To Have To Do With The Law: An Essay

This is an experimental text with three voices. The first one is an autoethnographic study of being called on jury service at the Old Bailey, London. The second is a theoretical voice, analysing the theory of the lawscape as I have developed it in my writings, in combination with issues about atmospherics, enclosures, control of bodies and spaces, and temporalities of law. The third voice operates as commentary on the other two and the whole chapter as such, offering an antilogos to the traditional understanding of essay writing, especially for law students but also for academics. This last voice suggests the disruption of the flow of textuality in order for materiality to flood in

And For Law: Why Space cannot be understood without Law

Doreen Massey, the iconic political geographer, whose book For Space has influenced the way various disciplines understand space, has largely ignored law in her work. In fact, just as most non-legal scholars she replaces law with politics. Here, I read Massey through law, arguing that often, non-legal writing is characterized by a misapprehension of the law. Through an analysis of her arguments against some understandings of space (such as systemic, negative, closed, textual), I mount a critique against the standard understandings of law (as precisely all these things) and suggest instead a lawscaping way of understanding the connection between law and space, as well as issues of spatial justice and responsibility

Ontological Anosmia

Anosmia, or the absence of smell, is not just a subjective experience but, as I argue in this text, an ontological affect. Anosmia in the form of deodorisation and hygienisation, is the projected aim for many institutions, indeed often societies as a whole, that try to direct individual a!ects along prefabricated targets of racial, ethnic and class discrimination, rampant consumerism and unconscious participation in atmospheric engineering. Odours consist of what I would like to call the olflow, the incessant olflow of odours in which human and nonhuman bodies are agents of odour generation and consumption. Odour engineering directs the olflow and reinforces olfactory discrimination. I conclude with a call against the threat of what I call ‘ontological anosmia’, namely the flattening of multiplicity of desire and the engineering of emergence as spontaneity

“An Absurdly Quiet Spot”: The Spatial Justice of WW1 Fraternizations

Recent research on WW1 shows that incidents of fraternization across enemy lines took place regularly. However, fraternization remains a taboo in many contexts. The fact that the 2005 film Joyeux Noel by Christian Caron, which explicitly deals with the subject, encountered resistance from the authorities, is an indication of the kind of difficulty associated with the issue. I am drawing my inspiration from the way fraternizations are depicted in the film and in the literature in order to explore the concept of spatial justice. I define spatial justice as the question that emerges when a body desires to occupy the same space at the same time as another body. Defined like this, the question of spatial justice opens up in the dread of No Man’s Land and in particular the exchange of affects, objects and narratives that went on during fraternizations. I trace the movement of spatial justice as one of withdrawal from the asphyxiating atmosphere of the war and the propaganda machine. This withdrawal is not one of unpatriotic stance but of a courageous and difficult detachment from the supposed legality of the war that could only function on the basis of hate and demonization. While fraternizations did not end the war, they allowed for the possibility of spatial justice to emerge, as an opportunity to reorient the space and the bodies within

Spatial justice in a world of violence

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos opens the book with his latest contribution to his comprehensive project of re-theorising spatial justice with a piece titled ‘Spatial Justice in a World of Violence’. Through a close reading of the photographic series Fortunes of War, Life Day by artist Eric Lesdema, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is interested in how these images reveal peripheral spaces at the edge of violence which impose an ethic of spatial responsibility on the viewer in the act of turning away and looking elsewhere. While no acts of explicit violence are shown in the images, we are left with no doubt that violence is ubiquitous along the spatio-temporal continuum. This continuum of violence between bodies raises questions of complicity and responsibility. Do we submit to a state of affairs in which space is saturated with the everyday and immobilised violence of the ‘engineered atmosphere’ – or is it also possible for bodies to withdraw from the atmosphere, through ruptures and folds within the continuum? Such a notion raises the ethical possibility of the ‘emergence of spatial justice’

Performing Metaphors

Three performances, three folded theoretical contexts, three slidings, three material metaphors. My aim is to place these in a theoretical context that facilitates an understanding of material metaphors, but also push them into unpredictable directions that I, as both performer and observer, cannot possibly follow - but the reader indeed might. I start by thinking of concepts as objects, and show how all metaphors operate within a specific metaphorical edifice that constrains meaning. This is illustrated with a performance I gave on ghosts and colonisation at the Copenhagen Royal Cast Collection. In section three, I move deeper in the fold, and think about objects as concepts, using paper manifolds at a performance at the Swedish Royal Academy of Music. Finally, in section four, I slide between matter and materiality, their differences and similarities, as a prelude to a performance on death and life, contract and fear, and Venice and water I gave at the Australasian Law, Literature and the Humanities conference in 2019