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

John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Anderson is famously redefining egalitarianism in the field of political philosophy. Conventionally, philosophical debate has imagined the two concepts of equality and freedom to be polar opposites. Anderson has sought to challenge this perception by subordinating the popular egalitarian notion of distributive equality to that of democratic equality, which brings the concepts of freedom and equality together. Anderson’s groundbreaking work extends beyond political philosophy and engages in interdisciplinary research across fields and topics such as racial integration, the philosophy of economics, theories of value and rational choice, and the history and philosophy of the work ethic. In this interview, Anderson reveals the importance of empirical analysis within philosophy, what we can learn through an analysis of the history of egalitarianism and the role of social movements within its discourse, and how present inequalities have come about.   CJLPA : Could you perhaps tell us a bit about your trajectory to becoming a philosopher?   Professor Elizabeth Anderson : I started off in college studying economics, but there I noticed issues that I had at a very foundational level. These were questions like: should we assume that preferences are all in the person’s self-interest? We often choose to observe social norms: for example, out of norms of etiquette, you don’t take the last roll in the basket. But if the host offers it to you, you would prefer that to not having it. I thought economics wasn’t sorting out the distinctions well, and that was leading to mistakes in welfare economics. If people are declining to do things just out of social norms, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their welfare is being advanced, even though they’re doing what they want in the sense that they are choosing to do it. Such foundational questions moved me into philosophy, because philosophers want to put pressure on concepts that are used in the social sciences that maybe haven’t been probed adequately, and to think about introducing other ideas that could call into question some of the normative conclusions that people are drawing from their social scientific research. So that moved me into philosophy, but I have always been engaged in the social sciences. I think economics would be enriched if it drew distinctions that better tracked normatively important ideas.   CJLPA : Your current research interest is in the history of egalitarianism. What was your motivation behind this recent research interest?   EA : If you look in contemporary political philosophy, you see that much is written about freedom, and what freedom means, and why it is important. Equality is there, but I found it to be under-theorised. In particular, there’s the dominance of a certain distributive notion of equality that is kind of cosmic, which I think makes no sense. It applies to situations like this: imagine there is a distant world out there with beings just like us, only they have half the welfare levels that we do. Some conclude that there would be this unfairness in the universe because there’s an inequality. I think this notion of inequality has nothing to do with the inequality that people care about in real society. What people care about is not just some abstract difference between what I have and what you have. It’s all about social relations and social processes. How did those rich people get all that money? Did they get it at others’ expense? And are they using that wealth to dominate others? Does society turn wealth disparities into grounds for stigmatising the less advantaged? If it’s just some cosmic inequality with some distant planet, there’s no causal connection between our well-being and their well-being, and there is no injustice in that.

Mark Cazalet, born 1964, trained at the Chelsea and then Falmouth Schools of Art, after which he held scholarships in Paris and India. He works in a variety of media, including engraved glass, paint, prints, mosaics, and graphic media. He has taught in several art institutions and has been a Senior Member of Faculty at The Royal Drawing School since 2012. Travel has always played an important role in his art. Through the experience of his journeys, he has opened up rich colloquy between contemporary and traditional arts, between classical and folk forms. Architecture, film, fiction, and theology have all played a role in his creative evolution.   Professor Frances Spalding, CBE, FRSL, PhD, the interviewer, is an art historian and biographer. After studying History of Art at the University of Nottingham, she became a specialist in twentieth-century British art. Following the publication of her British Art Since 1900 , in the Thames & Hudson ‘World of Art’ series, she was commissioned by the Tate to write its centenary history. She has also produced five biographies of artists as well as one on the poet Stevie Smith. She taught at Newcastle University 2000-15, becoming Professor of Art History. In 2014 she guest-curated the exhibition ‘Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision’ for the National Portrait Gallery. During the year 2015-6 she acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine and became a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.   This conversation took place at Clare Hall, Cambridge, on 25 February 2021.   Professor Frances Spalding: Our guest this evening is Mark Cazalet. Mark is an artist who has pursued a very wide-ranging career. He could be described as a latter-day John Piper, for, like Piper, he has worked in a variety of media, received major public commissions, has a strong sense of place and has travelled widely. Both Piper and Cazalet remind me of Beethoven’s remark, ‘Art demands of us that we do not stand still’, a challenging statement that refers to much more than travel. Travel, however, is something which many of us have greatly missed during the COVID crisis. Some years back I heard a speaker at a conference in Cambridge say, ‘The most radical thing you can do today is to stay at home’. This was with reference to ecology, but today we understand this command in relation to COVID, as well as in relation to our carbon footprint. Yet the fact that a common swift can stay in the air for ten months without touching ground shows how innate within the natural world, including within us, is the need to move, to migrate, to travel. Friedrich Nietzsche advised, ‘Never trust a thought that didn’t come by walking’. And I want to suggest that the current interest in reviving a habit that began seven hundred years ago, namely that of pilgrimage, is further evidence of our need to locate ourselves in place and time, and to realise that remembrance is key to the continuing of life.   This evening Mark Cazalet will deliver a presentation on his work and travels, and the understanding he has gained from the latter. So, over to you, Mark.   Mark Cazalet : Frances wrote the first important essay on my work back in 1994, and since then has put her finger on the pressure points in my work, consistently, sparingly but fiercely. This opportunity to present the role that travel has had in my work has made me aware that my creativity has been subject to two forces: a centrifugal force, and a gravitational force. Since the seventies, the opportunity to propel ourselves out into the far corners of the world has been an exciting liberation. But it has come at a cost. I think we are now beginning to ask ourselves why we are travelling such big distances. What do we really learn from these travels? And how might—in this present time and after the pandemic—our notions of  significant  travel change? That is what I call the gravitational aspect—what matters to us here and now and within our environment, and which calls on our need to stay still, the alternative to travel.   Because I will start by showing you some of my early work, which I’m frankly terrified to see again, I thought I’d jump ahead in this first slide to a recent work from my Kyoto Zen gardens series which I’m pleased with and excited by (fig 1). But I want to compare it with work from my degree show (such as fig 2). The comparison makes me aware that, as an artist, you don’t travel forward in a linear way, but are endlessly bumping into old iterations of yourself. With creative work you travel cyclically. Things you thought you had dealt with come up again. While studying at Falmouth, in Cornwall, I imagined myself as another Peter Lanyon, in a glider, flying over the countryside and becoming a Cornish abstract painter. As so often happens on long journeys, you end up doing the very opposite thing you thought you would do. I ended up as a student hunting in charity shops collecting detritus and creating strange, theatrical, mise-en-scène, dark cityscapes. Fig 1. The stillness the dancing, Kyoto Zen garden collage (Mark Cazalet 2020, collage papers, inks, MT tape, pencils, and oil pastels, 46 x 130cm).

Well-known for her book  Bananas, Beaches and Bases , exposing the embedded systemic and institutionalised patriarchy that is evident not only in global politics, but in the political science and literature of international relations, Professor Cynthia Enloe is one of the most compelling feminist theorists and political scientists of the twenty-first century. Currently a Research Professor of Political Science at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Professor Enloe has written countless articles and books on the important role gender plays in the areas of militarism, war, and globalisation. In this interview, Professor Enloe outlines the difficulties faced by feminist theorists and researchers, how to identify gender disparities during crises (with reference to the current pandemic), and the questions one should ask in order to be able to expose patriarchy, as well as the importance of asking these gender-curious questions.     CJLPA : In your most recent book, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy , you write that, contrary to common belief, patriarchy is not weakening, but modernising and adapting to current times. Why has this happened?   Professor Cynthia Enloe:  First of all, I’m not a pessimist. I’m not somebody who says that all the efforts of women around the world in so many different countries that challenge patriarchal practices, patriarchal beliefs, and patriarchal institutions are fruitless. That’s not my message. But what I am more and more aware of is how those people who are committed to patriarchy—even if they don’t call it that; they call it ‘preserving normalcy’—constantly are updating their ways of preserving their privileges. That’s what I mean. Here’s one example: when a comics artist and a comics company, for example, together created Wonder Woman  in 1940, that looked then like a big breakthrough: a woman could be a fictional superhero! But Wonder Woman ’s creators and marketers—she was created by a man and a male-owned comics company—deliberately dressed her in a sexualised costume. Wonder Woman  didn’t look like most women in the world. Opposition to her sexualised portrayal motivated dozens of UN staff women dramatically to protest this comic book figure being named (by a male-led UN department) the ‘ambassador for women and girls’ in 2016. To these hard-working international civil servants, that UN choice looked like an updated version of patriarchy. So, on the one hand, the creation of a woman superhero seemed to challenge the patriarchal presentation of the usual masculinised superhero; on the other hand, though, the creative innovation seemed designed to perpetuate the sexualisation of women with power. Patriarchal imagination was simultaneously being challenged and confirmed.   Here’s another example of patriarchy’s adaptability. There used to be no women cabinet officers in virtually any government. I have a friend whose mother was the first woman to be a cabinet minister in Chile, becoming the Minister of Education back in the 1960s. She was a Chilean feminist pioneer. Women’s breaking into the masculinised world of government cabinet officers has been indeed a real gender achievement in any country. Nevertheless, while we recognise that, we still have to keep asking when and how the male political elite transformed their cabinets so as to feminise some cabinet posts—for instance, now routinely appointing women to the posts of Ministers of Environment, Culture, Health, and Education, while carefully ensuring that the most powerful cabinet posts have remained in the hands of male ministers (Defence, Interior, and Finance today still are the most commonly masculinised).   You’ll notice that the ‘patriarchal sustainability formula’ relies on masculinising some things, while feminising other things, and—this is key to any patriarchy’s perpetuation—always acting as though the things that are masculinised are more serious, more valuable, more significant than the things that are feminised.   With this understanding in mind, we can take a fresh, feminist look at the still-unfolding history of women and men in governments’ cabinet posts. Patriarchal people’s preferred scenario is: first, men (and a few ‘Margaret Thatcher’s) with political power stubbornly resist women being allowed to take up senior cabinet posts. But then, though, when women begin to stick their collective feet in the political door, thereby managing to gain a few senior cabinet offices, the male political elite begin to appoint them to ministries that, in their shrunken masculinised political imaginations, are deemed less politically important.   Now is the point where you probably want to intervene and ask, ‘But nowadays, in our current era of climate crisis, how can even patriarchal politically powerful men imagine that their own government’s environment ministry is less important for their country than, say, their defence ministry?’ Or, put another way, you might ask, ‘With climate change threatening entire populations’ ways of life, how can patriarchal men kid themselves into thinking that environmental policy-making can be feminised, that is, shoved to the political margins?’.   These are exactly the sorts of questions feminists— as thinkers, researchers, and activists— pose. So we have to stay on our toes. Will ministries of environment today start to acquire more political saliency? As they do, will the proportion of all of the world’s ministers of environment who are women begin to drop? As climate change acquires the precious mantle of a ‘state security issue’, will male political elites begin to deem environmental policy ‘too important’ to be left in the hands of mere women? Stay tuned!   People who are invested in patriarchal ways of doing things, I’ve learned, are always trying to update their strategies, trying to convince the rest of us that their revised formulas amount to ‘progress’. Patriarchal people, in other words, are never just old fusty men in pinstripe suits, smoking cigars in their private clubs. Patriarchal people are now the hip Silicon Valley guys working out, eating salads, and sporting black T-shirts. I think it’s a big mistake for us ever to imagine that patriarchy is old-fashioned. It can be as up-to-date as tomorrow.   CJLPA : In your opinion, what current challenges do feminist thinkers like yourself face more generally, and more specifically within the field of international relations?   CE:  Lots of people who ask feminist questions about international politics face not so much direct hostility as in attention. Feminist questions—and their answers—about the gendered causes and consequences of Brexit, Iran’s weaponry, Palestinian rights, Myanmar’s military coup, the world trade in Xinjiang cotton, implementing the Paris Climate Accord, the trials at the International Crimes Court, too often are met with ‘Who cares?’ The scores (really scores!) of us who are seriously pursuing these and many similar questions (nothing is out of bounds for feminist international politics specialists!), have become convinced, as a result of what we’ve uncovered in the workings of international politics, that we can help citizens and policymakers be more effective by helping them become more realistically informed about the complex workings of power.   Our findings over the last 50 years of gender-curious research have shown us, first, that there are a lot more wieldings of power in more sites (especially efforts to control women—as mothers, wives, girlfriends, daughters, sex workers, factory workers, plantation workers, domestic workers, refugees, and widows) than non-feminist commentators want to admit. Non-feminist commentators constantly underestimate power. Second, our collective investigations have revealed that power takes many more forms than most commentators acknowledge. That’s one of the findings that all the activists and their academic allies who’ve made #MeToo into a genuinely global movement have lit up in neon.   In the academic field of what is called ‘IR’, gender-curious scholars have made a lot of headway. There are now new books and whole book series by publishers like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Palgrave, and Routledge focused on gender and international politics. That’s big. Major transnational NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, The International Crisis Group, and Refugees International now fund and publish gender-conscious investigatory reports. In no small part that is due to there being a lot more feminist-informed staff people inside those NGOs. We also have created or transformed dozens of academic journals that publish very interesting articles that explore the workings of gender and power—that explore the relationships between diverse women, men, and power, as well as the contests over the norms of masculinity, femininity, and those contests’ implications for gaining, losing, and wielding power.   Furthermore, we’ve created academic associations and caucuses within academic associations around the world. Both the US-based International Studies Association and the British International Studies Association have large and lively gender studies sections. Just recently, I was talking with women who have created a Women and Gender Caucus inside the Brazilian International Relations Association. Last week, I was talking with a professor in Bucharest who has launched a new network of South-eastern European feminist security experts. There also are now at least two separate Feminist Foreign Policy groups.   Still, it can be hard for feminist researchers to get a hearing in the most prestigious media or most prominent international politics academic forums. What oftentimes happens is that you look at undergraduate and graduate course syllabuses and what do you see? The faculty member teaching the course doesn’t think of themselves as knowing much—or, frankly, caring much—about the workings of gender in international politics, yet nowadays feels they’ve got to give at least a token nod toward gender and IR (this is progress!). So, they squeeze the topic of gender and international politics into just one week. One week for the world’s workings of masculinities: really?  One week for exploring women’s resistances to abuse and   privilege:  really?  And, of course, this single week is put at the end of the term. This means that by the time the faculty member gets to the end of the term, she—or usually he—hasn’t covered everything else they consider important and therefore zips over gender political analysis without serious consideration.   That’s how patriarchy works. It was a big success to get most people who teach international politics—especially in the introductory undergrad or grad courses—at least to assign one reading on gender in international politics, and to devote at least one week to the topic, but neither in a way that might infuse the entire course and its students with a deeper feminist curiosity. Despite tokenisms, though, there are nowadays more and more graduate students in more and more countries—South Korea, Japan, India, Sweden, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Romania, Turkey—who are really serious about investigating and teaching about the multiple gender dynamics shaping international politics. There’s where hope lies.   CJLPA : That’s exactly why I wanted to ask that question because I have spoken about it quite a lot recently with some of the female peers in my course. We have asked in seminars, for example, why should feminist critiques not be incorporated in other module topics?   CE:  You are so right: ask ‘Why?’ See if you can get the instructor in the course to be a little uneasy about their own segregating of gender dynamics into a separate section, as if it had nothing to do with everything else you all are investigating. I call this ‘patriarchal siloing’. It’s a teaching practice that is designed to foster the risky notion that most of international political life is pristinely un-gendered—as if contests over manliness do not shape militarism, as if practices of making women’s factory labour ‘cheap’ does not affect international trade, as if efforts to control women’s reproduction do not play roles in migration, development, or nationalism. You could even suggest that the instructor reorganise the course. Everyone is very possessive about their own course syllabuses. Still, you might suggest, ‘Next term, couldn’t you place the gender-curious analytical questions up in the second week of the course so that then we will be prepared throughout the rest of the course to ask those probing questions?’ That’s not asking the faculty member to completely reorganise his or her thinking, though it might have that effect on the students! Give it a try, and then tell me what happens!   CJLPA : What has been the effect of COVID-19 on gender inequalities across the world, and what are we likely to see happen to these inequalities post-pandemic?   CE:  This is so interesting. In recent months as the pandemic lockdowns have rolled across diverse countries, I’ve been hearing two things: first, that the ‘politics of care’ finally, after decades of neglect as a mere ‘women’s issue’, might be taken seriously; second, that what has happened in so much conventional (that is, not gender-curious) political commentary is that a lot of people who are treated as ‘experts’ because they presumably know how to talk about budgets, balance of payments, and national security, but haven’t a clue about the workings of child care, are having to move over and give at least a bit of authoritative space to those feminist economists, feminist sociologists, feminist historians, and feminist labour researchers who do know the broad policy implications of low-paid and unpaid gendered child and elder care.   One of the things I’m very hopeful about in the new Biden–Harris administration here in the US is that both care and experts on care are getting a lot of official attention. Joe Biden has appointed specialists in the gendered political economies of care to senior posts both in the White House and in several cabinet departments. Women representatives in the House (for instance, Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut) and the Senate (Patty Murray of Washington stands out) are finally getting the legislative and executive backing their childcare and family bills deserve.   Perhaps the biggest conceptual innovation in US politics today is that ‘infrastructure’ now includes not only the conventional bridges and highways, but also family care provision. Talk of government funding for bridges and childcare in the same policy sentence—that’s big!   Since eldercare and childcare in so many countries relies not only on women’s unpaid labour but also on the low paid labour of migrant women workers, of course, that means—as it has long meant— that the political economy of care is an international political phenomenon. This means that in the not-quite-yet-post-COVID world, all of us who do international political analysis had better get up to speed on the gendered international politics of care.   During my doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, nobody ever urged me to investigate the politics of paid and unpaid care. But when I was researching what became the first edition of Bananas, Beaches and Bases , it dawned on me that I should look at the international migration of domestic workers. It was Filipinas who stirred my curiosity. I’ve been interested in Philippines politics for decades because of its experience as an American colony, because of its serving as the site of major US military bases, because of its vibrant electoral politics, and because of its prominent women’s movement. So, when researching Bananas , my attention was caught by the data showing that remittances sent back home by thousands of Filipina women and Filipino men working abroad was a significant factor in the Philippines’s balance of payments. The men were working especially as crew members on globalised cargo ships. The women were working as nurses and as domestic workers. Suddenly I realised, ‘I should pay attention to that’.   One reason that I think I was kind of ready—not an expert, but intellectually ready—for the COVID-19 era was that I had already been tutored by women in international domestic migration networks (which now include Brazilian, Sri Lankan, Ecuadorian, as well as Filipina women) to keep track of domestic work as an international political phenomenon, even if most political commentators weren’t paying much attention.   As we haltingly, stunningly, unevenly move beyond COVID, what will the gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work look like? Will the economic inequalities between women and men in post-pandemic UK, Brazil, US, India, and Australia gape even more widely than they did before 2020? What will be the consequences for both national and international politics? We had better start paying attention now.   CJLPA : Do you think that we also need to keep an eye on the kind of crisis management that goes on afterwards?   CE:  What are the gender analytical skills required today by employers of anybody who gets a crisis management job? My guess is none. That likelihood is despite a burgeoning literature on the gender differences in what happens in all sorts of natural disasters and public health crises to men and to women.   For example, feminist geographers have investigated what happens to men in earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis and what happens to women. Gender differences, they have found, loom large. Who was taught to swim, who wasn’t? Whose customary attire enables them to run fast? Who must rescue the children? Who fishes in boats out the ocean, who harvests seafood close to shore? Who in any household is responsible for collecting firewood and fresh water? Who in a hastily assembled refugee camp is most likely to be threatened with sexual assault? If crisis managers don’t know of these findings or do not integrate their lessons into their organisations’ preparedness practices and their response practices, they will not only fail to address the particular needs of women and men; their gender-ignorant actions will deepen gender inequities.   CJLPA : Would you say you are quite hopeful in this instance?   CE:  Wherever any gender analytical skills are being seriously taught is a cause for hope. Any university that is making the acquisition of gender analytical skills a degree requirement gives me even more hope. We can’t wait until people are hired into policy-making or crisis management jobs, and then imagine that they’ll suddenly become gender-curious—though, thankfully, I’ve seen this happen occasionally. Far more effective is to build gender curiosity and gender analytical skills acquisition into the career-building curriculum.   CJLPA : Do you have any recommendations on how to be a conscious feminist?   CE:  Each of us is most likely to see the value of a feminist curiosity in our own lives as citizens and in our own work in any field if we can grasp how gender dynamics of any sort shapes the thing we care about. So, first, I’d suggest that everyone plunges into case studies. In most of my writings I try to mix case studies with larger analytical questions and patterns. The big picture and the small picture—I never choose one over the other. It’s the relationships between the two that I’ve found most revealing. I’m wary of those commentators who imagine that their own badges of ‘intellectual sophistication’ are earned by talking only about the big picture.   I think we all learn lasting lessons from exploring grittily detailed case studies. We learn to appreciate complexity; we learn to stay wide awake to subtleties; we train ourselves to have long attention spans. We can learn a lot too from delving into case studies of poor policy-making.   Look, for instance, at the relationships between men and women and the operations of masculinities and of femininities in London’s Grenfell Tower fire disaster, in Flint, Michigan’s water contamination tragedy. Investigate the workings of masculinities in the Boeing MAX 8 disasters. Explore the sexual abuse of local Congolese women by international male health workers during the country’s recent Ebola outbreak. Take a close look at the gender dynamics shaping responses to COVID in New Zealand, India, and South Korea.   Second, I would suggest that we all pay attention to what data are being collected and what data are not being collected—with what consequences. It’s amazing how much feminist energy has been and is still being spent trying to get national and international agencies to collect gender-disaggregated data for the sake of making better, fairer, more effective, more sustainable policies. For years, the UN collected nutritional data by ungendered household caloric intake. Households, though, do not eat! Men and women and boys and girls eat—and, lo and behold, gender-smart data collectors found that, even within poor households, adult men consume more calories and especially more protein than do adult women.   Finally, data must be gender-collected and gender-disaggregated on everything: illness, deaths, carers, students, teachers, paid work, unpaid work, bankruptcies, arms manufacturing, policymakers, budget expenditures, policing, market vendors, vaccinations, contractors, detentions, weapons possession, mining, farming, banking, peacekeepers, donors, sexual assault perpetrators, child marriage…everything. Teresa Turkheimer, the interviewer, is a final-year undergraduate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, working towards an MSc in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics in the 2021-22 academic year. Her interests lie in European politics, European Union foreign and security policy, and political philosophy.

Professor Andreas Rahmatian is Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Glasgow School of Law. Originally from Vienna, he obtained his first degree in law and a PhD in Private Law from the University of Vienna, and completed another degree in musicology and history there. He holds an LLM from the University of London. He worked as an associate attorney-at-law in Vienna and qualified as a solicitor with a City firm in London before he became a full-time academic. He has been a fellow at the Institut d’études avancées in Nantes, France. His research focuses on intellectual property law and commercial law. His books are  Copyright and Creativity: The Making of Property Rights in Creative Works (2011),  Lord Kames: Legal and Social Theorist (2015), and Credit and Creed: A Critical Legal Theory of Money (2019).    CJLPA:  Do you think all forms of creativity should be protected by the law? Professor Andreas Rahmatian : It’s a difficult question, of course, because it depends what you mean by creativity. Here we probably talk about creativity in relation to copyright in particular, because creativity can otherwise be in relation to all sorts of things. Now the problem with copyright creativity is that it’s not necessarily dealing with artistic creativity. Obviously, artistic creativity is also part of copyright creativity, but the understanding of creativity in copyright is based on a normative definition, if not a completely clear one. Whether that is artistic creativity as an artist understands it is actually immaterial. So the question is, when you ask, ‘Should all forms of creativity should be protected by the law?’, it is already the case that non-artistic creativity is protected by the law. Whenever you have got a kind of selection or arrangement which somehow points back to some individual, then you have got, as it were, creativity in the sense of copyright as ‘originality’.   The judgment of Infopaq [1] and the following cases of the CJEU in the EU didn’t change very much the originality ideas in the UK, in my opinion. In the United States the understanding of originality is pretty much the same, but whether that original work is also artistic in any way is rather irrelevant. It [the work] can be rather trivial. That is actually immaterial for the protection. And this is how copyright laws envisage creativity—even on the Continent, where they operate with all sorts of devices to water down the (theoretically) more personal requirement of the author’s input. In theory there is an approach more geared towards creativity in the sense of artistic creativity, but in reality this is much less so. There is, for example, this nice legal concept of ‘small change’, or kleine Mü̈nze —it is really called like that in Germany—where you have works of everyday use, really ordinary works which can have some notional modicum of creativity put in, and you still get protection. Then below that level you quite often have neighbouring rights, for works which do not fulfil the required creativity level or originality level, but the neighbouring rights still protect them. Then below these, you have under certain circumstances protection against parasitical competition in the sense that you actually have a prohibition to copy someone else’s work. So you have got all sorts of protection levels, both on the Continent and in the UK (or in the common law countries), and they achieve protection in different conceptual ways.   Now some people will say ‘creativity’ also means creative investments, or even ‘creative’ accounting, which is usually illegal but perhaps also creative. So it’s very hard to pin down ‘creativity’. A typical problem is restoration work in the arts, by a picture restorer, or a restorer of musical pieces. The classical case in that area in the UK was the Sawkins v Hyperion  case, 2005,[2] which shows that for copyright protection you need not be creative in the sense that you are actually creating anything new. Artistic creativity, if you go to an art school or to a conservatoire as a composer, has a tinge of novelty, but we are not interested in novelty in copyright law. So the restorer, who actually writes his counterpoint in the style of the music of the late seventeenth century, as Sawkins did, in order to restore the missing parts to produce a performing edition, did exactly not [sic] mean to be creative but faithful to the work to be restored. It’s meant to be in the style of the Baroque composer. And yet it is protected as original for copyright purposes, and there’s no doubt that this also applies on the Continent: the result in such a case would have been, and in fact was, the same, because in France, in a parallel case, Sawkins’ work was viewed as being original. That was decided under French copyright law, although the French authors’ rights system is supposed to be totally different. It’s a very nice case where we have two different legal systems with essentially the same facts, the same claim in both cases, and the same result, based on a different conceptual system. Although it may be quite difficult to appreciate this from an ‘artistic’ viewpoint, the creativity or the skill of a restorer should get protected. In fact, in France and in Italy there are quite a few cases in relation to restoration, especially in the visual arts, and there is no doubt that they get protection.

Currently Professor of Government at King’s College London, Professor Vernon Bogdanor is a leading expert in British constitutional politics and history and has received a CBE in recognition of his extensive contribution to the field. In his most recent book, titled Britain and Europe in a Troubled World , published in 2020, Professor Bogdanor traces Britain’s historical relationship with the European Union in order to understand how Brexit came to be. In this interview, Professor Bogdanor tackles the constitutional issues that the United Kingdom is likely to face in a post-Brexit era, the different lessons learnt as a result of the referendum vote in 2016, and the role that the monarchy has to play in the current British parliamentary democracy . This interview was conducted across 28 and 29 April 2022. CJLPA : What brought you to research and understand British politics? What fascinated you the most about British politics or the British political system? Professor Vernon Bogdanor : Our very strange constitution. The Queen once said that the British constitution has always been a puzzle and always will be. I have tried to elucidate that puzzle. We are in fact one of just three democracies in the world which do not have constitutions. The other two are New Zealand—whose population is half that of Greater London—and Israel, although the Israelis are working towards a constitution. Now, some people in Britain ask, ‘Should we have a constitution?’ But in a sense, that is an absurd question. The real question is: ‘What is there about the air in Britain that means we should not have a constitution, not do what every other country does?’ This problem has become more acute since we left the European Union (EU). In my view, when we were in the EU, we were in fact living under a constitution, namely the treaties of the EU, which provide for a division of power both at the centre between the Commission, the Council of Ministers, the Court of Justice, and the Parliament, but also territorially between the EU itself and the member states. Also, in recent years, the EU has yielded the protection of rights in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights which was enacted in 2009. That led to a remarkable episode in British constitutional history which has not been very much noticed. In Benkharbouche v. Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs [1], Ms. Benkharbouche claimed against the Sudanese embassy unfair dismissal, failure to pay her the national minimum wage and holiday pay, as well as breaches of the Working Time Regulations. The Sudanese embassy claimed immunity under the provisions of the 1978 State Immunity Act. But the Supreme Court ruled that sections of the Act were incompatible with Article 6 of the European Convention providing for a fair trial. The remedy for this would be a declaration of incompatibility which is not a strictly legal remedy, since it has no legal effect. But Article 47 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights provides that if rights had been violated by the Convention, they have also been violated by the Charter. So, the relevant parts of the State Immunity Act were disapplied. For the first time in British history, the Court disapplied part of an Act of Parliament because it conflicted with human rights. That, I think, would have Dicey turning in his grave. It was something new and unprecedented. As we have now left the EU, the Charter no longer applies, but Benkharbouche, nevertheless, is an important precedent. The European Charter protects a far wider range of rights than the European Convention. The Convention was enacted in the early 1950s and human rights are, in my view, a dynamic phenomenon. For example, in those days there was no thought of the right to protect the environment which is in the European Charter. Few thought of the right to academic freedom which is in the European Charter. But the most important right is the right to equality in terms of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and so on which is not in the European Convention. There is also a right to healthcare in the European Charter but not in the Convention. The Convention provides a right to education but not healthcare. Leaving the EU took us out of a constitutional system. We have incorporated almost all EU law into our own law, so that the government and parliament can decide what they want to keep, what they want to modify, and what they want to repeal. That is, of course, a huge task. Incorporation itself is nothing new. For example, our ex-colonies incorporated British law so that they could decide which British laws they wanted to keep. But when they did that, it was because they wanted to develop a constitution of their own. We have done something perhaps unique in the democratic world and instead of entrenching we have been dis-entrenching. We have moved away from a constitutional system to an unprotected constitution. This is emphasised by the fact that one part, almost the only part I think, of EU law that we have not incorporated is the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. This means we have moved from a system which protects rights, to one which does not protect rights. We do have the European Convention, but the way we have adopted it is rather different from almost every other country because judges are not given the right by the Human Rights Act to disapply legislation conflicting with the Convention. All they can do is to issue a declaration of incompatibility. That is just a statement which has no legal effect, and it is then up to Parliament to decide whether to take action. Parliament has a special fast track procedure by which it can take action if it so wishes, but courts in other European countries have much greater powers because they can disapply legislature. This raises a very interesting question because the other 27 member states of the EU do, of course, retain the European Charter. So, I would ask this question: Are our Members of Parliament (MPs) so much more sensitive to human rights than the legislators of other countries in Europe that they can be entrusted with this very important function? I will leave the answer to this question to those reading the interview! It is worth stressing that rights are not solely for nice people like ourselves, but also for very small minorities who may not necessarily be very nice, for example, prisoners, suspected terrorists, suspected paedophiles, and so on—also, asylum seekers, a very small minority not effectively represented in Parliament, also have rights. Brexit raises this issue of whether we should continue to live under an unprotected constitution which does not effectively protect human rights. And there is a further question arising from Brexit. Does the devolution settlement need further protection in Scotland, Wales, and particularly in Northern Ireland? I will discuss devolution a little later. With our strange constitution, law and politics are closely intertwined. Much more of our constitution than in other countries is based on convention. These conventions, in turn, often depend upon popular feeling. For example, we have the case now of Boris Johnson and Partygate. A Prime Minister who has deliberately misled Parliament must, so the Ministerial Code declares, resign. But this convention depends in large part on popular feeling. Are people angry enough to protest to their MPs or do they say that it does not matter too much? A great writer on the constitution, not as well-known as Bagehot, but well worth reading, Sidney Low, author of The Governance of England first published in 1904, said, ‘We live under a system of tacit understandings, but the understandings are not always understood’. That seems to me a very perceptive point about the British constitution. CJLPA : I am assuming on the basis of the points you have just mentioned, do correct me if I am wrong, you are a supporter of a codified constitution in the UK. In light of this, has this been received or acknowledged by figures in the political system? Are there supporters for a constitution at the moment? I can imagine that the current opposition might not be keen on that idea. VB : When we had a Labour government, Gordon Brown who was Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010—and I think it no accident that he came from Scotland—favoured a constitution. If he had been re-elected in 2010, he would have tried to enact one in 2015 which was the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta—but he was not re-elected. The Liberal Democrats have long been in favour of a constitution, and I think some in the Labour Party are. Perhaps the longer Labour is in opposition, the more likely it is to support a constitution. But the Conservatives are, in general, not in favour, partly because they are the natural party of government in the sense that they tend to be in power most of the time. I mentioned that it was not an accident that Gordon Brown, being Scottish, was in favour of a constitution, for many Scots have never accepted the idea of the sovereignty of Parliament. They say that it is the Scottish people who are sovereign, and that point has been tacitly accepted by Westminster. There was a referendum in Scotland on independence in 2014. The Scots voted against it, but had they voted for it, they would have become independent. There was also a referendum before devolution was introduced. In both cases it was accepted that it was for the Scots to decide, even if their decision went against the wishes of Westminster. So, for the Scots, the central principle is perhaps less the sovereignty of the Westminster parliament than the sovereignty of the Scottish people. That is also accepted in Northern Ireland. If a majority in Northern Ireland were to decide that it wished to join with Ireland, that would be accepted by Westminster. An American once said that in politics where you stand depends upon where you sit. Perhaps that is true in Britain because it may be that the sovereignty of parliament is primarily an English concept. The Welsh government favours a quasi-federal system for the United Kingdom (UK). The Scots believe in the sovereignty of the Scottish people. In Northern Ireland there is a divided community, but there also, the principle of the sovereignty of parliament is overtaken by the principle of the sovereignty of the people. There are, however, two different views about the Northern Ireland constitution depending on whether you are a unionist or a nationalist. CJLPA : Say Gordon Brown is attempting to get re-elected again and he has the idea of codifying the constitution within his manifesto. What is the extent of the risk of the codification of the constitution becoming a politicised issue in the media? VB : I doubt if there is much risk. Enacting a constitution would be a long process because it would require popular consent. Most people in England do not think much about the constitution, although they do in Scotland and Northern Ireland. We would first have to have a body to draw up an agenda; then you would need a Royal Commission which would have to travel around the country having evidence sessions. That would be a kind of learning exercise for the public. Then the government would draw up a constitution and then there would have to be a referendum, probably with a majority needed in all parts of the UK, unlike the Brexit referendum. So, it would be a long process. I do not think it would necessarily be party political. I think, however, that it will be a long time before we get a constitution. It is not an immediate issue, and it is very low on most people’s priorities. Human rights also are very low on most people priorities, though one lawyer, former MP and former attorney general Dominic Grieve, has made the interesting suggestion that the European Convention should include a right to healthcare as the European Charter does, in addition to the right to education. The reason is that the right to healthcare would affect large numbers of people, and therefore it would be more likely that more people would feel they own the Convention, which they do not at present now because they think of it as defending disreputables such as criminals. But they would then own it and there would be more respect for human rights. Otherwise, constitutional issues are a minority concern. There are no mass meetings in Trafalgar Square with crowds clamouring for a constitution! CJLPA : If a human rights issue is quite prominent and has a lot of media following, perhaps it could grab some attention? VB : Only amongst a small group of the intelligentsia, the academics—the chattering classes if you like, not amongst the people as a whole. I do not think academics are very representative of public opinion in general or necessarily have much insight into public opinion. Opinion polls show that enacting a constitution is not a priority. CJLPA : I think you would agree with me that there have been many, but not all, British politicians who have been out of touch with the citizens that they are trying to represent: take the recent Partygate scandal that you mentioned earlier and the fact that it is currently difficult to punish a misbehaving government, or Brexit where even though the referendum was a close result, MPs were evidently not representative of the UK because a majority of them actually wanted to remain. In light of that, to what extent is the current UK political system truly a representative democracy? VB : I think your introduction of the referendum is very important. For, as you say, the majority of MPs were against Brexit, and the government was against Brexit. For the first time in British history, Parliament was enacting legislation in which it did not believe. Legally, Parliament is still sovereign, it could have ignored the referendum, it would not have been unlawful to do so. But, in practice, it was not possible to ignore the referendum. So, Brexit is a milestone in our constitutional history. Not only was Parliament no longer in practice sovereign, it was shown not to be representative of the people. As you know, many in the British political elite were fervent Remainers and did not want to accept the result. The EU does not like referendums either. In 1974, shortly before we were to have our first referendum, the ex-President of the European Commission Monsieur Jean Rey said these matters should be left to trained people. ‘You cannot’, he said, ‘have a system in which housewives should be allowed to decide the future of Britain!’. A lot of the arguments against referendums, in my opinion, are similar to the arguments used against extending the suffrage—that the people are ignorant, that they do not understand the issues, and that political decisions are best left to elites. A French reactionary, Joseph de Maistre, declared that the principle of the sovereignty of the people—which is now a part of our constitution I believe—is so dangerous that even if it were true, it would be best to conceal it! Not only is the referendum now part of our constitution, but there are, what we might call, ‘shadow referendums’, referendums which were not held because of fear of the result, but which nevertheless influenced the political agenda. For example, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007, he very much wanted Britain to join the Euro, but he believed that this required a referendum. However, he never put the issue to referendum because there was not one single opinion poll which showed a majority in favour of the Euro. You may say looking at the experience of continental countries, particularly Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, that we were lucky not to join the Euro! CJLPA : On the topic of democracy, I would like to ask a question specifically about the role of the British monarchy because monarchs by now are the exception, not the rule. Especially now, in Britain, it is quite difficult to support the monarchy when its role in the UK constitution might be minimal but its influence, as we have seen, has proven to be plenty. What role, if any, does the monarchy have to play in a democratic system? VB : The main role of the monarchy is not constitutional. Its constitutional powers are almost nil. But as well as being head of state, the Queen is head of the nation. She can, as it were, represent the whole country to itself. By contrast, if you have a president, you either have a president such as Macron in France or Biden in America who is head of the executive. They represent not the whole country, but just half of the country. Or you can have a constitutional president without political power which, for example, Italy and Germany have. I suspect that very few people could name the presidents of Italy and Germany, I certainly could not, and the position is usually given to a harmless retired politician who is put out to grass. Do we want that here? President Cameron or President Blair? They could not represent the whole country. This is particularly important with the devolution settlement because any elected person would be either English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish. The Queen is none of these and all of them at the same time. We are lucky in the Queen because she instinctively understands, what you might call, ‘the soul of the British people’, which it would be very difficult for a politician to do. Unlike a politician, she has no party-political history. No one knows whether she is Labour, Liberal Democrat, or Conservative, or what her views are on politically controversial matters. I think we are fortunate to have a constitutional monarchy. The constitutional monarchies in Europe are very stable, moderate countries: some Scandinavian countries, Britain, the Benelux countries, and Spain. We are lucky that we have never had a revolution because revolutions or defeat in war tend to get rid of monarchies. For example, in Italy the monarchy was removed after the defeat in the Second World War because the king was thought to be associated with fascism, in Germany after the First World War, and in France after the revolution. We are lucky, perhaps because we are an island, that we have never been involved in revolutions or upheavals. In 1945, when we had the first Labour majority government, the American president Harry Truman was visiting Britain and he said to King George VI, ‘I see you’ve had a revolution here’, and the King said ‘Oh no we don’t have things like that’. CJLPA : You say that the monarchy is the ‘soul of the British people’. I would perhaps counter that. You mentioned the Nordic countries and the role that their monarchy has to play. I would say that the level of influence is completely unparalleled. It is true that the power is minimal, but the influence and the presence is not. VB : I do not know if the Queen has much political influence. When has she exerted political influence? I do not think that is right. CJLPA : I was thinking more of the case of Prince Charles. VB : Yes, that is interesting. He has had influence, but not on party political matters. His technique is to raise an issue which he thinks has been hitherto ignored by politicians, for example, the environment and climate change. When the politicians do take up the issue, he steps back. He has also spoken on a number of other issues that he thinks important which are not party political, for example architecture, teaching Shakespeare in schools, and so on. He has said controversial things, but they are not controversial in the party-political sense. He has never spoken publicly about Brexit or whether we should have a Conservative government or Labour government. He is very careful in all his speeches not to appear partisan. He does not speak on advice like the Queen but, out of courtesy, he shows his speeches to ministers. I suspect that if ministers said, ‘Well, look, this does entrench on government policy’, he would back down. He has known since birth what his role will be, and he has been trained and brought up in the constitutional tradition. He has not been party-political, but he has influenced opinion in other ways. I agree with you on that. CJLPA : With race and identity coming up a lot, regarding the institution itself and its imperialist past, rather than the Queen more specifically or the members of the family, I think people disagree that it is representative of the British people. VB : The monarchy in Britain is unlike the other monarchies I have mentioned because it has an international dimension thanks to the existence of the British empire, now the Commonwealth. Of the 54 countries which are members—around a third of the world’s population—15 of them, now that Barbados is a Republic, are Commonwealth monarchies. The rest are republics. The Commonwealth is a voluntary organisation of equals, while the empire was based on domination. But the empire cannot have been quite as terrible as some suggest if almost all of the colonies have voluntarily agreed to join the Commonwealth. The only former countries ruled by Britain that have voluntarily left the Commonwealth are Burma, now Myanmar, and Ireland. Two counties which were not part of the empire—Mozambique and Rwanda—have joined. The Commonwealth gives the monarchy an international dimension. The majority of people in the Commonwealth are not white and not Christian. This means that the monarchy must stand and does stand for racial and religious equality. In her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the Queen’s first visit was to Leicester which is an example of a multiracial city where integration has proved successful. And in 2004 she made a particularly interesting Christmas broadcast. She spoke of the parable of the Good Samaritan, the implication of which was clear. ‘Everyone is our neighbour, no matter what race, creed or colour. The need to look after a fellow human being is far more important than any cultural or religious differences. Most of us have learned to acknowledge and respect the ways of other cultures and religions, but what matters even more is the way in which those from different backgrounds behave towards each other in everyday life’. She then went on to say: It was for this reason that I particularly enjoyed a story I heard the other day about an overseas visitor to Britain who said the best part of his visit had been travelling from Heathrow and into central London on the tube. His British friends, as you can imagine, were somewhat surprised, particularly as the visitor had been to some of the great attractions of the country. ‘What do you mean?’, they asked. ‘Because’, he replied, ‘I boarded the train just as schools were coming out. At each stop children were getting on and off—they were of every ethnic and religious background, some with scarves or turbans, some talking quietly, others playing and occasionally misbehaving together, completely at ease and trusting one another’. ‘How lucky you are’, said the visitor, ‘to live in a country where your children can grow up in this way’. We can also see the influence of the monarchy in the Queen’s broadcasts on COVID and in broadcasts commemorating D Day and VE Day where she was able to speak for the whole country. In my opinion, the case for constitutional monarchy is unanswerable. CJLPA : To what extent did the countries in the Commonwealth remain within the Commonwealth for economic reasons? VB : That is part of the argument, but one should not exaggerate it because, after all, when countries become independent, they do not ask whether they will be better off or worse off. If you had said to the Nigerians in the 1960s, ‘You will be economically worse off outside when you are no longer a British colony, when you are no longer ruled from Westminster’, they would have said ‘That’s completely irrelevant. We want to govern ourselves’. The Indians and other newly independent countries would have said the same. So, I would not overstress that argument. The Commonwealth is in a way a sentimental organisation which does a great deal of good because one of the main problems in the world is the relationship between people of different ethnic groups and religions. It is often forgotten that the Queen’s Christmas broadcast is not delivered in her role as Queen of Britain but as Head of the Commonwealth in which a majority are neither white nor Christian. I think it must be valuable to bring together people of different countries and different ethnic groups. CJLPA : We know that the Northern Ireland protocol is a particularly precarious issue, and a very delicate part of the Brexit process. We know it has been ruled by the High Court and the Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland as legal. If it is not constitutional, on the other hand, what does that mean for Brexit as a whole, or even just the UK constitution in general? VB : What it means is that at the very least the Protocol must be radically amended. The Protocol may or may not be constitutional. But the courts were asked to pronounce on whether it is lawful—a different matter. They have said that it is lawful, but it does not follow that it is constitutional. After all, a statute that is incompatible with the Human Rights Act is lawful, but it is not constitutional. It would be lawful for the government to have ignored the Brexit referendum, which was an advisory referendum. But most of us think it would not have been constitutional. CJLPA : What is likely to happen from here on in with the Northern Ireland protocol? What are we likely to see? VB : The Northern Ireland Protocol is a consequence of Brexit. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK with a land border with an EU country. That has become of greater importance since Brexit because Britain will probably diverge from EU rules and regulations. The question is whether the regulatory and customs border should be on the island of Ireland or in the North Sea. Wherever it is, there is going to be trouble because if it is in the island of Ireland, the Irish nationalists are going to be annoyed. If, as is the case, it is in the Irish Sea, the unionists will be annoyed. Brexit goes against the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement or Belfast Agreement—I should say that there is no agreement on what it is to be called. If you are unionist you will call it the Belfast Agreement, if you are nationalist you will call it the Good Friday Agreement. But whatever it is called, the Agreement was an attempt to resolve the Irish problem. It enabled residents of Northern Ireland to identify as British, Irish, or both, and to enjoy Irish citizenship as well as British citizenship. But, with Brexit, if someone decides on Irish citizenship, she cannot access in Northern Ireland the rights of an EU citizen. She cannot, for example, access the European Charter for Fundamental Rights. So, Brexit does complicate the Irish problem. Both John Major and Tony Blair said in Northern Ireland that this would be a consequence of Brexit. Northern Ireland, as it happens, did not vote for Brexit: 56% voted to stay in the EU. But Britain is not a federal state and so Northern Ireland was overruled by the rest of the country. The Northern Ireland courts have been considering the contention by the unionists that the Protocol is unlawful because it goes against the Act of Union of 1800 which provided that there should be no customs barriers between Britain and Ireland. The courts have said that the relevant part of the Act of Union was overridden by the Withdrawal Act which is also a constitutional statute. Parliament well knew what it was doing when it enacted the Protocol, and in so doing, it implicitly repealed the relevant part of the Act of Union. The argument against the constitutionality of the Protocol would be that the Act of Union is absolutely fundamental because it is constitutive of the UK itself. So, it cannot be implicitly repealed but has to be explicitly repealed. That issue may go to the Supreme Court, I do not know whether leave to appeal to the Supreme Court has been given but the unionists are seeking it. CJLPA : Because of the fact that it was brought by staunch unionists to the courts, is conflict almost inevitable? VB : Yes. The withdrawal agreement is a victory for the Irish nationalists. It is a zero-sum game. The Good Friday Agreement, or the Belfast Agreement, tried to avoid the zero-sum game. Both unionists and nationalists could win, one could be both British and Irish. But, in relation to the Protocol, one can understand the unionist position, since the Protocol divides the UK economically. CJLPA : Regardless of how the Northern Ireland protocol is likely to turnout, are we likely to see a chain reaction of similar, but more sovereignty-related, issues in the other devolved nations? VB : Yes, Brexit has caused renewed conflict between Westminster on the one hand and Scotland and Wales on the other, for this reason. When the devolution settlement was made in the late 1990s the assumption was that Britain would stay in the EU. The devolution of some functions, for example, agriculture and fisheries, was fairly meaningless because almost all policy in those areas was determined by Brussels, so there was no real scope for an independent policy in these areas from Edinburgh or Cardiff or, indeed, Westminster. In theory, with the incorporation of EU law back into Britain, all EU powers relating to devolved matters should go to Scotland and Wales. But this raises a problem since we cannot have, for example, four different systems of agricultural subsidies in the UK, especially when agriculture will almost certainly be the subject of trade negotiations. Suppose we seek an agreement with America. The Americans would want to ensure that they had access to the whole of the UK market, not just England. So, in the Internal Market bill, the government reserved some powers which had been devolved. There has been much annoyance in Scotland and Wales and their governments have tried to amend the law through the courts. They have, however, not succeeded since we do not have a federal system. So, Parliament can still legislate on matters devolved to Scotland and Wales. But in Scotland and Wales many say, ‘This may be lawful but it’s unconstitutional, you shouldn’t be legislating on devolved matters without our consent’. So, Brexit has raised problems in Scotland and Wales as well as in Northern Ireland. CJLPA : On a similar note, there is the looming possibility of a second independence referendum. In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has promised the Scottish people that in a stable post-COVID era she would propose to them the question of independence. VB : That is possible, but contrary to what many think, Brexit makes independence more of a gamble because there would then be a hard border between Scotland and the rest of the UK. The rest of the UK is Scotland’s largest trading partner: almost all its exports go to the rest of the UK, not to the Continent. So, independence could be economically catastrophic for Scotland. In addition, Scotland gets more per head in public spending than England thanks to the Barnett formula. And she would face the same problem she faced in 2014 of what her currency should be. If it were to be the pound, she would have her monetary policy controlled from London. A similar arrangement caused Greece and Italy many problems with the EU. They were restricted in their economic policy since they had no control of monetary policy which lay with the European Central Bank. If Scotland had her own currency, interest rates might rocket sky high, since the new currency would be such an uncertain quantity. If Scotland joined the Euro, she would have to reduce her budget deficit to around 3%. Her budget deficit is now at around 7 or 8%. The cuts in public expenditure or increases in taxation would need to be huge. They would make George Osborne, the austerity Chancellor, look like Santa Claus! Scotland would not get the benefit of Margaret Thatcher’s EU rebate either, I suspect. So, independence is a less viable project than when Britain was in the EU, but, as I mentioned a moment ago, it might be argued that these economic factors are not really fundamental when it comes to independence. When India and Nigeria became independent, they did not ask whether they would be better off of or worse off. Nor did Ireland when she became independent. Pressure for independence seems to be receding a little at the moment, though it is stronger amongst younger voters than older ones. The current Conservative government will not grant a second referendum but if there is a Labour government dependent on the Scottish National Party (SNP), the SNP might insist on a second referendum as a price for supporting that government. So far, we have been talking about the British problem, but I think Brexit gives rise to great EU problems as well. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, said it was a mistake to believe that the factors leading to Brexit are not also present in other EU countries. Brexit, he said, should be a warning signal for the EU. President Macron of France—on the Andrew Marr Show in early 2017—could not guarantee that if a referendum were held in France that it would not yield the same result as in Britain—Frexit. The EU faces problems and I think the main problem is that the original model—the Jean Monnet model, the Jacques Delors model—has reached its limit. As the EU comes to entrench upon national sensitivities, it encourages a populist reaction, particularly in areas such as immigration and control of economic policy. I think it would be better for Europe to develop along Gaullist lines, as a Europe des etats , a Europe of states (De Gaulle has often been mistakenly accused of using the phrase Europe des Patries ). The Commission remains the only body that can initiate legislation. Many find that odd since it is not elected and cannot be dismissed by the voters. Some Gaullists have said that it should become a secretariat of the Council, and that seems to me sensible. The federalists, Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors, wanted the Commission to be eventually responsible to the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers to become the upper house of member states. But Europeans do not regard the European Parliament as their primary legislature. Their primary allegiance is to their domestic legislatures and the European Parliament is seen as part of an alienated superstructure – representing them not us. There is a conflict, exacerbated by the EU, between the political class and the rest. The political class favours integration but the people are sceptical. This is particularly so in France. It was first revealed 30 years ago when the French, thought to be at the centre of European integration, only narrowly accepted the Maastricht treaty. Then, in 2005, they rejected the European constitution. Nevertheless, the elites go ahead regardless and that seems to me foolish. They need to take account of popular feeling. The EU was founded in a different age, the early 50s, when there was much greater deference, and I am not sure it works as well today when there is a demand for greater accountability. So, Brexit contains important lessons for the EU as well as for Britain. CJLPA : What lessons have the member states themselves learnt? And do they have a responsibility for how Brexit played out? VB : I think they need to look at how to combat populism and I have tried to suggest how that might be done. What is remarkable in Britain, contrary to many predictions—and I was myself a Remainer – is that Brexit, paradoxically, has liberated Britain’s liberal political culture. Survey after survey has shown that the public is more sympathetic to immigration than it was. We have developed more liberal attitudes to immigration than most EU member states, and immigrants have more of a chance of finding employment here than in many other European countries. The present government contains six members from non-white ethnic minorities. Angela Merkel’s last government in 2017 had none at all. When we left the European Parliament, we took a large percentage of ethnic minority Members of the European Parliament with us. A number of European countries have none at all. Contrary to what many predicted, we have not become a more insular racist country, we have become a more liberal country. Populist forces seem to have been weakened. The EU must itself learn how to combat populism. CJLPA : After Brexit we saw many far-right parties recoil very quickly from their own plans to exit from the EU. What has the far-right learnt with regards to Brexit? VB : The far-right benefits from general alienation from government, particularly on immigration and on the fact that the EU makes it very difficult for national governments to control economic policy. In the Mediterranean countries—not so much in Italy but in Spain and Portugal and possibly Greece—the far-left has gained more. The far-left has gained in France as well. It is the entrenching by the EU on national sensitivities that is so worrying. If you look at past federal states, many have been built after war—the American Civil War, the German wars under Bismarck, the Swiss war in 1848—and took a long time to form, even in America where everyone speaks the same language. There is not going to be any sort of federation in a Europe comprising so many different national traditions, languages, and cultures for a long time. One might have got it and might possibly still get it if an inner core of the original six got together—Germany, Italy, France, and the Benelux. But there is very unlikely to be a federation of the 27 member states. CJLPA : In light of some of the negotiations being postponed to a later date, when will we see a post-Brexit life? Will we be seeing it anytime soon? VB : Brexit is a process not an event. I think the process will continue for a long time. And it will be some time before we can judge the economic and constitutional effects of Brexit. On these matters the jury is still out on whether Brexit will prove beneficial or not. The jury is also still out on the future of the UK. Will Scotland remain part of it? Will Northern Ireland? No one knows, and I am not going to predict. It is difficult enough for the historian to find out what has happened in the past let alone what will happen in the future. This interview was conducted by Teresa Turkheimer, an MSc student in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main interest lies in understanding the causes and effects of inequalities that characterise the labour market today, and is hoping to pursue a career in research in the coming years. [1] [2017] UKSC 62.

A front-runner in the fight for equality and justice, Professor Judith Butler is one of the most influential philosophers of the past century whose work has transformed the field of queer and feminist scholarship. By redefining what gender means and how it is displayed, Butler has broken down societal and cultural barriers, and, most importantly, allowed others inspired by their work to finally understand their identity and their place in the world. Both an activist and a scholar at UC Berkeley, they have also worked to blur the lines between the academic and public spheres, redefining what it actually means to be an intellectual in the current era. In this interview, Professor Butler delves into the increasing censorship of gender studies, discusses the unjust treatment of war victims, and reflects on their career thus far. This interview was conducted on 10 May 2022. CJLPA : For the interest of our readers, could you tell us about your story and your professional trajectory, how you got to where you are now? Professor Judith Butler : I was trained in philosophy at Yale University and in Heidelberg in Germany and was meant to be a somewhat classical continental philosopher. I studied Hegel, Marx, Kant and I continue to love that work but I did enter the world of gender studies and gender politics in the late 1980s, in part because I suffered discrimination on the job market on the basis of my gender presentation and sexual orientation. I realised I couldn’t get past those obstacles easily and so I thought that I should probably write about it, make it my theme. As a result, I produced scholarship that is a melange of continental philosophy and feminist theory. I’ve also been active in human rights organisations including a former organisation called the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, but also the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City—and I am involved in Jewish Voice for Peace and engage in activism for Palestinian rights of political self-determination. I also continue to consult with a wide number of countries, policymakers, and feminist, queer, and trans activists on gender politics, trying to fight the anti-gender ideology movement which has turned out to be quite influential and destructive. In fact, I’m writing a book on that topic now. CJLPA : You mentioned your work in gender studies as well as your work with regard to feminist theory. Are the two inextricably linked or are they two separate entities, and should they be regarded as so? JB : They’re interlinking projects. They’re not the same but I do not think it is possible to do work in one area without connecting with the other. Both of them are important academic forms of inquiry, and they each need institutional support. Many scholars would not be able to distinguish between what is feminist studies and what is gender studies, since gender is at the heart of both forms of inquiry. Indeed, as academic fields, they are also related to social movements, often teaching literature generated within the context of social movements. And they both require institutional support. Even when one is doing scholarly work in feminist studies—let’s say one is working on renaissance literature or psychoanalytic theory, or something that feels very academic and not particularly activist—one still needs to have an institutional space where that can happen. I need funding for my research, I need a job, or I need a fellowship—in other words that research has to be supported. It cannot be censored, it cannot be criminalised, and my programmes cannot shut down otherwise I can’t do my academic work. So, we might say that even the most self-referential academic work is still dependent on institutional support of some kind: publishers willing to publish, or universities establishing programmes that are keeping them alive. Our academic work depends on institutional conditions that are of public concern, and under certain circumstances, we can be censored or criminalised or our programmes can be shut down, at which point we can’t do that academic work. So, the politics of the problem are in some ways linked to the academic activities themselves. That said, I would say that not all feminist theory has to immediately say, ‘Oh and here’s the activist implication of what I just wrote’. I don’t think so. Sometimes we are trying to understand the world, we’re trying to reconfigure how we understand social relations or history or even the psyche, we’re undertaking projects that are academic in nature that may change people’s understanding and maybe even change their lives or their activism. But I don’t believe we have to justify our academic work through its activist potential, nor do I think we always have to lay out what the activist potential is. CJLPA : Is this a source of frustration for academia, and is there a way to change that? JB : There are two sorts of problems. On the one hand, we are fighting censorship across the world. In India, they closed down something like 40 gender studies programmes, in Hungary gender studies had to move to Vienna, along with the entire university: the Central European University. They were shutting down gender studies because gender is apparently this terribly frightening and destructive ‘ideology’ according to those who oppose it. And now we’re seeing legislation that seeks to keep the word out of certain languages, or keep gender studies and critical race theory out of curricula—both of which have become caricatures, phantasms by those in the positions that criticise them or seek to censor them. So, we do have to be able to say, ‘Look, what we do is open inquiry’. And that’s what universities are supposed to be supporting. We’re asking key questions. We are discussing and debating, we clearly don’t all hold the same view. This is a field of study like other field of studies where there are methodologies that are contested and discussed and revised. There are norms of research and ways of proceeding that are academic in character, and that have as their aim an open-ended inquiry to know something better, to find out what is true or what is real. That is what we do as scholars. We need to defend the study against those who would caricature it, demean it, and substitute a frightening phantasm for the complex work that we actually do. On the other hand, very often in the classroom these days young people want to know what one’s own political position is or what political position they should take immediately on an issue. Sometimes, when you’re asked to take a position, for instance, are you for or against gender studies, it is important to take a step back and question whether gender studies is a monolithic thing that any of us could, or should, vote on in that way. Maybe the reduction of gender studies to a monolith to which we say yea or nay is precisely the problem. As somebody for whom critical thought requires a willingness to call a framework into question, I don’t want to have to take a political position if I don’t like the way it is framed, when it is the frame that is politically problematic. That’s where a critical form or reflection becomes important and that’s also part of pedagogy: we have to ask people to think through their positions, the way they are framed, what they imply, which is precisely not the same as prescribing a certain position or training them how to take them. CJLPA : On the note of critical thinking, how can one be a gender conscious researcher, whatever the field may be? JB : Well it’s interesting, you know I’m reminded of EP Thompson’s very important work on the working class, and he did quite an impressive job in treating the working classes as a kind of subject, and what they underwent, and how this was produced in time and in history—a very textured and persuasive work that had, and continues to have, enormous influence in the field of social history. And my friend Joan W Scott came along and said, ‘Oh I just love this work but he’s missing something, which is that the world of work and the world of the public is already gendered’. It was not a factor or something added onto a class analysis, but it informed the very way in which we conceptualise the working class subject. Further, what Scott proposed was that gender operates through a wide number of fields as an active and consequential presupposition. Gender doesn’t just describe gender identity, as many people now assume. An entire public world might be gendered in the sense that it’s structured by certain masculine values or presumptions that are not always marked. What, for instance, is the gendering of the public sphere? Is the public sphere presumptively masculine and, if so, how we can read that? Even now, with the war in Ukraine, we don’t see much commentary on the gendering of the war, but it’s very much there. There is a form of masculinism at stake for Putin, but also for Zelenskyy whose t-shirt and appearance re-enforced a form of heroic masculinity—the fighting man. How many women can assume that position? What does it mean that this heightened militarism and even the resistance some of us support, relies on certain ideas of embodiment: able-bodied, willing to fight, capable of fighting, of the age in which you could fight, and masculinised?—with an occasional woman with the shotgun looking like a Kurdish fighter who we’re supposed to appreciate for the feminism she represents. The recent reports on sexual violence at the border or in family homes in Ukraine are just absolutely appalling, which is why the recognition of gender-based violence is so important for legal and public policy. I think we do need to think about gendered practices, gendered spheres of life and not just gendered persons. CJLPA : On the topic of gender, you’re most well-known for your ground-breaking theory JB : of gender performativity which was introduced most famously in your book Gender Trouble in 1990. On the note of the Ukrainian war, as well as the gendered reporting of the war and the gendered war itself, if gender is performative, who or what dictates the script in the current era? JB : In general, you can try to dictate a script—people do try, and sometimes scripts seem to be pretty strongly dictated when strong directors are at work, and actors are willing to acquiesce to their will. In such cases, scripts are fixed in place—but I think in fact there’s some contingency and unexpected turns in scripts that, if I follow your metaphor, are a bit more improvisational, sometimes departing from the script, or sometimes shredding the script. For me, there may be gender norms that prescribe what we should do, but even in the act of apparent compliance, we can be departing from the norm, even contesting its power. Obviously, there is a hyper-gendering of issues going on right now, not only in the war, but in a wide range of political efforts to deny reproductive freedom, LGBTQI+ rights, and debunk gender studies. Obviously, Putin and his version of masculinity has been commented upon at length, but I would underscore the public and shameless form in which he displays his willingness to destroy and to subject the most vulnerable people to violence. This is a sign of the kind of masculinity he values, one measured by the shameless infliction of harm. It is important to remember that there is no one masculinity, no single norm that organises the appearance or operation of masculinity. With Putin, we see a lethal version of masculinity at work. For instance, Masha Gessen has written about Putin’s masculinity in a way that I think is pretty interesting, and then of course in the Boston Review, just recently, there was an important statement by the Director of Gender Studies at Kharkiv National University, her name is Irina Zherebkina, and she’s a translator who, in fact, translated some of my work and some of the major work of feminist theory from across the globe. She understands the attack on gender and feminism as a key component of this war. Putin himself named ‘gender’ as a potential threat to the spiritual values of Russia in his policy statement on national security in 2015. CJLPA : Does performativity extend to other forms of identity? Whether that be race, disability, class, religious association, to what extent is identity in these instances on the other hand performative? JB : I said gender was performative over 30 years ago and I’m not sure I would hold to the exact same position I put forward then. It’s interesting the positions you write about when you’re unemployed. I did have a temporary position at the time, but I think that when we say gender is performative, we don’t mean that it’s only performative or that’s the only thing we can say about gender. It just means that people generally have to establish their gender within a grid of legibility, or that gender is established through various means. Though the ways in which we do in a daily way unconsciously or consciously assert gender or establish it, suggests that it needs to be asserted or established, it could go another way. And it is never fully or exclusively in our power to do that establishing. There’s no natural necessity about the ways in which gender becomes available to us, which is not to say that nature plays no role or that volition is all that matters. Gender is established and re-established through various powers, and always through processes articulated in time and space. Performativity doesn’t mean it’s all fake or false or artificial, and it surely doesn’t mean that it’s fully chosen in the sense that ‘Oh, I can choose whatever I want to be today’. It means only that gender is negotiated for us before we have any agency, and we come to negotiate it in quotidian ways in time. It is not established once and for all through sex assignment, and even sex assignment cannot stabilise sex through time. As I have moved through the world, there were times where I would walk into a bathroom or locker room, because I’m a swimmer, and be told that I’m in the wrong one and I’m pretty sure I’m in the right one. Once in China I was not able to speak the language, so I literally took my shirt off so that they could see, then they were, ‘Ohhh ok, ok, ok, ok!’ But like, what did I have to do? It wasn’t immediately clear. I mean there’s some ways in which cultural legibility works this way. Obviously not just about myself, but a range of people who deal with how they are perceived, what they have to make clear time and again in order to be known or recognised or even to pass into or out of regulated spaces. This happens differently with disability. Sometimes you have to let it be known. It doesn’t mean that your disability is a performative effect in the sense that it has no substantial reality; on the contrary, the problem is that if you seek to make yourself known, legible, recognisable, or seek to evade forms of recognition that imply criminalisation or pathologisation, then a kind of orchestration of the body becomes important, a way of making plain or public one’s bodily situation, quite regardless of whether or not one has a visible disability. There are, of course, many misunderstandings about performativity because it draws on both linguistic and theatrical traditions. In my view, it cannot be reduced to either domain, but rather names their interconnection, the site of their overlapping. For those who take performativity to be a theatrical mask that you put it on and take it off at will, performativity is a bit of entertaining fakery. Although masks, as we know, can have much more important meanings in dance, religion, and rituals. The example of drag that I offered in Gender Trouble became inadvertently exemplary for some readers of what performativity means. A number of women do get up and ‘put on their face’ and ‘fix their eyes’ and ‘do their hair’. These are just daily ways of crafting, inspired by both anxiety and, presumably, gender idealisations of various kinds. One might not describe such activities as a gendered kind of crafting, but it is a gendered kind of crafting, just as some sorts of activities seek to de-constitute those norms on purpose, or engage in another way of doing gender that doesn’t really work with masculine and feminine, either exposing a gendered spectrum, or a position outside the spectrum as it has been established. At the same time, and equally importantly, we’re done to by norms, by the unconscious, by others; we’re undone and redone by norms that work on us in ways that we can neither track nor control. We’re not just crafting ourselves in some radically agentic way; we are struggling with the ways in which we were treated and situated and formed over time, and that’s why it’s a struggle rather than an arbitrary expression of personal liberty. On the issue of race people have thought, ‘Oh well does Butler think that somebody could just say: ‘Well I’m Black’, when they’re not Black, when they have no Black formation, they have no Black legacy, they don’t come from Black parents or a Black world, they just have decided that they feel Black and they want to say they’re Black. Or they want a fellowship, so they falsely claim they’re Black, or they want to belong to a certain community and deceive people in order to achieve that sense of belonging. We’ve seen people who have lied, who have fraudulently appropriated racial or cultural identities, including indigenous ones, and these are all unethical actions. That is not performativity—that is lying. For me, performativity is actually a way of challenging restrictive and oppressive norms, but cultural appropriation is an example of racial oppression. Sometimes one has to make plain what one’s background is, the community from which one comes, the sexuality that is one’s own, or the gender that represents one’s lived reality. In those cases, performativity does not create that history or sexuality or lived reality, but it does make it legible, and sometimes for the first time, or against a way of saying and naming that leaves one effaced and erased. Performativity seeks to break through that erasure, but cultural appropriation is a form of erasure. Obviously, we have to be able to understand the situations in which performativity is operating in order to evaluate its effects. We can, for instance, ask how racial norms consolidate racism through forms of performativity, in which case performativity is a way of analysing a social issue, but not, by itself, something to be celebrated or condemned. It helps us to see how reality is construed, how intelligibility is established and contested, and we might sometimes like that contestation, and sometimes not. Performativity is not its own frame of reference. CJLPA : On the note of the changing terms of reality—you also briefly mentioned your example of Drag queens—what role, if it plays a role at all, does art have to play in performativity? JB : At the time that I used the drag example, I wanted to show that what counts as feminine and masculine can change, and that some traits we take as natural or fixed are, in fact, constituted over time by virtue of practices and repeated styles. But the example was taken to be exemplary of performativity itself, and that produced some consequences I neither anticipated nor wanted. For instance, some drag performers do, in fact, clothe themselves and act in certain ways under very specific conditions, but then ‘return’ to their truer genders in everyday life. This is, of course, not the same as what happens with trans people who are living their gender reality in every aspect of their lives. The idea of a punctual, discrete, and transitory performance was reinforced by the example of drag, but, in fact, gender as lived is another matter. I did not clearly grasp the implications of that example when I wrote about it nearly 35 years ago, but I see it better now. For those who quite legitimately want the reality of their genders recognised, or who prefer to use the language of sex to describe their trans lives, it is important to underscore that sex can be reassigned, that genders can change, and that the sex or gender arrived at by trans people designated their reality. I believe that performativity can still describe that reality, since the language and recognition is achieved by various means. I would now say that gender is the apparatus through which sex is assigned, established, and re-assigned and re-established. Gender is not the cultural form that natural sex assumed, but the process through which that assumption and establishment takes place. In this sense, it is not an identity, but the process through which identity is established. Similarly, performativity is not fluff or artifice, but rather the name for the very consequential process by which subjects are formed and come to identify themselves, establish their reality, and demand recognition. Art is enormously important for me. It was what I missed most, aside from friends, during the pandemic. It has the power to embrace and fix my mind, claim my attention and transform me. CJLPA : Is it a vessel for power or is it more a platform for self-expression? JB : If we are speaking about art or artistic practice, or art objects, we have approached a complex problem. Personally, I love going to museums even though I understand the critique of museums and love both public art and performance. I am also drawn to abstraction, even though I understand the critique of abstraction from several quarters. I’m very often interested in when a painting is finished, in what year, and seek to understand how history is refracted in non-representational modes. That doesn’t mean I don’t love realism, but I do wonder about the ways in which it has been written about. Lukacs interests me, for instance, but his writing also maddens me. Is it realistic to imagine that society gives itself to us as a totality? I suppose I am always somewhat ambivalent in museums. I might want to burrow myself within the frame in order to take in what that painting is asking of me, but it’s very hard as I move around a museum structure not to be saturated with capitalism, with the hurting feet of the guards, the cost of membership, and, of course, the cost of the artworks themselves. One is, after all, roaming around a market. I remember one day I had fully enjoyed a day inside the Whitney in NYC only to exit and find people I knew protesting members of the museum’s board, Warren Kanders, who eventually resigned because his company was selling tear gas used against protestors! How do I allow myself that absorption in painting, that sense of renewal and reconfiguration, that can happen within a frame, or within a play, or even in a performance piece that is provisional without thinking about the infrastructure, who’s paying, who’s profiting? I suppose I am influenced by Brecht who cautioned not only against identification, but absorption as well. I’m very interested in performance studies, and luckily taught in the field a couple of times at UC Berkeley with my colleague, Shannon Jackson, so seeing what happens when performance moves off the proscenium and into the street or various public spaces is important to me. Performance can become part of a strike against museums or other corporate entities, and that counterpoint is very powerful. In general, there is a performance dimension to strikes and protests that is very important for the articulation of political rage but also political sorrow. We see a lot of improvisational art and performance in the Movement for Black Lives, as Patrisse Cullors has shown. I am also aware of the power of plays that were written in classical Athens but have enormous power in contemporary life: Esperanza Spalding’s rendition of Iphigenia is one. But Antigone remains ever-generative; Antigone was played under dictatorial Argentina and then post-dictatorial Argentina. Antigone was played in Colombia, in Ecuador. Colombians in exile performed the play in Mexico City; it was performed in Palestine on a rubble of rocks that used to be somebody’s home, changed into a platform. The Jenin theatre project on which I served on the international board, was all about turning political rage and sorrow into art, especially photography and performance. I think for me, some of the most emotionally powerful and life-changing, but also conceptual-framework-changing events have happened through powerful, powerful performances and powerful art, including poetry. We could document, as well, the way photography has changed our experience of illness, of war, of science, of the virus in ways that have enormous social and political implications. CJLPA : You say how walking through a museum and seeing certain frames, paintings, sculptures, whatever they may be, emotionally affects you, and that art has both positive and negative aspects. I can also see how that could be a source of anxiety for many people, not being able to, for example, walk through the museums and enjoy the art available without the knowledge of how it was retrieved—take, for example, the current scandal with the British Museum and how they retrieve certain historical items. How do we manage that anxiety? JB : I followed Christopher Hitchens’ writings on the Elgin marbles scandal, and I thought it was among the better things he did, really instigating that campaign to return the marbles to Athens. I’ve seen the partial display of those marbles in Athens as well as in the UK, and I’ve deliberately gone between the two sites to see what was stolen and how it was presented by the British Museum. I won’t not go see stolen art, but then part of looking involves seeing how the stealing is framed, and how the frame effaces the crime. Something similar happened in France after the opening of the Musée du quai Branly and art stolen from Africa was identified. After being petitioned by Felwine Sarr from Senegal, Macron agreed to return the art to Africa. Reparations of this kind are crucial to exposing the continuing colonial legacies at work in the art world, including legacies of military destruction and pillage. The repatriation of artworks is a counter-imperialist move that we need to examine and continue to think about, including the way that those legacies have contoured the canon of art history itself, as Banu Karaca has demonstrated. The history of looting is also something we look away from when we become absorbed in the work of art, but maybe we can somehow have both. There are aspects of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism that enter into my ‘seeing’ when I go to museums, but it does not fully preclude becoming claimed by a work of art. It is that seeing moves from one dimension to another, and that the one is always hovering in the background of the other. I think we can allow ourselves that absorption, but also try to figure out what the institutional and labour conditions for this beautiful encounter I’m having are. It doesn’t destroy it for me, but it needs to be part of what I take in when I go. CJLPA : I’m particularly interested in your notion of grievability and your work in the field of necropolitics more generally, and I wanted to ask you a more topical question on this basis. I was wondering whether grievability could be applied to describe the differences we see in the treatment of war victims. Are there differences in the grievability of war victims, for example, in Ukraine compared to Palestinian citizens, or Syrian refugees? And if there is, how do we minimise this? JB : I think there’s no way to think about war without thinking about those who are fleeing war, and that means that we’re thinking about borders and detention practices. Wars are often about contesting or claiming borders, as we know. They can be ways of moving borders or breaking borders. But the border, wherever it is, is the place for the gathering of refugees and the treatment of refugees, the negotiation of alterity, citizenship, and rights of mobility, even rights of existence. Some people, following Michael Walzer, make a distinction between just and unjust war and, according to that framework, an unjust war is obviously being waged against the Ukrainian people (as of 2 June 2022). But is it right to say that the Ukrainians are waging a just war? Or is it better to say that they are engaged in a fully legitimate resistance to military aggression? Those kinds of debates centre on established nations, but let’s remember that nations get established through establishing territorial boundaries and regulating rights of passage. On the border with Poland, radical social inequality accompanies, and qualifies, the general admiration for Polish hospitality. Some refugees merit hospitality, but others clearly don’t. I’m reminded of Mahmood Mamdani’s book Good Muslim Bad Muslim where he argues that the Muslim who can assimilate well, the one who is well educated, who shares cultural or class behaviours and values with Europeans, including secular commitments, stands a chance of becoming the good one. But the one who holds out, affirming their community of belonging, participating in religious or cultural activities that deviate from dominant religious, cosmopolitan cultures, is usually deemed bad or suspect, not only because they adhere to certain religious practises, but because they are seen to adhere: they are publicly regarded as adhering to that community rather than assimilating to a national one, or they wear something that announces that they are in fact religious, or that they belong to a religious tradition and community. I recall Mamdani’s distinction because at the borders of Europe, we are witnessing mechanisms that distinguish between good and bad refugees. It’s been the case for some time that wealthy people can buy their way into citizenship in places like Spain, and that other European nations demand to see bank and investment accounts in deciding who can come in and who can stay. Even as Angela Merkel invited Syrians to Germany—and that was a great thing that she did—she discriminated against a number of North Africans at the border and did not open that same door to them. These are all examples of social inequality, but also decisions about whose lives are worthy of supporting and whose can be abandoned. For those who make those decisions according to national policies, they are all the time distinguishing between those lives that are legible, intelligible, valuable, and those that are clearly not. Even if they never say it to themselves, they are deciding whose lives are dispensable, can be tossed, or can be left to die at the border or drown at sea. For instance, in Honduras, people are living in conditions at borders that not only put them at extreme risk for COVID, but also, now, other diseases. They are living in unsanitary conditions, or without basic medical or health provisions. They are a population that is left to become ill, made increasingly susceptible to illness and to death by the lack of infrastructure provided. Maybe nobody is shooting them or bombing them, but some powers are letting them die. This is a form of slow violence, as Rob Nixon has said. That letting the population die in a way that many countries do—and I think Europe does this as well in its maritime restrictions on immigration over the Mediterranean—constitutes the second form of death-dealing that Foucault describes in Society Must Be Defended. The first might be understood as the deliberate decision of sovereign powers to declare war or sentence someone to death. Putin is emulating that form of sovereign power as we speak. But then there’s this ‘letting die’, which usually happens through policy or through neglect and dispensability. Neglect can be unthinking or it can be deliberate policy, as when Malta turns back leaky vessels filled with migrants. I think that by letting them die, we can call it necropolitical as Achille Mbembe has, I have no problem with that and I use that term myself, but sometimes those forms of death dealing are intertwined and I think we do see that in war. CJLPA : In light of that, should there be a criteria or international law in place so that countries, or specific countries, keep their borders open and welcome refugees with open arms? JB : I think there’s clear racism at the border of Poland, and the Polish government was clearly happier with Ukrainian refugees than with refugees coming from Afghanistan or Syria or North Africa. At work is both racial and religious discrimination. It’s also part of this assimilationist logic that says, ‘Oh you can come to a European country, but you must assimilate to this culture, or be regarded in advance as capable of that assimilation’. Why does anyone make a demand of that sort? Why can’t anyone come and actually change the country, change and enrich the culture of the country? Inviting migrants in implies agreeing to be transformed by new members of the society and, yes, becoming a different country. Yes! Allow the country to evolve into a more international, transnational region, that’s actually enormously hopeful. Multilingualism, that’s no less than fabulous, especially when educational and cultural institutions provide for that, and support that vision. So, although we surely need firmer anti-discrimination laws at the border, that only goes part of the way toward realising the new vision of society that is required. We also need to strengthen international covenants to stipulate that all stateless people have the right to belong somewhere, and that it is the obligation of every state to admit people from whatever origin or location for asylum procedures and to give their petitions fair, transparent, and comprehensive reviews on a non-discriminatory basis. Also, it will be imperative to rethink the state not just as a sovereign entity that defends its borders through military means and hyper surveillance but considers its borders as a portal and a threshold. The border should be rethought as portal and threshold, the site of translation, exchange, and movement, and the state should be rethought as a set of dynamic relations with other territories, regions, and states. It should be defined by that relationality rather than by its sovereign defensive position. CJLPA : What advice would you give to aspiring researchers, students of inequality, or activists? JB : I would say that if you’re a researcher in a university, make sure you do not stay fully enclosed within the university, that you don’t treat the university walls as protection and enclosure. You actually need to insist that those walls become porous and that the communities around you, the broader world, enter the university and help to decide the purpose and plan of research. I think that academics can become very self-referential within the university, and I believe some of the anti-intellectualism on the right comes from not really understanding what we do in universities and why we do it. I think there’s also anti-intellectualism on the left or on the part of those who believe that the internet provides more knowledge than any possible classroom. I don’t know about this term, ‘scholar/activist’, I don’t know if I am that or not: sometimes I’m just a scholar, sometimes I’m just an activist, and sometimes I’m blending, so I don’t really know how to reflect upon that distinction. But I think learning how to go out into the world through other platforms and making our knowledge known, and explaining its value, and handling the challenges to it in various kinds of venues, whether it’s online or in person, is a really important thing for academics to do. If we work in public universities, and the public cannot understand the value of what we do, they will seek to defund us, especially during austerity. Besides, it sharpens our thinking and it connects us with people, so we don’t become hermetically sealed within academic life and too neurotically self-referential. The academy is a place where neurosis can breed dangerously, so one needs to remember to stay connected to a larger world; it lifts one out of oneself and reminds us that we are not the centre of the world. I do think academics at the start of a career should be afforded the chance to wake up in the morning and feel passionate about what they do. Don’t pick the topic that you don’t love because you think it’ll get you somewhere professionally: No. Especially if you’re writing a dissertation or a first book, you must want to see that page when you wake up. You must be eager to get back to where you left off. But that means you have to find your desire and stay with it, and trust that it will yield something that’s valuable to you and to others. CJLPA : At this moment in time what is your current research interest, what are you working on, and what was your motivation behind this interest? JB : Well, I’m writing a book called Who’s Afraid of Gender? which is a critique of the anti-gender ideology movement. I’m trying to take apart their arguments while tracking the phantasms that haunt their thinking, which show the limits of argumentative discourse. Of course, it’s hard to argue with somebody who won’t read the work in question but nevertheless has a firm idea of what it is about. One is confronted with a highly phantasmatic side of anxiety and fear. One also has to think about how to address that. If you can’t work at the level of argumentation and evidence, how do you proceed? How do you address somebody’s massive anxiety and fear and hatred? So, that’s my problem and I’m trying to confront that question. And then I have a long-standing project on Kafka on the law—I guess we could have talked about that—where I am trying to understand, in general, how his writing relates to indefinite detention. Indefinite detention has become the most common carceral practice in the world, and Kafka had a developed premonition about how it works. In particular, he was interested in the status of legal systems when the sequence of a trial and punishment is reversed, that is to say, when one is found guilty first and then the trial and its deferment becomes an indefinitely extended form of punishment. So, I’m also interested in how Kafka thinks about the architecture of law because law is both a temporal and spatial problem in his work. When it takes architectural form, law comes to resemble prisons and their impasses. His literary writing collapses narrative into carceral space and its impasses. CJLPA : What kind of course is feminist philosophy currently taking? JB : I think there are several things going on. I think Black feminism has enormous influence not only in the US and UK, but throughout Europe, Africa, and Latin America. There’s a great deal of work being done by contemporary feminist philosophers on race and gender, but also prison abolition. We have to think about abolitionism as a form of Black feminist philosophy. There continues to be work being done in the philosophy of science relating to reproductive freedoms, personhood, the question of life, care, and the technologies of both reproduction and sex assignment. There is also a fair amount being done on feminist movement politics, especially the feminist strike, bringing forward the work of Rosa Luxemburg into contemporary feminist politics, and a great deal of reflection on both resistance and revolution. Many feminist philosophers are interested in how we think about desire and affect in politics. To answer that question, many feminist philosophers go back to Spinoza or bring Spinoza forward into the present to try to do that—I find those positions very interesting even though I cannot always go along. Decolonial feminism is important for philosophy and for several other fields, engaging feminist thinkers who have written extensively on colonisation such as Rita Segato and Françoise Vergès. CJLPA : Do you have any career memories or regrets that you have as a philosopher or as an activist? JB : I think that Gender Trouble was written when I was trying to secure a permanent job, and I think it was kind of trapped in the French discourse of the time in the US. It was written in a more difficult style than it should have been. Despite its difficulty, it remains popular and people still read it. Perhaps I could have shown more clearly how I was influenced by social movements, especially AIDS activism and LGBTQI emergent movements, but also the history of feminist thought, including Black feminist thought and poetry. I wish that I could have written that book for a broader audience and perhaps with a broader citational base, but I somehow imagined that it would not have much of a life. Of course, I have many regrets in my career, and there were times when I responded to a plea from a friend that ended up putting me in a morally compromised position. I cannot undo that kind of mistake, but I can now live my life differently. One has to be humble in relation to one’s errors, affirm the errancy, as it were, to become a more attentive and responsible person. On the other hand, I have been gifted by the connections that my work has made among readers and translators, the latter group being some of the most important intellectuals I have met. They have introduced my words, and me, to worlds that I would have never understood or known about. So, basically, I feel gratitude. So, I’m much more connected to different parts of the world by virtue of very brilliant translators who spent time with me and who ultimately became my intellectual colleagues and friends. Translation is difficult, frustrating, and transformative, like life. This interview was conducted by Teresa Turkheimer, an MSc student in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main interest lies in understanding the causes and effects of inequalities that characterise the labour market today, and is hoping to pursue a career in research in the coming years.

Shona Illingworth is a Danish-Scottish artist and Professor of Art, Film and Media at the University of Kent, UK. Her work examines the impact of accelerating military, industrial, and environmental transformations of airspace and outer space and the implications for human rights. She is co-founder with Nick Grief of the Airspace Tribunal ( https://airspacetribunal.org/ ). Recent solo exhibitions include Topologies of Air at Les Abattoirs, Musée—Frac Occitanie, Toulouse (2022–23), The Power Plant, Toronto (2022), and Bahrain National Museum, Manama (2022–23). Illingworth was a Stanley Picker Fellow, is an Imperial War Museum Associate and sits on the international editorial boards of the Journal of Digital War and Memory, Mind & Media . The monograph Shona Illingworth—Topologies of Air was published by Sternberg Press and The Power Plant in 2022 ( https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/shona-illingworth/ ). With over 40 years’ experience as a legal academic in three universities, Nick Grief is now Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Kent where he completed his undergraduate and doctoral studies. Throughout his career he specialised in public international law, international human rights law, and EU law, with particular reference to airspace, outer space, and nuclear weapons. Nick also practised at the Bar for 25 years, mainly as an Associate Tenant at Doughty Street Chambers, where he is now an Honorary Associate Tenant. He was a member of the legal team which represented the Marshall Islands before the International Court of Justice in cases against India, Pakistan, and the UK concerning the obligation to negotiate in good faith towards nuclear disarmament. This interview was conducted in September 2023. CJLPA: First, I just wanted to say thank you both for taking the time to interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art  to discuss your work on the Airspace Tribunal, a revolutionary human rights project that considers the case for the freedom of individuals to live without physical or psychological threat from above.[1] So I would just like to start by asking if you can tell us a little bit about the inception of the idea, and how things have progressed thus far with respect to the work of the Tribunal.   Nick Grief : It sounds crazy, but the germ of this idea originated at a meeting that we both attended at the University of Kent in 2016. It was a planning meeting, and I was at the time Dean for our Medway campus. Shona was there as a senior member of her school, and during one of the breaks we found ourselves sitting next to one another. We didn’t know each other, but we got chatting and discovered mutual interests in human rights, airspace, outer space, etc. And that’s what led us to start talking and thinking about this project. I think that’s probably where it dates from Shona, isn’t it?   Shona Illingworth : Yes, that’s the first time we met. We had an immediate connection through our common interests and concerns. The reasons for that are also quite important, particularly considering that I am an artist and Nick is a lawyer.   I grew up on the northwest corner of Scotland in a small community of craft workers that had established itself in a former military early warning station on the edge of the Cape Wrath Range, one of NATO’s most extensive live bombing ranges. It’s a 360-degree range, which aso means that it can be attacked simultaneously by land, air and sea. Twice a year, NATO and its allies conduct Europe’s largest military training exercise called Joint Warrior, using this landscape and airspace as a proxy for places of conflict elsewhere. Up to 20 countries participate in these large-scale ‘war’ exercises, which include live artillery fire, aerial bombardment, anti-submarine ships, and more recently drone technology. Around 75 aircraft are regularly involved across northwest Scotland and numerous warships appear on the horizon.   Most critically, for me, in terms of my relationship with the sky, was that without warning, three or four GR4 Tornado jets could suddenly come in very quickly and very low to drop 1000-pound live bombs on a small island just off the coast. As a child growing up there in the 1970s, the vast open skies of this remote and sparsely populated landscape would instantly collapse into an oppressive lid over our heads. The sonic force was visceral, our spatial world contracting with the overpowering military presence above. It was a complete transformation of our environment through the sheer force of the jets—that level of violence and control.   My parents were part of the 1960s post-war generation looking for another kind of life. They moved to this remote location, also hoping to escape the threat of nuclear annihilation. There was, growing up there, this constant sense of threat. This was a place that had been part of the Chain Home Command during the Second World War, then identified as the site for an early warning station at the start of the Cold War. There was always a sense there of imminent threat coming from the over the horizon.    The military use of the Highland landscape had been an area of focus in my practice for many years.[2] In 2012, I began work on a project called Topologies of Air, during an artist residency at Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre in the Outer Hebrides. I was particularly interested in the planning and consultation process for a large expansion of the Hebrides Range, extending from the Outer Hebrides out into the North Atlantic. The Range is used for complex weapons trials and live-firing and is managed by a commercial company called QinetiQ. I’d read the consultation documents, and it was clear to me that the terms of the consultation were very constrained. For example, the economic case presented was that if the expansion didn’t take place, the military may close the Range and jobs would be lost. Employment and the risks of de-population have long been of critical concern for remote communities. The environmental impacts were considered in equally narrow terms.   During the residency, I recorded conversations with people living there, and undertook research. I was interested in the cultural history of the sky and relationships between people in that landscape and the space above. I became very aware of how modernity’s representation of the sky as open and empty contributed to an erasure of the deeper cultural history of the sky and understanding of its place in many different cosmologies. This act of cultural erasure, I would argue, supports the military instrumentalisation of the sky as a ‘sanitised’ space of ‘unlimited altitude’ for weapons testing.[3]    When I returned, I met Nick and discovered that he was a lawyer and law professor with expertise in international airspace law and human rights. When we met again to discuss my research in the Outer Hebrides and the consultation on the expansion of the Hebrides Range, I also described my experience growing of up in the edge of the Cape Wrath Range. Nick asked me whether I thought freedom from the effects of those oppressive forms of occupation above could be a question of human rights. I said, absolutely. Nick then explained how the legal framework for defining airspace had not significantly changed since 1944 and we agreed that this did not reflect the radical transformations in how the sky is now being used. It was during that first meeting that we decided to set up an international people’s tribunal, which we called the Airspace Tribunal, to develop the human rights dimension of airspace and outer space and consider the case for and against a proposed new human right.[4]   NG : Let me just add a little bit of colour on the legal side. My background is as a lawyer specialising in international law and human rights. In particular, I did my PhD on international airspace law, because I’ve always been intrigued by aviation and airspace even as a youngster. Before I went to university, I was fascinated by the concept of airspace and how airspace is controlled. I was particularly fascinated by the legal regime governing international airspace where there is no sovereign territory below, for example, the airspace over the high seas.   One of the first things Shona and I did was to look closely at the airspace over the UK and adjacent to the coast. We were keen to see how these military activities that Shona has described in and around the north of Scotland were provided for in terms of airspace regulation. We plotted the various restricted zones and danger areas on a map of the UK, and it allowed us to see their impact at a glance. Another thing we did was ask whether there were existing human rights laws by which this kind of activity could be challenged with respect to people’s enjoyment of the space above their heads, as live munitions are being used in these test zones.   SI : Just to add to this, during the production of an earlier work of mine called Balnakiel , I was filming the Joint Warrior Exercise from the Range Control Tower on the Cape Wrath Range.[5] I was with cinematographer Bevis Bowden and we were filming a Show of Force, which is a military tactic used to disperse civilians in an area of conflict by bringing fast jets in extremely low over the ground. I didn’t know, however, that the target area for the exercise was the control tower where I was standing. Within seconds, I experienced three GR4 Tornado jets flying incredibly low towards the building. The rush of adrenaline, the fear, the physiological transformation of my body lasted for 48 hours. It was so intense I could not sleep. I say this because even though I knew that I was not under attack or at risk, the impact was overwhelming. It has been incredibly important for the Airspace Tribunal to gain an understanding of the actual lived experience of the expanding militarisation and weaponisation of airspace and increasingly outer space, by hearing from people in different parts of the world who are being subjected to threats, violence and risk of injury or death from above, and who are often living in a perpetual state of anticipatory anxiety which can cause long-term physical, psychological, and physiological harm.[6] Fig 1 and 2. Shona Illingworth, Topologies of Air, 2021. Three-channel digital video and multichannel sound installation, 45 min. Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by The Wapping Project. Installation view: Topologies of Air, The Power Plant, 2022. Photo: Toni Hafkenschied.

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 7th Avenue studio. He had considered several possible titles for the painting, including Contra-Rural Landscape and Chemical Landscape, which make clear the work’s ‘abstract selection and synthetic combination’ of aspects of a city dweller’s experience—like the new sulfa ‘wonder drugs’. As listed by Davis, these included ‘Fruit and flowers; kitchen utensils; Fall skies, horizons, taxi cabs; radio; art exhibitions and reproductions; fast travel; Americana; movies; electric signs; dynamics of city sights and sounds; […]’.[57] Yet rather than depict such elements specifically Davis, as he subsequently explained, ‘introduced Time into Form by referring the immediate concrete shapes to more general shapes which have a much more extended existence in Time and Place’.[58] Davis’s references here to ‘more general shapes’ as well as to ‘extended existence in Time and Place’—along with his mention in his 1940 text on Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors of ‘a new unity’ which ‘is a new part of Nature’—all point to the centrality of ideas about the space-time continuum for Davis and, specifically, its interpretation as a ‘block universe’. Minkowski had formulated the four-dimensional space-time continuum in 1908 in order to unify the multiple frames of reference of individual observers after Einstein had made them relative in 1905, and he actually referred to his structure as an ‘absolute’ world.[59] With events in an individual’s existence redefined by Minkowski as ‘world-lines’ traversing this four-dimensional continuum, subsequent theorizing led to the conception of a ‘block universe’. In this interpretation, summarized by Jeans in The Mysterious Universe, the space-time continuum is understood as a four-dimensional geometric structure in which future events are already extant (and past events preserved), and an individual simply progresses through three-dimensional cross sections of the structure as time progresses.[60] Eager to create a rationalized vision of nature, Davis wrote in 1933 of his recent paintings: This series of pictures […] presents simultaneously that which is observed sequentially. It rationalizes vision and creates a new view of nature which is not entirely the accident of binocular vision. In contrast to ordinary methods which present on a canvas observations made in time and are therefore to a degree unrelated, this system brings into one focus and one place, the past, present, and future events involved in the act of observation of any given subject.[61] Or, as he asserted in 1943 of his paintings’ similarity to the space-time continuum’s fusion of the relative viewpoints of all observers: ‘The result is an objective coherence not obtained before in painting. […] The total quality of the design evokes a cosmological point of view for the observer’.[62] After the 1941 publication of Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, Davis was operating as the primary contemporary American Cubist in an artistic context in which connections between Picasso and Einstein or Cubism and Relativity were regularly being drawn. Yet it was Davis—not Picasso—whose art theory and style owed a debt to Einstein’s theories. Davis believed his art was an accurate response to the ‘spirit of modern society, which in its progressive aspects is materialistic and scientific’.[63] Einstein and the four-dimensional space-time continuum of Relativity Theory thus served as an effective vehicle for Davis to fashion himself as a logical, scientific painter in the art world of New York, in which the far more subjective style of Abstract Expressionism was emerging by the late 1940s. Implications for the Question of Modernism in Art and Science During 1950-2 Marcel Duchamp and Davis, two artists who found rich stimulation in science (albeit pre-Einsteinian for Duchamp and Einsteinian for Davis) were both consulting editors for the New York journal Trans/formation. The periodical affirmed on its masthead that ‘art, science, technology are interacting components of the total human enterprise’ and that, contrary to the contemporary tendency to treat them in isolation, Trans/formation would ‘cut across the arts and sciences by treating them as a continuum’.[64] That motto is a good reminder that in the early twentieth-century scientific discoveries such as X-rays, radioactivity, and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy generated a vast amount of popular literature that made them readily accessible to the general public. Popularizations of Relativity, including those by Jeans and Arthur Eddington, also brought aspects of Einstein’s theories into public purview, but the increasingly mathematical orientation of physics—and especially quantum physics—gradually dampened the early twentieth-century sense that the layperson should and could grasp the latest science. No longer would articles on the newest science routinely appear in general interest magazines like Harper’s Monthly, as they had done in the early years of the century. Only the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 would turn the public’s attention once again to atomic science in the later 1940s and 1950s, but other themes—fear of the atom or its potential for good—would dominate such discussions, rather than the science itself.[65] Even if its subjects were phenomena invisible to the human eye, ether physics was still visualizable to some degree, and it clearly inspired artists to attempt to paint windows onto a ‘meta-reality’ just beyond perception’s reach. As in Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler or Boccioni’s Matter, it was an ethereal, spatially ambiguous, vibrating, and fluctuant realm of interpenetrating matter and space that was envisioned—supported by the model of continuity offered by the ether, Le Bon’s focus on dematerializing matter, and Bergson’s philosophy. Here the ‘fourth dimension’ was another sign of that higher reality: a suprasensible dimension of space, often linked to the ether, rather than a component of Einsteinian space-time. And in that earlier context painters regularly sought to give form to invisible energies and dimensions. How different, then, are the flat, diagrammatic images of Davis with their hard-edged clarity and logic; they are not meant to be looked through, but stand instead as self-sufficient inscriptions, composed of discrete, discontinuous components. As noted earlier, Davis’s planar units derive stylistically from the prewar Synthetic Cubist collages and paintings of Picasso and Braque, which subsequently became standard fare in modern painting. However, those planes had nothing inherently to do with Einstein until Davis determined to use them as elements in a painting style that he believed could approximate the objectivity he identified with the space-time continuum as a ‘block universe’, free of the accidents of individual perception. With its forms transcending the specifics of observation at any given moment, works such as Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors accomplished Davis’s goal for painting, which he ultimately designated as ‘The Amazing Continuity’ (as he painted the phrase on his 1952 painting Visa).[66] Rather than the ethereal continuity of Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, however, continuity for Davis signified a new matrix of experience—the space-time continuum.[67] Just as there is no single entity ‘modern art’, but rather the products of multiple artists on two sides of a major divide between 1900-19 and the 1920s-40s, the ‘science’ to which the artists responded in the two periods differed significantly. In the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century, discoveries made in the context of the still-reigning ether physics excited the imaginations of cutting-edge artists of the era, but predated public knowledge of the science later considered to be ‘modern’, ie Relativity Theory. There was no zeitgeist that meant that Picasso must have responded to Einstein. Instead, for artists, the concept of ‘science’ in any given year after 1905 signified a variety of exhilarating new ideas other than Relativity Theory—at least through World War I. Popular scientific writing, including by scientists like Lodge and popularizers like Le Bon, abounded in this period and served as the interface between the realms of art and science. We miss far too much of the richness of modernism when the simplistic tendency to link the two ‘banners’—Picasso and Einstein—impedes the historical recovery of that highly creative and complex moment in the early twentieth century. Linda Dalrymple Henderson Linda Dalrymple Henderson is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History, Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching have focused on modern art in its broader cultural context, including ideas such as ‘the fourth dimension’, the history of science and technology, and mystical and occult philosophies. In addition to over eighty journal articles and essays in book and catalogues, she is the author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press 1983; new ed MIT Press 2013) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton University Press 1998). [1] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (Thames and Hudson 1971) 26. This essay is an updated version of a text of this title published in the catalogue for the 2012 exhibition The Moderns at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, curated by Cathrin Pichler and Suzanne Neuberger. The discussion of Stuart Davis herein draws directly on the ‘Reintroduction’ I was then adding to the 2013 edition of my book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (originally 1983). I am currently at work on a project titled ‘Ether and the Energies of Modernism: Art, Science, and Occultism in the Early Twentieth Century’. This new book recovers a crucial backdrop for the develop of modern art by tracking science as known to the public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the prominent role of the ether of space both in its scientific and occult contexts. [2] Alfred H Barr Jr, What is Modern Painting? (The Museum of Modern Art 1943) 29. [3] For this phenomenon, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Four-Dimensional Space or Space-Time? The Emergence of the Cubism-Relativity Myth in New York in the 1940s’ in Michele Emmer (ed), The Visual Mind II (MIT Press 2004) 349-97, as well as typical texts such as Paul M Laporte, ‘The Space-Time Concept in the Work of Picasso’ (1948) 41 The Magazine of Art 26-32; Paul M Laporte, ‘Cubism and Science’ (1949) 7 The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism 243-56. [4] For the principles and popularization of Relativity Theory, see eg Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Atomic Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press 1999) 90-104. On the absence of significant interest in Special Relativity in France, where Henri Poincaré was the dominant figure of science, see Stanley Goldberg, Understanding Relativity: Origin and Impact of a Scientific Revolution (Birkhäuser 1984) ch 7; Thomas Glick (ed), The Comparative Reception of Relativity (D. Reidel Publishing Co 1987) 113-67. For a sampling of early responses to Einstein, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton University Press 1998) 234 n 19. [5] For these developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physics, see eg Kragh (n 4); PM Harman, Energy, Force, Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (Cambridge University Press 1982); Alex Keller, The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in His Cradle (Clarendon Press 1983). I discuss the popularization of the work of the scientists listed here in Henderson (n 4) and in the book in progress. The public appeal of scientists like Crookes and Lodge was augmented by their openness to aspects of the occult; see the pioneering study by Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press 2019). [6] Oliver Lodge, ‘Electric Theory of Matter’ (Harper’s Monthly Magazine, August 1904) 383-9. On the ether, see eg Bruce J Hunt, ‘Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether’ in Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (eds), From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford University Press 2002) 99-113; MJS Hodge and GN Cantor, Conceptions of Ether: A Study in the History of Ether Theories 1740-1900 (Cambridge University Press 1981); Harman (n 5). For a more recent discussion, see Jaume Navarro (ed), Ether and Modernity: The Recalcitrance of an Epistemic Object in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press 2018), with its documentation of the ‘recalcitrance’ of the ether. Donald R Benson, ‘Facts and Fictions in Scientific Discourse: The Case of the Ether’ (1984) 38 The Georgia Review 825-37 remains a useful introduction to the ether in the cultural context of nineteenth-century science. [7] Oliver Lodge, The Ether of Space (Harper & Brothers 1909) 104-5. [8] William Crookes, ‘Address by Sir William Crookes, President’ in Report of the Sixty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898) (John Murray 1899) 31. [9] For this history, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press 1983) ch 1. For a more extensive discussion, see Mark Blacklock, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford University Press 2018). [10] Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe, or Speculations on a Future State (4th 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) 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 21st 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 GK: Monuments have been pulled down in the recent past. Is this sculpture a way of addressing the historical imbalance of power? TS: Public art exists to challenge preconceived notions, allowing all individuals, even those who did not seek an artistic experience, to encounter it. These encounters can be intense, conjuring a range of emotions, from joy to rage. As an artist working within the public realm, I have seen the full gamut of reactions. I do not value one over the other as all elevate the discourse around any given project. In 2023, Seated (2022) was targeted and attacked by vandals in Bexhill-on-Sea, an incident that was particularly disheartening as it epitomised the violence Black and female bodies are subjected to. The violence enacted on the sculpture illuminates the persistent issues plaguing contemporary society and exemplifies the need for more diversity and representation in public art. Exalted images of people of colour and women should not provoke rage and should not automatically be deemed political. Iconography depicting blackness should be treated with the same respect and neutrality given to artistic media depicting all other groups. After the attack, rather than hide the sculpture from view, I wanted the local community to feel empowered though action. I organised with the museum a restoration event through which the community could remove the paint from the sculpture. Three hundred people queued to help to clean the sculpture and through community support she was restored to her former likeness. Fig 2. At Home—Lady in Purple in Hot Room (Tschabalala Self 2022, coloured pencil, acrylic, oil based enamel silkscreen print on paper, 121.9 x 91.4 cm). © Tschabalala Self, Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London GK: Can you talk about the scale of the work and the choice of materials: bronze and a dress painted in dazzling Lapis Lazuli? TS: Made of bronze, Lady in Blue will reference existing sculptures in the square but will be patinated, adding colour to signify a change. The blue is Lapis Lazuli, a rare and refined pigment used since antiquity, in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe primarily, a colour that has gained historical significance over time. Lapis Lazuli was used by Renaissance artists such as Bellini and Raphael and was often reserved for the clothes of the central character of their paintings, particularly the Virgin Mary. The blue remained significant for centuries in Western painting. I am interested, for example, in the link with Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring—as with Lady in Blue, the painting is a character study rather than a portrait of a particular person, a gesture that opens questions and conversations, rather than a fixed meaning. In both works, the protagonists are draped in ethereal Lapis Lazuli. Fig 3. Lady in Blue (Tschabalala Self) Model for Fourth Plinth Commission, Trafalgar Square, London 2026 © Tschabalala Self, Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London GK: How does this work fit within your art practice in general? TS: The starting point for this figure was a series of drawings I made in 2020 in preparation for my first public art project, commissioned by Performa 2021, which took the form of an experimental play. In 2020, I was deep in character development, devoting a lot of attention to the two main archetypes who would become the play’s main protagonists. My commission, Sounding Board, bore a series of fictional characters, amalgamations of several people who have appeared since in various iterations throughout my work. These drawings were strange, making great use of symbology, often conflating the figures with set props and various objects that one might find within the home. The domestic space and its trappings became embedded in my figures. My series At Home, which later inspired my first public sculpture commission Seated (2022), was developed during this time. My first two public art projects are tethered to a mediation on the home, which may seem ironic; but the home is a microcosm of the society at large and should never be considered distinct from the public realm. This interview was conducted by Gabriella Kardos, an artist and art historian. In 1976 she escaped communism with her family, fleeing Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania and emigrating to Montreal, Canada in search of freedom. Here she studied Fine Arts at Dawson College and Art History at Concordia University. She went on to teach Art Theory in the Painting and Drawing Department of Concordia University and Painting in the MA course of Vermont College of Norwich University, USA. She holds an MA from Central St Martins, London and has exhibited at the Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague, Anglia Polytechnic University in Ipswich, UK, ROSL, Victoria & Albert Museum, and WCPF in London. She lives in London where she is pursuing her art practice in painting and printmaking.

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.