 1919, the question of the ether’s existence was hotly debated among scientists sceptical of Einstein’s theories during the 1910s and 1920s, with passionate defences of the concept published in both scientific and popular literature.[26] Reflecting the mood of the ether’s adherents, Sir Thomson declared in his Presidential Address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1909 that ‘the ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe. […] The study of this all-pervading substance is perhaps the most fascinating duty of the physicist’.[27]   Recovering the ether’s centrality to early twentieth-century conceptions of reality is a much-needed step for cultural historians to take. Set against the backdrop of the ether, the art of both Boccioni and Kandinsky—like Picasso’s Cubism—gains new coherence and meaning. Boccioni’s 1912 painting Matter (fig 5) and his 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space  (fig 4)   both demonstrate his firm belief that ‘what needs to be painted is not the visible but what has heretofore been held to be invisible, that is, what the clairvoyant painter sees’.[28] Unlike the taciturn Picasso, Boccioni wrote extensively about his artistic goals and referred specifically to the ‘electric theory of matter’ and the ether, from both scientific and occult points of view, as his reference to clairvoyance suggests.[29] Virtually unknown to historians is the fact that Boccioni’s greatest sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space  of 1913, is an homage to the ‘infinite continuity’ of the invisible ether. As the end of his 1913 treatise Pittura scultura futuriste , Boccioni finally reveals his goal as the ‘materialization of the ethereal fluid, the imponderable’, declaring that ‘we want to model the atmosphere, to denote the forces of objects, […] the unique form of continuity in space’.[30] With its striking effect of ‘ether drag’, Boccioni’s dynamic striding figure manages to defy the fixed boundaries of a three-dimensional, sculptural object.   Fig 4. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Umberto Boccioni 1913, bronze, 111.2 x 88.5 x 40 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillie P Bliss Bequest. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig 5. Matter (Umberto Boccioni 1912, oil on poplar, 570 x 380 cm). Mattioli Collection, Milan. Photo: Luca Carra, Milan, 2002. In his painting Matter Boccioni, a confirmed Bergsonist, explores simultaneously the process of particulate dematerialization (like Picasso) and the materialization of form from the vibrating ether-filled space around his mother. Boccioni’s painting is a graphic demonstration of the widely held view of the ether expressed by popular science writer Robert Kennedy Duncan in his 1905 book The New Knowledge : ‘Not only through interstellar spaces, but through the world […] [and] through our own bodies; all lie not only encompassed in it but soaking in it as a sponge lies soaked in water. How much we ourselves are matter and how much ether is, in these days, a very moot question’.[31] Boccioni believed that ‘solid bodies are only atmosphere condensed’[32] and explained in 1913 that ‘it should be clear, then, why an infinity of lines and currents emanate from our objects, making them live in an environment which has been created by their vibrations’.[33]   I have elsewhere termed this phase of early twentieth-century art ‘vibratory modernism’, and ethereal vibrations were also central for Kandinsky and Duchamp as well as for avant-garde writers from FT Marinetti to Ezra Pound.[34] Like Boccioni, in his 1911 treatise On the Spiritual in Art  Kandinsky cited the ‘electron theory—i.e., the theory of moving electricity, which is supposed completely to replace matter’ and considered the ‘dissolution of matter’ to be imminent.[35] In Kandinsky’s view, the time had come for spiritual qualities to replace material objects in a new type of totally abstract composition of colour and form, such as his Composition VII of 1913 (fig 6). Kandinsky’s goal for his paintings was to set up a sympathetic vibration or Klang  in the soul of the viewer. He drew vital support for his theories not only from music and synaesthesia, but also from the widely discussed analogy between wireless telegraphy and telepathy in this period. Having lived on the outskirts of Paris for a year during 1906-7, Kandinsky encountered the active French interest in the ether and its vibrations in the writings of figures such as Camille Flammarion, Hippolyte Baraduc, Albert de Rochas, and Darget.[36]   The thought transfer Crookes had attributed to ether vibrations was a central model for Kandinsky, along with the ‘thought photography’ of Baraduc, working at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Kandinsky was deeply interested in Baraduc, who was but one of a number of figures, including the American engineer Edwin Houston, exploring the possibility of vibratory thought patterns being captured on a photographic plate. Houston, whose 1892 lecture on ‘Cerebral Radiation’ was reprinted as one of sixteen appendices in Rochas’s 1895 L’Extériorisation de la sensibilité , suggested that such an image could serve as a storage device, subsequently activating the same thought vibrations in another viewer—just as Kandinsky intended his paintings to do.[37] Fig 6. Composition VI (Wassily Kandinsky 1913, oil on canvas, 195 x 300 cm). State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Vibratory communication was also a theme of Duchamp’s nine-foot-tall work on glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even  ( The Large Glass) of 1915-23 (fig 7). Determined to ‘put painting once again at the service of the mind’, Duchamp investigated a wide range of scientific fields as well as four-dimensional geometry in order to invent the ‘Playful Physics’ of this work. [38]  His extensive notes on the subject, which he considered as important as the visual image, stand as a time capsule of the popular scientific milieu of the pre-World War I era. In Duchamp’s humorous scientific allegory of sexual quest, the Bride hangs in her ethereal, four-dimensional realm at the top of the Glass  and communicates with her desiring, three-dimensional, gravity-bound Bachelors below by means of her ‘splendid vibrations’.[39] The Bride’s basic form is rooted in X-ray images, and her vibratory communications are based on the model of wireless telegraphy and radio control. He also drew on a variety of other aspects of science and technology to create the insuperable contrasts between the upper and lower realms of the Glass : radioactivity, atomic theory, the kinetic theory of gases, Perrin’s work on Brownian movement, thermodynamics, the liquefaction of gases—as well as classical mechanics, chemistry, biology, meteorology, and automobile and airplane technology. Fig 7. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (Marcel Duchamp 1915-23, oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels, 277.5 x 175.9 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Katherine S Dreier. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2025 / ADAGP, Paris / © Association Marcel Duchamp.  Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. In the 1960s, long after both the fourth dimension of space and early wireless communication had faded from prominence (and before their return to cultural awareness in the later decades of the century), Duchamp contributed to the recovery of the largely forgotten spatial fourth dimension by publishing his extensive notes on the subject in his 1966 deluxe White Box  [ A l’infinitif ].[40] It was a highly significant gesture by the artist who before World War I had unquestionably known more about contemporary science than any other. Yet the paradigm shift that occurred after 1919 left Duchamp detached from that cultural grounding. He would never engage Relativity Theory in a similar way, and his reference to the public ‘always need[ing] a banner, whether it be Picasso, Einstein, or some other’ was surely a reflection of the wrenching shift Einstein’s emergence created for an artist of thirty-two who was deeply grounded in an earlier scientific paradigm.   1920s-1940s: The Triumph of Einstein and Relativity Theory   While Duchamp’s study of science in the prewar period had predated Einstein, avant-garde artists in the 1920s, such as the Russian Naum Gabo and Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, responded directly to the new, temporal fourth dimension of Relativity Theory by incorporating time into their art.[41] Among these pioneering works were Gabo’s Kinetic Construction  of 1920 and Moholy-Nagy’s Light Display Machine  or Light-Space Modulator of 1922-30 (fig 8). The latter’s 1947 book Vision in Motion , published the year after his death, served as a highly influential codification of modernism in terms of the new space-time aesthetic and actually included Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 in this context. Indeed, Duchamp’s own experiments with rotating optical devices (eg the Rotary Demisphere  of 1925) were incorporated into the lineage of kinetic art during the 1940s and regularly exhibited alongside works by Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Calder, and others during the 1950s and early 1960s. Fig 8. Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator) (László Moholy-Nagy 1930, aluminum, steel, nickel-plated brass, other metals, plastic, wood and electric motor, 151.1 x 69.9 x 69.9 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, BR56.5. If adding time to art was the dominant response to Einstein and space-time, several other approaches emerged in this period as well. One of the first reactions to Einstein’s new celebrity occurred in Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch’s collage Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany  of 1919. There Höch, relying simply on Einstein’s visage, clipped his photograph from the front page of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung  and included him among her images of revolution in the upper left quadrant of the collage.[42] Beyond Einstein’s image itself, other artists responded to the deformations of distance and time posited by the Special Theory of Relativity.   Dali’s The Persistence of Memory  of 1931 (fig 9), for example, embodies the parallel he saw between Einstein’s ‘physical dilation of measures’ and his own Surrealist ‘psychic dilation of ideas’.[43] Although Dali referred to his limp watches as ‘the soft, extravagant, and solitary paranoic-critical Camembert of time and space’, he generally drew on Special Relativity Theory rather than the curved space-time of General Relativity.[44] By contrast, younger Surrealist artists in the 1930s, such as Matta Echaurren, actually attempted to envision of the ‘look’ of the curved space-time continuum of General Relativity, as in his painting The Vertigo of Eros  of 1944. André Breton wrote in 1939 that such works demonstrated the painters’ ‘deep yearning to transcend the three-dimensional universe […] as a result of Einstein’s introduction into physics of the space-time continuum ’.[45] Fig 9. The Persistence of Memory (Salvador Dali 1931, oil on canvas, 24.1 x 33 cm). © 2025 Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA /Art Resource, NY. However, it was the American painter Davis who made perhaps the most original artistic innovations in response to the new paradigm of Relativity Theory. Davis’s unique variation on Picasso and Braque’s Cubism grew out of Cubism’s second, collage-based phase, referred to as Synthetic Cubism, which commenced in 1912. (That style lies behind Picasso’s 1932 Girl Before a Mirror (fig 10), which reflects its later, more decorative qualities—along with the patterns of Henri Matisse—as well as the newer Surrealist focus on interior psychology and organic form.) Although Davis had spent a year in Paris in 1928-9, observing French painting at close range, it was only in the early 1930s that he began to develop his mature theories about how to paint landscapes in a modern style that both respected the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and could evoke landscape space. In contrast to the ‘window’ on invisible reality of prewar Analytical Cubism or Futurism, Davis’s planar works (see fig 14) essentially diagram the American landscape in a hard-edged, syncopated style that also owes something to the jazz piano rhythms he adored. However, it was Einstein and the literature on Relativity Theory that played a more fundamental role in the development of Davis’s mature theories and painting style. Fig 10. Girl Before a Mirror (Pablo Picasso 1932, oil on canvas, 162.3 x 130.2 cm). © 2025 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Einstein had attracted Davis’s attention when the former visited the United States as a guest at Cal Tech during winter 1930-1 and 1931-2.[46] His visits triggered a barrage of journalistic coverage, inspiring the phrase in the verse of Herman Hupfeld’s ‘As Time Goes By’: ‘We get a trifle weary with Mr. Einstein’s theory’. Yet Davis was clearly not weary of Einstein’s theory in this period, and a clue to one of his specific sources occurs in a 1932 entry in his daybook (fig 11). One of Davis’s pages includes two diagrams, with the notations ‘when you draw this—you are drawing this rectan[gular] linear space, potentially’ and ‘you are drawing this angular direction, potentially, when you draw this’.[47] In his highly important popularization of Relativity Theory, The Mysterious Universe  (1930), James Jeans had drawn just such a diagram to illustrate the fusion of space and time in the new space-time world of Einstein (fig 12). At this moment Jeans’s diagram offered Davis a new avenue for configuring nature via angles and triangles, which he termed ‘angular variation’.[48] As Davis recorded above his own drawing,   From any given point the line moves in a two-dimensional space relative to all existing points […] Relativity, knowledge of this fact, and the ability to visualize logical correlatives of a given angle allows the artist to see  the real  angular value of his drawing as opposed to associative value.[49] Fig 11. Daybook drawing (Stuart Davis 1932). From Diane Kelder (ed), Stuart Davis (Praeger 1971) 55. Fig 12. Diagram to illustrate the motion of a train in space and time. From James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (The Macmillan Co 1931) 108. When Davis used angular variation and triangles in paintings of 1932 such as Landscape with Garage Lights , his diagrammatic triangles also implied temporal associations through the model of Jeans’s space-time diagrams. Davis’s reliance on Jeans also helps to explain his statement that ‘a triangle could be analogous to a second of Time. The picture itself could be called a Duration of so many seconds of Time’.[50] Time would continue to be a central issue for Davis, although he would ultimately leave planar angular variation behind as a primary organizing element and pursue what he termed ‘color-space’.[51] While remaining committed to the two-dimensional surface of his paintings, Davis now followed Jeans up a dimension in order to create a logical space that would transcend the accidents of perception.[52] As Jeans had written following his space-time diagram, ‘We can imagine the three dimensions of space and one of time welded together, forming a four-dimensional volume, which we shall describe as a “continuum”’.[53] Indeed, Davis’s adoption of the hyphenated ‘color-space’ to describe his approach to space-making via colour suggests a deliberate response to the space-time continuum that was to become a conceptual touchstone for his painting.   When Davis painted Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors  in 1940 (fig 13), he wrote of the new kind of ‘reality’ the work embodied:   The painting is abstract in the sense that it is highly selective, and it is synthetic in that it recombines these selections of color and shape into a new unity, which never existed in Nature but is a new part of Nature. An analogy would be a chemical like sulphanilamide which is a product of abstract selection and synthetic combination, and which never existed before, but is none the less real and a new part of nature.[54]   In Jeans’s discussions of the space-time continuum Davis would have found support for his position in contemporary debates about abstract painting. Jeans explained that while it could be said that ‘the four-dimensional continuum is […] purely diagrammatic, […] because we can exhibit all nature within this framework, it must correspond to some sort of objective reality’.[55] Similarly, Davis argued in his 1945 ‘Autobiography’ that ‘through science the whole concept of what reality is has been changed. Science has achieved the most astounding ‘abstract’ compositions, completely ‘unnatural’, but none-the-less real’.[56] Fig 13. Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style (Stuart Davis 1940, oil on canvas, 91.44 x 113.98 cm). The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation and the M. and M. Karolik Collection, by exchange. © 2025 Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © 2025 The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors (subtitled 7th Avenue Style ) reflects Davis’s exuberant embrace of urban experience, including the ‘hot’ jazz rhythms that delighted him in and around his 7 th Avenue studio. He had considered several possible titles for the painting, including Contra-Rural Landscape  and Chemical Landscape , which make clear the work’s ‘abstract selection and synthetic combination’ of aspects of a city dweller’s experience—like the new sulfa ‘wonder drugs’. As listed by Davis, these included ‘Fruit and flowers; kitchen utensils; Fall skies, horizons, taxi cabs; radio; art exhibitions and reproductions; fast travel; Americana; movies; electric signs; dynamics of city sights and sounds; […]’.[57] Yet rather than depict such elements specifically Davis, as he subsequently explained, ‘introduced Time into Form by referring the immediate concrete shapes to more general shapes which have a much more extended existence in Time and Place’.[58]   Davis’s references here to ‘more general shapes’ as well as to ‘extended existence in Time and Place’—along with his mention in his 1940 text on Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors  of ‘a new unity’ which ‘is a new part of Nature’—all point to the centrality of ideas about the space-time continuum for Davis and, specifically, its interpretation as a ‘block universe’. Minkowski had formulated the four-dimensional space-time continuum in 1908 in order to unify the multiple frames of reference of individual observers after Einstein had made them relative in 1905, and he actually referred to his structure as an ‘absolute’ world.[59] With events in an individual’s existence redefined by Minkowski as ‘world-lines’ traversing this four-dimensional continuum, subsequent theorizing led to the conception of a ‘block universe’. In this interpretation, summarized by Jeans in The Mysterious Universe , the space-time continuum is understood as a four-dimensional geometric structure in which future events are already extant (and past events preserved), and an individual simply progresses through three-dimensional cross sections of the structure as time progresses.[60]   Eager to create a rationalized vision of nature, Davis wrote in 1933 of his recent paintings:   This series of pictures […] presents simultaneously that which is observed sequentially. It rationalizes vision and creates a new view of nature which is not entirely the accident of binocular vision.   In contrast to ordinary methods which present on a canvas observations made in time and are therefore to a degree unrelated, this system brings into one focus and one place, the past, present, and future events involved in the act of observation of any given subject.[61]   Or, as he asserted in 1943 of his paintings’ similarity to the space-time continuum’s fusion of the relative viewpoints of all observers: ‘The result is an objective coherence not obtained before in painting. […] The total quality of the design evokes a cosmological point of view for the observer’.[62]   After the 1941 publication of Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture , Davis was operating as the primary contemporary American Cubist in an artistic context in which connections between Picasso and Einstein or Cubism and Relativity were regularly being drawn. Yet it was Davis—not Picasso—whose art theory and style owed a debt to Einstein’s theories. Davis believed his art was an accurate response to the ‘spirit of modern society, which in its progressive aspects is materialistic and scientific’.[63] Einstein and the four-dimensional space-time continuum of Relativity Theory thus served as an effective vehicle for Davis to fashion himself as a logical, scientific painter in the art world of New York, in which the far more subjective style of Abstract Expressionism was emerging by the late 1940s.   Implications for the Question of Modernism in Art and Science   During 1950-2 Marcel Duchamp and Davis, two artists who found rich stimulation in science (albeit pre-Einsteinian for Duchamp and Einsteinian for Davis) were both consulting editors for the New York journal Trans/formation . The periodical affirmed on its masthead that ‘art, science, technology are interacting components of the total human enterprise’ and that, contrary to the contemporary tendency to treat them in isolation, Trans/formation  would ‘cut across the arts and sciences by treating them as a continuum ’.[64] That motto is a good reminder that in the early twentieth century scientific discoveries such as X-rays, radioactivity, and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy generated a vast amount of popular literature that made them readily accessible to the general public. Popularizations of Relativity, including those by Jeans and Arthur Eddington, also brought aspects of Einstein’s theories into public purview, but the increasingly mathematical orientation of physics—and especially quantum physics—gradually dampened the early twentieth-century sense that the layperson should and could grasp the latest science. No longer would articles on the newest science routinely appear in general interest magazines like Harper’s Monthly , as they had done in the early years of the century. Only the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 would turn the public’s attention once again to atomic science in the later 1940s and 1950s, but other themes—fear of the atom or its potential for good—would dominate such discussions, rather than the science itself.[65]   Even if its subjects were phenomena invisible to the human eye, ether physics was still visualizable to some degree, and it clearly inspired artists to attempt to paint windows onto a ‘meta-reality’ just beyond perception’s reach. As in Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler or Boccioni’s Matter , it was an ethereal, spatially ambiguous, vibrating, and fluctuant realm of interpenetrating matter and space that was envisioned—supported by the model of continuity offered by the ether, Le Bon’s focus on dematerializing matter, and Bergson’s philosophy. Here the ‘fourth dimension’ was another sign of that higher reality: a suprasensible dimension of space, often linked to the ether, rather than a component of Einsteinian space-time. And in that earlier context painters regularly sought to give form to invisible energies and dimensions.   How different, then, are the flat, diagrammatic images of Davis with their hard-edged clarity and logic; they are not meant to be looked through , but stand instead as self-sufficient inscriptions, composed of discrete, discontinuous components. As noted earlier, Davis’s planar units derive stylistically from the prewar Synthetic Cubist collages and paintings of Picasso and Braque, which subsequently became standard fare in modern painting. However, those planes had nothing inherently to do with Einstein until Davis determined to use them as elements in a painting style that he believed could approximate the objectivity he identified with the space-time continuum as a ‘block universe’, free of the accidents of individual perception. With its forms transcending the specifics of observation at any given moment, works such as Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors accomplished Davis’s goal for painting, which he ultimately designated as ‘The Amazing Continuity’ (as he painted the phrase on his 1952 painting Visa ).[66] Rather than the ethereal continuity of Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space , however, continuity for Davis signified a new matrix of experience—the space-time continuum.[67]   Just as there is no single entity ‘modern art’, but rather the products of multiple artists on two sides of a major divide between 1900-19 and the 1920s-40s, the ‘science’ to which the artists responded in the two periods differed significantly. In the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century, discoveries made in the context of the still-reigning ether physics excited the imaginations of cutting-edge artists of the era, but predated public knowledge of the science later considered to be ‘modern’, ie Relativity Theory. There was no zeitgeist  that meant that Picasso must have responded to Einstein. Instead, for artists, the concept of ‘science’ in any given year after 1905 signified a variety of exhilarating new ideas other than Relativity Theory—at least through World War I. Popular scientific writing, including by scientists like Lodge and popularizers like Le Bon, abounded in this period and served as the interface between the realms of art and science. We miss far too much of the richness of modernism when the simplistic tendency to link the two ‘banners’—Picasso and Einstein—impedes the historical recovery of that highly creative and complex moment in the early twentieth century. Linda Dalrymple Henderson Linda Dalrymple Henderson is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History, Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching have focused on modern art in its broader cultural context, including ideas such as ‘the fourth dimension’, the history of science and technology, and mystical and occult philosophies. In addition to over eighty journal articles and essays in book and catalogues, she is the author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art  (Princeton University Press 1983; new ed MIT Press 2013) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works  (Princeton University Press 1998).  [1] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp  (Thames and Hudson 1971) 26. This essay is an updated version of a text of this title published in the catalogue for the 2012 exhibition The Moderns  at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, curated by Cathrin Pichler and Suzanne Neuberger. The discussion of Stuart Davis herein draws directly on the ‘Reintroduction’ I was then adding to the 2013 edition of my book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (originally 1983). I am currently at work on a project titled ‘Ether and the Energies of Modernism: Art, Science, and Occultism in the Early Twentieth Century’. This new book recovers a crucial backdrop for the develop of modern art by tracking science as known to the public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the prominent role of the ether of space both in its scientific and occult contexts. [2] Alfred H Barr Jr, What is Modern Painting? (The Museum of Modern Art 1943) 29. [3] For this phenomenon, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Four-Dimensional Space or Space-Time? The Emergence of the Cubism-Relativity Myth in New York in the 1940s’ in Michele Emmer (ed), The Visual Mind II  (MIT Press 2004) 349-97, as well as typical texts such as Paul M Laporte, ‘The Space-Time Concept in the Work of Picasso’ (1948) 41 The Magazine of Art 26-32; Paul M Laporte, ‘Cubism and Science’ (1949) 7 The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism 243-56. [4] For the principles and popularization of Relativity Theory, see eg Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Atomic Physics in the Twentieth Century  (Princeton University Press 1999) 90-104. On the absence of significant interest in Special Relativity in France, where Henri Poincaré was the dominant figure of science, see Stanley Goldberg, Understanding Relativity: Origin and Impact of a Scientific Revolution  (Birkhäuser 1984) ch 7; Thomas Glick (ed), The Comparative Reception of Relativity  (D. Reidel Publishing Co 1987) 113-67. For a sampling of early responses to Einstein, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works  (Princeton University Press 1998) 234 n 19. [5] For these developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physics, see eg Kragh (n 4); PM Harman, Energy, Force, Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics  (Cambridge University Press 1982); Alex Keller, The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in His Cradle  (Clarendon Press 1983). I discuss the popularization of the work of the scientists listed here in Henderson (n 4) and in the book in progress. The public appeal of scientists like Crookes and Lodge was augmented by their openness to aspects of the occult; see the pioneering study by Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain  (Cambridge University Press 2019). [6] Oliver Lodge, ‘Electric Theory of Matter’ ( Harper’s Monthly Magazine , August 1904) 383-9. On the ether, see eg Bruce J Hunt, ‘Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether’ in Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (eds), From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature  (Stanford University Press 2002) 99-113; MJS Hodge and GN Cantor, Conceptions of Ether: A Study in the History of Ether Theories 1740-1900  (Cambridge University Press 1981); Harman (n 5). For a more recent discussion, see Jaume Navarro (ed), Ether and Modernity: The Recalcitrance of an Epistemic Object in the Early Twentieth Century  (Oxford University Press 2018), with its documentation of the ‘recalcitrance’ of the ether. Donald R Benson, ‘Facts and Fictions in Scientific Discourse: The Case of the Ether’ (1984) 38 The Georgia Review 825-37 remains a useful introduction to the ether in the cultural context of nineteenth-century science. [7] Oliver Lodge, The Ether of Space  (Harper & Brothers 1909) 104-5. [8] William Crookes, ‘Address by Sir William Crookes, President’ in Report of the Sixty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898) (John Murray 1899) 31. [9] For this history, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art  (Princeton University Press 1983) ch 1. For a more extensive discussion, see Mark Blacklock, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford University Press 2018). [10] Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe, or Speculations on a Future State  (4 th  edn, Macmillan 1876) 221. [11] Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension  (Swan Sonnenschein & Co 1904) 17-8. On the impact of the ideas on the fourth dimension and the ether propounded by Hinton as well as Stewart and Tait and their larger context, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art  (MIT Press 2013) 2-7, 15-21; Henderson (n 9) ch 1. [12] On Relativity Theory, see Kragh (n 4) 90-104. [13] Henderson (n 11) 69-91. [14] Ramón Gómez de la Serna, ‘Completa y veridical historia de Picasso y el cubisme’ (1929) 25 Revista de Occidente 100. [15] Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations  (Wittenborn and Co 1944) 12. [16] Duchamp cites Jouffret in his notes for his Large Glass project, documenting the book’s presence in the Parisian avant-garde; see Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp  (Oxford University Press 1973) 89. On Princet’s much-debated role, which itself forms an interesting history, see eg Henderson (n 9) ch 2. Artist Tony Robbin has reconstructed the history of early attempts to model four-dimensional geometry and suggests further convincing comparisons between specific elements in Picasso’s Cubist works and Jouffret’s innovative technique in Tony Robbin, Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought  (Yale University Press 2006) 29-33. [17] Henri Poincaré, La Science et l’hypothèse  (Flammarion 1902) 89-90. [18] ibid 72-73. See Henderson (n 9) ch 2. For Cubist theory in its larger context, see also Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighton, Cubism and Culture  (Thames & Hudson). [19] The discussion of X-rays and radioactivity that follows is presented in greater detail in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists’ (1988) 47 Art Journal 323-40; Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science—An Overview; II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early 20th Century’ (2004) 17 Science in Context 447-50. [20] See eg Gustave Le Bon, ‘The Decay of Matter’ ( The Independent , 26 July 1906) 183-6. [21] On Bergson and Cubism, see again Antliff and Leighten (n 18). [22] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory  (Zone Books 1988) 200-1. [23] ibid 196, 208. [24] Gilbert Boudar and Michel Décaudin, Catalogue de la bibliothèque de Guillaume Apollinaire  (Editions du CNRS 1983) 52. See Commandant Darget, Exposé des différentes méthodes pour l'obtention de photographies fluido-magnétiques et spirites: Rayons V (vitaux)  (Ed. de l'Inititation 1909). [25] For a fuller version of this case for the relevance of the ether for Picasso and prewar Parisian culture—and its documentation, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science—An Overview; II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early 20th Century’ (2004) 17 Science in Context 448-53. For Picasso’s photography, see Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror  (Flammarion 1997) eg figs. 83, 84, 109. [26] On this topic, see eg Navarro (n 6). Indexes such as the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature  document the continued public interest in the ether after 1919. [27] JJ Thomson, ‘Address by the President, Sir J. J. Thomson’ in Report of the Seventy-Ninth Meeting of the British Associaton for the Advancement of Science (1909)  (John Murray 1910) 15. [28] Esther Coen, Umberto Boccioni  (The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1988). On Boccioni, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space’ in Clarke and Henderson (n 6) and, for a fuller discussion, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Umberto Boccioni’s Elasticity, Italian Futurism, and the Ether of Space’ in Navarro (n 6). [29] Umberto Boccioni, Dynamisme plastique: peinture et sculpture futuriste (L'Age d'Homme 1975) 105. [30] ibid. [31] Robert Kennedy Duncan, The New Knowledge  (A. S. Barnes 1905) 5. [32] Coen (n 28) 239. [33] Umberto Boccioni et al, Futurist Manifestos  (Viking Press 1973) 89. [34] Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space’ in Clarke and Henderson (n 6). [35] Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ in Complete Writings on Art  (Da Capo 1994) 142, 197. For a fuller discussion of Kandinsky, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Abstraction, the Ether, and the Fourth Dimension: Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich in Context’ ( Interalia , November 2020) < https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/linda-dalrymple-henderson-abstraction-the-ether-and-the-fourth-dimension-kandinsky-mondrian-and-malevich-in-context/ > accessed 16 August 2025. [36] Kandinsky cites both Flammarion and Crookes in a footnote in On the Spiritual in Art , see Kandinsky (n 35) 143. On Kandinsky's interest in Flammarion, Baraduc, and Rochas, as well as Crookes, whose writings were regularly translated in France, see eg Sixton Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting  (Abo Akademi 1970) 51-5, 122-3. A copy of Darget's book—owned also by Apollinaire, see (n 24)—is in the Nina Kandinsky archive in the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. While Kandinsky knew the 1901 book Thought-Forms by Theosophists Annie Besant and CW Leadbeater (who cite Baraduc), his belief in the coming ‘epoch of the Great Spiritual’ and the role his art could play in that process drew significantly on the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, as documented in Long 1980. For Kandinsky’s paintings of this period, see the excellent Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue: Magdalena Dabrowksi (ed), Kandinsky: Compositions (The Museum of Modern Art 1995). [37] For a further discussion of Baraduc, Rochas, and Houston, see Henderson (n 34) 140-2; Henderson (n 35). [38] Duchamp (n 16) 49, 125. See Henderson (n 4), on which this paragraph is based. For a concise overview of the science Duchamp engaged, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘The Large Glass  Seen Anew: Reflections of Science and Technology in Marcel Duchamp’s “Hilarious Picture”’ (1999) 32(2) Leonardo 113-26. [39] Duchamp (n 16) 42. [40] See ibid 74-101. [41] For the artists’ responses to Einstein here and in the following two paragraphs, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Einstein and 20th-Century Art: A Romance of Many Dimensions’ in Peter Galison, Gerald Holton, and Silvan S Schweber (eds), Einstein for the 21 st Century (Princeton University Press 2008) 101-29. On Moholy-Nagy and Duchamp in this context, see Henderson (n 11) 35-42. [42] See Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hôch  (Yale University Press 1993). [43] Salvador Dali, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dali  (Haim Finkelstein ed, Cambridge University Press 1998) 229. [44] ibid 272. [45] André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture  (Brentano’s 1945) 152. For an excellent study of Surrealism and science, including both Einstein and quantum physics, see Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art, and Modern Physics  (Yale University Press 2007). [46] Ronald W Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times  (World Publishing 1971) 426-35, 444-5. [47] Diane Kelder (ed), Stuart Davis  (Praeger 1971) 55. [48] ibid. [49] ibid. [50] ibid 58. [51] See eg John R Lane, Stuart Davis: Art and Theory  (The Brooklyn Museum 1978) 66. [52] See ibid 28. [53] James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe  (The Macmillan Co 1931) 109. [54] Stuart Davis, ‘Stuart Davis’ (1940) 12 Parnassus 6. [55] Jeans (n 53) 109. [56] Kelder (n 47) 30. [57] Davis (n 54) 6. [58] Lane (n 51) 17-8. [59] Eddington echoes that language in his talk of the space-time continuum as an ‘absolute world-structure’; see Arthur S Eddington, The Nature of the Physical Universe  (The Macmillan Co 1929) 62. [60] Jeans (n 53) 127-8. [61] Lane (n 51) 28. [62] Lane (n 51) 57. [63] ibid 66. [64] 1 Trans/formation: Arts, Communication, Environment, A World Review (1950) inside front cover. [65] On this subject, see eg Paul Boyer, By Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age  (The University of North Carolina Press 1994). [66] For further discussion of the ‘Amazing Continuity’, which to date has always been interpreted in purely art historical terms (following a 1952 comment to Alfred Barr by Davis), see Henderson (n 11) 27-34. [67] While a shift away from the fluidity suggestive of the ether characterizes modern painting after Cubism, Futurism, and Kandinsky of the 1910s, artists like Duchamp and Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich engaged the ether but adopted hard-edge, diagrammatic styles. On the ether-related aspects of the Large Glass , see Henderson (n 4) ch 8. As I have argued elsewhere, Malevich's interest in ‘cuts’ through a plane or space of a lower dimension followed Charles Howard Hinton's association of such planes / spaces with a fluid film analogous to the ether, an argument reiterated by PD Ouspensky in his Tertium Organum (1911), a book well known to the Russian avant-garde. On this subject, see Henderson (n 35); for a basic discussion of Malevich (sans ether), see Henderson (n 9) ch 5.

Dr Alison Gilliland was Dublin’s 353rd Lord Mayor in 2021/2022. She is currently a Dublin City Councillor for the Labour Party, representing her local area of Artane / Whitehall and works as a facilitator, advisor, and researcher. Her community-oriented council work is underpinned by her previous experience as a training and equality officer for her trade union, the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation. CJLPA : Dublin has had a mayor for nearly 800 years. How do you view your role as mayor this year? Dr Alison Gilliland : The role of mayor this year is a particularly pertinent one in the sense that we're transitioning out of a global pandemic. And then suddenly, we have the dark cloud of a war in Ukraine. So it's a year with lots of ups and downs. When I was elected in June, I had three priorities: the sustainable recovery of our city, giving visibility to women and girls, and housing. I chose those three because they were issues in our city, like other cities around the world that are trying to recover from COVID, but they also speak to the global perspective—of the climate crisis, for example. Firstly, COVID gave us great opportunities here in Dublin to accelerate some of the plans we had, particularly with regard to active travel and mobility. You might see a huge increase in cycling infrastructure around the city. That change took place over a couple of months, to allow people greater space to walk around and to cycle, conscious that people didn't want to get on public transport, but also conscious at the back of our head that we need to keep people less dependent on private cars. So there's an element of human and community recovery as well one of climate resilience. Women, secondly, because globally women are not equal partners at the decision-making table. I'm only the 10th female Lord Mayor of Dublin City. The 10th in the last 80 years, because our first female was in 1939. So I'm very conscious of that gender imbalance. Also, from the perspective of urban planning and development, we need to have both views. How women move around the city and their experiences of work, culture, and recreation are very different to those of men. And finally housing. We have a massive housing crisis in the country, but more so in Dublin as our capital city and biggest urban centre. We have people struggling to make rent, and people who would like to buy their own home but can’t, due to lack of supply. We’re seeing an excess of ‘build-to-rent’ development, generally funded by investment funds demanding very high rents. That has a financial impact on people's ability to live and work in the city, and a knock-on impact on our domestic economy. The question is: how can we square that circle? We do as a city have responsibility for the provision of what we call social housing, housing for people under a certain income threshold. While we don't technically have a responsibility for the provision of housing for those above that threshold, we're very conscious of those at a middle income that are struggling, so we've taken it upon ourselves to build cost-rentals: lower rent, not-for-profit rentals on public land. They're the three big issues for me. And, of course, other issues pop up during the course of the year. One of the issues that has come up for me is the high level of street issues: on-street homelessness, on-street addiction and substance misuse, and on-street safety. CJLPA : You said earlier that ‘we only have a responsibility for social housing, but have taken on developing cost-rentals on public lands’ to ameliorate the housing crisis. Who is ‘we’? Is that the Dublin City Council? AG : Yes, it's the Council. At the national level, the Minister for Housing, Local Governments, and Planning produced legislation that allows for what we call cost-rentals. As a local authority, we own some of the public land in Dublin City, with other public land owned by state bodies or the Office of Public Works. What we are doing on some of our larger developments is mixing social with cost-rental. I think one of the reasons we have got into a situation where we have so little housing stock in public ownership is because we've had a scheme whereby local authority tenants could buy out their local authority rental house. We've ‘lost’ 25,000 units because of that and I'm very concerned about the long term. We have people now paying very high rents. My question is: what will happen to those people when they retire and they take a significant drop in their income? They won’t be able to afford those rents. We need to build and increase our housing stock so that we have a cushion there for that eventuality down the line. We also need to increase our stock to accommodate those on social housing waiting lists. As a state, I believe we have a responsibility to help those who can’t afford housing because we need sustainable communities. If we don't have sustainable mixed income communities, we're going to get different ghettos and communities isolated from each other. CJLPA : How has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine impacted Dublin? AG : We now have refugees arriving in the city every single night. We have established several ‘resting centres’ with the civil defence and housing section, where we look after them for 24 or 48 hours until they're allocated somewhere for accommodation. That's our role at the moment. I can see that developing into the provision of housing and also integration. I’m conscious that most of the families are women and children, who will need schools, and involvement in local community activities. They are safe here, but probably suffering trauma and we need to figure out how we can best support the manifestation of that trauma. CJLPA : You have been a Dublin City Councillor from 2014 to 2021. Over those seven years, which of Dublin’s issues have grown in salience and which have shrunk? AG : What has particularly grown in importance is the climate crisis. Every report that we get is worse. The national government does have a Climate Action Plan, which is very good in the sense that it sets out very clear objectives. But I don't feel that we are doing enough. I don't feel a sense of urgency from some of the actors at a national level. So for ourselves at council, it's our responsibility, and my responsibility as Lord Mayor, to push that agenda. The climate lens permeates everything I do. For example, in the sustainable COVID recovery, we’re concerned with accessibility in the city, permeability in the city, walking, and cycling. This ensures sustainability, but also enhances the quality of our air. I’m old enough to remember smog in Dublin clinging to your clothes. We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. We also need to be more conscious of greening our city, not only from the carbon and climate change perspective, but also in terms of quality of life and the aesthetics in the city. We started a pilot to pedestrianise some of our streets. We have two main areas that are pedestrianised, and a third one which we trialled on weekend evenings last summer. That is now going to be made permanent. This should really enhance the city. What we hope to do is have people arrive into the city by Connolly Station, which is our north-south access, and be able to walk at least five kilometres in a pedestrianised or traffic-free area. That will give great accessibility to the city, a lovely sense of flow, and a sort of added ambience. CJLPA : The Dublin City Development Plan 2022-2028, and the development strategy of other cities such as Paris, emphasise the ‘15 minute city’. Can you speak to the significance of this? AG : Yes. What the idea of the ‘15 minute city’ will do for Dublin is make us focus on creating communities that have all the services they require within a 15 minute walk, cycle, or journey by public transport. There are two challenges in that. Obviously, it's about reducing your carbon footprint by limiting the need for private transport, but it's also about growing communities and bringing people back together. I think we all saw that during COVID lockdowns, with small enterprises developing within local communities. The challenges we have in this respect are getting more people to live in the city centre, because that's where a lot of the employment is, and getting employment into local communities. We now need to be more conscious of the balance between employment opportunities and housing. We can’t build residential units and housing on every single piece of land we have and take every piece of land, because it's more than houses. You need community infrastructure, recreation, and employment. One of the issues I'm working on is over-the-shop vacancy, or what we call upper floor vacancy. I hosted an online summit just before Christmas, where we brought in a lot of the stakeholders, owners of some of those buildings, architects, developers, and businesses, to identify what the key challenges were. There are challenges around planning requirements. But one of the biggest challenges is that those who own them are not motivated to go through the pain of planning, financing, and regenerating the floors of the shop. In a lot of cases, they don't need the income. Many of the owners don't even live in Dublin. So that is a challenge. We have a few ideas of how we might partner with private developers and owners to help regenerate those upper floors because they're such a valuable resource. We can't demolish and rebuild everything. We need to be sustainably ‘recycling’ these buildings, reusing them and not releasing any more carbon into the atmosphere. CJLPA : Do you compare Dublin to other cities? And if so, are they other Irish cities, other EU capital cities, or global cities? AG : I consider Dublin a European capital city. The size of our country and the size of our capital is similar to Denmark, one of the smaller European countries. Every city, particularly Dublin, has its own unique characteristics, but we do aspire to be one of the leading European capital cities and I think we're well respected. Tourists love Dublin because of its unique character and the people. Dublin people make Dublin. And we have similar challenges to other European countries with regard to climate, housing, resilience, and post-COVID recovery. So there are a lot of similarities, but Dublin has its own unique context. One of the things that really struck me this year was the reaction from Dubliners to outdoor dining. We don't have a tradition of outdoor dining in Dublin because of the climate, but with COVID we introduced outdoor dining as a way of enabling the hospitality industry to get back on its feet while there were still restrictions on eating indoors. We doubled the number of seats and tables in an outdoor space in the city in a couple of weeks. And I think that that atmosphere, along with the pedestrianisation of a lot of the streets, has really increased the European vibe in the city. I know a lot of people have fed it back to me and said the city now feels like those modern European capital cities. You have it in Paris, and it rains in Paris as well. I think we don't mind sitting outside, under the heater, with coats on. It's an element of the city that we can then enjoy. CJLPA : How has COVID impacted Dublin? AG : No more than any other European city. We've lost businesses, particularly in the hospitality sector because they suffered most from the lockdown and the restrictions. I wouldn’t say we ‘lost’ our arts and culture and industry, but they really, really suffered. I think that had a two-fold impact on us. We realised how central arts and culture are to our well-being, and the balance that we need in every community within our city. Previously, there was focus on the city centre and on people coming into what we call ‘town’ to go for a bite to eat, go to the theatre or cinema. COVID exposed the dependence the city centre had on workers coming in every day for retail, for hospitality, and for culture. When they weren't there, communities in the periphery of the city were flourishing because everybody was located at home in their own area. And the city centre was vacant and empty. That has given us a real impetus to work harder on upper floor vacancies, for example, to get more people living in the city. CJLPA : Why are arts and culture important to communities? AG : I suppose it's the coming together of the community. Even though you may not know most of the people in the cinema, everybody laughs at the same thing. It's that sharing. As there can be such a focus on academia, and business, and the economy, people tend to forget the importance of people who work and thrive in the arts, how we as humans thrive through the arts. One of our challenges is to find more arts and culture spaces. Because it's not a business as such, it's hard to make a profit that will allow you to pay the high rents. When we came out of lockdown just after my election last year, myself and the head of city recovery approached some of the big landlords on our main retail shopping street, Grafton Street, where they had vacant commercial space, and asked them if they would give us the space for six months at a very cheap rent, where we could experiment with pop ups. Whether that be arts workshops or the circular economy and upcycling, to see what people would react to, what they wanted in a space, and at the same time create footfall. CJLPA : Where, and in what way, is Dublin’s local art and culture under threat? AG : We’re particularly conscious of ‘The Liberties’, Dublin 8. We’ve had a significant amount of applications for build-to-rent. We’re looking at thousands of new apartments. But it’s also one of the areas that has the fewest green spaces. We’re in favour of preserving green spaces for recreational use. If we’re going to be true to the concept of a 15-minute city, you should also be able to walk to your local football pitch to play, or your local club. So there’s always a tension around use of land. The other challenge we have is where private owners develop older buildings that might have a cultural space in them. One earlier this year was called the Cobblestone which, for all intents and purposes, is a pub. But it’s bigger than that! It has rooms for people to learn to play Irish traditional music or take Irish language classes. It brings people together for that Irish cultural space, and you just can’t recreate that. That was going to be demolished, and a hotel built on it, but planning wasn’t given. We’ve written a compromise into our Development Plan: where a cultural space is going to be redeveloped, the size of the cultural space has to be retained and recreated as far as possible. One of our problems, in the interaction between national and local, is that we have no definition of ‘cultural spaces’ in national legislation. So for some, as in this case, a pub was a cultural space, even though that would generally come under hospitality. The other is the architecture of the place. These new shiny buildings are beautiful, but it's almost like we’re sanitising the city. We have to be conscious to retain what makes Dublin City’s character and hold onto some of those old buildings. We have a beautiful theatre, Smock Alley Theatre, and we’re in the process of reclaiming that as a municipal theatre space. We have the old school of music off Grafton Street, which is vacant at the moment. In our Development Plan, we’re looking at how we can best use that space. We’re giving it over to artists for temporary use, but questions remain in the long term. Should we use it as a museum? My preference would be using it for something that’s more interactive. That could be science, tech, or arts, but the aim would be something that people can actually go in and interact with, instead of just passively looking. My underlying principle when it comes to developing our city is: if it works for Dubliners, it’ll work for tourists alike. I think there was an over-emphasis during the early 2000’s on the tourist economy. We’re creating an experience in the city for tourists without thinking about our own Dubliners who need experience. Another challenge is that our public cultural experiences like museums all close at six, which isn’t always accessible to families with children or workers. We hosted an exhibition at the Round Room of the Mansion House this past summer open until eight o’clock, and the public reception towards this showed these opening hours are more accessible. CJLPA : In an architectural sense, how do you balance progress with culture and heritage? AG : We have a scheme called ‘Protected Structures’, according to which we are conscious of buildings with a particular architectural, social, or historical value. Once they're included in that record of protected structures, the physical and cultural integrity of those buildings has to be preserved. In some cases, planning would just require the façade to be retained, whilst the inside can be regenerated in a more modern way. Other times it’s the integrity of the entire building, including the contents. That's probably the best way that we can retain our cultural and social architectural heritage. CJLPA : Who puts structures on that protective list? AG : We retain the list. Anyone can apply and say ‘let's save this building, we think this building is of significant architectural heritage’. You make an application, then it is assessed by heritage officers in the Council. Every building has some sort of architecture, culture, or social value to it. It is a balancing act, since you have to ensure you’re not blocking a huge amount of modern development, but we're very conscious of the need to preserve our cultural and architectural heritage. CJLPA : How does a city facing a housing crisis balance the rapid delivery of houses with social infrastructure? AG : We use our Development Plan. In this Plan, we have certain criteria with regard to social and community infrastructure. For example, our Development Plan requires a childcare or creche facility for every X number of residential units. There are requirements in some of our zonings for 20% of the land to be used for public open space. It's not always easy. Take schools, for example: the Department of Education decides where schools are. If we own the land we can work with them, but where private owners own the land this isn’t possible. One of the difficulties we have run into is that the Department of Education doesn't take account of the 15-minute city or sustainability. They look at a five kilometre radius, but you cannot walk five kilometres, and you probably couldn't cycle it if you're a young kid. Again, it's trying to align national and local parameters. CJLPA : Dublin is a short city, slow to incorporate skyscrapers. But are they a viable solution to the housing crisis? AG : We've been gradually moving to higher buildings in the city. Our docklands are a wonderful example of height when it's well planned. I think that there's an aesthetic ‘skyline’ consideration. There are questions with regard to them being the solution to residential needs. I'm not sure about that. There is a cost: the higher you build, the more expensive it is. And with regard to our own fire safety requirement, once you pass a specific height, you then have to increase your fire safety installation requirements. There's also the energy concern as regards the installation of lifts up and down. There's a lot to consider there. We have some very high-density areas that are low; height doesn't necessarily give you density. The other consideration is the amount that a residential skyscraper would cost either to buy or rent. We have a lot of very high end, high buildings that are financially inaccessible to those who need housing. While developers will say ‘I want to build a 42 storey residential building that will provide X amount of residential units’, my question is: well, how much will they cost through rent? Because if it's more than 30-40% of somebody's disposable income, it's not going to serve the city. CJLPA : What would be some popular misconceptions about solutions to the housing crisis? AG : That there is a solution. It's very, very nuanced. We do have to build, but planning regulations can inhibit this. The new, special planning policy requirements that were brought in nationally, which superseded our development plan, particularly with regard to height, have held up so many planning applications. With regard to social housing, we have to jump through hoops with the Department of Housing when we're building. It takes about a year and a half to go through that application process with them. The big challenge now is how to build sustainably. The war in Ukraine has created difficulties with international trade and prices of construction products have increased. There is a difficulty finding people now to work on construction. So there are lots of factors and no one simple solution, except just build! And build sustainably. This interview was conducted by Kylie Quinn, who was born in Dallas, Texas, and studies Law and Political Science (LLB) at Trinity College Dublin. Focusing her final year on Law, Sustainability, and Finance, she will graduate in 2023.

Manuel Rabaté is Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. He has taught Arts & Cultural Management at Paris-Dauphine University and Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi. He is a Knight of France’s National Order of Merit.   Dr Souraya Noujaim is Scientific, Curatorial & Collections Management Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. She has studied the British Museum’s Arabic weights and measures, and has been Islamic Art History Chair at the École du Louvre.   Louvre Abu Dhabi sits at a tense but enriching cultural crossroads. The museum brings the name of France’s most treasured cultural institution to the desert of the United Arab Emirates. The museum is innovative but its geopolitical context is difficult: a background of continuous government negotiations, and the cultural friction between East and West. The institution’s Director, Manuel Rabaté, and Curatorial Director, Dr Souraya Noujaim, discussed their creative vision and difficulties with honesty.   CJLPA : Louvre Abu Dhabi arose in 2017 out of a 2007 agreement between France and the UAE. What was the intention behind the agreement?   Manuel Rabaté : This agreement was extraordinarily visionary. You cannot read it in isolation. It was part of a master plan to make Abu Dhabi an important international centre of knowledge, education, sustainability, and tourism. It was made in tandem with other agreements that led to Sorbonne Abu Dhabu, Berkley Abu Dhabi, New York University Abu Dhabi, Zayed University and National Museum, and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Tourism was undoubtedly an important motive. The government of Abu Dhabi was keen to ensure diversification of economic assets, and found that strong investment in its educational and cultural fibre was an excellent way of achieving this. The UAE federation dates only to 1971, but the place has a rich, much older heritage. The UAE wants to preserve this and create a cultural legacy. There is much more there than just the sun.   The community is built on other institutions and ideals too. Many of the buildings in which Abu Dhabi’s cultural institutions sit have been designed by Western architects, and many institutions bear Western names. But they are not necessarily extensions of Western points of view and ways of doing things. A key part of the vision behind Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well as the wider cultural objectives of the Abu Dhabi government, was to promote a universal story. Much like the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris are not museums of British art or French art, Louvre Abu Dhabi is place where you invite the world to come and see how you perceive human interconnectedness. We want to tell the story of the world through artworks and objects of beauty, at the same time raising points about Arab identity and the interaction of East and West. This may sound like a cliché, but I mean it truly.   CJLPA : What are your goals as Director?   MR : My mission as Director can be structured around four pillars, which chime with what my view of what a museum is. First, I want to focus on the building itself and its surroundings. We have an incredible, delicate building on the sea. It is a challenge to maintain, but I take pride in being its custodian and improving its health and accessibility.

As described by The Arts Desk , Dr Laura Bowler is ‘ a triple threat composer-performer-provocatrice ’ . She is the vocalist in Ensemble Lydenskab, and as a composer she has been commissioned by orchestras and ensembles across the globe. She is a Tutor in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music and Lecturer in Composition at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.   I interviewed Dr Laura Bowler on the evolving relationship between music and politics through the captivating, yet sometimes overlooked sphere of contemporary experimental music.   Bowler really is one of kind. Described by The Arts Desk as a ‘triple threat composer-performer-provocatrice’,[1] she is a renowned composer, vocalist and artistic director, specialising in theatre, multidisciplinary work and opera. Her works have been performed by some of the world’s leading ensembles, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Manchester Camerata. Bowler is also a Tutor in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she invites her students to also explore the unique fusion between music and theatre in the realm of contemporary experimental music. However, it is Bowler’s utilisation of pressing political topics as central themes for her music—including climate change, social media and political ‘slacktivism’—which were the prime sources of intrigue in this illuminating dialogue. Indeed, by incorporating brash and provocative theatrical techniques, Bowler urges her audiences to subsequently reflect on the issues she presents to them. In our discussion, I invited Bowler to consider the mechanics by which compositional praxis and the production and consumption of new music can act as political intervention. By placing special emphasis on her two most notable works, Antarctica and FFF  (Freeze, Flight, Fight), Bowler addresses the complex dialectic between content and form, unpicking the functions that compositional intervention and dissemination can offer political objectives. Especially in the realm of contemporary experimental music, where her target audience may seem narrow, Bowler also considers the limits and challenges faced when mobilising musical material for social change.   Before unpacking her music, I was intrigued to hear about Bowler’s rather unique educational background. Born in Staffordshire, Bowler first studied Saxophone at the Royal Northern College of Music as an undergraduate, before switching to Composition after a term because of stage fright. This is ironic, of course, since she performs in all her musical projects. However, it was not until her master’s studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London that theatre started to play a central role in her work. After coming across the provocative Theatre of Cruelty  manifesto by the French dramatist Antonin Artaud, she made the text the focal point in her master’s thesis: ‘It made such an impact on me because of Artaud’s desire to search for the real  and the raw  in performers’. Experiences outside of music college at the   time further fuelled her passion for the theatrical, including a trip to the National Theatre in Warsaw to watch a production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis  . Language barrier notwithstanding (the play was translated into Polish), it was the physicality of the performance that moved Bowler above all else. Indeed, she ‘could not believe the level of sacrifice of these performers, and what they were giving and sharing’.   ‘How can I find this  in the western Classical music tradition?’ It was this question, Bowler asserts, which became the focal point of her doctoral work. Finding any solutions to this puzzle proved challenging. Despite Bowler’s passion for theatre, she had not received any formal training in theatre or drama. To overcome this barrier, she embarked on a theatre master’s degree at the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts (RADA), a move which, for Bowler, was fundamental to where her work is now.   The wonderful thing about the course [at RADA] was that not only did you get incredible training on how to facilitate rehearsals and facilitate a room and a psychology of a room, but you also got physical theatre training from the Theatre Ensemble Course there. I studied Grotowski theatre—very much linked to my work on Artaud at conservatoire—and focused on physicality and the ‘raw’ in performance and pushing my body to the extreme.   This passion for physicality is not only transferred to her work but also in her composition teaching. At the Royal Northern College of Music, Bowler leads a ‘Physicality and Performance’ course. By introducing her students to ‘Jerzy Grotowski theatre’ (which aims for complete integration of the actor’s mental and physical senses to reveal the core substance of a character) and the ‘Stanislavski Technique’ (a system comprising various techniques designed to allow actors to create and embody believable characters), Bowler is constantly questioning her students (an ‘interrogation’ method, she jokes) to find their true ‘rawness’.   This approach is perhaps similar to how theatre directors work today: Constantly questioning their actors, their motivations within the character, so that they then can reflect back on that, and find what it is they are ‘doing’ but not quite ‘doing accurately ’.   It was after her ‘fundamental’ studies in the Dramatic Arts that Bowler’s urge to write political works came about. She realised that abstract music on its own terms was not a strong enough vehicle to fully communicate the true human experience of the world; a composition could, therefore, be ‘directed’ if it wants to be. However, it was actually during her final years of her undergraduate degree when she first gained an interest in moulding her works around sociopolitical issues and, more importantly, in using her unique compositional idiom to convey a fully human experience. Bowler wrote a work on her experience of anorexia as part of a collaboration with the BBC playwright Lavinia Murray. Bowler toured this very human work round schools in her hometown in Staffordshire where, before performing the piece, she would also talk to students about her experiences of anorexia. This was especially provocative at the time, because she was still ill. This compositional ethos—that of writing music based on personal experiences which, subsequently, invites her audiences to reflect on their own actions—pervades her writing today.   I was very much doing it because this was my experience of the world, and that was what I was using to create this work. This certainly became the starting point for this need to communicate about the human experience in a more direct way than what was possible with ‘abstract music’.   This forms the crux of one of her most significant works, Antarctica , an immersive multimedia work for orchestra and   vocalist which was co-commissioned by the Manchester Camerata and BBC Radio 3. As suggested by the title, it is the pressing issue of climate change which takes pride of place in this piece. Before writing, Bowler realised that, like most people in privileged populations, her view of climate change was too obscure, preventing her from creating a truly personal, provocative work. So, in order to overcome this limitation, she embarked upon a voyage to Antarctica. While sailing, she recorded videos and took audio samples which, upon writing the work, were manipulated and juxtaposed to create an evocative ‘soundscape’ work. By essentially bringing back her experience of this environment that so few people get to experience first-hand, Bowler’s immersive experience persuades her audiences to reflect on this beautiful, fragile landscape, ‘so that it remains that way’. This is especially the case with the work’s ‘dark turn’.   The flipside of the work is the politics surrounding climate change and the manipulation of governments, the presentation and rejection of climate laws, and the use of text from the media and politicians. That complete juxtaposition with this beauty and landscape was important. The point of it all was to allow audiences to wallow in that beauty, only to be hit by the grotesqueness of the reality and our ignorance.   What do audiences themselves think? For Bowler, discussions with her listeners—or more accurately, ‘spectators’—are crucial for understanding whether the messages conveyed were powerful enough that they then felt the need to take action. These engagements have clearly stuck with Bowler, and she seems surprised by the things she has been told or asked. For example, after Antarctica , an elderly couple approached her, since they had also visited Antarctica, but on a cruise ship.   They were saying that ‘we did not see any rubbish when we were there, and we didn’t see any of the things that you described’. I then told them that the areas a cruise ship ventures in are obviously maintained for tourism, thus explaining the differences of our own experiences. Yet, because their experience of Antarctica was so pure and untainted, they almost could not accept what I had presented to them. It ruined their memory of it, which was very interesting.   The question Bowler seems to be asked most often is this: what new solutions is she presenting in her works? This question is certainly relevant here, especially since we are exploring this work through the lens of political action. Certainly, the theatrical elements embedded in her work imbibe connotations of protest. However, Bowler simply sees her unique musical idiom—her responsiveness to the ‘indirectness’ she perceives in pure abstract music—as a vessel to encourage audiences to simply reflect on the issues at hand and take action.   I don’t have the solutions. I’m not a scientist. Audiences experiencing this piece should then go home and think a little bit more about it. It takes them one step further on their path to acknowledging climate change and doing their individual bit towards it. That is what I see my role as here.   Bowler is excited to be addressing climate change again in a work provocatively titled temperatures aren’t what they used to be , which she is currently writing for the London Sinfonietta as part of a collaboration with play-writer Cordelia Lynn, theatre director Katie Mitchell, and documentary filmmaker Grant Gee. In stark contrast to Antarctica , the work centres on the issues of climate denial and climate psychology, inspired by responses she received on the subject by people completing a questionnaire.   It is a very individual experience. It does not really concern science or facts, but it’s about the process of going ‘OK, climate change is a thing, what does that mean? What can I maybe do as an individual?’ It is quite broad with regards to the spectrum of responses I got. Some people are activists, others do not do anything, and some recycle but drive an SUV. As you can see, this is a hugely complex topic, which is what I want to explore here.   Alongside her interest in global warming, Bowler’s works also address the problems associated with political ‘slacktivism’. This is an informal term which the Oxford Dictionary defines as ‘the practice of supporting a political or social cause by means such as social media or online petitions, characterised as involving very little effort or commitment’.[2] Some of her frustrations are addressed by her most physical work, FFF  (Freeze, Flight and Fight) for ensemble and vocalist, co-commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.   I came to write this piece because, like everyone else, I was on social media and sharing various things that were making me angry, and I was getting very involved in very heated conversations online, which were generally not very helpful for either party. I realised the physical  impact it was having on me, that although the existence of social media is one step removed from reality, it was affecting me so much on a really physical level.   What has this got to do with ‘Freeze, Flight, Fight’, a phrase which describes our instinctive and physiological response to danger? Well, while thinking about the physical effect on social media, she came across an article concerning the relationship between ‘Freeze, Flight, and Fight’ and politics, in relation to how one behaves in relation to political news. Bowler was intrigued and decided to write a work which conveyed this paralysing physical response to social media.   Like most of her works, moulding these very physical ideas into music comes with many challenges. One big obstacle to overcome is the fact that Bowler herself performs all of her music. Indeed, she sings through her pieces before writing them, which substantially aids the compositional process. I asked Bowler a question many have asked her before, namely whether she would ever give her pieces to someone else to perform. She replied with a firm ‘no’. Perhaps, Bowler states, she would consider it at some point, but would want to be present in the rehearsal process. It is clear how attached she is to her music, given that the messages reflected emanate from her own experiences. Audiences, therefore, are moved by such authentic, visceral projections of these messages, and are perhaps inclined to reflect on what they have just witnessed.   What about the players she works with? While watching FFF , I was immediately struck by how physical the orchestra was. Not only did the complexity of the instrumental texture lead to extremely gestural playing, but the players themselves were required to act at times and make various vocalisations. This is all very demanding, but Bowler’s training in Theatre Directing is a crucial asset here as she goes through all the actions in detail to ease the players’s tension. Of course, while her ensemble enthusiastically seeks to grasp and perform her ideas, Bowler is willing to compromise because, at the end of the day, musicians perform better if they are comfortable. Furthermore, Bowler’s role as a performer here also helps because her passionate demeanour in performance is very much absorbed and echoed by the players. A sense of comradeship evolves here, which also fuels the powerful messages of this work.   FFF is formed of three movements named ‘Freeze’, ‘Flight’, and ‘Fight’, with chaos and disorder emerging right from the work’s outset. The first movement commences with Bowler announcing, ‘In the beginning’, words from the opening of Genesis: words which, contrary to Bowler’s musical texture here, reflect stillness, serenity and, more importantly, order. The connotations of immobility and self-protection associated with the ‘Freeze’ are vividly captured in this movement.   The conflict between music and text is exactly to do with the passiveness with the experience of social media. It addresses how ‘pervasive’ social media is becoming in society and how it is slowly but surely affecting our behaviour. The movement shows how incredibly violent social media is, even if we do not know that it is. All of these juxtapositions of how it behaves is what I am trying to capture in some way in that first section.   The second movement ‘Flight’ sees Bowler appropriately embody the role of an air stewardess. Anger is momentarily sidelined, as she is seen signing sheets of paper, scrunching them up and throwing them across the stage. This all represents the act of signing online petitions, which Bowler considers to be emblematic of political ‘slacktivism’.   The movement functions as a commentary on our privilege to not only want the internet, but to want the internet to go ‘Yes, I can sign it, and then I’ll share it as a good deed, because I’m a good person’. But, how many people would sign it had they not been exposed to it on social media in the first place? I am certainly guilty of this, but it is important to reflect on that, and notice this process as ‘slacktivism’.   The chaos then resumes for the final movement ‘Fight’, where Bowler puts on an ‘emoticon’ head mask, repeatedly shouting the words ‘You capitalist! You socialist’. This represents a call to arms demanding that, instead of sitting there, scrolling and doing nothing, we take action. This is perhaps the most intense we see Bowler, shouting and pushing her voice to breaking point. However, Bowler then shuts down and a pre-recorded video of herself appears playing for the remainder of the piece. At this point, the players are spraying themselves with detergent and Bowler is passing round disinfectant wipes to the audience, though this has nothing to do with the current pandemic. While this is all happening, the virtual Bowler tells the audience that they ‘all need to get into a great big bath of disinfectant and we need to disinfect ourselves’. Bowler explains: ‘This moment here the idea of “cleaning” ourselves before we go out and take part in the “true and honest” fight, and not the “slacktivist”, easy one’.   While these works engage provocatively with global issues, challenges arise when presevnting them in the elitist world of contemporary experimental music, let alone Western classical music. Bowler is always aware that her music attracts a very niche type of audience and, as a result, thinks a lot about what is presented in her works and how. This is certainly an arduous task, since one can never predict what her audience is going to think or whether her ideas have come across in the way she intended. However, what is vital for Bowler is that, when one makes political works, regardless of what artistic medium one is working in, the formatting which is presented has to be fundamental to the context in which it is performed in. She unpacks this a little further:   With FFF , for example, the work was specifically designed for that form of the contemporary music festival. It wouldn’t work the same it if was presented at Bridgewater Hall for the Manchester Camerata, because the people who go would not experience the piece with the same kind of context of works that they know, and it would mean very different things, and they may be drawn the ‘peculiarity’ of the work rather than what’s in  the work.   However, despite the apparent solidity of her craft, Bowler poignantly reveals that she is constantly learning, seeking new ways to communicate the issues she is so passionate about, to ensure her audiences feel that same ardour to take swift action and to reflect on their own actions. It was inspiring to hear Bowler’s thoughts on music’s multifaceted power to express pressing political issues. Filippo Turkheimer, the interviewer, is a postgraduate Music student at New College, Oxford, where he holds a Senior Scholarship. He previously read Music at New College, sang in the college’s prestigious chapel choir, and was president of the music society. [1] Rayfield Allied, ‘Laura Bowler’ < http://www.rayfieldallied.com/artists/laura-bowler > accessed 30 March 2021. [2] ‘Slacktivism, N’. ( Oxford English Dictionary Online ) < https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2446/view/Entry/51394141?redirectedFrom=slacktivism#eid > accessed 30 March 2021.

Dr Mostafa El Feki is Director of the New Library of Alexandria. He has been a Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, and has held numerous posts in the Egyptian government, including Ambassador to Austria.   Dr Mostafa El Feki has witnessed five Egyptian presidencies and been prominent in the political sphere for the last four and a half decades. He is well placed to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of each Egyptian President to have served over the last 50 years. He outlines in detail how each President has helped or hindered Egypt’s status as a major Middle Eastern state, in addition to how the Egyptian populace have felt about each President.   I have to be honest and say that if I answered this question based on my own personal emotions, I would favour President Nasser’s legacy above all else. However, objectively speaking, with regard to stratagem and policy-making, I am compelled to highlight President El Sadat’s policies for their success. At first glance, this may feel like a contradiction. However, I don’t feel it is so. To offer you just a snapshot of my thought process regarding your question, President Nasser’s charisma and leadership were extremely attractive to my generation. For us, and many after us, he was a national hero. However, President El Sadat’s wisdom and political initiatives were also well received by the majority of the Egyptian people, especially in relation to the breakthrough he accomplished towards securing peace between Egypt and Israel in 1978, an accomplishment for which he was rightfully recognised by virtue of his ascertainment of a Nobel Peace Prize.   Having ‘worked most closely with [Hosni Mubarak] during [his] time as Political Secretary’ (July 1985–October 1992), Dr El Feki speaks candidly of this highly controversial President, whose 30-year reign incited the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Acknowledging that ‘Mubarak was a highly nationalistic leader and had a great career in the military service within the Egyptian Air Force’, Dr El Feki also expresses his reservations. ‘His problem was that he didn’t take full advantage of the “time factor” despite his extensive presidency, hence losing out on several valuable opportunities for the country during his term in office’.   With respect to the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Dr El Feki identifies ‘the main goal of the revolution’ as ‘the call for social justice and equality in Egypt. This is the reason you could see signs reading “A loaf of bread and justice” at the heart of the mobilisation in Tahrir Square […] This is also why many raised the picture of Nasser, as he was considered the symbol of social justice during his period of leadership’. Dr El Feki insists, ‘[i]t is also important to note that none of the slogans of the Egyptian revolution made an indication towards foreign policy or propaganda against Israel’.   When asked about Mohammed Morsi, a President yet more controversial whose term was cut short after one year and one month, Dr El Feki keeps his response brief and forthright. ‘With respect to President Morsi, he had no remarkable achievements during his tenure and his policies were widely considered to be a reflection of those the Muslim Brotherhood adopted’. When pressed on why Morsi’s tenure proved fruitless, Dr El Feki insists that ‘he made no progress whatsoever in any field of development. In fact, I believe his entire presidency was an immense failure’.