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Introduction   It is easy to overlook the endurance of British imperial structures in its former colonies, particularly in the legal and moral frameworks that govern gender and sexuality. Despite the formal end of the British Empire in the twentieth century, colonial legislation that criminalises same-sex relationships and / or gender variance continues to serve as the legal foundation for the persecution of LGBTQ+[1] people throughout the former colonies and prolongs their marginalisation. By the time homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK, many countries had gained independence and did not reform inherited colonial laws. As of 2024, homosexuality remains a crime in 29 Commonwealth countries,[2] representing around half of the total number of UN member states that criminalise homosexuality worldwide.[3] The British Empire was unparalleled in its systematic export of laws criminalising same-sex conduct, leaving an institutional legacy of homophobia unmatched by any other empire.[4] In a comparative analysis of 185 countries, Han and O’Mahoney found former British colonies far more likely to have legislation that criminalises homosexual conduct than colonies of other European empires or countries in general.[5] Colonial anxieties about gender non-conformity also persist: as of 2019, at least 26 states used public order, vagrancy, and misdemeanour offences to harass and criminalise gender-nonconforming people, while at least 15 jurisdictions criminalised gender expression through laws on ‘cross-dressing’, disguise, impersonation, and / or imitation—the vast majority of which originated from British colonial penal codes.[6]   This paper examines the continuity and discontinuity of British colonial-era laws relating to gender and sexuality in India and how these legal frameworks remain contested in contemporary politics. In doing so, it highlights how India’s legal system has functioned not only as a means of governance, but also as an instrument for enforcing moral and ideological codes that sustain exclusion. The paper situates India’s debates over gender and sexuality within their historical context, tracing the evolution of norms from pre-colonial traditions and histories of gender and sexual fluidity to the colonial imposition of Judeo-Christian norms, and finally to contemporary debates shaped by the constitutional promise of equality. Colonial legislation, such as the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) and Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, institutionalised ideals of heteronormativity and a strict gender binary, criminalising those that fell outside of these norms and casting them as threats to the social order. In particular, the paper explores the experiences of India’s hijra community, a gender non-conforming people who form an important part of India’s ‘third gender’, examining their historical significance in South Asia and the enduring influence of colonial laws on the community. Post-independence, India’s Constitution brought commitments to equality, non-discrimination, and freedom of expression, but legacies of colonial morality and normative hierarchies persist in both legal and social spheres. Recent rulings illustrate both the possibilities and limitations of legal reforms in reshaping these norms and hierarchies. Finally, the paper reflects on the contemporary politics of LGBTQ+ rights across the former British colonies, exploring the divergent legal trajectories of countries that are negotiating similar colonial legacies.   Queer identities in Indian cultural history   Records of queer identities in India can be traced back to Hindu mythology and ancient regional folklore, with gender and sexual fluidity abundantly depicted in Indian scripture, literature, and temple art, as well as in ancient texts including the Ramayana and the Mahabharata , which detail narratives of sex changes, homoerotic encounters, and transgender characters such as Shikandi.[7] For instance, the  Hindu deity Ardhanarishvara is reportedly said to have been created by the merging of the god Shiva and his consort Parvati, depicted with a body which is masculine on the right and feminine on the left. This can be interpreted as emblematic of the harmonious bond between husband and wife, but also reflects Shiva’s androgynous identity in this form—the name itself translates to ‘the lord ( Isvara ) who is half ( Ardha ) woman ( Nari )’.[8] Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra —an ‘astonishingly sophisticated’ Sanskrit textbook on social conduct and human relations, dating back to the third century—also describes same-sex relations and non-binary gender identities, and medieval Hindu temples, such as those in Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh (900-1050 AD), and Bhubaneswar, Odisha (750-1250 AD), explicitly depict homosexuality among the erotic imagery in their sculptures.[9]    Fig 1. 6th century Ravanaphadi cave temple, Ardhanarishvara (half Shiva, half Parvati), Aihole Hindu monuments Karnataka. Fig 2. Ardhanarishvara, Chola period, 11th century, Government Museum, Chennai. South Asia’s third gender   While the acknowledgement of genders outside the male / female binary has recently gained prominence in Western societies, people of varied gender expressions have been accepted as legitimate citizens in South Asia for centuries.[10] Among the most visible in these groups are the hijra community, who are generally phenotypical males or intersex people who adopt a feminine gender identity, some of whom undergo ritual castration.[11] Considered neither men nor women, hijras have long lived outside the Western gender binary and survived the colonial project of elimination to form an important part of the present-day (and legally recognised) ‘third gender’ in India.[12] The concept of a ‘third gender’ is derived from a complex history, encompassing various categories of gender non-conforming identities that have existed in their own right. For instance, khwajasaras (or ‘eunuchs’)[13] held prominent roles in the Sultanate and Mughal empires, providing widely varied services ranging from administrative duties to harem attendance. As in other Islamic courts, their perceived asexuality allowed them to navigate gender-segregated spaces, travelling freely between the mardana (men’s side) and zenana (women’s side), and serving as guardians of Mughal harems. They also had the prerogative to collect taxes and duties in certain areas and, as essential parts of the bureaucracy, many rose to significant positions of power during sixteenth to eighteenth-century Mughal India.[14] Today, hijras view khwajasaras as an important dimension of their past, although they have occupied distinct gendered, social, and temporal categories. Khwajasaras were masculine-embodied (castrated) slaves who worked in various roles, often in close proximity to the emperor (a social function that is now obsolete), whereas hijras expressed femininity and typically occupied a more marginal social position.[15]    Historically and in the present, the hijra community has formed kinship systems, customarily living together and engaging in public performances and dances, as well as collecting donations for their blessings ( badhai ), which are believed to be auspicious, during events such as weddings or childbirth.[16] In the eighteenth century, hijra lineages and badhai  practices were recognised by some Indian polities, and hijra subjects were entitled to state support. The Maratha Kings of Satara granted hijras small cash allowances and rent-free land grants that could be passed down between generations, and other rulers also offered patronage to hijras. In some cases, hijras apparently held a ‘codified right to beg’, but the community also became entangled with prostitution from early on. As such, the social position of hijras in pre-colonial India was somewhat ambivalent, but it nonetheless indicates a level of acceptance of gender fluidity that allowed hijras to ‘survive if not thrive without forcing a resolution’.[17] That there was space for gender non-conforming people to exist and fulfil alternative social roles—which were often associated with considerable authority or auspiciousness—is reflective of a more accommodating and plural society. Same-sex love and romantic friendships similarly existed ‘without any extended history of overt persecution’.[18]    British colonial morality and the policing of gender and sexuality   After the demise of the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century, South Asia was washed over with new norms imposed by British colonial administrators. The tolerance of varying expressions of gender and sexuality in India, long embedded in culture and society, stood in stark contrast to Britain’s Victorian, Judeo-Christian conceptions of a clear ‘male’ and ‘female’ binary and strict heteronormativity, thereby becoming focal points for colonial regulation.[19] The queerphobic sentiments that were previously a peripheral puritanical voice in India thus became dominant under colonial rule. British merchants had been depicting hijras as immoral and ‘disgusting’ people from at least the late eighteenth century, and by the 1850s and 1860s, the community was perceived as a serious cause of concern for the empire.[20] The murder of a hijra, ‘Bhoorah’, in the North-Western Provinces, coupled with accusations of hijras kidnapping, enslaving, and castrating children, prompted a moral panic which quickly translated into intense scrutiny and surveillance.[21]   To the imperial administration, any perceived deviance posed a threat to the colonial order and therefore needed to be controlled. The ‘eunuchs’, as hijras and other non-normative gender identities were referred to in the British colonial language, were rendered an ‘ungovernable people’, who could not be assimilated into respectable Indian society and were subject to ‘gradual extinction’.[22]    From 1860 onwards, the British Empire imposed numerous criminal laws on its colonies, beginning with India, through which it sought to restructure social norms.   The introduction of Section 377 (S377) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) as a legal transfer of the 1533 British Buggery Act made sexual activities ‘against the order of nature’, namely homosexuality, punishable by imprisonment.[23] Gender-nonconforming people, primarily hijras, were then explicitly criminalised in the CTA Part II Act of 1871. The law required the North-Western Provinces and Punjab government to keep a register of all ‘eunuchs’ who were ‘reasonably suspected of kidnapping or castrating children or committing offences under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code’.[24] Those on the register were prohibited from performing and wearing feminine clothing in public (in an effort to eliminate their culture) and barred from living with male children under 17 (so as to prevent the community from expanding). The law also interfered with inheritance by banning ‘eunuchs’ from making wills or gifts.[25] The entire community of hijras in India were impacted, as many sections of the Act were enforced across the whole country and key customs such as public performance and cross-dressing were deemed suspicious and sufficient to implicate them.[26] For instance, in 1884, a hijra named Khairati was tried for an unnatural offence under S377 with little proof besides their habitual wearing of female clothes.[27] In some cases, the law was enforced beyond its scope, effectively criminalising all male cross-dressing. Thus, the law became a tool for producing and policing normative identities in line with colonial morality, and hijras were reduced to objects of moral suspicion, characterised as a form of perverse sexuality.   W omen’s agency and sexualities were also particular sites of anxiety, and the colonial administration sought to extensively discipline them within the boundaries of Victorian morality. For instance, devadasis, women who were symbolically married to Hindu gods and performed dances as part of the rituals in the temples they inhabited, were traditionally respected cultural and religious figures and even enjoyed royal patronage in some cases.[28] Under colonial rule, the devadasi system—and particularly their freedom to exercise relationships with multiple partners—was deemed impure and unacceptable, with these women being recast as prostitutes and criminalised under the Indian Penal Code (1860) and the Contagious Diseases Act (1864).[29] In this way the colonial legal architecture conflated complex social roles with deviance and criminality, subjecting gender identity and any perceived sexual deviance to intense scrutiny, surveillance, and discipline.   Contemporary legal debates surrounding gender and sexuality   By framing gender and sexual diversity as inherently criminal, colonial laws entrenched a moral hierarchy that endures in legal and social frameworks, as well as in deep social stigma. As the following section will explore, these colonial legacies remain at the centre of contemporary legal debates surrounding gender and sexuality in India. While recent legal reforms have attempted to dismantle the structures of normative heterosexuality and the gender binary in line with constitutional principles, the evolution of laws such as S377 and CTA Part II exemplify how the policing of gender and sexuality has persisted long beyond India gaining independence.   CTA Part II and the continued policing of hijras   Hijras today face extreme marginalisation and violence and are ‘pushed to the fringes of society’ where begging and sometimes prostitution become lifelines, and access to employment, healthcare, and justice is uncertain, if at all possible.[30] Despite Part II of the CTA being repealed in 1911, its ideology has been carried forward in various institutions including state legislature and local police practices. For instance, the 1919 Telangana Eunuchs Act—a derivative of the CTA that gave police powers to arrest any ‘eunuch’ found ‘cross-dressing’ or performing and entertaining in public spaces—was retained in the state of Telangana until 2023, when it was declared unconstitutional following a petition by trans activists.[31] Similarly, in the state of Karnataka, Amendment 36A ‘Power to Regulate Eunuchs’ was implemented in the Karnataka Police Act in 2011, which granted police the right to register ‘eunuchs’ who are ‘reasonably suspected of kidnapping and emasculating boys or of committing unnatural offences’—language that is clearly adopted from the 1871 CTA.[32] Registered people are thenceforth prohibited from engaging in ‘undesirable’ acts. After a petition contested the unrestrained and arbitrary power granted to the police to persecute hijras, the local government changed the term ‘eunuch’ to ‘person’ in the law, but this, grievously, only widened the scope of the legislation, thereby facilitating further abuse of power against marginalised communities.[33] The resurgence of such archaic elements of the 1871 CTA illustrates the continued influence of colonial legislation on hijras in contemporary policing, reinforcing discrimination with a perennial threat of arbitrary arrest and prosecution.   Progress and pitfalls: Gender identity rights   Over the past decade, there have been some noteworthy legal reforms that have invoked the Indian Constitution[34] to enhance protections for gender minorities, including by establishing the right to self-determination of gender identity. In 2014, the Supreme Court of India ruled to legally recognise a third gender in response to a petition filed by the National Legal Services Authority of India (NALSA).[35] The Court highlighted transgender persons’[36] human rights based on international treaties, and also discussed the history of transgender persons in India, noting their shift from being respected figures in Indian mythology and Mughal courts to being criminalised under British colonial rule.[37] The Court identified the severe discrimination faced by transgender people in society as a violation of their right to equality (Article 14 of the Indian Constitution), and also expanded the scope of freedom of expression (Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution) to include the right to express one’s gender through dress, words, action, or behaviour. The judgment also held that discrimination on the grounds of ‘sex’, which is explicitly prohibited under Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution, included discrimination on the basis of gender (based on one’s self-perception)—an interpretation that effectively prohibits discrimination based on gender identity. Thus, the Supreme Court acknowledged the rights of all persons to self-identify their gender and declared that those who fall outside the male/female gender binary, including hijras, can legally identify as ‘third gender’. The government was directed to ensure recognition of ‘third gender’ in all documents and to create affirmative action quotas for third-gender persons in education and employment, in line with other minorities.[38]    This was a ground-breaking decision that, for the first time, established legal recognition of non-binary gender identities in India and declared their constitutional rights, marking a welcome divergence from the Western gender binary construct and helping to dismantle some of the structures that restrict India’s transgender community from fully and equally participating in society. The judgment has global significance as one of the first comprehensive applications of the Yogyakarta Principles[39] by any national-level court. By contextualising the issue within India’s historical tolerance of gender diversity, the Court also made an impactful statement on the colonial roots of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in a political climate where ‘traditional’ values are frequently weaponised to legitimise discriminatory norms and social hierarchies. In a recent case, the High Court of Andhra Pradesh ruled that trans women were legally entitled to recognition as women, rejecting claims that womanhood applies only to those who can bear children.[40] This case is a further example of the Court demonstrating an acute understanding of both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and its vision for universal equality.   On the other hand, some legal changes have proven harmful in practice. The government’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 was widely criticised as a step backwards for trans rights, and for undermining the 2014 constitutional right to self-determination. The Act appeared to be a positive development, prohibiting discrimination against transgender persons in education, employment, healthcare, and property access, and seeming to affirm the right to self-determination of gender identity. However, the law has several shortcomings, particularly regarding the mandated procedure for legal gender recognition. To be officially recognised as ‘transgender’, individuals must first obtain a ‘certificate of identity’ from the District Magistrate based on self-declared identity, after which they can apply for a ‘change in gender certificate’ to legally alter their gender. However, this second certificate is only issued with proof of sex reassignment surgery, raising serious concerns about the relationship between legal recognition and bodily autonomy. By putting a condition on legal recognition, the law risks creating a pressure on individuals to undergo medical procedures. This conflicts with the 2014 Supreme Court verdict and with international standards such as the Yogyakarta Principles, which oppose medical procedures being set as a condition for legal recognition of gender identity. Consequently, petitions have been filed before the Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of the Act.[41]    The path to decriminalising homosexuality   The colonial-era S377 legislation (the criminalisation of homosexuality) remained the foundation for the persecution of the LGBTQ+ community in India until 2018. Despite previous unsuccessful petitions, NGO Naz Foundation fought for the removal of S377 in 2006, arguing that it violates articles of the Indian Constitution, including Article 15, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth.[42] In a landmark judgement, the Delhi High Court repealed the act   in 2009 . However, in 2013, the Supreme Court of India overturned this judgement after appeals made by religious groups, leaving it up to parliament to legislate on the issue, meaning homosexuality was once again illegal.[43] Given that the Supreme Court legally recognised a third gender in 2014, this put third-gender people in a strange situation: on the one hand, they were now constitutionally protected, but on the other hand, they could be criminalised for consensual gay sex.[44] Finally in 2018, following further petitions, the Court expanded the understanding of discrimination on ‘grounds of sex’ under Article 15, and S377 was annulled on the basis that it violated citizens’ fundamental rights.[45] This landmark decision legitimised sexual fluidity, correcting a historical injustice against the queer community and marking a promising step towards decolonising domestic law. However, it also illustrated the resistance to overturning imperial laws in a society where heterosexual norms remain deeply embedded in domestic institutions.   The next battle: Legalising same-sex marriage   Despite the pivotal ruling decriminalising same-sex relationships in 2018, the fight for equality persists, with same-sex marriages yet to be legalised (at the time of writing). In 2023, India’s Supreme Court declined to extend recognition of non-heterosexual marriages in response to petitions filed by activists seeking a gender neutral interpretation of the Special Marriage Act, 1954 (SMA).[46] The SMA allows civil unions irrespective of religion but recognises marriage only between a ‘male’ and a ‘female’, thereby excluding same-sex couples and contradicting the constitutional rights to equality and dignity . Marriage in India carries significant social and legal significance and is deeply tied to notions of family, legitimacy, and respectability, granting legal entitlements to inheritance, next of kin status, joint adoption, and surrogacy.[47] The denial of marriage equality perpetuates the marginalisation and exclusion of same-sex couples in society, reaffirming heteronormative values and indicating a broader reluctance to reimagine hegemonic family models. Strong opposition to the proposed reform came from the government and religious leaders, who argued that same-sex unions are ‘not comparable with the Indian family unit concept of a husband, a wife and children’.[48] This reasoning highlights how the law continues to serve as the state’s instrument for codifying dominant moral ideologies about sexuality. While the five-judge bench was divided on several matters, the court ultimately upheld the constitutionality of the SMA, concluding that there is no fundamental right to marry and leaving it up to parliament to legislate on the issue. Crucially, this ruling not only reflects the resistance to opening up marriage to same-sex couples, but also the Court’s institutional constraints and the substantial legal consequences of amending the SMA, which intersects with an array of laws on divorce, succession, and inheritance. Striking down the SMA was equally unviable because it remains an important piece of legislation that facilitates interfaith marriage. The Chief Justice’s directives to the government to end all discrimination against queer couples signal will for reform, but the complexities of this case suggest that the journey towards achieving marriage equality is likely to be protracted.[49]   Colonial legacies, constitutional visions, and the politics of gender   Contemporary legal debates over gender and sexuality demonstrate a persistent tension between entrenched colonial legacies and normative social hierarchies on the one hand and the constitutional promise of equality, non-discrimination, and freedom of expression on the other. Questions remain about why laws that are inconsistent with the principles of the Constitution have been retained and why challenges to these laws have also been unsuccessful. For instance, why did it take until 2018 to remove S377? Why do some states retain derivatives of the draconian CTA Part II legislation? Colonial legal and epistemic frameworks that criminalised homosexuality and codified a rigid binary of ‘male’ and ‘female’ as naturalised and exclusive categories have been absorbed and reinforced by social, cultural, and religious institutions that continue to regulate bodies and sexualities in India. Socialised gender roles underpin heteronormative family systems, as well as structures of labour, care, and reproduction, sustaining a binary organisation of gender as a basis for social and economic relations. Non-normative gender and sexual identities remain the subjects of heightened political anxiety, with religious groups and conservative sections of society often mobilising against progressive legal reforms that seek to expand rights for minorities. Making changes to the ‘status quo’ therefore becomes difficult to achieve.   Contemporary legal debates about gender and sexuality also reflect an inconsistent application of constitutional morality. Bhatia identifies two distinct and conflicting readings of the Indian Constitution: the conservative reading, which is the dominant interpretation that the Supreme Court has placed upon the Constitution; and the transformative reading, which uncovers the Constitution’s founding aspirations for political and social transformation.[50] The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on LGBTQ+ rights has oscillated between these two readings, affirming and expanding rights in some cases (eg recognising the right to self-identify gender in 2014) and restricting progressive change in others (eg declining to legalise same-sex marriage in 2023). This ambivalence reflects a broader societal reality: despite legal recognition of queer identities, normative frameworks that sustain exclusion and inequalities remain entrenched in political, social, and cultural institutions. As such, achieving substantive equality will require moving beyond formal legal recognition to interrogate these frameworks both in the public and private domain. A commitment to transformative constitutionalism—in which the state is directed towards achieving certain social goals—offers a means for challenging these norms and fostering a more genuinely inclusive society that reflects the constitutional principles of equality, dignity, non-discrimination, and freedom of expression.   The broader global politics of LGBTQ+ rights   Shared histories, colonial legacies and legal trajectories   The debates concerning gender and sexuality in India are part of a broader global landscape in which states have navigated similar colonial legacies, but demonstrate divergent jurisprudential trajectories. The British administration exported Victorian norms and institutionalised the criminalisation of homosexual conduct throughout its global colonies by transferring and adapting the IPC, making homosexuality socially unacceptable and deeply stigmatised across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.[51] Much like India, histories of other countries demonstrate that strict heteronormativity and gender binary systems were far from the convention in pre-colonial societies, as many indigenous cultures similarly recognised and accommodated gender and sexual fluidity. King Mwanga II of Buganda (who reigned from 1884-97 in present-day Uganda) was widely known to engage in relations with other men.[52] More broadly, there is evidence of same-sex relationships throughout pre-colonial Africa.[53] The people of Igbo and Yorùbáland (in present-day Nigeria) also existed outside of Western gender and patriarchal constructs before British colonisation. Traditionally, women were not differentiated from or subordinated to men in these societies and were highly autonomous and powerful; evidenced through social institutions such as matrilineality, dual sex systems, gender flexibility in social roles, and neuter linguistic elements.[54] In Malaysia, too, there are records from as early as the fifteenth century of gender-nonconforming or androgynous priests and courtiers (‘sida-sida’) who held positions in the royal courts of the Malay sultans.[55]   Today, there is significant variation in the jurisprudence pertaining to homosexuality in former British colonies. In some states, courts have repudiated colonial legacies, invoking constitutional morality to decriminalise same-sex relationships and affirm equality, dignity and privacy as foundational values. For instance, in 2016, the Supreme Court of Belize found that Section 53 of the Penal Code, which criminalised same-sex activity between men, was unconstitutional and violated the rights to dignity, privacy, equality before the law and non-discrimination.[56] Similarly, when Botswana overturned the colonial-era anti-gay laws in 2019, the judge explicitly stated that they were a ‘British import’ developed ‘without the consultation of local peoples’.[57] In contrast, other states have retained or even strengthened colonial-era surveillance and persecution, with legal punishment varying from imprisonment to the death penalty.[58] In 2023, for example, Uganda passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act which increased the prison sentence for attempted same-sex conduct to ten years and introduced the death penalty for acts considered ‘aggravated homosexuality’.[59] This stark divergence between countries reflects the varied and complex negotiations of these colonial legacies. Yet it also evidences some commonality among states that have adopted an explicitly anti-colonial—or indeed ‘transformational’—interpretation of the Constitution to dismantle hierarchies, reimagine morality, and foster greater equality.   The contemporary politics of LGBTQ+ rights   The jurisprudential trajectories of postcolonial states are shaped by and contribute to a broader global politics of LGBTQ+ rights, where shared colonial legacies intersect with transnational actors, geopolitics, and the development industry. In one respect, there has been a growing recognition of LGBTQ+ rights as an indicator for modernity and development in Western (especially Western European) politics and the international development industry. Termed ‘homodevelopmentalism’, LGBTQ+ inclusive development agendas have gained prominence amidst the increasing employment of a human rights based approach as a development paradigm.[60] This phenomenon can be situated within the broader discourse of what Puar termed ‘homonationalism’, whereby ‘the right to, or quality of sovereignty is now evaluated by how a nation treats its homosexuals’, ie nations are evaluated on how ‘advanced’ they are depending on how they respond to homosexuality.[61] In this context, the ‘queering’ of development cooperation and policies, ie the demand for LGBTQ+ rights by governments, international organisations such as the UN, and Western capitalist institutions, has enforced a power dynamic that has proliferated the international politicisation of LGBTQ+ rights and mandated a global trend towards decriminalisation.[62] For instance, after Uganda announced an Act in 2014 that would have made homosexuality punishable by death, the World Bank rescinded a $90m loan and the country’s sovereign credit rating suffered.[63] Uganda annulled the Act in response, but in 2023, the country backtracked to pass the anti-homosexuality law that imposes the death penalty for ‘aggravated’ cases, and has again faced sanctions by The World Bank and the US.[64] In 2011, UK Prime Minister David Cameron considered making bilateral aid to Commonwealth nations conditional on the decriminalisation of homosexuality and in 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May urged Commonwealth nations to reform outdated anti-gay legislation preserved from British colonial rule.[65]    While these demands from the West may heighten pressure on states to take progressive measures with regard to decriminalisation, it is important to recognise that (apparent) advancements in LGBTQ+ rights do not always correlate with advancements in freedom and / or democracy, particularly when LGBTQ+ movements are co-opted by capitalist, imperial, and political forces. In the context of global politics, ‘pinkwashing’ refers to states that adopt an ‘LGBTQ+ friendly’ image to signal progressiveness and modernity as a means to gain international political acceptance, despite ambiguous political aims, or whilst neglecting other human rights issues.[66] Much of the discussion on pinkwashing points to Israel’s ‘gay-friendly public relations campaign’, which is viewed as a deliberate strategy to conceal or legitimise violations of Palestinians’ human rights and ongoing settler colonialism by projecting an image of progressiveness on the global stage and reframing narratives about the occupation of Palestine through the lens of (sexual) modernity.[67] Pinkwashing as a political strategy only works in the context of homonationalism, where the status of ‘gay-friendly’ or ‘homophobic’ has implications for international relations.[68] While legal reforms favouring LGBTQ+ communities may therefore be increasingly spotlighted, they do not necessarily reflect broader progress in democratic freedoms or human rights. Critically, they may also obscure the state’s failure to protect other marginalised communities. In India, the striking down of S377, while significant, potentially creates a ‘halo effect’, diverting attention from systemic issues such as the persecution of religious minorities and the entrenched violence against lower caste communities.[69] As Tamalapakula observes, India’s caste system perpetuates a ‘graded patriarchy’ that so deeply normalises violence against Dalit women that their rape is scarcely recognised as a violation at all.[70] This systemic violence and disregard for their rights is not only tolerated, but often reinforced by the same societal and state mechanisms that attempt to project an image of modernity and progressiveness internationally. Thus, viewing state support for LGBTQ+ rights as a proxy indicator of development or human rights risks neglecting broader realities, particularly in contexts where the LGBTQ+ movement is co-opted for sinister political purposes.   On the other hand, many Commonwealth nations scrutinise the demands of LGBTQ+ rights legislation from the West as a form of ‘modern-day Western interference’, asserting that tactics such as donor sanctions are inherently coercive and reinforce unequal power dynamics between donor countries and recipients.[71] There are also criticisms that LGBTQ+ inclusive development strategies reproduce narratives of Western civilisational exceptionalism by creating a divide between the ‘sexually developed’ West and the ‘sexually backward’ rest.[72] The imposition of human rights paradigms formulated at the international level can be met with resistance by states from the Global South, especially where those norms are perceived to interfere with a state’s autonomy to legislate. There are also contestations about the legitimacy of the Global North imposing human rights norms at the global level. Neo-colonialism refers to external policy and economic control that undermines the sovereignty and autonomy of former colonies, resulting in their continued exploitation.[73] However, in some states, the notion of neo-colonialism has become weaponised to equate rejecting LGBTQ+ rights with rejecting neo-colonialism: former Zimbabwean President Mugabe, for instance, called homosexuality a ‘white disease’.[74] The staunch moralities that were planted under Empire have grown so entrenched in some cultures that, somewhat perversely, the notion of homosexuality as something Western, and therefore suspicious, resounds throughout many countries. Thus, the politics of LGBTQ+ rights is shaped by a combination of homonationalism, anti-neo-colonialism, and domestic political agendas.   Conclusion   This paper has reflected on the impact of British colonial laws that imposed puritanical moral codes of heteronormativity and binary gender norms in India, erasing earlier ambiguities and recasting complex social roles and cultural practices through the lens of immorality and deviance. These legal interventions were underpinned by orientalist assumptions that hypersexualised aspects of Indian society and sought to categorise social and economic relations within a strict gendered framework . The colonial imposition of laws S377 and CTA Part II criminalised and pushed to the fringe communities that were previously accommodated within society. In particular, the attempted erasure of hijras resulted in an enduring legacy of exclusion and marginalisation, leaving the community today facing ‘ambivalence around their legal and socio-political status’.[75] By framing gender and sexual diversity as inherently criminal, colonial laws entrenched a moral hierarchy that continues to inform contemporary policing and lasts in deep social stigma. Recently, there have been notable shifts for LGBTQ+ rights in India. Legal challenges to outdated laws, such as the litigation brought by the Naz Foundation, demonstrate how grassroots and community-led initiatives can achieve meaningful change on a case-by-case basis. The Supreme Court’s invocation of constitutional morality in cases such as the 2014 ruling to recognise a third gender and the 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality reflect the transformative potential of the Indian Constitution to promote greater inclusiveness and pluralism. While these rulings have demonstrated a significant departure from colonial moral constructs, legal and social frameworks remain entangled in structures of heteronormativity and patriarchy. Achieving substantive equality therefore requires not only progressive jurisprudence but also a broader interrogation of the normative hierarchies embedded within India’s political, social, and cultural institutions.   In the global context, the British Empire appears ‘substantially responsible’ for the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that remains prevalent amongst many former colonies, where the imposition of homophobic penal codes into indigenous cultures that did not previously criminalise gender and sexual variance has had deep and lasting impacts.[76] Post-independence jurisprudential trajectories have proven to be complex and uneven: while some countries have repudiated colonial-era laws, others have increased penalties for homosexual conduct. Comparative study on the evolution of jurisprudence across former British colonies could therefore help to foster greater understanding of these divergent pathways and identify commonalities. Given the global politicisation of LGBTQ+ rights, it is important to recognise the colonial origin of the norms that reproduce exclusion, violence and inequality worldwide. Reframing decriminalisation as a form of decolonisation not only challenges the persistence of imposed colonial moralities, but also reclaims those indigenous epistemologies that historically demonstrated greater pluralism. Anushka Sisodia Anushka Sisodia is a researcher at ODI Global, where her work applies political economy analysis to global issues including conflict and fragility, gender, digital societies, and financing for development. She has previously led projects for UN Women UK and the Loomba Foundation, written for The Diplomat, and worked with Cambridge Central Asia Forum. Anushka holds an MPhil in Development Studies (Distinction) from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Geography with Economics (First-Class Honours) from the LSE.  [1] Acronym used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and / or questioning people. Other commonly used acronyms include LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi, and trans), LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer), and LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex). [2] The term ‘Commonwealth’ is used here to refer to the political association of countries that largely constitute former British colonies, although today any country can voluntarily join the modern Commonwealth. [3] International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), ‘Legal Frameworks | Criminalisation of consensual same-sex sexual acts’ < https://database.ilga.org/criminalisation-consensual-same-sex-sexual-acts > accessed 1 October 2025. There is some discrepancy in these statistics between sources. [4] Alok Gupta, ‘This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism’ ( Human Rights Watch , 17 December 2008) < https://www.hrw.org/report/2008/12/17/alien-legacy/origins-sodomy-laws-british-colonialism > accessed 1 October 2025. [5] Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney, ‘British colonialism and the criminalization of homosexuality’ (2014) 27(2) Cambridge Review of International Affairs 268-88. [6] Human Dignity Trust, ‘Injustice Exposed: The criminalisation of transgender people and its impacts’ (17 May 2019) 9 < https://www.humandignitytrust.org/resources/injustice-exposed-the-criminalisation-of-transgender-people-and-its-impacts/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [7] Kavita Kané, ‘Storytelling: LGBT themes in Hindu mythology’ ( Indian Express , 14 July 2020) < https://indianexpress.com/article/parenting/blog/storytelling-lgbt-themes-in-hindu-mythology-5273332/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [8] Betty Seid, ‘The Lord Who Is Half Woman (Ardhanarishvara)’ (2004) 30(1) Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 48-9. [9] Wendy Doniger, ‘On the Kamasutra’ (2002) 131(2) Daedalus 126. [10] Pre-modern historical references are situated broadly in South Asia, given that the national borders of contemporary India emerged only in recent history. [11] Gayatri Reddy, ‘Geographies of contagion: Hijras , Kothis , and the politics of sexual marginality in Hyderabad’ (2006) 12(3) Anthropology and Medicine 255-70; Jessica Hinchy, ‘The eunuch archive: Colonial records of non-normative gender and sexuality in India’ (2017) 58(2) Culture, Theory and Critique 127-46; Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900  (Cambridge University Press 2019). [12] For further reading on the paradigms of classification pertaining to hijras see Vinay Lal, ‘Not This, Not That: The Hijras of India and the Cultural Politics of Sexuality’ (1999) 61 Social Text 119-40. [13] In the South Asian context, the word ‘eunuch’ itself is a legacy of the colonial-era translation and classification of a broad range of distinct social practices. See Emma Kalb, ‘A eunuch at the threshold: mediating access and intimacy in the Mughal world’ (2023) 33(3) Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 747-68. [14] Lubna Irfan, ‘Nature of slavery and servitude in Mughal India’ (2022) 13(4) South Asian History and Culture 466-80; Ina Goel, ‘Understanding Caste and Kinship within Hijras, a “Third” Gender Community in India’ in Katie Nelson and Nadine T Fernandez (eds), Gendered Lives: Global Issues  (State University of New York Press 2022); Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India  (Duke University Press 2009; Kristofer Rhude, ‘The Third Gender and Hijras’ ( Harvard Divinity School , 2018) < https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/religion-context/case-studies/gender/third-gender-and-hijras > accessed 1 October 2025. For further reading on the role of eunuchs in Mughal courts see Ruby Lal, ‘Harem and eunuchs: Liminality and networks of Mughal authority’ in Almut Höfert, Matthew Mesley, and Serena Tolino (eds), Celibate and Childless Men in Power: Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern World  (Routledge 2017). [15] Jessica Hinchy, ‘Hijras and South Asian historiography’ (2022) 20(1) History Compass; Kalb (n 13). [16] Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900  (Cambridge University Press 2019). [17] Lal (n 12) 131. [18] Ruth Vanita, ‘Homosexuality in India: Past and Present’ (2002) 29 IIAS Newsletter 10 < https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=libstudies_pubs > accessed 1 October 2025. [19] Amy Bhatt, ‘India’s sodomy ban, now ruled illegal, was a British colonial legacy’ ( UMBC Magazine , 14 September 2018) < https://magazine.umbc.edu/indias-sodomy-ban-now-ruled-illegal-was-a-british-colonial-legacy > accessed 1 October 2025. [20] Laurence W Preston, ‘A Right to Exist: Eunuchs and the State in Nineteenth-Century India’ (1987) 21(2) Modern Asian Studies 371-87. [21] Hinchy (n 16). [22] Hinchy (n 16) 9, 100. [23] Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality: Queens, Crime and Empire (Routledge 2018). [24] Shakthi Nataraj, ‘Criminal “folk” and “legal” lore: the kidnap and castrate narrative in colonial India and contemporary Chennai’ (2017) 8(4) South Asian History and Culture 523-41; Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India  (University of Chicago Press 2005). [25] Jessica Hinchy, ‘The eunuch archive: Colonial records of non-normative gender and sexuality in India’ (2017) 58(2) Culture, Theory and Critique 127-46. [26] Nataraj (n 24). [27] Arondekar (n 14). [28] Janaki Nair, ‘The Devadasi, Dharma and the State’ (1994) 29(50) Economic and Political Weekly 3157-67; Shriya Patnaik, ‘Marginalizing the matriarchal, minority subject: a critical analysis of human rights and women's reform projects in colonial and postcolonial India through the case-study of the “Mahari-Devadasi”’ (2021) 2(1) Electronic Journal of Social and Strategic Studies 59-88. There is evidence of exploitation and coerced prostitution within the devadasi system in some parts of India, both historically and in the present, however it is generally understood that the intention of the original role of the devadasi was devotion to temple service. See Tameshnie Deane, ‘The devadasi system: an exploitation of women and children in the name of god and culture’ (2022) 24(1) Journal of International Women’s Studies. [29] Nair (n 28); Kalpana Kannabiran, ‘Judiciary, Social Reform and Debate on “Religious Prostitution” in Colonial India’ (1995) 30(43) Economic and Political Weekly 59-69; Jisa Thomas and SP Vagishwari, ‘Surveilling bodies, governing morality: Biopower and the contagious diseases acts in colonial India’ (2025) 33 Ethics, Medicine and Public Health. [30] Ajita Banerjie, ‘Decriminalising Begging Will Protect Transgender Persons From Police Harassment’ ( The Wire , 17 August 2018) < https://thewire.in/rights/decriminalising-begging-will-protect-transgender-persons-from-police-harassment > accessed 1 October 2025. [31] Ankita Dhar Karmakar, ‘How A Regressive Transgender Act Was Finally Thrown Out’ ( Behan Box , 17 July 2023) < https://behanbox.com/2023/07/17/how-a-regressive-transgender-act-in-was-finally-thrown-out/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [32] Nataraj (n 24); Jayna Kothari and Diksha Sanyal, ‘Courts Recognizing Transgender Rights’ ( Oxford Human Rights Hub , 28 February 2017) < https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/courts-recognizing-transgender-rights/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [33] Banerjie (n 30); Bindu N Doddahatti, ‘Karnataka Trans Policy May Be a Step in the Right Direction, But Needs Work’ ( The Wire , 20 March 2018) < https://thewire.in/lgbtqia/karnataka-trans-policy-may-be-a-step-in-the-right-direction-but-needs-work > accessed 1 October 2025; Jessica Hinchy, ‘The long history of criminalising Hijras’ ( Himal Southasian , 2 July 2019) < https://www.himalmag.com/long-history-criminalising-hijras-india-jessica-hinchy-2019/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [34] The Indian Constitution, which came into force on 26th January 1950, is the foundation of the country’s political and legal systems and of its citizens’ fundamental rights. [35]  National Legal Services Authority v Union of India  [2014] INSC 275. NALSA provides legal services for marginalised communities. [36] Transgender was described as an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity or gender expression does not conform to their biological sex. This encompasses those who do not identify with their sex assigned at birth, including hijras/eunuchs who, in the petition, describe themselves as ‘third gender’, identifying as neither male nor female. [37] Christina Zampas, ‘Embracing difference – India’s ground-breaking judgment on transgender rights’ ( Amnesty International , 2 May 2014) < https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2014/05/embracing-difference-india-s-ground-breaking-judgment-on-transgender-rights/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [38] ‘India court recognises transgender people as third gender’ ( BBC News , 15 April 2014) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-27031180 > accessed 1 October 2025; National Legal Services Authority (n 35). [39] A set of international principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity drawn up in 2006 by human rights experts. See Zampas (n 37). [40] Ankush Kumar, ‘Indian court rules a transgender woman is a woman’ ( Washington Blade , 25 June 2025) < https://www.washingtonblade.com/2025/06/25/indian-court-rules-a-transgender-woman-is-a-woman/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [41] Kyle Knight, ‘India’s Transgender Rights Law Isn’t Worth Celebrating’ ( Human Rights Watch , 5 December 2019) < https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/05/indias-transgender-rights-law-isnt-worth-celebrating > accessed 1 October 2025; Alexandra Oancea, ‘The Shortcomings Of India’s New Transgender People’s Act’ ( Human Rights Pulse , 29 November 2021) < https://www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/the-shortcomings-of-indias-new-transgender-peoples-act > accessed 1 October 2025. [42] Maria Thomas, Madhura Karnik, and Michael Thomas, ‘Timeline: The struggle against section 377 began over two decades ago’ ( Quartz , 21 July 2022) < https://qz.com/india/1379620/section-377-a-timeline-of-indias-battle-for-gay-rights > accessed 1 October 2025. [43] Han and O’Mahoney (n 23). [44]  BBC News (n 38). [45] Gautam Bhatia, ‘Indian Supreme Court Decriminalizes Same-Sex Relations’ ( Oxford Human Rights Hub , 6 September 2018) < https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/indian-supreme-court-decriminalizes-same-sex-relations/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [46] Geeta Pandey, ‘India Supreme Court declines to legalise same-sex marriage’ ( BBC News , 17 October 2023) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-65525980 > accessed 1 October 2025. [47]  Supriyo v Union of India  [2023] INSC 920; Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘India’s supreme court declines to legally recognise same-sex marriage’ Guardian (London, 17 October 2023) < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/india-same-sex-gay-marriage-supreme-court-decision-verdict > accessed 1 October 2025. While the SMA cannot be interpreted to include non-heterosexual couples, transgender persons in heterosexual relationships can marry under the existing framework. [48] Arpan Chaturvedi, ‘India government opposes recognising same-sex marriage’ ( Reuters , 12 March 2023) < https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-government-opposes-recognising-same-sex-marriage-court-filing-2023-03-12/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [49] ‘Plea for Marriage Equality: Judgement Summary’ ( Supreme Court Observer , 18 October 2023) < https://www.scobserver.in/reports/plea-for-marriage-equality-judgement-summary/ > accessed 1 October 2025; ‘India: Failure to legalise same-sex marriage a ‘setback’ for human rights’ ( Amnesty International , 17 October 2023) < https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/india-failure-to-legalise-same-sex-marriage-a-setback-for-human-rights/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [50] Gautam Bhatia, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts  (HarperCollins India 2019). [51] Han and O’Mahoney (n 5). Countries that directly inherited laws criminalising homosexual conduct from the British Empire include: Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Botswana, Brunei, Eswatini, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Myanmar (Burma), Nauru, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Samoa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. [52] Thabo Msibi, ‘The Lies We Have Been Told: On (Homo) Sexuality in Africa’ (2011) 58(1) Africa Today 55-77. [53] Leah Buckle, ‘African sexuality and the legacy of imported homophobia’ ( Stonewall , 1 October 2020) < https://www.stonewall.org.uk/news/african-sexuality-and-legacy-imported-homophobia > accessed 1 October 2025. [54] Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses  (University Of Minnesota Press 1997). [55] Neela Ghoshal, ‘“I’m Scared to Be a Woman”: Human Rights Abuses Against Transgender People in Malaysia’ ( Human Rights Watch , 24 September 2014) < https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/09/25/im-scared-be-woman/human-rights-abuses-against-transgender-people-malaysia > accessed 1 October 2025; Mayang Al-Mohdhar and Sarah Ngu, ‘Uncovering Malaysia’s Rich History of Gender and Sexual Diversity: Challenging the Narrative of LGBT Rights as “Western” and “Un-Asian”’ ( Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières , 1 July 2019) < https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article49802 > accessed 1 October 2025. [56] ‘A History of LGBT Criminalisation’ ( Human Dignity Trust , 17 September 2025) < https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/a-history-of-criminalisation/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [57] Buckle (n 53). [58] Daniele Paletta, ‘ILGA World Updates State-Sponsored Homophobia Report: “There’s Progress In Times Of Uncertainty”’ ( ILGA , 15 December 2020) < https://ilga.org/news/ilga-world-releases-state-sponsored-homophobia-december-2020-update/ > accessed 1 October 2025. [59] ILGA (n 3); Ashwanee Budoo-Scholtz, ‘Uganda’s President Signs Repressive Anti-LGBT Law’ ( Human Rights Watch , 30 May 2023) < https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/05/30/ugandas-president-signs-repressive-anti-lgbt-law > accessed 1 October 2025. [60] Christine Klapeer, ‘Queering Development in Homotransnationalist Times: A Postcolonial Reading of LGBTIQ Inclusive Development Agendas’ (2018) 22(2-3) Lambda Nordica 41-67. [61] Jasbir Puar, ‘Rethinking Homonationalism’ (2013) 45(2) Rethinking Homonationalism 336-9; Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi, ‘Pinkwatching And Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its Discontents’ ( Jadaliyya , 9 August 2012) < https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/26818 > accessed 1 October 2025; Sarah Schulman, ‘Israel and “Pinkwashing”’ New York Times  (New York, 22 November 2011) < https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/opinion/pinkwashing-and-israels-use-of-gays-as-a-messaging-tool.html > accessed 1 October 2025. [62] Han and O’Mahoney (n 5). [63] Fox Odoi-Oywelowo, ‘No, Uganda is not making it illegal to be gay (again)’ ( Al Jazeera , 6 June 2021) < https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/6/6/no-uganda-is-not-making-it-illegal-to-be-gay-again > accessed 1 October 2025. [64] ‘Uganda's President Museveni approves tough new anti-gay law’ ( BBC News , 29 May 2023) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-65745850 > accessed 1 October 2025. [65] ‘Cameron threat to dock some UK aid to anti-gay nations’ ( BBC News , 30 October 2011) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15511081 > accessed 1 October 2025. Pippa Crerar, ‘Theresa May says she deeply regrets Britain's legacy of anti-gay laws’ Guardian (London, 17 April 2018) < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/theresa-may-deeply-regrets-britain-legacy-anti-gay-laws-commonwealth-nations-urged-overhaul-legislation > accessed 1 October 2025. [66] The term ‘pinkwashing’ in relation to LGBTQ+ issues emerged in the 2010s by gay rights movements, referring to the practice of capitalising on alleged support for LGBTQ+ rights as a way to profit or to distract from another agenda. Pinkwashing may also be used to refer to the corporate appropriation of Pride and ‘rainbow capitalism’. [67] See citations at (n 61). [68] Puar (n 61). [69] Sue A Cooper, Krishnamurthy K Raman, and Jennifer Yin, ‘Halo effect or fallen angel effect? Firm value consequences of greenhouse gas emissions and reputation for corporate social responsibility’ (2018) 37 Journal of Accounting and Public Policy 226-40. [70] Sowjanya Tamalapakula, ‘Who is a woman and who is a dalit?’ (no date) 3(1) Anveshi Broadsheet on Contemporary Politics 14-5. [71] Odoi-Oywelowo (n 63). [72] Klapeer (n 60); Daryl WJ Yang, ‘From Conditionality to Convergence: Tracing the Discursive Shift in Homo-Developmentalism’ (2020) 46(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal. [73] Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism  (International Publishers 1965). [74] Buckle (n 53). [75] Sarah Elizabeth Newport, ‘“Unnatural Offences”, Postcolonial Problems: The ambivalent position of hijras in contemporary Indian law and literature’ (2018) 38(1) South Asian Review 87-99 [quotation from abstract]. [76] Han and O’Mahoney (n 5).

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 19th 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.

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 1983; new ed Cambridge MA 2013) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works  (Princeton 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.

Introduction   Western thought can be pervasive. It has spread from Europe outwards, often to the detriment of other ways of knowing, supplanting preexisting bases. Some post-colonial authors have explored these cultural encounters and clashes through literature and critical theory. In his Globalectics , Ngũgĩ explored how, in the period prior to the colonial encounter, autochthonous thought and knowledge existed and thrived.[1] This is in contradiction to the dominant Western view, which holds that thought and philosophy arose through contact with Western ‘civilizations’: that the colonies only came to exist, epistemologically, because of this contact. Ngũgĩ argues that colonial knowledge aimed to construct a particular perception of reality that sought to erase colonized peoples prior to their ‘discovery’ through conquest.[2]   My eureka moments around whose knowledge matters arrived through formal education. In high school my class took a fieldtrip to New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was introduced to high art and culture. The experience was transformational. The majesty of the museums, the scale of the art works, and their colours and forms, not to forget their setting in a global city, represented the sheer possibilities of life and I was drawn in. After moving to the UK, I again engaged with Western art works and representational culture in museums as an undergraduate, but this time was curious about art from outside the Western canon.   In particular, ethnographic artefacts created within the context of daily life were represented differently from the art market driven value of museums and gallery pieces. Yet ethnographic artefacts were also traded and valued for their aesthetic and artistic qualities, as Steiner documents.[3] These works were predominantly from former European colonies in Africa and included performance masks and Nkisi medicinal figures (fig 1). Among them high art existed, as seen in the Benin Plaques (from current day Edo State, Nigeria) made using the lost wax technique that pre-dated colonial contact (fig 2). Post-contact, European artefacts such as manilla , crescent-shaped metal rings made in Europe and used by the Edo people as currency, were incorporated into some representations, documenting intercultural exchange. Western artists like Picasso incorporated African sculpture into their works. While also documenting intercultural exchange, underpinning the juxtaposition was the difference between simple representational art and complex conceptual art. Despite being included by Western artists, artworks produced in service of the everyday tended to remain outside the high art canon, as something ‘other’, located in ethnographic museums, with anonymous works categorised regionally as representative of specific cultures and periods.   Fig 1. Nkisi Nkondi (artist unknown, 1801-75). Art Institute of Chicago. Fig 2. Plaque (artist unknown 1501-1700). Art Institute of Chicago. Later, as an academic instructing higher education students, I have again experienced how knowledge and experiences are differentially represented, whether from the global Western view or from a local African one. During a film screening about international development and reconciliation between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, in which Paul Kagame was presented as a champion for peace and unity, one student from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) walked out. Later, she explained that Kagame was responsible for perpetuating the genocide, especially in the DRC, and that his perceived character among Western audiences should not be the only interpretation.   Western interpretations and validations can undermine and obfuscate alternative ways of knowing and being. In this article, the focus shifts to bioethics and its attendant notions of personhood, comparing Western and African conceptualisations. This aims not only to better understand their similarities and differences, but also to amplify an African alternative for consideration within the Western canon.   What is Bioethics?   Questions about the beginning of life, through IVF, stem cell research, or abortion, and end of life, such as advance directives or assisted dying, are the concern of bioethics. Bioethics is an applied form of ethics, a branch of moral philosophy, which strives to provide guidance for life and death decision making. It centres on the norms by which we live our lives and tends to sit outside of more abstract contemplations of existence or being, as explored through metaphysics and ontology. Bioethics can also extend to other living entities, such as animals and the natural environment, being worthy of care, respect, and consideration.[4] It fundamentally draws on our societally internalised morality[5] as bioethical values underpin our everyday thoughts and actions.   Bioethics, as it is generally practiced, has Western origins, arising in the twentieth century in response to some of the most egregious violations against persons and their autonomy or ability to self-determine. In response to these atrocities, codes were developed, such as the Nuremberg Code (1949), the Belmont Report (1979), and Principlism,[6] each of which underpins informed consent as the practical manifestation of autonomy. These ethical guidelines clearly enunciate that individuals hold the authority to self-determine and define under which conditions their autonomy would be violated. Duties between healthcare practitioners and patients date back to the Hippocratic Oath and the Code of Hammurabi, both of which existed before the common era.   Ethics and moral guidelines were also present in precolonial societies. Akan (Ghanaian) proverbs attempted to address common assumptions and beliefs about human experience through a ‘synthetic’ or unified interpretation.[7] Proverbs provided insight and guidance on how to live, for oneself and as part of a community. An individual’s identity is therefore connected to and defined by engagement with others.[8] Bioethics in Africa is rooted in these communitarian systems of ‘collective responsibility, community participation, and engagement’ that underpin society.[9] The ethical norm lies in the individual obligation to fulfil their share of that collective responsibility.   Individuals exist in both Western and African contexts. In the former, individuals hold inviolable ‘natural’ autonomy; in the latter, individuals are ‘natural’ members of a society, who require society to realise their potential.[10] Ajei and Myles review autonomy and contest informed consent as it is currently framed within Western logics, questioning to what degree a Western person is exerting their autonomy in any given situation when having to rely on the knowledge of others to make their decision. That is, how can a cancer sufferer be said to make an informed decision about treatment when they understand so much less about cancer or treatment outcomes than their doctor? This questioning is not limited to African bioethicists but also includes legal scholars who question the degree of being ‘informed’ in the informed consent giving process.[11] Ajei and Myles also extend notions of relationality to Western thought, where healthcare practitioners, again, are rooted in beliefs about doing good and not harming and would therefore see compliance with their recommendations as the right thing to do—the only thing to do.[12] This suggests that consent and autonomy, even in individualised Western contexts, are not as independently generated as the concept implies.   When teaching students whose traditions and history align more with communitarian ethics than individualist ones, to presume Western individualist bioethics as the baseline for ethical values would be a further injustice of erasure and silencing of alternative systems of knowing; it would also exclude recognition of the power and knowledge differentials in any decision-making processes. Delving deeper, it is necessary to understand what makes a human being a person in each context, Western or African, and how this informs autonomy. Personhood—Patient or Agent   Western and African bioethics each draw a distinction between being a human being and being a person, and what moral status each holds. Moral status can be seen as a duality, where a recipient (patient) experiences the effects caused by an actor (agent).[13] Broadly speaking, patient-centred ethics is relevant to Western philosophy and agent-centred ethics is relevant to African philosophy.[14] In the west, the patient-centred approach suggests that the patient is like an object who possesses attributes (ie humanity, consciousness, or rationality) which indicate personhood. This idea of a possessor of properties aligns with the concept of ‘Western possessive individualism’, often associated with people surrounding themselves with material possessions, whether through seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities (fig 3) or contemporary collections named for the benefactor (such as the Tate or Guggenheim), and the status this confers.[15] In a Western bioethical context, the focus is on the object of morality, the patient and the attributes they possess, and not the subject of morality, the agent and what they do.[16] In the Western view, there are arguments over which attributes determine personhood status. For some, foetuses or individuals who are braindead constitute persons, due to being human beings. For others, those same entities would not be persons.[17] The deciding factor is whether the patient possesses certain qualities that constitutes personhood. Fig 3. The museum of Ole Worm (1655, engraving). Wellcome Collection. Conversely, in African traditions, the action that someone undertakes is also factored in when ascribing personhood. Achebe notes that for the Igbo of Nigeria, ‘every generation will receive its own impulse and kinesis of creation’, such that overemphasizing the product undermines each generation’s (or person’s) development through the process.[18] The fetishization of possession undermines the character development in striving for moral perfection.[19] Tangwa locates actions as the source of morality, arguing that ‘human persons are not morally special [as patients], they are morally liable [as agents]’.[20] The Western version is the ‘minimal definition’ of personhood (based on characteristics possessed), whereas the African version proposes the ‘maximal definition’ of personhood, based on the measure of the excellence of the moral agent.[21] As such, a human being must work to attain personhood through their actions and intentions to continually better themselves for the purpose of bettering their community. Achieving one’s potential is therefore not a self-serving end. Persons become so through caring for one another in a shared way of life.[22]   For some African philosophers, the community overshadows the individual. For others, it does not. Ghanaian philosopher Gyekye questions the personhood of a robotic automaton who unthinkingly abides by the group will.[23] Although a person is dependent upon social relations, such dependence does not ‘dissolve her individuality within a broader notion of community’.[24] This is because a person’s individuality remains. While an individual is a member of a community and that community aims to help that individual achieve moral virtue, it still comes down to the individual to act.[25] The deciding factor is how much the individual did the moral work to become a person. A person is at once both free and not free, due to their individuality and the pressure imposed upon them from the community.[26]   Yet the attainment of personhood by these standards could suggest that if society does not deem one to have worked for the welfare for others, they could be denied personhood. This would have material and existential implications, such as death sentences for being LGBTQI+, healthcare denial for abortion, or refusal to approve of stem-cell research.[27] Atuire aims to reconcile these contemporary bioethical dilemmas besetting Africa through an alternative yet still indigenous view of personhood. He maintains the African theorisation of personhood as underpinned by the patient/agent duality which confers both privileges and duties: what is owed to an object (patient) and what a subject (agent) owes to others. Differing from some African bioethicists, however, Atuire asserts that object moral status is a condition of all human beings, irrespective of any specific capacities they hold. Being human is inherently relational and this fact alone confers object moral status. To this he adds subject moral status, for which individual actions toward collective human flourishing are accounted. Full moral status, ie full personhood, is accorded only to those beings with both object and subject moral statuses.   Atuire acknowledges traditional African philosophers’ wish to eschew what is seen as the reach of Western influence and its technological advance; however, he questions their complete refutation as a false ideological bid to return to ‘precolonial culture’ and its ‘uncontaminated reality’,[28] stating that these issues are concrete challenges in Africa, in need of ethical and practical attention. Instead of ‘dislodging’[29] or ‘exorcising’[30] Western influence, in a bid to return to an imagined pre-colonial past, he recommends active engagement with these contemporary concerns toward the development of practical and locally relevant solutions .[31]   With these moral statuses explained, Atuire focusses his attention on the question of abortion, something which impacts millions of women in Africa while garnering divergent ethical views. An embryo or foetus would be accorded object moral status as part of the human species. Object moral status denotes vulnerability and a need for heightened societal protection. Rather than spurning the pregnant person who seeks an abortion as someone rupturing traditional African values by not contributing to human flourishing through taking the birth to full term, Atuire extends the notion of vulnerability to them, as patients owed care. In doing so, he recognises their distress in having an unwanted pregnancy, the stigma and long-term social harm of bearing an ill-conceived child, and the potential death faced through unsafe abortions outside of the community’s sight.   Subject moral status comes from acting for one’s community. Therefore, Atuire argues, to abandon a pregnant person to their plight of an unwanted pregnancy would not be serving humanity, nor would it be exhibiting communal humanism on the part of other members of the community. His argument rests on a reconsideration of whose vulnerability matters. He cites the traditional African ethicists’ attention to an agent’s sympathy—of having ‘sympathetic identification with the interests of others, even at the cost of a possible abridgement of one’s own interests’[32]—through which they fulfil their duty to the community and exercise social virtue. By reframing vulnerability to include the pregnant person as a patient, his proposal demonstrates how traditional African ethical frameworks can account for and incorporate contemporary bioethical challenges besetting African societies, while remaining congruent to a communitarian ethic. His argument to sympathise with the patient could also reframe the rights-based approach to abortion within Western contexts, to one that aligns within patient-centred ethics.   Moving forward   This article seeks to advocate for an alternative to Western ways of knowing and being through a comparison to African perspectives in art and ethics. In so doing, it attempts to broker a dialogue between Western and African viewpoints, and to suggest that their values, while different, are not opposed. It also hopes to suggest that there is more to be gained from engaging with each another than there is in remaining apart.   Western perspectives tend to revolve around attributes possessed by individuals, whereas African perspectives tend to value processes and actions taken for the benefit of communities. This can be seen in the art collections amassed by individuals versus the qualities of forging both objects and character, through actions undertaken. That said, gaps appeared on both sides. In Western contexts, this centred around the concept of autonomy, where the precept of self-direction is tempered by acquiescence to medical authority. Similarly, in African contexts, self-subsummation to the will of the community was refuted, as automatons could not also be moral agents taking action for the betterment of the group.   These examples demonstrate that in the fields of art or ethics, once aware of our own restrictions, a space emerges for wider reconsideration. Dialogue between Western philosophy and African philosophy could offer Westerners moral tools through which to consider contemporary challenges.[33] At the same time, such dialogue could address current and emerging bioethical issues in Africa, by engendering theory that aligns with African sensibilities.[34] This dialogic approach would better serve international classrooms by shifting entrenched philosophical divisions and opening pathways for change. In global contexts, it is this reckoning with both indigenous and imported values that gives rise to informed, inclusive, and relevant information necessary to address contemporary concerns. Each side alone is insufficient as important aspects remain unresolved. Recognising commonalities amid philosophical differences can enrich all engaged. Julie Botticello Dr Julie Botticello is an anthropologist, who has worked in academia since completing her PhD in 2009 on Yoruba-Nigerians and their aspirations for wellbeing in the post-colonial context. Post-doctorate, her research interests have remained focussed on post-colonial migrants and other marginalised communities, whether in relation to health, work, or education, to affirm alternative knowledge bases in our interconnected, yet heterogenous, globalised world. Critically, Dr Botticello’s research questions how technological advances in reproductive health reshape ethical frameworks, especially in settings marked by historical and epistemic inequalities. Specifically, this research pathway explores the confluences of African and Western perspectives on bioethics and biotechnology in reproduction, considering how the advancement of technology, combined with epistemic transnationalism, challenges accepted norms.   Currently, Dr Botticello serves as the Program Director for the BSc in Health Sciences and a Senior Lecturer at the University of New Haven (UNH), in Connecticut, USA. In 2024/25, she held a Faculty Fellowship with the Center for Teaching Excellence on inclusive pedagogy, and as part of the Yale Prison Education Initiative, expanded higher education access to incarcerated women in a Federal Prison. Previously, she was the Course Leader for the Public Health BSc degree, led the Athena Swan Gender Equality self-assessment team, and served as a Senior Lecturer for the School of Health, Sport and Bioscience, at the University of East London, UK.   [1] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing  (Cambridge University Press 2012). [2] ibid 30. [3] Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit  (Cambridge University Press 1994). [4] Caesar Atuire, ‘African Perspectives of Moral Status: A Framework for Evaluating Global Bioethical Issues’ (2022) 48(2) Medical Humanities 238-245. [5] Godfrey Tangwa, ‘The Traditional African Perception of a Person: Some Implications for Bioethics’ (2000) 50(5) Hastings Center Report 39-43. [6] See Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics  (8th edn, Oxford University Press 2019). [7] Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Temple University Press 1995) 21. [8] Oche Onazi, Human Rights from the Community  (Edinburgh University Press 2013) 38. [9] Yaw Frimpong-Mansoh, ‘Bioethics: Traditional African Perspective’ in Yaw Frimpong-Mansoh and Caesar Atuire (eds), Bioethics in Africa, Theories and Praxis  (Vernon Press 2019) 49. [10] Martin Ajei and Nancy Myles, ‘Personhood, autonomy and informed consent’ in Frimpong-Mansoh and Atuire (n 9) 77-94. [11] Radhika Rao, ‘Informed Consent, Body Property, and Self-Sovereignty’ (2016) 44 Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics   438. [12] Ajei and Myles (n 10). [13] Kurt Grey and David Wegner, ‘Moral Typecasting: Divergent Perceptions of Moral Agents and Moral Patients’ (2009) 96 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 505. [14] Kevin Behrens, ‘Two “Normative” Conceptions of Personhood’ (2011) 25 Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy 103-118. [15] James Clifford, ‘Objects and Others’ in George Stocking (ed), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (University of Wisconsin Press 1985). [16] Tangwa (n 5) 40. [17] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (3rd edn, Cambridge University Press 2011). [18] Chinua Achebe, ‘Foreword’, in Herbert Cole and Chike Aniakor (eds), Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos  (University of California Press 1984). [19] Motsamai Molefe, An African Ethics of Personhood and Bioethics: A Reflection on Abortion and Euthanasia  (Palgrave MacMillian 2020). [20] Tangwa (n 5) 40. [21] Ifeanyia Menkiti, ‘Person and Community in African Traditional Thought’ in RL Wright (ed), African Philosophy: An Introduction  (University Press of America 1984) 132. [22] Thaddeus Metz, ‘An African Theory of Moral Status: A Relational Alternative to Individualism and Holism’ (2012) 15 Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 387-402. [23] Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience  (Oxford University Press 1997). [24] Ajei and Myles (n 10) 87. [25] Molefe (n 19) 36 [26] Ajei and Myles (n 10) [27] Caesar Atuire, ‘A Prolegomenon to Bioethics in Africa: Issues, Challenges and Commonsensical Recommendations’ in Frimpong-Mansoh and Atuire (n 9). [28] Atuire (n 4) 244. [29] Molefe (n 19) 10 [30] Kwasi Wiredu, ‘An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Orality’ (2009) 40(1) Research in African Literatures   8-18. [31] Atuire (n 4) 238. [32] Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye, Person and Community  (Council for Research in Values and Philosophy 1992) 194. [33] Tangwa (n 5). [34] Atuire (n 4) 238.

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 Harlem, USA) lives and works in Hudson Valley, New York. Tschabalala is an artist and builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self's work seek to expand her critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo (2024); Highline, New York (2024) Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); FLAG Foundation, New York (2024); Barbican, London (2024); CC Strombeek, Grimbergen, Belgium (2023); Desert X, Coachella Valley (2023); Kunstmuseum St Gallen (2023); Le Consortium, Dijon (2022); Performa 2021 Biennial, New York (2021); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2021); ICA, Boston (2020); Studio Museum Artists in Residence, MoMA PS1, New York (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019), amongst many others. Gabriella Kardos : The Fourth Plinth commissions make us look at the world in different ways, addressing issues of importance for British society. They point a mirror to our contemporary world, they embody ideas which need to be expressed in concrete form to remind us of important issues we are facing today. How do you view Lady in Blue within this context?   Tschabalala Self :   Lady in Blue is a sculpture that pays homage to a young, metropolitan woman of colour—a quotidian figure, like many one might encounter in contemporary London. Lady in Blue is not a figure from the historical or political past, but rather a symbol of our shared present and future ambitions. She reflects equity through representation, acknowledgement, and action, where all global citizens are exalted and appreciated for their unique contributions, and a future where the ordinary individual is recognised for their extraordinary capabilities. She expresses resilience and grace through the complications of our ever-evolving modern world.   Inspired by a desire to bring a contemporary woman to Trafalgar Square, Lady in Blue adds a new perspective to the public space. Unlike Henry Havelock, Charles James Napier, or George Washington, this anonymous woman is not a real person but an icon; she represents many individuals rather than the adulation of one. This symbolism allows all who interact with the sculpture to imbue her with their own personal relationship and take meaning from her placement.   This figure would be the first sculpture of mine to depict a walking figure. Movement and walking are associated with agency in my work. The fact that my figures are often ‘on the move’ speaks to their ability to assert their own will and exist within their own reality, rather than existing solely for the edification of the viewer. Similarly, I feel there is great political power in showing a woman walking in the public sphere as opposed to being posed or static: the gesture illuminates the forward moment of all women collectively. Fig 1. Lady in Blue (Tschabalala Self) Model for Fourth Plinth Commission, Trafalgar Square, London 2026 © Tschabalala Self, Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

Both art and science have been cornerstones of western society for millennia, yet their synthesis—artistic research—has yet to achieve widespread acceptance in European […] academies. Samuel Penderbayne[1]   Artistic Research   Artistic research has many faces. [2]  For some it is research ‘about’ art (art as research object : art history [3]  as well as artists’ self-exploration into their own body of work). [4]  For others it is research ‘for’ art (art as research objective : artists utilizing pre-existing scientific research methods as tools and inspiration to create artworks). [5]  For yet others it is research ‘through’ art (art as research method : scientists developing novel research methods through their own artistic practice or partnerships with artists). [6] The Art Side   There have been many prominent artistic research authors from the art side [7]  and many more that conduct artistic research without explicitly writing about it. And while there is a marked increase in research-oriented artistic practices fueled by anthologies,[8] journals,[9] fellowships,[10] and PhD programs, [11]  the same cannot be said for the science side.   The Science Side   There is a general lack of academic scholars who dare explore this route, especially legal scholars, [12]  and especially artistic research understood as more than the one-way-street of simply offering finished research results up for artists to interpret, or the one-way-street of picking famous art disputes to give legal opinions on.   This essay describes my own path of opening up my research to art and outlines ‘Law x Art’ understood as a new subcategory of artistic research and a supplemental ‘academic modus operandi’ [13]  in the legal sciences.   My Decade of Separation   The connection between art and law has, however, not always been apparent to me. For more than a decade my two passions of art and law were stowed away in separate compartments of my brain and life.   Law—Rationality, Formality, Objectivity   One was a highly structured, hierarchical endeavor, infused at times with an almost mathematical dogmatic logic, which I had decided to dedicate my working life to. It required one to analyze, memorize, and regurgitate large quantities of external knowledge, abstract information, paragraphs, and cases. It was result-oriented and classification-based. It offered very little room for coincidence and play. It necessitated a certain self-rigor and self-deprivation to master. It meant following the rules.   Art—Intuition, Informality, Subjectivity   The other represented an escape from those strictness and rules. To record music, to paint, write poetry, or even just to consume other people’s art made me flow. It was full of embodied, sensory, and intuitive spontaneity, a sense of knowing without discursive thinking.[14] The knowledge it created was largely located within myself—even if influenced by external sources. It invited the unsystematic, the illogical, the incomplete. Its outcome was never pre-determined. It allowed me to push boundaries, to provoke, to break rules.   Yet art was something I let myself explore only after a day’s work had been completed successfully, only after I had fulfilled my self-set quorum of productivity, art was something I as a legal scholar relegated—for many years—to the outer margins of my life.   During this time, my ‘decade of separation’, I felt, that—even though I greatly enjoyed diving deep into navigating this strange new world of paragraphs and articles—I left something behind on the surface: an intuitive dimension of myself, cast aside to fit into the preset mold of the rational, straight-thinking, unaffected law student and legal scholar. [15]  It took overcoming the separateness of law and art in my mind, to overcome this separateness of self, and to feel truly at home in my profession. Convergence   Three core experiences triggered this convergence. First, my PhD studies, which turned me from passive consumer and applicator of external legal knowledge into the creator of new legal knowledge and introduced for the first time a creative element into my legal education. Second, my time spent at Yale Law School, known for centering in its curriculum also non-legal sciences like psychology and political economy, solidifying the interdisciplinarity of my research. And third, meeting role models and collaborators ranging from lawyers double-majoring in art history to legal scholars who are practicing artists.[16] My role models were not necessarily older, established individuals but rather young colleagues whose bravery to combine art and law in the face of the conservatism of traditional legal discourse I admired. I needed to see someone   else live the connection between law and art before I could see myself live it. It is through many conversations and collaborations with this group of individuals that my view of Law x Art was shaped.   Today, I no longer consider law and art as opposites. They are complementary for me, bear intrinsic similarities, and I continue to see characteristics of one in the other.   On a high level of abstraction, they both attempt to illustrate aspects of the human condition through exploration, revelation, and representation, and in this sense both art and the legal sciences work toward advancing human understanding. [17]  Law like art is continually evolving and rich with permutations and surprises . Law is not set in stone but contingent on the society that birthed and sustains it. Law like art is a reflection of society.   On a more concrete level, intuition plays a big part in the writing of any text—be it legal or artistic. This includes the intuition of picking a topic to write about, the intuition of how to structure one’s own thoughts for the reader, and the intuition to know when a text is finished. The deep interest a legal scholar feels for a particular topic that compels them to dig deep into it and ‘scratch an intellectual itch’ is also intuition. As is the moment the researcher wakes up from sleep, the answer to a problem they have been unsuccessfully working on for months suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere at the tip of their tongue. This is said to have happened even to the father of the scientific method of rationality and objectivity himself: René Descartes, who stated that the very basis of his scientific method came to him in a dream. [18]   Even the purest forms of scientific research are thus shaped by tacit dimensions such as intuition, creativity, or spontaneous experimental practice. [19]  To allege a wall between science and art with objectivity and rationality on one side and subjectivity and intuition on the other is over-simplistic. [20]  Einstein alluded this to when he proclaimed that ‘the greatest scientists are artists as well.’ [21] Law x Art   Law x Art evades this oversimplification. It aims at centralizing artistic practice’s intuition in the legal sciences to create hybrid forms of knowledge and offer a new academic modus operandi. The goal is not to replace but to supplement traditional approaches in the legal sciences. [22]  Law x Art builds interdisciplinary bridges out of artistic intuition into domains of rational legal thought [23]  by encouraging scientists to develop research projects in tandem with artists, as well as encouraging scientists to develop their own research-based artistic practice. [24]   Creating Zones of Resonance   The intent of Law x Art is not, however, to discipline or rationalize art, and subjugate it to the legal sciences. Art is not just a useful ancillary to scientific research to communicate with the general public more successfully than academic journals and lengthy monographs could; it is not limited to interpreting pre-existing scientific knowledge but may contribute to producing new knowledge. In that sense the artist is not someone who works for  the researcher but someone who works with  them, and law and art are not translations of one another but actors in their own right—neither is subordinate or just a tool for the other.   Law x Art creates zones of resonance and friction for both such actors. While the concept of resonance does not intend to name specific methods to borrow from, rather proposing a set of strategies of suggestion, insinuation, and montage, so as to configure a space ‘where neighboring objects might oscillate in sympathetic vibration’, as artist-anthropologist Rachel Thompson puts it. [25]  Further, the concept of zones of friction particularly welcomes inspiration coming from confusion and chaos, [26]  from having your perspectives and ideas challenged by exposure to other fields and methods. [27]  Strategies of suggestion to create zones of resonance and friction include the following questions:   What are the tacit dimensions of my research? (self-reflection as to the limits of scientific knowledge) How can artistic practice make the tacit dimensions of my research fruitful for knowledge production and communication? (making the invisible visible) How can my research be experienced through art? (creation of experiential knowledge)[28] What metaphors are present in my research? (revealing potentially fruitful connections and novel ways of seeing) [29] What thoughts about my research have I not dared to explore for fear of appearing unprofessional, overstepping the boundaries of my discipline or being laughed at by my colleagues? (this may be where true discovery lies)   Opening a Two-Way Street   Following from the concept of zones of resonance, Law x Art must be understood as a two-way street of mutual productive irritation.   Not just Law →  Art:  What Law x Art is consequently not  about is lawyers taking up artistic practice as a hobby. This produces art more or less inspired by their legal work, but which stands relatively disconnected next to it in the sense of a one-way street: law as subject of art. Examples of such disconnected artistic practices by lawyers may be found in works by Goethe, Kafka, Rosendorfer, Schlink, or von Schirach (so-called poet-lawyers [30] ), as well as in the collection of the ‘Law & Art’ online gallery.[31] These works either do not deal with legal issues at all or are merely about finding artistic representation for pre-existing legal issues. That is not to say that this one-way street may not lead to highly noteworthy works of art—but it’s not Law x Art. Not just Law ←  Art:  Nor is Law x Art about legal scholars giving opinions on cases involving the art world. This, too, constitutes a one-way street: art as subject of law. While there are a number of books with titles such as ‘Law and the Arts’, [32]  ‘Art and Criminal Law’, [33]  or ‘Art Trials’, [34]  none of them constitute artistic research understood as a two-way street. Many merely pick an art law case with which to exemplify and confirm general concepts of legal dogmatics with no true dialogue between art and law occurring. The authors never take off or question their ‘lawyer’s glasses’, they never leave the safety of their discipline’s ivory tower. Further, these works are often concerned explicitly with the ‘direct connectivity’ of art and law, rather than resonance and friction. This approach, too, may produce important works of scholarship, but it is not Law x Art.   It is chiefly for this reason—so as not to be conflated with these already existing perspectives—that I choose not the name of ‘Law and  Art’ for my approach but of ‘Law x  Art’.   X stands for the two-way traffic of mutual productive irritation at a crossroad. The x, too, makes it clear that Law x Art is not about a peaceful coexistence of art and law but resistance and dissent. It demands challenging the expectations of one’s own discipline and one’s own dogmatic conditioning.   x stands for two way-street x stands for resonance x stands for friction x stands for the unknown x stands for inspiration coming from confusion   Fig 1. The author’s offices at the University of Halle.   Examples of My Emerging Practice   Implementing Law x Art in my own work has been an ongoing process. With various projects I have remained within a one-way street (eg advising as legal expert a theatre in Mainz for a play on the Wirecard fraud and embezzlement scandal). Yet the goal is always opening a two-way street between art and law, while at the same time accepting that pushing research to a discipline’s limits naturally courts a high risk of failure and recognizing that the process of such artistic experimentation may be just as important as the results. [35] Fig 2. Wirecard-play ‘Villa Alfons’ at Staatstheater Mainz 2022. IstaCard-CEO Markus Schwartz is seen climbing a giant badger (German: Dachs ), a symbol for the German stock market index DAX (still image © Andreas J Etter).   Beyond Law Salon   At the core of my Law x Art practice stands the Beyond Law Salon  series that I curate and host with collaborators Daria Bayer and Stella Dörenbach in Berlin.[36] The salon is designed to bring together three times a year a diverse group of scientists and artists to discuss, explore, and perform topics of law and art. Inspirations are drawn from the work of the performance collective signa , whose site-specific performances always involve the audience.   Past Salons have been dedicated to AI generated art, violence in art, and burnout in academia. Each evening contains informative as well as interactive elements aimed at disintegrating the strict categories between artist and scientist as well as audience and performers. At one Salon, the AI-based composer collective ktonal  presented a piece of their music, before a legal expert commented on intellectual property protection of the art just witnessed, while guests became AI-artist themselves at the same time, co-creating through apps such as WOMBO Dream .   Every Salon spans multiple rooms, offering different experiences in each of them; one room is usually reserved to be entered in solitude. During a past Salon on violence and consent the Salon hosts—re-enacting Marina Abramović’s performance Rhythm 0—took turns in such secluded room to act as immobile ‘objects’ surrounded by an assortment of, among other things, knifes, scissors, and pins giving guests permission to use them as they pleased on the hosts.   At another evening on the topic of burnout and labor laws, Salonists were refused entry at the agreed upon time but instead sent out individually to bars, busstops, and parks with the task of each collecting a story from a stranger. When reuniting as a group after several hours guests were invited to join the performance of Academics Anonymous (AA), sharing their experience of workaholism and of being gifted an unexpected break in their busy schedules by our initial refusal of entry.   The atmosphere of all Salons is un-institutional in the sense that it rejects knowledge communication through the traditional hierarchical lecture format and instead offers—over candlelight and wine—impulses and suggestions as well as communal, experimental knowledge production. The idea is to take art out of the museum, to take science out of the university, and to infuse ‘the every day’ with them.   Performative Lectures, Art as Evidence, Artist Collaborations   I further implement Law x Art within my research into white-collar crime, reaching from the quasi-lawless space of offshore financial centers to the billion euro Cum-Ex tax evasion scandal. I have, for example, held performative lectures during which water is unpredictably yet constantly dripping onto the audience while I speak, symbolizing the money slipping through legal loopholes into tax havens. Research into the crimes of the rich and powerful is particularly suited for artistic exploration due to the hidden power asymmetries within the law that favor wealthy criminals, and due to art being an innate mechanism to question power. If law is power, law is the establishment—art is the question mark that may make the hidden visible. Art is a means to put normative or normalized behaviors to the test. [37]   Further, art can act as evidence. This was first proposed by the filmmaker Laura Poitras[38]   whose documentary Citizenfour  (2014) on the whistleblower Edward Snowden won an Oscar and sustained attention to the NSA’s global illegal surveillance efforts. The concept of art as evidence, too, has a role in scientific discourse. It can, to use Pointras’ words, be a ‘medium […] we can use to translate evidence or information beyond simply revealing the facts, [and] how people experience that information differently — not just intellectually, but emotionally or conceptually.’ ⁠[39]   Art’s ability in this sense is not limited to the one-way street of science communication, but art itself becomes ‘an entry point to investigate sensitive issues’. Such ‘artistic intrusions’ into ultraspecialized fields of knowledge may be needed either to address topics that have not yet been readily addressed by scientists at all or to generate a public discussions beyond expert circles. [40]  Examples relating to my research include past works on offshore financial centers by artists such as Femke Herregraven  (2011), Paolo Cirio (2013, see fig 3), the Rybn collective  (2017), and the DMSTFCTN  collective (2017).   Fig 3. Loophole for All ( Paolo Cirio 2013, video channels and digital prints ) (Installation at Poetics and Politics of Data, exhibition at House of Electronic Arts, Basel, Switzerland, 2015. © Paolo Cirio).   To explore this further myself, I have been working with the artist Margerita Pevere  and the curator Daniela Silvestrin  as fellows at the Silbersalz Institute  (2022-2023) which pairs scientists and artists for collaboration. In the process I have learned from Pevere’s bio-art concept of ‘leaky bodies’[41] and her ‘poetics of uncontainability’,[42] and transposed them to the uncontainability of bodies of information (secrets) in the offshore space (consider the Panama Papers Leaks ). Pevere, too, has inspired the title of my upcoming monograph Anti-Leviathan .[43] The book uncovers a world in which the traditional Leviathan—the symbol of state power—is challenged by a collective ‘Anti-Leviathan’: a swarm of highly skilled lawyers, bankers, and advisors who help move and conceal vast sums of (criminal) money in the offshore world. The Anti-Leviathan undermines the foundations of tax justice and democratic processes as well as creating a parallel reality, a two-tier criminal justice system in which elites operate untouched by state control.   The scholarly text in my book is accompanied by seven artistic works which I have created in parallel to the three-year academic writing process (see fig 4). They reflect my personal approach to the subject and point to intellectual dead ends not reflected in the text, providing an insight into the genesis of the book.     Fig 4. Artwork from the author’s upcoming book ‘Anti-Leviathan’: Swarm ( Lucia Sommerer 2023, canvas ⌀ 50cm, wire stainless steel ). Wandering: a randomness inviting research methodology   Finally, reflections through Law x Art have helped me recognize as central to my work an approach I have practiced for many years but never named: wandering.   Wandering—on its surface more akin to an artist’s way of relating to the world than a scientist’s—has notably been deployed as a research methodology by US anthropologist Howard Campbell. [44]  It is characterized by random explorations, stumbling onto things, meeting ideas and people in an impromptu way, walking past the boundaries of caution.   While Campbell uses his approach in a literal way—he is actually randomly walking around a location, for example Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, the murder capital of the world—I have long used his approach in a metaphorical sense. It is my mind that wanders around outside my discipline, stumbling, bumping into fragments of foreign ideas. The more disconnected from my research the area I am wandering in, the more promising it seems for unexpectedly encountering a phrase, an image, a sound that will become the core of my legal research later. All my major research topics have come to me that way, discovered not by avid intra-disciplinary discussion and literature study but stumbled upon like a rock on which I hit my toe. By randomly googling, spending too much time on social media, browsing gossip magazines at the hairdressers, or eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations at a party. And oftentimes an academic paper that becomes most important to an argument I am trying to make in my writing is the very one I have encountered only because I misspelled something in the search engine.   Of course, there are moments in every research when loose wandering will pause and pre-structured, minute scientific analysis takes over. [45]  But this is not to negate the role of wandering in formulating the research questions in the first place and in moving the research along by little bursts of chance here and there.   All scientists do ‘wandering’. For me, however, it constitutes an element so central to research, that I consider it necessary to bring it from the unconscious into the conscious, and explicitly credit it. Conscious wandering in this sense is a randomness inviting practice. There is extensive literature on the beneficial role of randomness in complex evolutionary systems like random gene mutations, [46]  in childhood learning, [47]  as well as in imitating human creativity with computers [48] . The same beneficial role of randomness is true for the evolution of academic ideas.    Conscious wandering, while many times likely to end up at strange an impassable dead-ends, is inviting us to think ideas that have not been thought before, and that could not have been thought employing linear thinking. Law x Art is one such way to bring conscious wandering into the legal sciences. Future   Law x Art has the potential to enrich legal debate within the discipline as well as with the public and to provide a creativity-enhancing, supplemental academic modus operandi in the legal sciences.   To normalize Law x Art I invite the reader to, in a first step, utilize hybrid formats of knowledge communication, ranging from research exhibitions to performative lectures and teach-ins at museums (see also the work of Daria Bayer,  who chose to compose her PhD in Law thesis in the form of a theater play). [49]  It is through this novel way of conceiving the communication  of academic knowledge that different perspectives and pathways to creating  academic knowledge will become apparent. Further potential lies in transposing this approach from research into teaching and infusing the classroom with artistic elements.[50] Law—one of the most important resources of power—should not exclusively be communicated in structurally conservative ways. Ultimately, however, to sustain a Law x Art movement and anchor it in legal scholarship in the long term new institutional structures are needed, eg funding for scholar-artist tandems,[51] scholar-artist retreats,[52] and artist in residence programs at law schools.[53]    As cornerstones of western society, science and art have influenced each other for centuries. It is now time to make their connectedness explicit—not just in the legal sciences. Lucia Sommerer   Lucia Sommerer is a Berlin-based artistic researcher  at the intersection of law, technology, and art. She holds an assistant professorship  in criminal law and criminology at the University of Halle (Germany), is a fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project  (USA), and a member of Kollektiv im Fenster  (kiF). Contact: lawxart@mailbox.org . The author thanks colleagues and collaborators Daria Bayer, Stella Dörenbach, Johanna Hahn, and Katrin Höffler for valuable comments on a first draft of this text.   [1]  Samuel Penderbayne, ‘From Artist to Artistic Researcher. Chapter 2.3.1. Epistemology’ ( Hamburg Open Online University,  2022) < https://legacy.hoou.de/projects/from-artist-to-artistic-researcher/pages/2-4-epistemology > accessed 1 July 2024. [2]  See eg Peter Tepe, ‘Über Konzepte der künstlerischen Forschung 5.2. Zu Martin Tröndle/Julia Warmers (Hg.): Kunstforschung als ästhetische Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur transdisziplinären Hybridisierung von Wissenschaft und Kunst ’ ( Mythos-Magazin , January 2023) < https://mythos-magazin.de/erklaerendehermeneutik/pt_kuenstlerische-forschung5-2.pdf > accessed 1 July 2024; Till Bödeker, ‘Zum Wissensbegriff der künstlerischen Forschung’ ( Mythos-Magazin , January 2023) < https://www.mythos-magazin.de/erklaerendehermeneutik/tb_wissensbegriff-kuenstlerische-forschung.pdf > accessed 1 July 2024; Margherita Pevere, ‘Arts of vulnerability. Queering leaks in artistic research and bioart’ (Doctoral thesis, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture 2022) 26 et seq; Julian Klein, ‘What is Artistic Research?’ ( Journal for Artistic Research , 23 April 2017) < https://jar-online.net/en/what-artistic-research > accessed 1 July 2024; Henk Borgdorff, The Debate on Research in the Arts (Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen 2006); Christopher Frayling, ‘Research in art and design’ (1993) 1(1) Royal College of Art Research Papers 1, 5; Claudia Schnugg, Creating ArtScience collaboration: Bringing value to organizations  (Springer 2019). [3]  Till Bödeker and Peter Tepe, ‘Early Connections between Science and (Visual) Art’ (2023) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. [4]  Peter Tepe, ‘Science-Related: Four New Series’ (2022) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal; Samuel Penderbayne, Cross-genre composition  (Wolke 2018) 12. [5]  See eg AEC and others, ‘Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research’ ( Culture Action Europe,  2020) < https://cultureactioneurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Vienna-Declaration-on-AR_corrected-version_24-June-20-1.pdf > accessed 1 July 2024; Suzanne Anker, ‘Vanitas (in a Petri dish) Series’ (2016) < https://www.suzanneanker.com > accessed 1 July 2024;  Lia Halloran, ‘Your body in a space that sees’ (2025) < https://liahalloran.com > accessed 1 July 2024; Dietmut Strebe, ‘The Prayer’ (2020) < https://www.diemutstrebe.com > accessed 1 July 2024. [6]  See eg Neri Oxman, ‘Nature x Humanity’ (2024) < https://oxman.com > accessed 1 July 2024; Peter Tepe, ‘On: Art Inspires Science’ (2020) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. [7]  See above (n 2-6); Jens Badura, ‘Erkenntnis (sinnliche)’ in Jens Badura et al (eds), Künstlerische Forschung: Ein Handbuch  (Diaphanes 2015) 43-8; Anke Haarmann, Artistic research: Eine epistemologische Ästhetik  (transcript 2019); Dieter Mersch, ‘Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens’ in Elke Bippus (ed), Kunst des Forschens: Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens  (Diaphanes 2014) 27-48. [8]  See eg Peter Lynen and Stefan Pischinger (eds), Wissenschaft und Kunst. Verbindung mit Zukunft oder vergebliche Sisyphusarbeit?  (Ferdinand Schöningh 2018); Gerald Bast, Elias G Carayannis, and David FJ Campbell (eds), Arts, Research, Innovation and Cociety  (Springer 2015); Badura et al (n 7); Mick Wilson and Schelte van Ruiten (eds), SHARE: Handbook for Artistic Research Education (ELIA European League of Institutes of the Arts 2013); Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (eds), The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts  (Routledge 2010). See also Graeme Sullivan, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts (Sage 2010). [9]  See eg ‘w/k–Between Science & Art Journal’ (Peter Tepe and others, since 2019); ‘Journal for Artistic Reserach’ (Society for Artistic Research, since 2011); ‘Art/Research International’ (University of Alberta Libraries, since 2016); ‘Nordic Journal of Art & Research’ (Oslo Metropolitan University, since 2012); ‘Nordic Journal for Artistic Research’ (Stockholm University of the Arts & the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme,   since 2018); ‘Airea—Arts & Interdisciplinary Research’ (Eleni-Ira Panourgia and others, since 2018); ‘Research Catalogue—An International Database for Artistic Resreach’ (Society for Artistic Research, since 2011). [10]  See eg ‘Künstlerische Tatsachen’ < https://www.kuenstlerische-tatsachen.de > accessed 1 July 2024 . [11]  Cf. Thomas Gartmann, ‘Studies in the Arts: An Artistic-Scientific Doctorate’ (2022) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal; Peter Lynen, ‘Die Verleihung des Dr. art. und Dr. mus.—Ein Bärendienst für Kunst und Wissenschaft’ (2011) 11(3) Forschung & Lehre 218. [12]  See however Daria Bayer, Tragödie des Rechts (Duncker & Humblot 2021); ‘A Decentralized Right to Breathe’ ( Logische Phantasie Lab,  2023) < https://www.lo-ph.agency/dertb > accessed 1 July 2024; Gary P Bagnall, Law as Art  (2nd edn, Routledge 2006); Amin Parsa and Eric Snodgrass, ‘Legislative arts: interplays of art and law’ (2022) 14(1) Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 1. [13]  Cf. Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vadén, Artistic research: Theories, Methods and Practices  (Academy of Fine Arts 2005) 9. [14]  Louis Arnaud Reid, ‘Intuition and Art’ (1981) 15(3) Journal of Aesthetic Education 27. [15]  Cf. Duncan Kennedy, ‘Legal education and the reproduction of hierarchy’ (1982) 32(4) J Legal Education 591;   Nicola Lacey, ‘Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy Revisited’ (2014) 5(4) Transnational Legal Theory 596; Duncan Kennedy, ‘The Hermeneutic of Suspicion in Contemporary American Legal Thought’ (2014) 25(2) Law and Critique 91, 128 et seq. [16]  See inter alia authors in (n 12) above. [17]  Cf. Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts-based Research Practice  (The Guilford Press 2009) 2. [18]  Robert Withers, ‘Descartes’ Dreams’ (2008) 53(5) Journal of Analytical Psychology 691. [19]  Cf. Badura (n 7) 43 et seq.; Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension  (Routledge 1966); Anon Collective, The Book of Anonymity  (punctum books 2021) 22. [20]   See also Pevere (n 2) 26 et seq;   Bayer (n 12); Tepe (n 2) 10 et seq; Alexander Becker, ‘Art and Science’ (2016) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. [21]  Einstein Archive 33-257. [22]  Cf. Badura (n 7) 43 et seq. [23]  Cf. Samuel Penderbayne, ‘From Artist to Artistic Researcher Chapter 2.3.1.b Intersubjective Resonance and Metacognition’ ( Hamburg Open Online University,  2022) < https://legacy.hoou.de/projects/from-artist-to-artistic-researcher/pages/2-3-1-b-intersubjective-resonance-and-metacognition > accessed 1 July 2024. [24]  Cf. Bödeker and Tepe (n 3) 4. [25]  Rachel Thompson, ‘Labyrinth of Linkages—Cinema, Anthropology, and the Essayistic Impulse’ in Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson (eds), Between Matter and Method  (Routledge 2020) 5; Anon Collective (n 19) 59. [26]  Cf. Katrina Schwartz, ‘On the Edge of Chaos: Where Creativity Flourishes’ ( kqed , 6 May 2014) < https://perma.cc/5KZ7-A99F > accessed 1 July 2024. See also Robert M Bilder and Kendra S Knudsen, ‘Creative cognition and systems biology on the edge of chaos’ (2014) Front. Psychol 5; Krystyna Laycraft, ‘Chaos, complexity, and creativity’ (Proceedings of Bridges 2009: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture) 355 et seq;   Frank Ulrich and Peter Axel Nielsen, ‘Chaos and creativity in dynamic idea evaluation: Theorizing the organization of problem‐based portfolios’ (2020) 29(4) Creativity and Innovation Management 566. [27]  Milena Tsvetkova interviewed in ‘News: Milena Tsvetkova reflects on sabbatical at SFI’ ( Santa Fe Institute , 19 May 2023) < https://perma.cc/W8PM-J72U > accessed 1 July 2024. [28]  Cf. Camilla Groth et al, ‘Conditions for experiential knowledge exchange in collaborative research across the sciences and creative practice’ (2020) 16(4) CoDesign 328. [29]  On the scientific benefits of metaphorical thinking David Gray and Michele Macready, ‘Metaphors: Ladders of Innovation’ in David C Krakauer (ed), Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019  (SFI Press 2019) 129 et seq. [30]  Cf. Yvonne Nilges, Dichterjuristen: Studien zur Poesie des Rechts vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert  (Königshausen & Neumann 2014). [31]  See ‘Law & Art’ < https://www.lawand.art/ > accessed 1 July 2024. [32]  Werner Gephart and Jure Leko (eds), Elective Affinities and Relationships of Tension  (Klostermann 2017). See also several contributions on law and art in Lynen and Pischinger (n 8) 167 et seq; Nathalie Mahmoudi and Yasmin Mahmoudi, Kunst-Wissenschaft, Recht-Management: Festschrift für Peter Michael Lynen  (Nomos 2018);   Peter Michael Lynen, Kunst im Recht: Erläuterungen zum Spannungsfeld von Kunst, Recht und Verwaltung  (Der Kleine Verlag 1994); Eduardo CB Bittar, Semiotics, Law & Art: Between Theory of Justice and Theory of Law (Springer 2020). [33]  Dela-Madeleine Halecker et al (eds), Kunst und Strafrecht: Eine Reise durch eine schillernde Welt  (De Gruyter 2022); Uwe Scheffler, Art and Criminal Law Brochure  (2020). [34]  Johann Braun, Kunstprozesse von Menzel bis Beuys: 13 Fälle aus dem Privatrecht  (2nd edn, Beck 2009). [35]  Cf. Anon Collective (n 19) 55. [36]  See ‘Beyond Law Salon’ < https://www.kollektivimfenster.com/beyond-law > accessed 1 July 2024. [37]  Christoph Schenker, ‘Wissensformen der Kunst’ in Badura et al (n 7) 105 et seq. [38]  Tatiana Bazzichelli (ed), Whistle-blowing for Change: Exposing Systems of Power and Injustice  (Transcript 2023) 67 et seq. [39]  ibid. [40]  Anon Collective (n 19) 53, referencing Brian Holmes, ‘Extradisciplinary Investigations: Towards a New Critique of Institutions’ in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice Reinventing Institutional Critique  (MayFly 2009) 53 et seq. [41]  Pevere (n 2) 67 et seq. [42]  ibid. [43]  Lucia Sommerer, Anti-Leviathan: How offshore financial centres promote white-collar crime, create inequality and endanger democracies  (Nomos forthcoming). [44]  Howard Campbell, Downtown Juárez: Underworlds of Violence and Abuse  (University of Texas Press 2021). [45]  Cf. David Bohm, On Creativity  (Psychology Press 2004) 50 et seq. [46]  Andreas Wagner, ‘The role of randomness in Darwinian evolution’ (2012) 79(1) Philosophy of Science 95. [47]  Alison Gopnik, ‘Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions’ (2020) 375(1803) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. [48]  John McCarthy et al, ‘A proposal for the dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence, August 31, 1955’ (2006) 27(4) AI magazine 12; Simone Scardapane and Dianhui Wang, ‘Randomness in neural networks’ (2017) 7(2) Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 1. See also Daniel Kahneman et al, ‘An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence’ (2022) 1(1) Collective Intelligence 1. [49]  See Bayer (n 12). [50]  See eg Peter Tepe, ‘Vorlesungstheater’ (2022) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal; Peter Tepe, ‘25 Jahre Schwerpunkt Mythos, Ideologie und Methoden…und kein Ende’ ( Mythos-Magazin , September 2013) 39 et seq < https://mythos-magazin.de/geschichtedesschwerpunkts/pt_25Jahre.pdf > accessed 1 July 2024. [51] See eg ‘Silbersalz Institute’ ( Documentary Campus ) < https://www.documentary-campus.com/training/silbersalz-institute > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Künstlerische Tatsachen’ (n 10). [52]  See eg ‘Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann Haus’ < www.vatmh.org > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Villa Massimo’  < www.villamassimo.de > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin’ < www.wiko-berlin.de > accessed 1 July 2024. [53]  See eg ‘Artist-in-Residence Program’ ( Columbia Law School ) < www.law.columbia.edu/community-life/strategic-initiatives/artist-residence-program > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Artist in Residence’ ( Center for Interdisciplinary Research at University of Bielefeld ) < www.uni-bielefeld.de/einrichtungen/zif/funding/art/ >  accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Center of Art, Science & Technology ‘ ( MIT ) < https://arts.mit.edu > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Arts at CERN’ ( CERN ) < https://arts.cern > accessed 1 July 2024.

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.

Roshi Rouzbehani, a London-based Iranian illustrator, uses her captivating artwork to champion social causes. Beyond captivating aesthetics, her editorial and portrait illustrations address critical issues like gender equality, women’s rights, and mental health awareness, sparking conversations and advocating for positive change.   CJLPA : Thank you for taking the time to interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art to discuss your work as an illustrator and artist with your pieces having been featured in publications such as The New Yorker , the  Guardian , The Washington Post , and numerous others. Your illustrations and portraits are known for advocating for the rights of Iranian women. Could you share the specific experiences or events that initially drew you to this cause?   Roshi Rouzbehani :   I have always felt a deep connection to the advocacy for the rights of Iranian women, shaped by my upbringing in the oppressive patriarchal regime of Iran. In this societal framework, women often find themselves lowered to second-class citizenship, confronting various challenges and injustices. The struggles faced by political prisoners within my family and circle of friends exposed me to the harsh realities of existence under such a system.   Having resided in Iran until my early twenties, I closely witnessed the profound impact of religious dictatorship on every facet of life. This firsthand experience ignited a determination within me to employ my illustrations and portraits as a powerful tool for highlighting these pervasive issues. Through my art, my objective is not only to encapsulate the strength and resilience of Iranian women, but also to catalyze change and advocate for a society that is more just and equitable, enabling women to fully embrace the rights and freedoms they rightfully deserve. 'Free Tehran' (Roshi Rouzbehani) CJLPA : In light of recent events, such as the cases of Mahsa Amini and Armita Geravand, how do you see your role in raising awareness about human rights issues in Iran, and more specifically, women’s rights?   RR : I feel responsibility to amplify the voices of the oppressed and to challenge the societal norms that maintain gender inequality in Iran. Illustrations have the power to evoke emotions and create a sense of empathy transcending language barriers so that everyone can understand without the need for translation. Through visually portraying the experiences and struggles of Iranian people, I can contribute to raise awareness about their rights. My work serves as a catalyst for social change, aiming to inspire a transformative impact on the collective consciousness.   CJLPA : Can you describe a specific piece of your work that has been particularly impactful in highlighting the challenges Iranian women face in terms of their rights and freedoms?   RR : On the first anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death in custody, I curated a series of ten images titled ‘Mahsa Amini and a Year of Brutality and Courage in Iran’ which was published in the Guardian . One of these images, titled ‘An Eye for Freedom’, pays homage to Niloofar Aghaei, a midwife who lost sight in one eye during last year’s protests. The image portrays the harsh reality of security forces using live bullets, metal pellets, and tear gas to injure several individuals. Niloofar Aghaei, a woman dedicated to bringing new life into the world, bravely took to the streets in the fight for freedom. Her story serves as a powerful reminder of the Woman, Life, and Freedom motto.

Had any of the players who competed for the inaugural tennis grand slam of 2022 in Melbourne been complete (i.e. sovereign, self-governing) individuals, they would have declared the ‘AO’ boycott before the tournament started.[1][2] Not only because of Djokovic, but also because of Renata Voráčová. Not only out of the camaraderie with the two fellow members of the traveling circus which professional tennis (along with all other professional ‘spectator’ sports) has become, courtesy of the ‘contemptible money economy’.[3] Nor because of supporting Djokovic’s undoubtedly hard and inevitably controversial choice not to get vaccinated. Not even because the famed AO had fallen easy prey to inconspicuous electioneering by the incumbent government. The principled individuals would have abandoned the tournament in light of what the cases of Djokovic and Voráčová inadvertently told us about what we have become. The boycott, however, was unthinkable. It could never happen, not in a million years. The inverse vision emphatically unfolded as part of a history adorned with the narratives of the ‘great success’, ‘uplifting finale’ and reignited ‘GOAT’ debates. To borrow the self-righteous assertion of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, echoed by many, ‘the Australian Open was bigger than Djokovic, much bigger’.[4] No doubt they were right, although it is less clear whether any of them thought through the repercussions of their emotional and patriotic endorsement of the AO’s hyperbole. It is no secret that we have long since dispensed with the critical gift of unhurried and prolonged contemplation.[5] As a result, we tend to become too wrapped up in today’s multitude of political whirlwinds, whether big or small, brief or protracted. Nietzsche warned us about the perils of foregoing the ‘ vita contemplativa ’ and living, instead, ‘as if one always ‘might miss out on something’. When this happens, he argued, ‘hours in which honesty is permitted’ become rare, and even when they arrive, we have no energy left to for them.[6] Heeding Nietzsche’s warning, we might stop to ponder ‘why not?’. Why wouldn’t the boycott happen, why couldn’t it, should there have been one and, most importantly, what does the highly publicised scandal around Djokovic tell us about ourselves? Admittedly, it has always been a tall order to expect athletes to act as a barometer of collective conscience. It is, however, not without precedent. Sport often ends up caught in the crossfire of politics, which has in recent decades marred and brutalised the Olympic spirit, still vaguely synonymous with the few remaining pockets of uncommercialised athletic endeavour. Still, past athletes have, on occasion, shone an uncomfortable and uncompromising light on the perils of a situation the majority might passively sanction as ‘normal’. Jesse Owens did just that in 1936. Today, inside the fact that the boycott could never happen, hides a small but important secret. It binds us in a manner we prefer to pass over in silence even though we must speak about it. The secret is that we have firmly forgotten the original meaning of the word ‘idiot’. These days, when we casually throw around the term ‘Cov-idiot’, we refer to someone dangerously (almost offensively) weak in their mental and ethical faculties, unable to recognise the blindingly obvious benefits of getting vaccinated. In so doing, we habitually misuse the term or, to be more precise, we utilise its inverted meaning . An ‘idiot’ (from the Greek ἰδιώτης , or ‘ idiotes ’), however, is not at all a ‘fool’ or mentally incapacitated.[7] Neither Aristotle, nor Dostoyevsky, nor Nietzsche thought so.[8] The root adjective ἴδιος (‘ idios ’) denotes a state of affairs which is ‘not shared’ or an individual who, akin to a branch torn from the tree, is ‘disconnected’ from a larger whole, ie whose communitarian sensibility has been disabled. In other words, an ‘idiot’ is simply a ‘ private person ’.[9] That is, ‘idiot’ is a designation for an individual whose psychic cord—informing and enabling their sense of the ‘communal’ and the ‘collective’—has been irreparably severed, turning such fragmented human beings into ‘ dividuums ’. These dividuums are those who can be re-assembled as the meaningless (in and of themselves) and disposable (Marx would say ‘commoditised’) cogs of new socio-economic wholes—the vast religious, industrial, commercial, and ideological, forms of repressive machinery.[10] Much as in ancient Athens ‘idiot’ denoted a person positioned, by choice or fortune, outside of the polis (i.e. a form of disenfranchisement) and made weaker and more vulnerable on account of such externalisation, today the same term denotes the basis on which we are re-incorporated into society—i.e., as idiots.[11] Put slightly differently, we are incorporated into society as subjects who have internalised our own disenfranchisement from the community and from the communal, and therefore as inevitably of lesser value than individuals. Nietzsche would remind us that two other forms of reactive power, namely religion (meaning Christianity) and slave morality, operate according to exactly the same principle, the ‘reversal of the evaluating glance’, in terms of creating obsequious subjectivity.[12] Don’t get me wrong, today’s ‘private persons’ are invariably clever, educated, sophisticated and endowed with high morals. Yet, having been moulded into ‘idiots’, they have unwittingly become vulnerable and susceptible to being fooled and manipulated, without even realising this.[13] Private persons arranged into a ‘society’ serve as a powerful repellent of the few non-idiots from the new configuration of the polis .[14] The behaviour and the decision-making of idiots is different from that of individuals.[15] Idiots are powered and informed by a fundamentally different algorithm: one of constantly chasing after and maximising (but never fulfilling) the elusive personal marginal utility, in the form of the abstract notion of happiness, a ‘bubble’ that requires continual inflation. So much so, that ‘dividuums’ come to internalise and normalize their idiocy in much the same way, Nietzsche explains, as we have internalised the valuations of slave morality which inhibit individual autonomy and privilege the collective welfare of idiots as the ‘gold standard’ of good citizenship.[16] Tsitsipas, the Greek tennis ace, said that Djokovic made ‘the majority’ look like ‘fools’, and he was absolutely right.[17] ‘Fools’, however, in what sense? Did Tsitsipas inadvertently express the sentiment of the righteous idiotic majority that lacks an authentic collective identity which could extend beyond the mere slogans ‘expanded into a political theory’?[18] Echoing him, Martina Navratilova, a fellow idiot, suggested that Djokovic ‘should have taken one’ (i.e., the vaccine) ‘for the team’.[19] The embattled Australian government, justifying their decision to deport Djokovic after a protracted theatrical performance that all but revitalised the notion of the ‘kangaroo court’ and ended up dramatically invoking the ghosts of ‘civil unrest’, stated with unwavering confidence that they acted in the ‘public interest’.[20] The curious thing is that all of Navratilova, Tsitsipas, and the Australian ministers genuinely believed that they spoke on behalf of a community: the tennis community, the Australian nation, humankind even. Using Covid as the new universal leveller, they believed they spoke on behalf of the ‘greater good’ in the firmly Benthamite/Millean sense. The kind of ‘good’ that extends beyond the notion of mechanical compliance with the rules. The kind of ‘good’ that should appeal to our ethical core notwithstanding that the chief functionality of the latter has long since been replaced with the plight of the idiot, powered by the totalising drive for equalisation intolerant of difference and thirsting for unanimity at any cost. Incidentally, Adam Smith thought that agents acting to further self-interest, without either ‘knowing it’ or ‘intending it’, helped to advance the ‘interest of society’.[21] One thing Smith overlooked and Nietzsche problematised was how the nature of collective interest may evolve following the reconfiguration of individuals into idiots and their subsequent re-incorporation into society. Nietzsche was weary that such ‘living for others in egoism’[22] would only ‘conceal knavery and harshness’[23] in the same way that ‘public opinions’ only serve to hide ‘private indolence’,[24] and by so doing aid in weaponizing the vindictive drives of the idiotic multitude.[25] Reinforcement of such ghostly yet militant collective identity, stitched together by exasperation and ressentiment , was on full display in the ‘no holds barred’ approach by the Aussie government in the pre-election fight for their idiots’ hearts and minds. Djokovic, in the wrong place at the wrong time, ended up being precisely the right person, offering a once in a lifetime gift to the politically fraught rhetoric of the ‘democracy of concepts [that] rules in every head—many together are master: a single concept that wanted to be master has crystallised in an ‘‘idee fixe”’.[26] Redolent though it may seem, even Smith would agree that ‘idiot’ does not necessarily designate someone of inferior intelligence.[27] Rather, it denotes someone who is (liable to be) manipulated on account of having been placed into and fully accepted the context (and the consequences) of acting only out of one’s—presumed autonomous and enlightened—self-interest, albeit one that is no longer informed by the authentic sense of the ‘communal’ or the ‘collective’ and, for that reason, unable to find fulfilment. The ‘collective’ now connotes an entirely abstract construct, hollow and lacking substance. It no longer allows for the possibility of ‘1+1 > 2’, where the ‘collective’ or ‘communal’ transcends the individual without trumping them. The present day ‘collective’ is a simple sum of private egoisms, each acting in their own self-interest. Crucially, however, each ‘private person’—a dividuum, or idiot—is a vastly diminished version of the ‘individual’, and the sum of ‘private persons’ invariably represents a far lesser magnitude than the fellowship of individuals. The ‘atomistic chaos’ of modern society lacks the ethos and material necessary for building the ‘new form of community’[28] (‘ Gemeinschaft ’) of truly ‘free individuals’,[29] which would be a ‘fellowship rather than the flock’.[30] As a result, Nietzsche argues, the collection of ‘atomistic individuals’[31] does not add up to a ‘collective individual’.[32] When we become incorporated as private persons, we trade individual autonomy for the collective welfare of idiots . Though we may be adorned with the labels of equality, freedom, and dignity, we effectively surrender the right to make principled choices. The latter, Nietzsche tells us, is not at all a ‘private matter’.[33] The assemblage of private persons is far weaker, more vulnerable, and politically impotent beyond the periodic hysterical outpourings of ressentiment, the ‘signs of the lowest and most absurd culture’.[34] The mass of ‘private persons’ will never win a war. It will never build anything worthwhile, let alone guarantee a stronger future. It will, however, happily submit itself to any coercion, just as long as this subjection is sublime enough and doesn’t hurt too much, allowing private persons to bask in the oblivious trinketry of the present moment.[35] Having undergone this transformative journey ‘at the freezing point of the will’,[36] private persons lackadaisically dwell in the ‘self-created world of opinions’,[37] no longer able to detect ‘the weight of the chains’.[38] Zarathustra forewarned that ‘even a prison’ of slave morality would ‘seem like bliss’ to the ‘restless people’, who can only ‘enjoy their new security’ in its inescapable nets.[39] The trouble is that any form of ‘mass idiocy’, by amplifying collective ‘moral effects’, invariably creates fertile ground for and becomes the conduit for the development of fascism and tyranny, which leverage ‘the power that lies in unity of popular sentiment, in the fact that everyone holds the same opinions’.[40] Nietzsche argues that the ‘private lazinesses’ hidden behind ‘popular sentiment’ come at an extremely high price: they turn the masses into the accomplices of the very crimes they think they help safeguard against.[41] The tyranny of words, idioms, ideas and opinions, once embraced by the multitude of idiots, soon becomes transformed into a real and potent weapon of reactive power: tyranny by the people, of the people and for the people.[42] Except that these people—akin to the Homeric ‘lotus eaters’—have lost, forgotten, or put to sleep their meaning as individuals.[43] They have traded their right to choose as autonomous individuals in exchange for the chimera of private citizenry, for the illusion of a social construct ‘in which everyone enjoys their own social ‘contract’.[44] They have effectively agreed to subordinate themselves to totalising oppressive drives, having squandered their ability and credibility to resist them. These idiots may occasionally develop a faint sense that they are being fooled and yet they are powerless ‘to not be fooled’, thus only exacerbating their predicament.[45] They have become the ‘fooled ones’, and we know well the sort of things the fooled can end up sanctioning and even eagerly participating in, believing all along that they are playing their part in bringing about the greater good.[46] Viewed in this context, Djokovic’s visa cancellation and his subsequent deportation were acts by the government acting ‘in the public interest’ of idiots: ensuring that idiots remain just as they are, and the bliss of idiocy remains unperturbed, for its veneer, concealing myriads of ‘subterranean demons and their knavery’, tends to be thin and fragile.[47] That is where the contradiction lies, inverting reality and distorting valuations. This, Nietzsche—following in Aristotle’s footsteps—suggests, is where we ought to start looking for answers. Many may argue that comparisons between the AO of 2022 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 are misplaced. For the most part, I would agree. But in one important respect, namely that of the perilous complacency which has rendered us mere spectators in face of the pervasive rise of the repressive social control systems, the parallels could hardly be more merited. Make no mistake, ‘Let’s turn the world into one hospital or penitentiary’ (otherwise known as ‘build back better’) is a clever slogan. Unlike many others, it represents a realistic and achievable target.[48] It feeds on the energy we all, mostly unwittingly, lend it whilst we appear to be craving and beckoning it with nothing but the ‘good intentions’ of our hearts and minds. Alas, Nietzsche cautions that when individual sovereignty is made into a private affair ‘an abundance of dragon’s teeth are sown’ at the same time.[49] The more we demand that general security be guaranteed, ‘the more do new shoots of the ancient drives to domination assert themselves’.[50] We are no longer dealing with an isolated case of the ‘lunatics taking over the asylum’. Rather, the rapid and pervasive spread of idiotism resembles a situation in which the entire world, as though consumed by irredeemable guilt, has obsequiously agreed to place itself in the same woke asylum just so no idiot would any longer feel out of place. That is why the news of Djokovic’s deportation has caused many an idiot to experience an uplifting, if fleeting, sense of exaltation. Not being discriminating enough in what we wish for, not daring to be individuals (i.e. un-idiots and anti-idiots), we may sooner or later have our wish granted, if only to prove right either the gloomy prophet Silenus[51] or Plato, who warned that the penalty idiots end up paying is none other than to find themselves ruled by evil.[52] This is important because—and in this we can be certain—the machine will not stop harvesting our freedom in the name of ‘unanimity’, as long as we continue to submit ourselves to it ‘as material for heating’: Mankind mercilessly employs every individual as material for heating its great machines: but what then is the purpose of the machines if all individuals (that is to say mankind) are of no other use than as material for maintaining them? Machines that are an end in themselves - is that the umana commedia ?[53] However, ‘precisely because we are able to visualize this prospect, we are perhaps in a position to prevent it from occurring’.[54] For this reason, we need a Jesse Owens to emerge from the cirque macabre enveloping us. Not as a solution, not as an Übermensch , but as a flicker of light and an instant of ‘counter-reckoning’ informing the sense of our ‘counter-action’—to ‘put a stop to the injury by putting a stop to the machine’.[55] Dmitri Safronov Dmitri Safronov holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Cambridge for research on ‘Nietzsche’s Political Economy’ (2020). Dmitri received an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and Honors BA in Philosophy and Politics from Trent University. Prior to matriculating at Cambridge, he spent over 20 years in the City of London, working for the leading global investment banking franchises. Dmitri’s profile and list of recent publications can be found on < https://philpeople.org/profiles/dmitri-safronov >. [1] This article quotes extensively from Nietzsche’s unpublished notes. These are assembled in the Nachlass and accessed from < http://www.nietzschesource.org >. Notes in the Nachlass are organized according to the year, number of the notebook, and number of the notebook entry, e.g. NF-1885(year): 2(notebook) [179] (note). [2] The author is triple vaccinated, lost his beloved aunt to the virus, does not hold anti-vax views, and is not a Djokovic fan. [3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (first published 1873-76, Cambridge University Press 1997) ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ §§4-6. [4] Crystal Wu, ‘Dan Andrews says Australian Open is “much bigger than any one person” as Novak Djokovic faces wait over visa stoush’ ( Sky News Australia , 16 January 2022) < https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/dan-andrews-says-australian-open-is-much-bigger-than-any-one-person-as-novak-djokovic-faces-wait-over-visa-stoush/news-story/c2a4a0388fc026bf6c28dcfcf97d31f6 > accessed 15 February 2022. [5] Cf. Nietzsche’s discussion in Nietzsche (n 3) ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ §4; ‘David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer’ §8. [6] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (first published 1882, Vintage Books 1974) §329. [7] Only in English and only by the late 14th-early 15th century does ‘idiot’ become a designation for the ‘mentally deficient’ (Oxford English Dictionary). [8] Cf. Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens (Cambridge University Press 1996) 1253[a]. His two main claims are that man is by nature social (or political) and that ‘the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense…’. Dostoyevsky presents a masterful exploration of this subject in The Idiot (1868-69) . Nietzsche echoes Aristotle’s logic, arguing that community is ‘a body on which no limb is allowed to be sick’ (NF-1888:15[1]) as well as exploring its permutations in modernity with recourse to Dostoyevsky’s psychological insights. Cf. also Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (first published 1878-80, Cambridge University Press 1996) ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §33; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (first published 1888) in The Portable Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann ed, Penguin Classics 2008) §16. [9] Precisely this connotation of ‘idiot’ is used exclusively throughout the article. Should you find the usage of ‘idiot’ distressing, simply replace the offending term with the placating ‘private person’ as you feel necessary. However, it is recommended to take the cue from Nietzsche’s treatment of the similar semiotic challenge to modern sensibility as was posed by the discussion of the highly uncomfortable subject of ‘slavery’. Nietzsche, who was well aware that the modern world anxiously avoided the word ‘slave’ (cf. his 1871 essay ‘The Greek State’), nevertheless challenged our ability and willingness to do anything about the substance of ‘slavery’, when we cannot even handle the sound of the word (cf. NF-1871:10[1]). So, perhaps, see how much ‘offence’ you can take before boiling over with righteous indignation – one way or another, this exercise will tell you something about yourself. [10] Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (first published 1878-80, Cambridge University Press 1996) §57; NF-1885:2[179]; NF-1887:10[17]. Cf. also Richard Mulgan, ‘Aristotle and the Value of Political Participation’ (1990) 18(2) Political Theory 195-215; Julian Young, Individual and Community in Nietzsche’s Philosophy (Cambridge University Press 2015) 5-10; Raymond Geuss, A World Without Why (Princeton University Press 2014) 231. [11] Cf. Nietzsche (n 10) §§472, 481, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §33. [12] Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (first published 1887, Cambridge University Press 1994) I §10; NF-1881:11[73]; NF-1887:10[135]; NF-1888:14[9]. [13] Cf. NF-1886:5[71]; NF-1888:15[42]. Cf. also the definition of ‘idiot’ in Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (Brockhaus-Efron 1890) < http://www.vehi.net/brokgauz/index.html > accessed 15 February 2022. [14] Cf. NF-1881:11[185]; NF-1888:14[91]. [15] For the purposes of this discussion, we leave out the possibility highlighted by Aristotle that an ‘idiot’ could also be a ‘god’; cf. Aristotle (n 8) 1253a 27–29. Nietzsche, likely echoing Dostoyevsky, strongly disagreed with this Aristotelean possibility when discussing Jesus; cf. NF-1888:14[38]. Dostoyevsky makes this point in The Idiot through the image of Prince Myshkin. [16] Cf. Nietzsche (n 10) §45, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §276; Nietzsche (n 12) I §§4-5. Nietzsche also suggests that ‘wherever slave morality predominates, language shows a propensity for the words “good” and “stupid” to edge closer together’; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (first published 1886, Cambridge University Press 2001) §260. [17] Harry Latham Coyle, ‘“It makes the majority look like fools” – Stefanos Tsitsipas slams Novak Djokovic for “playing by his own rules”’ ( Eurosport , 13 January 2022) < https://www.eurosport.co.uk/tennis/australian-open/2022/it-makes-the-majority-looks-like-fools-stefanos-tsitsipas-slams-novak-djokovic-for-playing-by-his-ow_sto8707032/story.shtml > accessed 15 February 2022. [18] Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner (first published 1888) in The Portable Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann ed, Penguin Classics 2008) §7. [19] Tom Parsons, ‘Novak Djokovic told to “take one for the team” as Martina Navratilova weighs in on debacle’ Daily Express (London, 10 January 2022) < https://www.express.co.uk/sport/tennis/1547560/Novak-Djokovic-visa-Martina-Navratilova-Australian-Open-Roger-Federer-Rafael-Nadal > accessed 15 February 2022. [20] Ben Doherty, ‘Novak Djokovic visa: Australian minister Alex Hawke says risk of ‘civil unrest’ behind cancellation’ The Guardian (London, 15 January 2022) < https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jan/15/novak-djokovic-visa-australian-minister-alex-hawke-says-risk-of-civil-unrest-behind-cancellation > accessed 24 June 2022. [21] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published 1759, Oxford University Press 1976) 183. [22] Nietzsche (n 10) §1. [23] ibid §443. [24] ibid §482. [25] Cf. ibid ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §33; NF-1887:10[113]. [26] ibid ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §230. [27] Cf. Smith (n 20) Ch. 3, Section 3, ‘Of Self-Command’. [28] NF-1883:16[50]. [29] NF-1880:8[61]. [30] NF-1882:4[48]. Cf. the excellent discussion on this point by Vanessa Lemm, Homo Natura (Edinburgh University Press 2020) 176-177. [31] NF-1882:4[83]. [32] Nietzsche (n 10) §94. [33] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (first published 1881, Cambridge University Press 1997) §9; Nietzsche (n 3) ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ §§1-2. [34] NF-1888:14[38]. [35] Cf. Nietzsche’s discussion in Nietzsche (n 3) ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ §4; Nietzsche (n 10) ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §286; Nietzsche (n 12) ‘Preface’ §6; Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (first published 1888) in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann ed, Modern Library 2000) ‘Why I Am a Destiny’ §5. [36] Nietzsche (n 10) §349. [37] NF-1887:11[341]. [38] Nietzsche (n 10) ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §10. [39] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (first published 1883-5, Random House 1954) IV ‘The Shadow’. [40] Nietzsche (n 10) §472. [41] ibid §482. [42] Cf. Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (first published 1947, Bloomsbury Academic 2013) 43-5. Cf. also Plato’s discussion on the creation of ‘the fiercest extremes of servitude’ from ‘the height of liberty’; Plato, The Republic (Penguin Books 1905) 563[a]-564[a]. [43] The image of the ‘Lotus eaters’ is used by Plato in his discussion of the ‘democratic man’ – i.e. private person lacking in willpower and judgement – in Plato (n 41) 561[e]-562[d]. Plato’s reference is to Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey . [44] NF-1888:14[197]. [45] NF-1886:5[71]. [46] Cf. Adam Smith on the ‘invisible hand’ – a euphemism for the magic wand that transforms individuals into idiots; Smith (n 20) 183. Nietzsche’s assertion that it is always ‘the invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst’ (Z: I, Tree ) appears imminently more accurate; Nietzsche (n 38) I ‘The Tree on the Hill’. [47] Nietzsche (n 10) §111; NF-1887:10[113]. [48] Cf. the discussion in Nietzsche (n 6) §329; NF-1886:4[7]; NF-1888:14[182]. [49] Nietzsche (n 10) §472. [50] Nietzsche (n 10) ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §30. [51] Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (first published 1872, Vintage Books 1967) §§3-4. Leonard writes beautifully about this ‘frightening wisdom’ of Silenus in Miriam Leonard, Tragic Modernities (Harvard University Press 2015). [52] Plato (n 41) 347c. [53] Nietzsche (n 10) §585. Consider the latest cynical attempt to shame Djokovic into vaccination by the UK’s Health Secretary, Mr. Sajid David, who suggested that it is only the millions of vaccinated spectators who make it possible for Djokovic to ‘get back to play the sport in front of them and earn millions again, it’s ok for him to have them take the vaccine, but the vaccine is not OK for him ’ (author’s emphasis); Jennifer Meierhans, ‘Novak Djokovic is urged by the UK health secretary to reflect on his Covid jab refusal’ ( BBC News , 15 February 2022) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60391876 > accessed 21 February 2022. [54] Nietzsche (n 10) §247. [55] ibid ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §33.

The following short essay was written as a supplement to an essay published in 2018 [1] which provided an analytic description of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s political philosophy and vindicated Heidegger’s view of this philosophy as fundamentally technological in nature, representing the final stage of Western metaphysics. As Heidegger put it, ‘in the thought of will to power, Nietzsche anticipates the metaphysical ground of the consummation of the modern age’, making him the ‘ last metaphysician  of the West’. [2]   Heidegger classified Nietzsche’s politics under the headings of Machiavelli and Roman Culture (Caesar), technique  and imperium . These terms illustrate how the overman ( Übermensch ), who represents subjectivism at its peak, challenges the subjectivism of the ‘last man’, who also   seeks dominion over the earth. Heidegger claims that by the time Nietzsche wrote Twilight of the Idols , he ‘had clear knowledge of the fact that the metaphysics of the will to power conforms only to Roman culture and Machiavelli’s The Prince ’. [3] For Nietzsche, Roman culture signified Caesar, political genius and organization, autocracy, and imperium , while Machiavelli signified political realism, the political subjectivity of the Renaissance ( virtù ), and technique  ( technē )—the manipulation of appearance for political ends, the the state as a work of art, or manufactured politics.   Heidegger argues that a Machiavellian cloud hangs over the end of metaphysics since ‘there belongs to it the ubiquitous, continual […] investigation of means, grounds, hindrances, the […] plotting of goals, deceptiveness and maneuvers, the inquisitorial, as a consequence of which the will to will is distrustful and devious toward itself, and thinks of nothing else than the guaranteeing of itself as power itself’. [4] Heidegger’s situation of Nietzsche’s politics within the metaphysical purview of Machiavelli’s Prince  indicates that he views modern politics as fundamentally subjective (self-legislating), technical, or manufactured, an expression of a technological will to power which deploys itself as machination viewing the human being instrumentally, as calculable and manipulable.   The only difference between the configuration of domination of the last man, who ‘set[s] up a glittering deception which is then agreed upon as true and valid’, [5] and that of the overman is that the latter, who has declared war on the democratic masses, knows, or should know, that what he has constructed is merely semblance or simulation.   Thus a ll modern ideologies (including Nietzschean ideology), to the extent that they are determined by the development of modern metaphysics, must inevitably share certain salient characteristics and thus must be considered formally the same . In the age of technology, the final stage of metaphysics, there is produced a ‘power - based’ truth replaced by aggressive justification , propaganda—or the ‘production of semblance for the preservation and enhancement of power’—and a guiltless brutality which ‘posits what is to be considered right and wrong from the viewpoint of its own power’. Heidegger illustrates this modern power - based truth with the following example: ‘when the British recently blew to smithereens the French fleet docked at Oran it was from their  point of view “justified”; for “justified” merely means what serves the enhancement of power’. [6] A power-based truth represents the destruction of the critical distinction between truth and falsehood, where truth and untruth both constantly prove to be useful; [7] where the distinction between the ‘real world’ and the ‘apparent world’ is abolished and there are only interpretations. [8]   Heidegger recognizes that Nietzsche, given the context in which he found himself, was forced to elevate his language to a higher intensity—which he did, populating it with symbols, images, and emblems. Nietzsche treats language, including images and symbols, as an instrument, simultaneously justifying the right   to lie , to simulate and dissimulate, that all power structures since Plato have consistently claimed. [9] This trait is an essential aspect of Nietzsche’s description of the artist - philosopher who, like the actor, takes a pronounced ‘delight in simulation […] the inner craving for a role and a mask, for appearance ’. [10]   In this essay, I continue to outline Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s political ontology—which may be defined as a description of the properties common to the being of the political—with a preliminary focus on the Nietzschean notions of animality, cruelty, guilt, and the morality of pity. It should be said for the sake of clarity that Nietzsche’s political thought includes a political ontology (eg of the will to power) but one which is meaningful only in an oppositional framework. Heidegger, by contrast, takes up fundamental elements of Nietzsche’s political thought and political psychology and formulates them into a descriptive political ontology of the technological age, without the oppositional demarcations codified by Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian ideology and its chain of equivalences. The implications of this investigation transcend the Nietzschean corpus and apply to our current place in history.   1. The Nietzschean Credo   Nietzsche’s political thought, in its both antithetically negative and tragically affirmative expression, in its opposition to ‘notions of justice that derive from Christian, humanistic, Enlightenment […] and socialist moralities’, [11] which we can properly call its ideology, in its Dionysian and radically aristocratic projection, constitutes the political ontology of the contemporary technological age, forming one unified system, internally conflicted. This system may be defined by a metaphysical orientation towards subjectivism , or the supposed necessity of Caesarism and charismatic leadership, strength of will , that must prescribe; [12] values ,   agonistically divided into those that are ascending  and those that are in decline , and whereby each   ‘subjects the opposing activity to the standard of a universal […] morality’, [13] in Nietzsche’s case appealing to health or to the instinct of life ; [14]   ‘man’, self - designated ‘as the creature that measures values’; [15] force  and will to power , whereby power becomes the ultimate explanatory, determinative principle—‘on every side there is the struggle for power’ [16] — claiming the ‘essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form - giving forces that give new interpretations and directions’; [17] a power-based truth , characterized by aggressive, polemical justification , propaganda, [18] and guiltless brutality , [19] with the ensuing critical destruction of the distinction between truth and falsehood; a ‘ mission ’ assigned by ‘fate’, or ‘destiny’, and invented for the purpose of self - legitimation); [20] and  globalism , the closure of the distinction between ‘national’ and ‘international’ [21] , with a struggle for the dominion of the earth, for world government or imperium . [22] This is the general framework of Nietzsche’s political thought which, in the Heideggerian reading, sheds its superficial ideological aspect and is converted into the political ontology of the technological age.   Another salient feature of Nietzsche’s political thought and the political ontology of the technological age, as critically engaged by Heidegger, is the extent to which psychology dominates this era. [23] Nietzsche takes deep - rooted psychological structures as his object, primarily instincts and the animal —sometimes referred to as the ‘blond beast’ or, more frequently, as the ‘beast of prey’. As Nietzsche portrays it,   one cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness. [24]   This is the regenerative imperative which comes to reveal itself in a technoscientific context with a premodern revaluating  orientation, favouring the ancient, aristocratic  Greek and Roman cultures [25] which produced ‘noble and autocratic men, in whom the animal  in man felt deified and did not lacerate itself’. [26] Nietzsche recounts that during these flourishing ancient times, ‘in the days when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful’, [27] but laments that the inherently aristocratic character of these cultures was eventually extinguished by both the moralism of Platonic philosophy, which converted all values into moral values, and the Christian slave rebellion. The result of the former transformation was the ‘superfetation of the logical’, [28] and the pitting of rationality against the instincts and the unconscious, an idealistic philosophical imperative which Nietzsche prosopopoeically animates in Twilight of the Idols : ‘One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards ’. [29] The latter momentous, ressentiment - driven transformation led in turn to the ‘morbid softening and moralization through which the animal “man” finally learn[ed] to be ashamed of all of his instincts’, [30] his natural  instincts, the body, sexuality, the passions. [31] But, as Nietzsche insists, in effect defining the dogma of his own philosophical countermovement, to ‘ have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for décadence : as long as life is ascending , happiness and instinct are one’. [32]   This is the credo of a naturalistic morality which considers it imperative to establish the means to channel and cultivate the animal in the human being in ways that are neither self - destructive nor socially destructive (at least to the extent that a social structure remains). How Nietzsche intends to accomplish this for the radically aristocratic order he envisions, in his ‘attempt to raise humanity higher’, [33] is not comprehensively clear. Yet every society must ultimately confront this potentially dangerous problem. Christianity confronted it by loathing, obstructing, and repressing the animal  in the human being—‘the ancient animal self’ [34] —leading to a culturally venerated self - lacerating guilt and self - denial, and a final ‘forcible sundering from his [man’s] animal past’. [35]   An animal, Nietzsche says, ‘loses its instincts […] when it prefers what is harmful to it’. [36] But it may be asked: what is lost exactly when an animal ‘loses its instincts’? The answer is the ability to maximize, enhance, overcome, or even preserve itself. This is because   Every animal […] instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power; every animal abhors […] instinctively and with a subtlety of discernment that is ‘higher than all reason’ every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could obstruct this path to the optimum. [37]   To make this maximization possible, at least this much is clear: the sense of guilt, the guilty conscience, and the morality of pity must be diminished. As Nietzsche writes: ‘the overcoming of pity I count among the noble virtues’. [38] This assertion might appear rather anaemic if Nietzsche also did not elevate the instinct of cruelty to the degree that he does, as overcoming pity and increasing cruelty are one and the same. There can be no reluctance in acknowledging that the aggressive  instinct of cruelty possesses a philosophical status higher than all of the other healthy  and natural instincts Nietzsche identifies, insofar as it constitutes, as the ultimate ‘form-giving’ force that imparts ‘new interpretations and directions’, [39] the condition for their activation (in forming a culture or in simply overcoming the ‘anarchy among the instincts’), such as the ‘instinct for self - preservation’ or ‘ self-defense ’ or ‘those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future  grows’, which the ‘entire West has lost’—the instincts (or drives) for authority, organization, or durability. [40]   The argument that the instinct of cruelty possesses for Nietzsche an elevated philosophical status is fivefold. First, Nietzsche associates the ‘masters’ with ‘beasts of prey’ who are, without question, cruel, as they forcibly shape reality. [41] Second, via reference to ‘men of prey’ and ‘barbarians in every terrible sense of the word’, Nietzsche suggests that cruelty lies at the ‘origins of an aristocratic society’ where human beings could be found ‘whose nature was still natural’. [42] Third, in Ecce Homo , commenting on the second essay in On the Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche points to the originality of his conclusion stating that it is in this essay that cruelty is ‘exposed for the first time as one of the most ancient and basic substratum of culture that simply cannot be imagined away’. [43] Fourth, in what may be read as a development of the previous notion, Nietzsche declares that ‘higher culture is based on the spiritualization [or sublimation] of cruelty ’. [44] Fifth and finally, in the Genealogy , Nietzsche expresses the general rule that all ‘instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward ’, [45] while specifying that it was cruelty that was repressed in the ‘animal - man’ after it could no longer discharge itself externally when ‘the more natural  vent for this desire to hurt had been blocked’. [46] Once this occurs and the ‘bad conscience’ is formed the ‘animal - man’ only hurts himself.   If cruelty is the ‘most ancient and basic substratum of culture’, in a sense it is what is most real , [47] likely ‘the basic text of homo natura [that]   must again be recognized’. [48] If ‘higher culture is based on the spiritualization of cruelty ’, then cruelty must be discharged externally before being ‘spiritualized’ (or sublimated), for pure and endless spiritualization would be nihilism. The problem for Nietzsche is to press this basic instinct into service, just as it was the essential psychological problem for the ascetic priest, who ‘pressed into his service […] the whole  pack of savage hounds in man […] under cover of a religious interpretation’. [49] This problem was also later solved in Wilhelmine Germany, as Gustave Le Bon comments: ‘Germany did a really remarkable thing when she harmonized the evangelical ideal of charity, mildness and protection of the oppressed—stigmatized as slave morality by Nietzsche—with an ideal of force, brutality, and conquest so utterly foreign to Christian teachings’. [50] During World War II, the Wehrmacht found their solution in the drug Pervitin.   Nietzsche’s solution should be similar. It will mean the recovery of realist culture , the world of Thucydides and Machiavelli, of the spirit expressed in the ‘Funeral Oration’ of Pericles, where it is written: ‘our boldness has gained access to every land and sea, everywhere raising imperishable monuments to its goodness and wickedness ’, with scorn for ‘security [and] comfort’, [51] since the ‘diminution and leveling of European man constitutes our greatest danger’. [52] However Nietzsche’s solution is explained, the sense of guilt and the morality of pity will have to be diminished, mutatis mutandis , corresponding to a calibrated increase in cruelty and its complement, suffering (which makes noble). As such, the Nietzschean revaluation of all values will be initiated through desublimation  but will not lack a spiritualizing aspect. With it we will witness a real rupturing of social constraints and the breaking of contracts our naturalization permitting us more than, merely, the ‘ bestiality of   thought ’. [53] The explanation must also, necessarily, dwell reflectively on the meaning of Napoleon Bonaparte, since he represents the ‘synthesis of the inhuman  and superhuman ’, the political limit Nietzsche does not exceed, warfare spiritualized, and conquest made more artistic. [54] Nietzsche’s writing is replete with tension and obstructed paths, and cruelty empowered is the key to release.   2. The Heideggerian Conversion   The above description, with its intimations regarding the limits of Nietzsche’s political philosophy and political ontology—defining the final stage of metaphysics and the technological age—vindicates Heidegger’s assertion regarding Nietzsche’s figure of the ‘overman’: that the ‘overman’ is ‘extreme rationalitas  in the empowering of animalitas ’, ‘the animal rationale  that is fulfilled in brutalitas ’ (cruelty and guiltless brutality), [55] indicating that in the final stage of metaphysics ‘[s]ubhumanity and superhumanity are the same thing. They belong together, just as the “below” of animality and the “above” of the ratio  are indissolubly coupled in correspondence in the metaphysical animal rationale ’. [56] In other words, as Heidegger clarifies this statement, the ‘complete release of subhumanity corresponds to the conditionless empowering of superhumanity. The drive of animality and the ratio  of humanity become identical’. [57]   One factor in reading Nietzsche that had previously obscured the close link between rationality  and animality  in his work was, according to Heidegger, the ‘artistic aura’ imposed on Nietzsche’s philosophy by the ‘Wagnerian cult’, who made a ‘literary phenomenon out of it’, privileging its ecstatic Dionysian dimension. Heidegger explains that this was made possible   [b]ecause no one realized how, according to Nietzsche’s doctrine, the representational - calculative […] guarantee of stability [or preservation] is just as essential for ‘life’ [as will to power] as ‘increase’ [or enhancement] and escalation. Escalation [was] taken only in the aspect of the intoxicating, but not in the decisive aspect of at the same time giving to the guarantee of stability […] the justification for escalation. Hence it is the unconditional rule of calculating reason which belongs to the will to power, and not the fog and confusion of an opaque chaos of life. [58]   Securing permanence and providing the guarantee of stability is achieved through desublimation ( brutalitas ) and sublimation (the set of justifications  for enhancement and overcoming)—through technology [59] capable of producing the ‘radiant dream - creation of Olympus’. [60]   The indissoluble link, or even equivalence, that Heidegger sees between ratio  and animality (or the ‘complete release of subhumanity’) in Nietzsche’s philosophy is justified on the grounds that Nietzsche describes ‘instinct’ as a higher form of intelligence: ‘instinct’, Nietzsche writes, ‘is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far—the most intelligent’. [61] When Nietzsche exhibits his ‘sensitivity’ in Ecce Homo  he is alluding to an instinctual capability, one that makes it possible for him to discern ‘all signs of healthy instincts’. [62] It constitutes a kind of artistry or active, constructivist, shaping power at work in his project of the reversal or revaluation of all values. To instinctive activity, Nietzsche typically suggests, belongs ‘a subtlety of discernment that is ‘higher than all reason’ [63] —‘higher than all reason’ yet a kind of reason nonetheless.   According to Heidegger, when Nietzsche utilizes the term ‘instinct’ he is referring to an intellectual ability ‘which transcends the limited understanding’, superescalating  the term to coincide with ‘superhumanity’ (the Übermensch ). [64] Two immediate implications follow from this ‘superescalation’. The first is that the legitimation of the course of action (the necessity of the revaluation of all values, the technique to reverse perspectives) is entirely based on the ‘assured instincts’ of the philosopher legislators’. [65] The second is that, since animality or subhumanity is an intrinsic property of superhumanity, it may be concluded that superhumanity, as Nietzsche conceives of this type, is master of what is ‘elemental’—‘in such a way that precisely the animal element is […] subjugated in each of its forms to calculation and planning (health plans, breeding) […] [with] man [as] the most important raw material’ or resource. [66] The mastery of what is elemental is first and foremost a psychological (technoscientific) mastery of the—especially aggressive—instincts and emotions. This must rely on linguistic encoding as well as ‘protective measures’ and ‘hygienic regulations’. Nietzsche takes his exemplary model of breeding and social control from Hindu morality, which reveals such intensive applications in its calculating attempt to achieve an ‘automatism of instinct’ between all of the castes, [67] as well as from his study of the array of techniques employed by the ascetic priest, described most notably in the Genealogy . [68]   Nietzsche’s political ontology of the will to power is technological in character because of the ordered use of human beings it proposes and justifies, so as to bring about a stability that makes possible further escalations. When Heidegger states that ‘[t]heir use is employed for the utility of armaments’ [69] or war (in an age where physics and technology are militarised), it is entirely in accord with Nietzsche’s supreme example of the channeled fusion of subhumanity (cruelty, animality) and superhumanity. This fusion is made flesh in Napoleon, who represents the limit of Nietzsche’s political thinking, and whose life and history is a significant source of Nietzsche’s political ontology, which, in Heidegger’s words, as the ‘ground for the planetary manner of thinking, gives the scaffolding for an order of the earth which will supposedly last for a long time’. [70]   To read Heidegger on Nietzsche opens a portal to what is rarely, if at all, discussed in contemporary Nietzsche studies, and permits entry into a new range of studies explored by Nietzsche in the area of control and manipulation: the technological subjugation of human beings (their reduction to resources). It is this refusal to read, in the interests of privileging style or imposing upon Nietzsche’s thought a democratic politics, that makes it impossible for contemporary readers of Nietzsche to decode passages such as the following:   From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of domination. […] The possibility has been established for […] a new tremendous aristocracy […] in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist tyrants will be made to endure for millennia […] who [will] employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon ‘man’ himself. [71]   It may be argued that Nietzsche was, in addition to that of the Wagnerian cult, obscured by another sort of artistic aura in the Deleuzian reading, which neglected the energy of preservation in the will to power, as if Nietzsche had no interest in Apollo, no interest in stability and rational planning. Such a reading cannot dismantle the scaffold we mount simply because it does not associate Nietzsche, as Heidegger does, with technique, let alone with a power-based truth or guiltless brutality. Yet Nietzsche has a technological approach to symbolic systems and the reversal of values, as he indicates in Ecce Homo : ‘Now I know how, have the know-how, to reverse perspectives ’. [72]   In the final stage of metaphysics, subjectivity necessarily develops as the brutalitas  of bestialitas, fulfilled by violence and warfare in an age of highly sophisticated lethal weaponry and military equipment. For Nietzsche considered war as possessing a ‘curative power’, [73] and in Heidegger’s treatment of Nietzsche this idea attains an ontological status, while providing a more exacting set of terms to analyse our contemporary locus with respect to both the war industry and information systems. Don Dombowsky Don Dombowsky is a Professor of Political Studies and Philosophy at Bishop’s University in Canada. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics  (2004) and Nietzsche and Napoleon: The Dionysian Conspiracy (2014), and co-editor of Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche : An Edited Anthology (2008). [1]  Don Dombowsky, ‘“The Last Metaphysician”: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s Politics’ (2018) 23(5-6) The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 628-42. [2] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche , Volume III : The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics  (Harper & Row 1987) 8. [3]  Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche , Volume IV : Nihilism  (Harper & Row 1982) 165. [4] Martin Heidegger, ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’ in The End of Philosophy  (The University of Chicago Press 2003) 100 - 1. [5] Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking (Harper Perennial 1976) 74. [6] Heidegger (n 3) 144. [7] See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Vintage Books 1974) §344 [8] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols : or How to Philosophize with a Hammer  (Penguin 1968) ‘Real World’ §6. [9] See ibid ‘Improvers’ §5. [10] Nietzsche (n 7) §361. [11] Heidegger (n 2) 243 - 4. [12]  Nietzsche argues for the necessity of leadership during a period of decadence: ‘We have a different faith; to us the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value […] at some time new types of philosophers and commanders [must appear] […] It is the image [and necessity] of such leaders that we  envisage’, ‘ commanders and legislators [who] reach for the future’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future  (Vintage Books 1966) §§203, 211. Heidegger, likely with Nietzsche’s philosophical legislators in mind, refers to ‘the leaders [who] had presumed everything of their own accord in the blind rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything in accordance with their own will’. Heidegger (n 4) 105. [13] Heidegger (n 3) 145. The ‘greatest of all value - antitheses’ being ‘ Christian values— noble  values’. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ  (Penguin 1968) §37. [14]  These self - legitimating terms occur, for example, here: ‘all healthy  morality, is dominated by an instinct of life’. Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Morality’ §4. And, in another permutation, here: ‘A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power complexes but as a means of preventing  all struggle in general […] would be a principle hostile to life  […] an attempt to assassinate the future of man’. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals  (Vintage Books 1969) II §11. [15]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §9. This is taken as a self - evident function with an implicit difference between the Christian  and noble modes of experiencing value - legislation: ‘The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values […] it is value-creating ’. Nietzsche (n 12) §260. Conversely, the priestly type ‘used morality to raise itself mendaciously to the position of determining human values—finding in Christian morality the means to come to power ’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is  (Vintage Books 1969) ‘Destiny’ §7. [16]  Heidegger (n 4) 102. [17]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §12. To this effect, Nietzsche writes: ‘life itself is essentially  appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation […] exploitation’. Then, more metaphysically condensed: ‘The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else’. Nietzsche (n 12) §§259, 36. [18]  As Nietzsche from his own epochal context realizes, in an age of propaganda  ‘it is in itself a matter of absolute indifference whether a thing be true, but a matter of the highest importance to what extent  it is believed to be true’. Nietzsche (n 13) §23. [19]  Or, as Heidegger writes in ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’: ‘What is in acordance with its will is correct and in order, because the will to will itself is the only order’. Heidegger (n 4) 100. [20]  Heidegger (n 4) 102. [21] ibid 107. [22] Heidegger (n 2) 191. [23]  Nietzsche writes that ‘psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems’. Nietzsche (n 12) §23. Heidegger rightly observes that Nietzsche’s philosophy was ‘grounded in the predominance of ‘psychology’ in the concept of power and force’. Heidegger (n 4) 93. [24] Nietzsche (n 14) I §2. [25]  Nietzsche links ‘the salvation and future of the human race with them unconditional dominance of aristocratic values, Roman values’. ibid I §16. [26] ibid II §23. [27] ibid I §17. [28] Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Socrates’ §4. [29]  ibid ‘Socrates’ §10. [30] Nietzsche (n 14) I §7. [31]  See Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Morality’ §1: ‘to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life ’. [32] ibid ‘Socrates’ §11. [33] Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Birth of Tragedy’ §4 [34]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §18. [35]  ibid II §16. Nietzsche says it succinctly: ‘Christianity desires to dominate beast of prey ’. Nietzsche (n 13) §22. [36]  Nietzsche (n 13) §6. [37]  Nietzsche (n 14) III §7. [38]  Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Wise’ §4. [39]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §12. [40]  Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Expeditions’ §39. [41]  Nietzsche (n 14) III §18. [42]  Nietzsche (n 12) §257. The ‘beasts of prey’ who lie at the origin of the the state which was ‘carried to its conclusion by nothing but acts of violence’ are described by Nietzsche as ‘the most unconscious artists there are […] They do not know what guilt, responsibility, or consideration are, these born organizers; they exemplify that terrible artists’ egoism that has the look of bronze and knows itself justified to all eternity’. Nietzsche (n 14) §II 17. A superlative historical ‘beast of prey’ is the Renaissance figure, Cesare Borgia. Nietzsche situates him among the ‘healthiest of all tropical monsters’. Nietzsche (n 12) §197. [43]  Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Genealogy of Morals’. [44]  Nietzsche (n 12) §229. [45]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §16. [46] ibid II §22. [47]  As Heidegger recognizes: ‘We should not forget that Nietzsche gives the name beast of prey to the highest form of man’. Heidegger (n 2) 39. And Nietzsche reminds us that the ‘Superhuman type […] conceives reality as it is  […] is not estranged or removed from reality but is reality itself’. Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Destiny’ §5. [48] Nietzsche (n 12) §230. [49] Nietzsche (n 14) III §20. [50]  See Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of the Great War  (T. Fisher Unwin 1916) 116. [51] Nietzsche (n 14) I §11. [52] ibid I §12. [53] ibid II §22. [54] Ibid I §16. [55]  Heidegger (n 2) 177. [56]  Heidegger (n 4) 103. [57] ibid 106. [58]  ibid 94. Or it may be said: ‘ Forming horizons belongs to the inner essence of living beings themselves ’; ‘Securing permanence […] is a condition of life’. Heidegger (n 2) 86, 101. In this respect, also, a goal is crucial: ‘Formula of my happiness: A yes, a No, a straight line, a goal ’. Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Maxims’ §44. [59] See Heidegger (n 4) 99. [60]  Heidegger maintains that ‘Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power is prefigured in the sentence [from The Birth of Tragedy ]: “the Greek knew and sensed the terrors and horrors of existence: In order to be able to live at all, he had to set up the radiant dream - creation of Olympus above them”’. He elaborates: ‘The opposition of […] the “barbaric” […] is put here on one side , and beautiful, sublime appearance on the other  […] the idea is prefigured here that the “will” needs at the same time the guarantee of stability and escalation’. This means that technology encompasses both desublimation and sublimation, since the will to will employs both energies at the same time. ibid 95. [61]  Nietzsche (n 12) §218. [62]  Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Clever’ §10. [63]  Nietzsche (n 14) III §7. [64]  Heidegger (n 4) 105 - 6. [65] ibid 107. [66]  ibid 106. A crucial question for Nietzsche concerned the ‘type of human being one ought to breed , ought to will , as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future’. Nietzsche (n 13) §3. [67] Nietzsche (n 13) §57. [68] An experiential reflection that situates Nietzsche within the school of mass psychologists following Hippolyte Taine and Guy de Maupassant and preceding Scipio Sighele, Gustave Le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde. [69] Heidegger (n 4) 103. [70] ibid 95. [71] From Nietzsche’s notes of 1885-86, note 2[57] at < http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1885,2[57] >. [72]  Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Wise’ §1. [73]  Nietzsche (n 8) Foreword.

Introduction   Recent scholarship on early photography examines the photograph as primary source material in order to identify and explore ‘veins of influence’ that operate on, through, and from it. The ‘veins of influence’ analysis developed in that research brings us, whether as professional creatives, academics, or other participants, into dialogue with the photograph. Through such engagement, we become active participants in and agents of influence, shaping how these early images continue to exert influence in both the contemporary and future contexts.[1]   As creative professionals, we bear a responsibility to the image, and primarily to the persons, communities, and cultures represented within the frame. How should we define that responsibility? What are the elements that we should consider in order to create ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation, and thus better ensure a ‘fair and responsible’ influence of such images in the contemporary context, given what we know now? This responsibility necessarily extends to how we curate, exhibit, publish, digitise, catalogue, and otherwise present these images or maintain them for engagement.   This updated approach and revised discourse are especially important when the subjects involved are long gone, belong to shrinking communities, or otherwise lack a voice to contribute to the conversation and advocate for themselves. An optimal outcome of the fair and responsible treatment of these early photographs would be a re-evaluation of how, for example, Sri Lanka’s Vedda community is represented, to now improve engagement, fulfil unmet promises, and build meaningful dialogue that includes them in processes of community building and self-determination. The same images that once cast damaging shadows over this community, relegating them to positions of unimportance and primitiveness, have arguably contributed to their ongoing marginalisation. The way these images portrayed them in the past denied them the chance for progress. A retelling of that past, along with a re-assessment of the photographic documentation to present a more balanced narrative, would serve to celebrate Vedda identity in a respectful and empowering manner.   Through a case study of an extensive collection of early twentieth-century photographs of Sri Lanka’s Vedda community, taken by noted anthropologists Charles and Brenda Seligman, we will explore possible frameworks for what constitutes ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation of these images today, in the many platforms which may potentially showcase them, including the physical gallery, digital feature, documentary review and record, and the archives. Respecting the principles espoused herein, this article will show photographs already in the public domain through the Seligmans’ own publication.   The Seligman Collection, comprising some 400 glass negatives and prints and now part of the British Museum’s collection, documents the Seligmans’ field research on the Veddas in 1908.[2] This body of work has not been examined in this manner before and remains largely unnamed and unnumbered.[3] The Seligmans published their findings in the seminal publication The Veddas , which includes 72 photographs from the Collection as illustrations.[4]   To provide a proper historical context for this Collection, we will begin with a brief review of British colonial presence in Ceylon and the role that early photography played there. We will examine period perspectives on the Veddas as reflected in writings by colonials and others. This review will shed light on the cultural context in which the Seligmans were operating, which likely influenced both their research approach and the visualizations, through the photographs they took and selected for their publication. We will then briefly analyse the Seligmans’ study itself, noting key aspects of their methodology, relevant findings, and the photographs. The photographic process that the Seligmans followed over a century ago differs significantly from contemporary visual anthropology practices. By comparing these approaches—albeit in broad strokes—we can understand how the field has developed and how these developments reflect on the subject matter. Such comparisons highlight the ethical and legal developments related to human rights and the preservation of cultural dignity, particularly in research. In this way, we can better inform our understanding of the processes needed to develop a framework for what might be considered a ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation of the Collection images in a contemporary context.   Colonial Presence and Photographic Discourse   To understand the cultural context in which the Seligmans were operating, we need to consider the nature of British presence in Ceylon (since 1972 Sri Lanka), the colonial use of photography, and the prevailing perspectives on the Vedda community. Ceylon under the British contributed to the empire’s prime purposes of profit, power, and prestige. Propaganda about the colonial mission of civilising was an integral part of the colonial narrative, but the facts of the matter were somewhat different. As in India, so in Ceylon, there was a gap between the realities of imperial rule and the justifications of it which aimed to ward off criticism at home and among the colonial subjects. The administration’s approach to the Vedda community provides a clear example of this dissonance, with repeated efforts to ‘civilize’ and tame the community, which ultimately worked against Vedda interests and threatened their cultural existence.   Ceylon has a long history of occupation by conquerors and colonisers. From the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, Ceylon was colonized in part, first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch and finally by the British from 1802 until 1948, when the country gained its independence. [5]   The advent of photography conveniently coincided with the growth and consolidation of Britain’s empire, providing an impetus to the medium. Indeed,   [t]hrough means often complex and subtle, […] [photography] engaged viewers to look at the colonized through a pictorial dynamic of realist exoticism with varied results. Colonial photographs nonetheless often engender ambiguous and fluctuating relationships between the photographer or observer and the subject peoples and terrains.[6]    Frederick Fiebig’s 1850s salt print calotypes, now housed in the British Library, form the earliest known collection of ‘original’ (ie, not prints of originals) photographs of Ceylon. Other key commercial photographers operating in Ceylon in the mid-nineteenth century, either as travellers or through a more permanent presence on the island, included Samuel Bourne (Bourne & Shepherd), John Thompson, Joseph Lawton, Henry Cave, Colombo Apothecaries, AW Andree, Cyrus Koch, Henry Martin, Lawton & Co (Swaminathan Kandiah Lawton), Plate & Co, Scowen & Co, and Skeen & Co. Local photography studios tended to adopt standard classifications of photographic categories that included portraiture and ethnographical studies, often labelled as ‘native types’ or ‘racial studies’.[7] Gathering photographs under these broad headings helped to create ‘enduring markers’ of social status, religion, custom, ritual, ethnicity, and where various cultures stood in the indigenous hierarchies of high to low.[8]   Photographers found a ready market for portraits of the Veddas, indigenous people who wore few clothes. A notable example is the official album for the Royal Ophir Tour of the Duke and Dutchess of York in 1901, later King George V and Queen Mary, during which the couple visited Ceylon for a few days. That album features two images of Vedda men posed to show action with bows and arrows, and another of a cooking show. [9]     Early Writings on the Veddas   The earliest and much-referenced English-language account of the Veddas comes from Robert Knox’s 1680 publication, An Historical Relation of Ceylon . For centuries after, this work served as an important source of knowledge about Ceylon, including the Vedda community, and became a colonial classic, providing British leaders with new information about the island. Knox’s insights were based on nearly 20 years of captivity in Ceylon, during which he was in and out of ‘open’ jail, meaning he was allowed to roam the island freely. While his observations were undoubtedly shaped by his own prejudices, Knox was seen as providing an honest portrayal because he was perceived as a straightforward man who did not ‘dress the thought’. [10] Ironically, Knox’s account of the Vedda community became an authoritative reference, despite the fact that it was based purely on hearsay—Knox himself admitted to never having seen one of the ‘wild men’ he described. [11]  His depiction of a Vedda man, described by later commentator John Bailey as a ‘fancy portrait and decidedly flattering’, is evidence of his unfamiliarity with the community. [12]  Yet Knox’s account, though inaccurate, provided a detailed description of Vedda character, customs, property rights, diet, rituals, and clothing, and remains highly influential. Even the Seligmans credited him as the first to accurately describe the Veddas. [13]   By the mid- to late nineteenth century, further commentary on the Veddas emerged, mostly by colonial administrators who assumed the role of scholars due to their authority and access. One such administrator was John Bailey, who, based on his personal and repeated investigations, offered early ‘ground-truths’ about the Veddas. Bailey, who oversaw the Badulla region, home to the ‘most barbarous Vedda tribes’, took an interest in their habits and customs. [14]  He argued that the Veddas represented the ‘original’ and ‘pure’ indigenous man, focusing on the jungle-dwelling tribes because they maintained isolation from other races, thus preserving their supposed unique ‘peculiarities’. [15]  Like others of his time, Bailey also recorded the Veddas as intellectually inferior, stating that their frequent ‘perplexed’ manner was common among ‘people of weak intellect’. [16]   Around the same period, the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland (founded in 1845) published a few articles on the Veddas. [17] These articles often repeated the ideas of previous writers like Knox and Bailey, with little grounding in field research. The earliest article, published in 1851 by Reverend J Gillings, already noted the perceived corruption of the ‘pure’ Vedda identity through intermarriage with the majority ethnic group, the Sinhalese, reflecting a concern among scholars that such assimilation would erase an opportunity to study this ‘rare and treasured human specimen’. [18]  Colonial efforts to civilize the Veddas were evident in their attempts to settle them in smallholder lots with houses, efforts that were largely unsuccessful. The Veddas, resisting domestication, returned to the forests, continuing their traditional hunting practices and eschewing formal education, remaining ‘totally destitute’. [19] Furthermore, Gillings expressed disappointment in their resistance to Christianity, despite some success with coastal groups. [20] His writing reflects the missionary zeal common among colonials, who saw the Veddas as untamed and in need of saving.   In 1881, prominent scientist Dr Rudolf Virchow published a study on the Veddas’ origins in the same journal, in which he claimed that the Veddas had biological links to other South Asian indigenous groups, [21]  with conclusions based solely on skull measurements sent to him in Germany. [22]  He never set foot in Ceylon. Virchow theorised that the Veddas were related to Dravidian or pre-Dravidian tribes of Hindustan, bore little resemblance to Tamils, and that the Sinhalese showed evidence of Vedda genetic influence, likely through intermarriage. Despite never observing a living Vedda, Virchow offered extensive commentary on their social behaviour, echoing earlier authors like Knox and Bailey. His assertions about their intellectual inferiority, based on the size of their skulls, reflected the pseudo-scientific racism prevalent in the era. Virchow concluded that their inability to count or plan beyond the present day, along with failed educational efforts, proved the ‘inferiority of the race’. [23]   In 1902, American explorers HM Hiller and WH Furness documented their two-week visit with the Veddas, similarly describing them as primitive and noting their ‘unwashed, uncombed and all but unclad appearance’. Though their work has since been criticized as subjective and insubstantial, it reflected the prevailing colonial attitudes of the time. The explorers’ documentation included a few photographs, capturing these negative perceptions visually. [24]   Virchow’s ideas on physiological distinctions and origins were later echoed by Swiss naturalists Fritz and Paul Sarasin, who conducted five scientific expeditions to Ceylon between 1883 and 1907. Initially focused on zoology, the Sarasins’ later expeditions shifted to anthropological research on the island’s indigenous peoples, the Veddas, likely inspired by Virchow’s studies. [25]  Unlike Virchow, the Sarasins conducted fieldwork in Ceylon, collecting over 400 artefacts, skeletal remains of over 90 individuals, and more than 500 photographs. In their collection of portraits, we find early studies of the Veddas, very much following the period anthropological oeuvre of ‘mug shots’, rather than sociological studies. The Sarasins, in their 1907 visit, just before the Seligman visit, also ‘established the existence of a stone age upon the island […] [and objects] most reasonably attributed to the Veddas’. [26]   Their anthropological work included studies of Vedda skulls, following the period’s trend of racial anthropology, focusing on physical features over social or cultural contexts. They concluded that the Vedda phenotype was distinct from other Sri Lankan groups, but this assertion has been challenged by recent research. For example, Samanti Kulatilake’s study of the Sarasins’ collection found no significant cranial morphological differences between the Vedda and other Sri Lankan groups, suggesting that the long-held notion of Vedda distinctiveness may have been influenced by outdated or biased scientific approaches. [27]   The recurring themes in these various writings—primitive, unintelligent, hopeless—reflect the colonial mindset that reduced the Veddas to a subhuman species, albeit one deemed worthy of study. The Seligmans operated within this cultural context, informed by both scientific and popular ideas that framed the Veddas as objects of curiosity, backwardness, and inferiority.   The Seligman Study, 1908   Dr Charles Seligman and his wife Brenda conducted a significant anthropological study of the Vedda community during their expedition to Ceylon in 1908. Their research, officially commissioned and supported by figures including Cambridge anthropologist Dr AC Haddon and colonial administrators Sir Henry Blake and Henry McCallum, was driven by the belief that the Veddas were one of the most ‘primitive’ surviving races, potentially on the verge of extinction, thus their remit was to explore the Veddas’ ‘social life and religious ideas […] as thoroughly as possible’.[28] As such, the Seligmans’ work was heavily publicized and people eagerly awaited the results, viewing the study as crucial to understanding both the past and future of Ceylon. Newspaper coverage of the time echoed these sentiments, reporting that:   Ceylon has perhaps more than any contemporary ‘modernised’ country—for she is not yet wholly and completely civilised […] [The] few surviving primitive Ceylonese, the fast disappearing Veddas, stand as one of the few remaining proofs of a branch of the great theory of evolution propounded by Darwin and since applied by such thinkers as Haeckel, Thomas, Henry Huxley, and Buckle.[29]    The expectation was that the research would be ‘exhaustive in nearly all the details worthy of investigation’ regarding this ‘primitive’ and ancient group, though in fact the Seligmans only encountered and studied four families.[30]   In 1911, the Seligmans published the illustrated volume  The Veddas , which remains the ‘standard work’ on this ‘very primitive and interesting people’, as the Royal Anthropological Institute website informs us today.[31] The publication gained  iconic status that endures as  a ‘pioneering ethnology’ and a ‘standard reference work of the social structure and material culture of the Veddas’. Even now, some Sri Lankan academics accept the Seligman ethnographic research methodologies without challenge.[32]    While the study provided detailed accounts and extensive data, what should be kept in mind is that the photographic process may have been less that ‘fair and responsible’. At the time of the study, there were no photographing protocols. Some of their approaches appear questionable from today’s perspective. Nonetheless, the Collection remains extremely important for historical data, perspectives, and of course the images that were published. Photography was a key feature of the study and the Seligmans ‘devoted the whole of [their] attention to obtaining a reasonably complete series of photographs’. [33] The methodology was new, there were no protocols, and the results were iconic.   The study recorded what were new findings for the time, particularly because Brenda Seligman gained access to Vedda women and children. This allowed her to photograph and study more intimate instances of their family life, including making phonograph recordings of lullabies. She gained access to activities which men were not allowed to witness. Of the nearly 400 photographic glass negatives that are now part of the British Museum collection, some 71 photographs appear as illustrations in the Veddas  publication. Some of these Seligman admitted to touching up, in particular those documenting the dances at Sitala Wanniya and Bandaraduwa, to minimise the blurring from the movement. [34] Some photographs cover the Vedda dances of Kirikorana, Bambara Yaka, and Pata Yaka. We know now that the Kirikorana has sacred features, as likely do the other dances. In the absence of protest and clarification from the living Vedda community, what is the best practise for the sharing of these dance and ritual photographs now? How should they be handled in the Seligmans’ publication now that we know what we do? If Brenda Seligman gained access to photograph the Vedda women and their children in situations where men were not allowed, how can we rationalise breaching that privacy by showing these photographs to the public eye?   Another aspect of the Seligmans’ published photography that has come under scrutiny is the potential staging of Vedda subjects. Seligman himself observed that the Veddas were often ‘fetched’ to meet travellers at rest houses, where they would appear dressed in traditional Vedda attire, despite normally dressing like neighbouring peasants when not on display.[35] This suggests that even during the Seligmans’ study, there may have been a performative element in the Veddas’ presentation to outsiders, raising doubts about the authenticity of some of the photographs and observations. Nishanka Wijemanna has justly criticised the way the Veddas were presented in these images, arguing that they were dressed up as ‘showpieces’ for the benefit of foreign observers, thus reinforcing the stereotype of them as uncivilized and barbaric.[36]   The Seligmans’ study also raises ethical questions in view of its scientific evaluations and suggestion that ‘the few unsophisticated Veddas of the present day do in fact represent the aboriginal   inhabitants of Ceylon’. In support of this thesis, they referred to the work the Sarasins, using this and their own observations to separate the Veddas from the Sinhalese on the grounds that there were ‘obvious external characters in which the Veddas differ from the Sinhalese […] [at] a single glance’.[37] They compared certain measurements of the Vedda male being some three inches shorter than the Kandyan (Sinhalese) as further proof of such genetic distinction, not considering (as others before also failed to do) that such shorter height could have been due to nutrition.     The anthropologist James Brow, who undertook extensive field research on the Veddas in the 1980s, draws our attention to the problem that ‘the search of racial and cultural purity became an increasingly dominant theme in their [European’s] inquiries, and that their ability to discover it was greatly enhanced by the division of the Veddas into two kinds. Even the Seligmans, whose ethnography ushers in the period of modern anthropology as applied to the Veddas, were still under the spell of these concerns’.[38] Indeed, the Seligmans repeatedly note that the ‘Veddas have been regarded as one of the most primitive of existing races’.[39] Their aim was to ‘isolate the customs of the ‘pure blooded’ Veddas from those of the ‘half-breed’ combination of Sinhalese and Vedda strain, so that the ‘authentic’, ‘original’, and ‘ancestral’ customs of the Veddas can be discovered’.[40]   Nonetheless, we should also be aware of the potentially harmful biases that the photographs cast. Today, the Collection remains extremely important There is thus a need to establish a more effective approach to managing and disseminating the Collection through appropriate contextualisation.     Ethical Extrapolations   At the time of the Seligmans’ anthropological work in the early twentieth century, there were no formalised research ethics or institutional guidelines. Credibility relied heavily on the reputation of the researcher and photography, while used, was not yet recognised as a rigorous anthropological tool. This began to shift in the 1930s with the pioneering work of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, whose fieldwork in Bali (1937-9) contributed to the foundation of visual anthropology. Mead and Bateson aimed to document cultural behaviour as it unfolded naturally, stating that their goal was ‘to shoot what happened normally and spontaneously, rather than to decide upon the norms and then get [the subjects] to go through these behaviours’.[41] Their methodological approach, centred on a ‘disciplined subjectivity’, treated the camera as a neutral recording instrument rather than an illustrative device, thereby setting a precedent for ethical engagement through visual media.[42]   The aftermath of the Second World War catalysed a global movement toward codifying human rights and dignity, influencing how research, representation, and consent were subsequently framed. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasised the ‘inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’, while Articles 26 and 27 underscored the right to education and cultural participation.[43] The 1945 founding Constitution of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) likewise spoke to the importance of accurate cultural representation, stressing that member governments are ‘agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives’.[44] Later frameworks, such as the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, affirmed that Indigenous communities ‘have the right to the dignity and diversity of their cultures, traditions, histories, and aspirations [to be] appropriately reflected in education and public information’.[45] Although these instruments do not address photographic representation directly, they provide a foundational basis for ethical reflection on the use of such media in research, publication and exhibition contexts.   Today, a growing number of academic and research institutions, along with the communities they engage, have developed comprehensive ethical frameworks to guide responsible scholarship, particularly in cross-cultural and historically asymmetrical settings. Guidelines such as the ‘Code of Ethics for Research in the Social and Behavioural Sciences involving Human Participants’ (Netherlands)[46] and the ‘Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings’ articulate frameworks premised on concepts of fairness, respect, care, and honesty. The latter’s Article 8 (Respect) advises researchers to explore potential cultural sensitivities to avoid violating customary practices, while Article 12 stresses the importance of tailoring informed consent procedures to local contexts for meaningful understanding.[47] The ‘National Inuit Strategy on Research’, co-developed with Inuit leadership, frames research as a tool for achieving social equity and calls for ‘respectful relationships’.[48] Similar concerns are addressed in the ‘Protocols for Native American Archival Materials’, which guide institutions in handling sensitive heritage content.[49] Notably, the Warburg Institute’s decision to remove select early photographs of the Pueblo community from public access, citing cultural sensitivity, demonstrates the growing institutional recognition of ethical responsibility in archival and visual practices, as does that Institute’s development of a protocol for those materials. These evolving norms form a crucial backdrop against which we can ethically reconsider the Seligmans’ visual anthropological work.   These policies and conventions reflect ethical values that touch people’s lives, operating not only to grow community conscience but also to inform personal micro ethics, including those that assist in evaluating and rationalizing ‘ethically important moments in research practice’.[50] Guillemin and Gillam, in their astute coverage of ethical values, ask us to be ‘reflexive in an ethical sense [which] means acknowledging and being sensitized to the micro-ethical dimensions of […] practice and, in doing so, being alert to and prepared for ways of dealing with the ethical tensions that arise’.[51]   Though the Seligmans did not benefit from these policies to guide their photographic protocols and research, we now have the advantage of them and of hindsight. Given the iconic and pioneering stature of their study, it becomes imperative to properly frame the Collection images, not only to qualify their authority in light of recent learnings but to develop different approaches. A sad truth that underscores the importance of obtaining better narratives is that these past biases, including those depicted through visual media, may have contributed to the colonial and later Sri Lankan government’s poor treatment of the Veddas. The Veddas were forced out of their natural habitats starting with colonial development because they were considered ‘primitive’ and ‘totally destitute’, imagery that stayed in the wider community consciousness. These actions of neglect continue today with forced displacement and attempts to erase the identity of the group. In recent times, the Sri Lankan census even removed the classification of ‘Vedi’ in 1963.[52]   Recent publications surveying the plight of the Vedda community conclude that ‘these communities are faced with insurmountable challenges that rob their dignity and self-esteem when identifying themselves as the people of this land’.[53] The migration and / or forced displacement of the Vedda communities into areas where the government promised them land—promises that have not been met to this day—remains an ongoing issue.[54]   Engagement with the Collection and its ‘Re-Presentation’   Knowing what we do now, the central issue is how we should approach this collection to present it in the various platforms on which these images could feature, in such a way as to be ‘fair and responsible’ including, essentially, in ways that dignify the Vedda community. How can we display these photographs in a manner that avoids reinforcing outdated and harmful stereotypes—such as portraying the Vedda as primitive, unintelligent, or unworthy of recognition—that have historically caused them so much harm? In this context, re-evaluating the Seligman Collection and reframing the narrative may offer an opportunity to challenge existing biases against the Veddas and provide an alternative perspective that highlights their history and lifestyle, thereby elevating their recognition and status.   While a comprehensive review of the entire collection is beyond the scope of this study, several key points emerge that guide and contribute to the principles of ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation, that include the following:   1. Preface the Collection with Historical and Ethical Context:  The archival presentation should include a preface contextualizing the Collection’s development within its historical period, noting the absence of ethical frameworks that might have influenced the Seligmans’ methodology. It is likely that Charles and Brenda Seligman may have unconsciously perpetuated the cultural biases and stereotypes prevalent at the time regarding the Vedda community. Acknowledgment of this potential bias should precede the Collection.   2. Engage the Vedda Community and Local Scholars:  Such local involvement, along with connecting to points of origin, can inform and culturally sensitise curation. Collaboration with contemporary Vedda community leaders and local scholars to notate and comment on the collection and individual images, would further inform the archival depth of these images by including community perspectives, memories, and contemporary treatment of the images. Their insights should inform the contextualization of the images using culturally relevant knowledge. Representatives from the Sri Lankan Ministry of Culture, responsible for safeguarding Vedda heritage, could be involved in this process. Each photograph should be individually reviewed and annotated by Vedda community members to incorporate their perspectives on content and optimal display practices. These annotations should form part of the Collection’s archival documentation, ensuring that the presentation is guided by Vedda community authority in both public and archival contexts.   3. Protect Private and Sacred Content:  Images that infringe on personal privacy or depict sacred rituals should remain restricted and reserved solely for scholarly research, governed by institutional protocols. Public access should only be granted with explicit consent from the Vedda community, and such permissions must be formally documented. In particular, photographs depicting female activities, rituals, and sacred dances should not be publicly exhibited until the Vedda community authorizes their display or provides interpretive guidance to enable a nuanced understanding.   4. Establish Institutional Guidelines:  Institutions should develop and publicly share guidelines that reflect best practices for re-evaluating early photographic collections. The current lack of transparency in these efforts limits broader learning and collaboration. Public dissemination of these protocols would benefit institutional teams and stakeholders by incorporating the perspectives of those directly impacted by the presentation, promoting equitable and informed representation of colonial-era photographic archives.   Conclusion   Early authorities on the Veddas became experts primarily by extolling new knowledge and through repeated, often unchecked validation. By contrast, the Seligmans’ study was more rigorous, with focused attention on gathering findings for publication, further supported by funding. This study was not only pioneering but also credible, gathering important observational data that, while possibly distorted through a colonial lens, can nonetheless be reviewed in a contemporary context. Furthermore, the Seligmans’ objective appears to have been honourable, demonstrating a commitment to gaining ground truths and showing an appreciation for firsthand contact to enhance research credibility. Photography was a critical component of this endeavour, introducing a novel methodology that illuminated and supported his findings.   The criteria for evaluating whether there is ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation in these early images should consider the methodologies of picture-taking acceptable at the time, acknowledging that no formal guidelines existed, as well as to consider the objectives of the researchers. Those early studies and imaging exercises operated under different guidelines than those known and recommended today. While it can be argued that the Seligmans acted in good faith, this does not imply that they adhered to the standards of respect expected by contemporary human rights norms. Prefacing the context of the photographs encourages us to reflect, learn, and engage, utilising valuable historical endeavours to reshape narratives. My hope is that this review raises critical questions that we must address to gain new knowledge and consciously build upon the ‘fair and reasonable’ re-presentation of early photographs of peoples, generally, and in doing so also strengthen our individual and community consciences when we interact and intersect with these early images. Shalini Ganendra Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research integrates nearly three decades of programming experience with a foundation in legal training. She actively investigates theoretical frameworks through the lens of creative practices and cultural histories, particularly in under-researched regions such as Sri Lanka. Her work foregrounds the complex interplay between tradition and contemporary dynamics, offering alternative modes of engagement that are deeply attuned to diverse cultural contexts.   Shalini has received numerous accolades for her contributions to cultural development and community impact, including the Knighthood of St Gregory the Great (DSG) from the Holy See and the Chevening Fellowship from the United Kingdom. She has held visiting academic appointments at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, serving also as an Associate Academic in Oxford’s Department of the History of Art. Shalini read law at the University of Cambridge, earned an LL.M. from Columbia University Law School, and qualified as both a Barrister (UK) and an Attorney in New York. [1] Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra, Veins of Influence: Colonial Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in Early Photographs and Collections (Neptune Publishing Pvt Ltd 2023). [2] CG Seligman and Brenda Z Seligman, Collection of Seligman Glass Slides (396) and Prints from Those Slides: Photographs of Vedda Community, Ceylon  (1908). [3] James Hamill, ‘Charles Seligman Glass Slides and Photos, British Museum, Nature of Current Cataloguing’ (11 September 2024). [4] CG Seligman and Brenda Z Seligman, The Veddas  (Cambridge University Press 1911). [5] GC Mendis, Ceylon Under the British  (first published 1952, Gyan Press 2020) 12. [6] Eleanor M Hight and Gary D Sampson, Colonialist Photography, Imag(in)Ing Race and Place  (Routledge 2002) 15. [7] Other categories included plantation views, railways, archaeological sites (and buried cities), British royal visits, botanical gardens (and tropical plants), urban landscape, and elephant captures. [8] Benita Stambler, ‘Context and Content: Colonial Photographs from Kandy, Ceylon’ in H Hazel Hahn (ed), Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary: Global Encounters via Southeast Asia  (NUS Press 2019) 233. [9] George JA Skeen, The Royal visit to Ceylon, April 1901  (Government printer 1901) image numbers 28-30. See < https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PH-QM-00002/ > accessed 9 November 2025. By contrast, the private album of Queen Mary covering that tour has no images of the Veddas, indicating a lack of personal interest in them. See Royal Tour Ophir, 1901. ‘Queen Mary’s Photograph Album Volume 7’  (1901). [10] Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon  (Tisara Prakasakayo Ltd 1981) 48. [11] John Bailey, ‘An Account of the Wild Tribes of the Veddahs of Ceylon: Their Habits, Customs, and Superstitions’ (1863) 2 Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 278. [12] ibid 284. [13] Seligmann and Seligmann (n 4) 6. [14] Bailey (n 11) 279. [15] ibid 278. [16] ibid 284. [17] The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (RAS) has a long and illustrious history as an influential organisation, starting with its grant of royal status in 1823 by King George IV . The RAS’s elite colonial membership, commitment to scholarship, and subsequent, inclusion of elite local members in its various branches reinforced this enduring legacy. The Royal Asiatic Society of Ceylon was the society’s first branch, established in 1845. [18] Rev J Gillings, ‘On the Veddahs of Bintenne’ (1853) 2(2) The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 83. [19] ibid 88. [20] ibid 85. [21] Rudolf Virchow, ‘The Veddás of Ceylon, and Their Relation to the Neighbouring Tribes’ (1886) 9 The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 349. [22] Richard L Spittel, Vanished Trails. The Last of the Veddas  (Geoffrey Cumberlege, OUP 1950) xii. [23] Virchow (n 21) 371. [24] Richard Boyle, ‘Visiting the Veddahs, 1899’ The Sunday Times  (Sri Lanka, 12 June 2016) < http://www.sundaytimes.lk/160612/plus/visiting-the-veddahs-1899-196988.html > accessed 10 August 2024. [25] Samanti Kulatilake, ‘The Sarasins’ Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania’ (2020) 128 Anthropological Science 119, 120. [26] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) 18.  [27] Kulatilake (n 25) 122. [28] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) vii. [29] ‘Seligman’s Lecture to the Asiatic Society - A Link with Old Ceylon’ Ceylon Observer, Supplement  (Ceylon, 26 May 1908). [30] ‘The Sociology of the Ceylon Veddas: Final Investigation by Dr. and Mrs. Seligman’ Ceylon Observer  (Ceylon, 26 May 1908). [31] ‘Charles Gabriel Seligman’ ( Royal Anthropological Institute ) < https://www.therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/obituaries/charles-gabriel-seligman > accessed 10 September 2024. [32] Alex Perera, ‘Centenary of a Classical Study’ The Sunday Times  (London, 2 October 2011) < https://archives.dailynews.lk/2001/pix/PrintPage.asp?REF=/2010/12/22/art32.asp > accessed 30 October 2023. [33] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) 4. [34] ibid 235 fig 2.  [35] ibid vii. [36] Nishanka Wijemanna, ‘Myths and Reality about the Veddas’ (2023) 3 Voice of Citizens 15 < http://citizenslanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Issue-03-English-Final-2.pdf > accessed 5 July 2025. [37] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) 415. [38] James Brow, Vedda Villages of Anuradhapura, A Historical Anthropology of a Community in Sri Lanka , vol 33 (University of Washington Press 1978) 15. [39] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) vii. [40] Brow (n 38) 15. [41] Ira Jacknis, ‘Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film’ (1988) 3(2) Cultural Anthropology 166. [42] ibid 161. [43] United Nations, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (1948) < https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights > accessed 28 October 2023. [44] ‘Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (1945) Preamble < https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%204/volume-4-I-52-English.pdf > accessed 9 November 2025. [45] United Nations, ‘United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ (13 September 2007) < https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-%20the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html > accessed 3 September 2024. [46] ‘Code of Ethics for Research in the Social and Behavioural Sciences Involving Human Participants’ (2016) < https://www.eur.nl/eshcc/media/67289 > accessed 12 July 2025. [47] ‘Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings’ < https://www.globalcodeofconduct.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Global-Code-of-Conduct-Brochure.pdf > accessed 12 July 2025. [48] ‘National Inuit Strategy on Research’ (2018) < https://www.itk.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ITK_NISR-Report_English_low_res.pdf > 23. [49] ‘Protocols for Native American Archival Materials’ < https://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/ > accessed 10 September 2024. [50] M Guillemin and L Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research’ (2004) 10 Qualitative Inquiry 261, 278. [51] Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research’ (2004) 10(2) Qualitative Inquiry 278. [52] Lionel Guruge, ‘Editor’s Note’ (2023) 3 Voice of Citizens 4-5 < http://citizenslanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Issue-03-English-Final-2.pdf > accessed 5 July 2025. [53] ibid. [54] Ahinsaka Perera, ‘Issues Facing the Eastern Indigenous Community’ (2023) 3 Voice of Citizens 9 < http://citizenslanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Issue-03-English-Final-2.pdf > accessed 5 July 2025.

Sarah Dunant is a novelist, broadcaster, and cultural critic whose work blurs the line between historical inquiry and literary imagination. Best known for her fiction set in Renaissance Italy, she gives voice to women whose lives have been obscured by time, deftly merging narrative and historicism. Rendering the past not as backdrop but as pulse, Dunant allows history to unfold with the texture of lived experience. Her acclaimed novels, The Birth of Venus , In the Company of the Courtesan , and Sacred Hearts , have been translated into over thirty languages.   A long-time contributor to BBC Radio 4 and a thoughtful commentator on the intersections of gender, art, and power, Dunant returns with The Marchesa , a novel centred on Isabella d’Este. The Marchesa  offers a vivid reimagining of Isabella d’Este: art collector, political strategist, fashion icon, and one of the most influential women of the Italian Renaissance. Her court is long vanished, her treasures scattered, but thousands of preserved letters remain, housed in the deconsecrated church that now holds Mantua’s state archive.   From this paper trail, Sarah Dunant conjures Isabella’s voice, bold, curious, and unyielding, tracing her life from precocious daughter and reluctant bride to formidable consort and cultural force. Blending fiction with biography and art history, The Marchesa is both an intimate portrait and dialogue with Isabella, and a reflection on how we read the past through the lens of the present.   CJLPA : In your talk, ‘Being lost and being afraid is a part of writing’, you mentioned that before you began writing Sacred Hearts , you knew it would open in a cloistered convent, with the silence broken by the scream of a young girl. That striking image stayed with you throughout the research process.   In The Marchesa , you begin with a very different kind of sensory register: scent. ‘I have always had the most sensitive nose’ is the novel’s opening line, a sharp contrast to the auditory jolt of Sacred Hearts .   Why did you choose to open with Isabella’s sense of smell—her perception of bodies, decay, and perfume—evoking a rich fusion of Renaissance luxury and the physical erosion of her afterlife? Was this sensory focus present throughout your research process?   Sarah Dunant : It’s a good question, actually. The gleam of the idea for this novel came when I was in the archives in Mantua, and I got to step behind the door to take a look at where all the actual documents are stored. It’s an extraordinary building, once a deconsecrated church and an old Jesuit convent, with a mind-blowing amount of history pulsing out at you from stacks and stacks of disintegrating folders. And it struck me, because I already knew then how many letters Isabella had written and how many were written to her, that in some sense Isabella herself was in that archive. She was there in the letters. She saturated the ink of them.   I had this image that when I opened those folders she would somehow be there, hovering above, looking down at me or indeed whichever scholar was studying her. In fact, when I finally sat in the actual reading room, the setting was a huge disappointment; municipal, boring, and bare, so it was harder to hold that image. But at the same time I felt there was also a smell coming off all those disintegrating letters—a slight scent of decay, if you like. Now I already knew that Isabella had a relationship with scent, she produced her own perfumes. And that smell was important to many women at that time because of the relationship of bodies and sweat and dirt.   I’ve always felt that within historical novels, indeed within history, we spend a lot of time with the words but much less time with the senses. So I thought it would be fitting to begin not just with Isabella’s presence, but also her sense of smell.   That idea coalesced the more research I did, the more I understood syphilis, for instance, and what it meant to live with someone who had it, as her husband did. That understanding started to shift how I thought about smell: how it might carry disease, how perfume was also used to ward off the plague as well as mask unpleasant odours.   So I suppose what I’m saying is that that single image of her being present in the archive became a kind of magnet. As my research went on, other ideas fused onto it. There’s a passage later in the book where Isabella actually says the problem with history is that it’s all words, you can’t enter the senses, and she tries to take the scholar back into the court, to taste and smell the food, feel the cloth, hear the sounds. Because that is vital as a way to bring the past alive.   But it isn’t until you remind me, of course, that Sacred Hearts  began with a scream, another version of the senses, something hitting you from history, that I realise this has always been something the historian in me has been drawn to. Indeed, historians are now working on things like soundscapes for particular periods. And so we try to project people back atmospherically and sensuously, as well as through the rather dry, desiccated notion of the word on the page.   CJLPA : The nature of your book involves the interweaving of narrative and history, and you include italicised fragments from Isabella’s real-life letters, which are often verbatim. You then expand on them into a narrative with emotional depth. Rather than inventing a character entirely, it seems you’re really building on what the text gives you, adding interiority while staying grounded in the history and context. How did you approach that layering process, and what guided you in developing a voice and perspective around these documents?   SD : Actually, I think that Isabella is the greatest gift a writer could possibly have, because although she is, in many cases, a piece of work, a definite manipulator—she’s got charm and she’s also politically savvy. She uses letters as part of her diplomatic armoury, both to get what she wants in art and to control political situations when she’s having to rule the state. You start to see how letters contained absolutely everything during that period.   While we now tend to think of letters as something intimate, in that period they served as a kind of armour, especially for a woman with status and influence. For Isabella, they were a tool for everything from managing family relationships to controlling foreign policy or acquiring a work of art.   If you read enough of her words, you begin to watch the chameleon-like shifts in her tone depending on whom she’s addressing. She’s imperious when crossed: when the artist Giovanni Bellini in Venice fails to deliver a painting, she takes him to court to reclaim her money. That’s one kind of Isabella. Then there’s the charming Isabella, as when it’s clear they backed the wrong horse in one of the Italian wars, and she has to be as friendly to France as she was to Spain. You watch her craft letters full of flattery, things like ‘Oh, we’re all wearing the fleur-de-lis here because it’s so wonderful that you won’. Through these letters, you begin to appreciate both her intelligence and her guile. This also highlights how women wielded power at the time: they couldn’t show their hand openly. Both the art market and the diplomatic world, where most decisions were made, were run entirely by men.   How, then, did women make their mark without seeming too pushy? Once I found her voice, I saw she had self-awareness, she knew when to be tough and when to be charming. There’s a moment in the book when her husband is in prison, and she must write a pleading letter to the Queen of France, asking her to intercede. I imagined her sitting, crafting the very flowery prose: ‘Oh, I die a thousand times when I think of my poor husband’. Of course a thousand is too much, and she knows it, but it’s deliberately over the top as a way to get to the Queen. Moments like this gave me the richness of her personality. It’s also a historical observation because it shows how women mixed emotion and diplomacy through letters.   At one level, I think all my historical novels are a political, feminist reclamation of a past usually dominated by men. Ask people to name figures from the Italian Renaissance and very few will come up with a woman’s name. But I wanted to write books that are also a gripping read, so you keep turning pages to find out what happens. Having worked for the BBC over many years, I recall its founder Lord Reith’s idea that good broadcasting should ‘inform, educate, and entertain’. Over time, that word education has come to be seen as rather elitist or threatening in culture. So I have inverted that: if you entertain, you can inform, and maybe even educate, slipping it in under the guise of entertainment.   CJLPA : Going on from this, Isabella is so wonderfully sharp, reflective, but also can be envious, jealous, and performative. In this moment for example, where you write ‘My hand reveals a tremor, deliberate, of course, as I write the words’. Here she’s calculated, and she seems self-conscious of her effect on history.   Did you find moments in her real letters where that kind of theatrical self-awareness emerged? Was there a particular piece of correspondence that revealed the contrast between the woman and the icon, between the strategist and the self-doubting daughter?   SD : What I will say is that sometimes the letters challenge us across time. One in particular stands out: after giving birth to a second daughter, she writes a short, painful letter to her husband saying, ‘the chill that has come over me because I have given birth to another daughter’. For the modern reader, it can be jarring. Too often, we look to the past, expecting people to wear prettier dresses and feel exactly as we do. But if you do the real work of a historian, you begin to understand that their thoughts grew from a different cultural soil.   This letter is a striking example of that. At the time, marriages often faltered if a woman couldn’t produce a male heir. Isabella needs to produce a boy, and six years into her marriage, she hasn’t. And within that letter, I think something else is being revealed about her. The novelist in me thought: I don’t think this woman enjoys sex, actually. I think what she enjoys is the work she’s doing as a collector of art. She takes pleasure in being smart, confident, and politically capable. She doesn’t strike me as one of those women who coasted by on their looks and male attention.   CJLPA : Do you think this was an area where her sister Beatrice thrived in a way Isabella didn’t?   SD : Yes, I think so. And in that case, I wonder if it all felt quite daunting for her, the idea that, as she tells the scholar, ‘I know it is challenging for you to read that word “chill”, but you don’t know what it was like to be me’ .  In that moment, she had failed, again, to deliver a male heir. And that meant they had to keep trying until she did produce those three sons. We don’t often think about that now. We rarely consider that most women at the time would go on to have seven, eight, even nine children, that reality feels so distant from contemporary female experience. But it’s worth remembering: your gender was, in many ways, writing your history for you. And if you wanted to push back against that, you had to be clever, strategic. You had to know when to be sharp, when to be sweet. You had to learn how to survive it.   She’s a gorgeous character for both the novelist and the historian to get their teeth into. Because for the novelist, you can make her life narratively exciting. And for the historian, you can suggest that there are things she’s going to do that you may not necessarily like, coming from your own moment in history. But it seems to me that the imaginative journey of history is to take you back into the past and ask you to soak yourself in difference. And she is a perfect character to do that with, because sometimes she seems very modern, while at other points, she feels absolutely grown from her own moment, in ways that throw a gauntlet down to us.   CJLPA : To touch back on your previous point about Isabella and her sexual relations. There are recurring moments where Isabella complies dutifully with her husband Francesco   II Gonzaga’s sexual advances but registers disgust, such as when ‘he pushes his tongue between my lips […] I get a smell off him […] breath or saliva? […] I feel bile rising in my throat’. This physical revulsion is echoed in her memory of the unsettling, pseudo-sexual relationship between Beatrice and her grandfather, and again later, when Francesco, on his deathbed, acknowledges that Isabella never found pleasure in the bedchamber. How do you see sex and sexual performance functioning in Isabella’s life, and more broadly, in the lives of women of that period?   SD : Well, it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because I have to be aware of myself, that I’m also leading a kind of schizophrenic life. There’s both the novelist and the historian in me. And interestingly enough, that’s exactly what I’m talking about in one of my Radio 4 talks: the historian in me cannot prove how Isabella feels about sex, because there’s no evidence of it. But the novelist can ask questions based on the material that’s being uncovered, and that might lead you to feel a certain way.   There’s an extraordinary letter she writes after all the marriage ceremonies have ended and everyone has left. She writes to her sister — and I’m paraphrasing now — ‘My lord could not be nicer to me, but, oh God, I miss you’. And it’s absolutely clear that, yes, she’s young, yes, she’s homesick, but you feel this is a young girl who’s been through some kind of shock. She’s 16, and she’s been in the marriage bed with someone far more experienced than she is, because that’s how it worked in that period.   When we write historical fiction, there’s always a temptation to include sex, it’s part of the romantic cliché, especially with female characters. But we’re doing that from the perspective of decades of openness, of sex being sold back to us, discussed, deconstructed. In reality, many women in the past may not have liked sex or had the chance to explore it. They couldn’t reflect on it the way we can now, the strange contradictions, the mismatches between love and desire. So I wanted to challenge myself: can I write a good historical novel that doesn’t highlight sex? Because often, in novels or period dramas, it’s all about conflict, love, sex, maybe a bit of torture, the usual hooks. But I was more interested in being honest to the period, imagining a woman whose energy isn’t in the bedroom but in power, collecting, and patronage. That felt truer, and just as compelling.   CJLPA : You’ve said that you couldn’t have written these books 25 years ago because the research simply wasn’t there, and that it’s largely thanks to female historians asking new questions that women like Isabella have become more visible. There’s a moment in the novel where Isabella reflects on this shift herself: ‘Slowly, archives, throughout history founded by men for men, were being invaded by women […] my stubbornness, even my bad behaviour, were now to be celebrated’.   It’s a powerful merging of past and present. How do you see this historical reclamation continuing to evolve, both within scholarship and fiction? And what role do you think novelists can play in pushing it forward?   SD : Well, what I could say is that when I studied history at Cambridge, a long time ago, I don’t think I wrote a woman’s name in an essay, possibly a royal name, but that’s it. The history of women was still something we hadn’t really thought about at all. And because my own journey through life coincides, if you like, with the arrival of feminism, I then watched as women, and some men too, started to ask questions of the past that we hadn’t asked before, which in turn also became about challenging whiteness and attitudes to race.   I think if I have an image of history now, it’s history as a kind of pointillist painting. The past is made up of dots. The artist puts a lot of dots on the canvas, and gradually, if you stand back, you get the form and structure of the painting through these dots. Well, what the last 30 or 40 years has done is add hundreds of thousands of dots, dots that for me certainly highlight the other gender in the world, which is women.   Take the Renaissance. In 1976, the historian Joan Kelly wrote the article ‘ Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ That’s how little we knew about women in the Renaissance at that time. Partly, of course, because the Renaissance becomes very fashionable again at the end of the nineteenth century, when history starts to be ‘invented’ by people like Jacob Burckhardt, and they’re not interested in the women. And partly because the only man who writes art history is Giorgio Vasari, and there’s maybe one woman in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists . There was an orthodoxy up until the 1960s: this is what the past was.   But we have run a truck through that now. Indeed, for me one of most fantastic things about feminism is that it hasn’t just changed the present, it’s changed the past.   Now in doing so, novelists have taken broadly two main routes when resurrecting women in history. One was to concentrate on those who broke the mould and should have been more noticed, and the other to give voice to unknown women who were treated badly. So you had this kind of binary approach: famous but hidden, or invisible victims.   What’s fascinating about a character like Isabella is that she’s a real flawed, but hugely interesting woman. I don’t have to make her a victim; she was never anybody’s victim. I don’t have to make her likable. I don’t have to make her sexually attractive. She can stand on her own two feet and be who she was in history: a complex, powerful human being. That, I think, is the last part of feminism’s journey, that we don’t have to excuse these women, or champion them, or feel sorry for them. They’re just included as part of this rich painting, which, when we stand back, now looks measurably different. And I think that’s so important.   It feels to me that that should be the role of historians: to show that history is more complex than we thought, and it’s always more complex than our own moral judgments forged in our moment in time. Our job is to leave our own morality behind and go back and immerse ourselves in the ‘then’. And that’s what makes Isabella such a wonderful subject, because you are  immersed, because she’s actually talking to you. And in the end, I can’t tell when I’m talking or she’s talking, because the two merge.   CJLPA : You’ve spoken about her determination as a collector and how she had to fight to be taken seriously in a male-dominated art market. But her influence extended beyond collecting, into politics, fashion, taste, and the arts across Europe. Her studiolo  is often a focal point for historians. How do you see her use of aesthetics and patronage as part of her self-fashioning and assertion of power?   SD : She’s a little bit like a very, very early Virginia Woolf with A Room of One’s Own . It’s interesting because we know about places like Urbino and Gubbio, where the Duke of Urbino had small rooms for men to consider the classics, appreciate art, and define themselves as cultural beings. Women didn’t have that space.   Right from the start, Isabella goes for it. She had some training in this, born at the right moment, in the 1470s in Ferrara. The main Renaissance focus is usually Florence, Venice, Milan, and Naples, but places like Ferrara and Mantua had great artists and their own early Renaissance schools.   Isabella grew up in a city saturated with art and with parents who greatly appreciated art. On her mother’s wall was a Rogier van der Weyden Deposition , for example. So Isabella understood art from a young age and was well educated. She was perfectly positioned to build her own collection with clear taste.   This was a time when all the big names were sought after. And I think the wonderful thing about that studiolo  is that right from the start, it has marked out on its walls places where the art is going to go. In the case of her first studiolo , we know what her view was, looking out over the lakes. We know where the paintings would have gone; how, when commissioning works, she would specify details like light direction, even the size and number of the figures to be painted. She was at times—and there is no other word for it—a control freak.   Some artists, Bellini for instance, resisted, wanting more freedom. But she’s also lucky because she inherits one of the great mid to late fifteenth-century painters : Andrea Mantegna . Now, he was old by the time she arrives in Mantua and he’s not a particularly loving character. He clearly takes offence of being bossed around by a 17 year old girl.  They clash, but he still delivers art to her, and this gave her confidence to seek—indeed pester—other artists, including Leonardo da Vinci.   Her hunger for art, her confidence, and upbringing surrounded by art meant she wasn’t nervous about her own taste, which is vital for a collector. But as a woman, this was tricky. The dilemma was how much she charmed versus how much she ordered to get what she wanted.   What I really think about Isabella is that she was very lucky. She was a girl child, much loved by her father, and given a fabulous education. It was a moment when women were beginning to be educated in humanist culture, but it wasn’t intended that they would then use it in the way she did. Because she was smart, the firstborn, and adored, she exuded a kind of confidence from a very early age and clearly quite enjoyed showing off. That’s another reason why she is both adorable and deplorable at the same time.   CJLPA : Are there any pieces in her collection that you were particularly fond of or that stuck out to you?   SD : The piece I love, because the story really shows her bad behaviour, is the little Michelangelo statue, which no longer exists. It’s an amazing story. We know that when Michelangelo was a student in the Medici sculpture workshop in Florence, he copied a trope from Greek and Roman mythology: Cupid lying on a bed of stone, sculpted in marble or bronze. It showed the sculptor’s incredible talent to be able to do this with soft, childish flesh.   Michelangelo made one, and then he and a dealer dirtied it up, sent it to Rome, buried it in the ground, and ‘rediscovered’ it before selling it to a cardinal—this was before Michelangelo had become famous. When the cardinal found out it was a fake, he sold it on. But by the time Isabella goes after it, it’s already a famous fake, because Michelangelo’s name is now well known.   She gets it by going behind the backs of her in-laws, whose state has been invaded by Cesare Borgia. They’re actually staying with her at the time, seeking refuge. And she’s clearly always coveted this piece from the Duke of Urbino’s collection. So she writes to her brother, who’s a cardinal, asking if he can intercede with the Pope, who is Cesare’s father, to get her that little statue. And she does get it.   Of course, it’s bad behaviour, right? But as I have her say, and what she more or less says herself in the letters, is that that’s what you do when you’re a collector. And if men behaved like this, it would be seen as them really knowing what they wanted and getting it—strategic intelligence. So don’t blame me. And I love that about her. I know her brother-in-law was very annoyed about it. I know he made it clear when he won back his state that he’d like things back that had been taken. She writes this incredibly artful letter going, ‘Oh, but I spoke to your wife. She said if she knew that I’d liked it, she would have given it to me. So it’s really just between us families, isn’t it?’   She spins this tale and you think, ‘How could you say this?’ But of course, she wanted the Cupid, she got the Cupid, and she kept the Cupid. So at the same time as you’re enormously impressed, you’re quite shocked.   CJLPA : Returning to another shocking moment, the syphilis outbreak had a significant impact on Isabella and her relationship with Francesco. He was surprisingly brash about the illness, writing in 1508 to his agent at the court of Louis XII of France: ‘Please tell the king that my illness is probably caused by love!’—to explain why he may not be able to fight in battle. At the time, it seems the illness was almost celebrated like a battle wound.   Later, Isabella received a letter stating: ‘His Lordship showed me how the marks of his affliction have healed […] he would like to consummate marriage with you again […] a fresh young girl’. In retrospect, the letter reads as deeply unsettling, especially when viewed through a modern lens, with the knowledge we now have about the long-term ramifications of syphilis.   What impact did Francesco’s contraction of syphilis have on Isabella, both personally and publicly? And is there any evidence that they ceased physical relations after his diagnosis?   SD : It’s a question that I asked myself so many times. She must have known. For instance, after 1509, when she is only 34 and clearly still fertile, there are no more children, so in some shape or form she’s managing to avoid the marriage bed. And yet, there is nothing directly in the letters to back that up. Now, obviously, I haven’t read every letter, but I know the scholars who’ve done all the work on her, and I went to them and said, ‘Have you discovered anything about her talking about her husband’s syphilis?’ I mean, she knows syphilis exists — she mentions it in other letters, but there is or was nothing about him.   There’s this great quote by Thomas Aquinas, which still holds true for Isabella’s moment in history: ‘Prostitution is like the sewer in a great palace’. In other words — it is something men need. Sexual politics in this period is all about pure noble women and virile men; the double standard is ferociously powerful.   By 1509, Francesco had likely been suffering from syphilis for some years, though this wouldn’t have been obvious, since initially the symptoms disappeared, giving the illusion of a cure. The disease was still new and poorly understood. (It comes, we think now, from the new world.) It would return in cycles, and a man could remain sexually contagious for three or four years even without visible signs. But again there is no documentation of how noblewomen responded. It’s almost as if they weren’t supposed to know.   So I needed to ask the question, how will the reader find out how she knew? It was when reading Francesco’s letters that I discovered the comment you mentioned to the French king. And then I found that fabulous letter from her secretary when Francesco tells him how his ‘marks of affliction’ have healed, saying outright that he wants his wife home to get into bed with him again.   I love that letter, because we also know the couple had a row around this time. We know, for instance, that she writes back to him furiously. She never mentions his ‘invitation’ or indeed makes any reference to that letter at all. But she basically says, ‘Don’t give me a hard time. You have nothing to condemn me for’. Now, normally, she’s sweet as pie in the letters she writes to him. Whatever she’s personally feeling, it’s ‘Oh, I miss you, I love you’. She plays along with the narrative of the good wife. But in that one, she really goes for him. That, if you like, is the moment when the novelist and the historian go hand in hand again. Because I am sure she knew about the syphilis, and I’m sure it was therefore deliberate that she doesn’t sleep with him.   CJLPA : Giulio Romano created the Room of the Giants  at the Palazzo Te in Mantua, completing it between 1532 and 1535. The fresco portrays the dramatic story of the giants’ rebellion against the gods, drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, specifically Ovid’s Metamorphoses . The Room of the Giants  was commissioned not by Isabella d’Este, but by her son, Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that  whilst Isabella might have resisted the grotesque elements of the Room of the Giants, she was likely captivated by the sheer imagination behind it.   How do you think Isabella’s personal tastes and ambitions influenced her collaboration with Giulio Romano, and what does that reveal about her as a patron and a woman navigating artistic power?   SD : The thing about Isabella is that she was quite traditional in her views on art, particularly when it came to what she felt was morally or aesthetically right. And art was taking a real turn in the 1520s. We were moving away from the height of the Renaissance. Partly, that shift was due to the Sack of Rome, but also because the Renaissance itself was leaving Rome behind. This marked the beginning of the Mannerist period: artists had mastered human anatomy and perspective, and the style began to evolve, becoming more grotesque, more extravagant.   Before long, the Counter-Reformation would sweep in and strip art of its sensuality, responding to anxieties about the Reformation. But I don’t think Isabella was particularly fond of the more fleshy, erotic elements emerging at that time. Take Giulio Romano, for example, an extraordinarily talented painter who trained with Raphael and who in the Palazzo Te created what we now recognise as the first true mannerist palace. He experimented with architecture in ways that Michelangelo would later echo, but Giulio did it first. He was also a master of erotic art. Even today, at the Palazzo Te you’ll see priapic gods cavorting with willing females, or Apollo in a ceiling lunette driving the chariot of the sun across the sky wearing nothing under his billowing tunic. it’s extravagant, overtly sensual, and likely not to Isabella’s taste. She had a certain prudishness.   Nevertheless, I think she appreciated greatness when she saw it. I imagine Isabella sitting in those rooms, recognising how extraordinary it all was. I led a tour to Mantua and Ferrara in the autumn and even today, when people walk into the Room of the Giants, they are stunned. They’ve never seen anything like it. Romano reshaped the room itself, so it no longer feels like a room, but a cave. The original floor was made of pebbles that rose to meet the walls. As one scholar put it, it’s like ‘grotesque Disney’. Completely immersive. You weren’t just looking at art; you were in it. More like stepping onto a film set than viewing a painting.   CJLPA : As we reach the end of The Marchesa , the ending folds in on itself, the scholar becomes the author, the archive becomes the novel. It’s a quietly profound moment about authorship, legacy, and the act of writing history. What does that cyclical structure mean to you? Is it a comment on how we carry the past forward, or how women, across time, help write and rediscover one another into being?   SD : I didn’t know how The Marchesa  would end when I began writing. I knew Isabella’s personality would take the lead, the more I learned about her, the more her voice asserted itself. I always knew I wanted her to be in a kind of silent conversation with the scholar. And looking back, I think the book is partly about how one writes historical fiction, if one is serious about the history.   I’ve now written six of these novels and spent 25 years in the Renaissance, which ironically wasn’t a period I studied when I trained as a historian. So I came to it as an outsider, just as all this rich new research was unfolding. My approach is always split: the historian in me is constantly checking facts, making sure I’ve got the context right. The novelist, though, is waiting for that moment when I can turn knowledge into narrative, when I feel grounded enough in the truth to imagine beyond it.   That shift is almost osmotic. I sit with the research for so long that eventually I stop analysing it and start inhabiting it. I cease to be the historian and become the novelist. So that moment at the end of the book, when Isabella stops being the historical figure and becomes instead a character in a novel, is, in a way, what I believe historical fiction should  do.   It was fascinating being in the company of someone so strong, so smart, so flawed, who could only do what she did by being absolutely determined. You have to show her behaving badly and still forgive her. That’s why I liked the device of her talking to the future, and the future talking back through the scholar. The scholar’s journey is about saying: I leave my present behind and enter your past.   And I have to say, Lily-Rose, it’s really important to me that you have seen so much in it, because I’m now an older white woman. I’m trying to have a conversation about the present in the past. And I would like to have that conversation with people exactly at your moment in life. Because there are so many things to be talked about. The battles certainly haven’t been won. We still need spaces where these intergenerational dialogues can happen. So the fact that you got so much from The Marchesa,  and enjoyed  it—well, that’s everything.   Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin is a Cambridge University graduate, the External Arts Officer at CJLPA , and Managing Editor at The COLD Magazine . Currently working at DMG Media, she will soon begin a Magazine Journalism MA at City, St George, and she is the recipient of the Stationers’ Award. As a journalist and editor, she explores art and culture through film, theatre, literature, fashion, and visual art, with a focus on social issues, cultural context, and representation.