Embracing ‘Pataphysics of International Law

When walking down Hobrechtstraße in Berlin-Neukölln, Germany on the last weekend of June 2024, it was hard not to contemplate questions of order and disorder. Two persons dressed in what appeared to be the appropriate attire of cleaning professionals of the future or astronauts in an infant imagination of the 70s, them equipped with silver-coloured self-made construction site vehicles furnished with various kinds of brushed, hazard lights, electric blowers and speakers, sedulously roamed the streets, making sure to pay careful attention to any corner and object they found on and in the street and rearranging what they found. Vis-à-vis one of the few left-over public telephone booths you could find a sculpture mirroring what seemed to be signs of vandalism with a graceful bow. This unfamiliar encounter was part of the performance “Sonderberuhigung”. “Sonderberuhigung” is a German composite neologism playing on the established word “Sonderreinigung”, i.e. “special cleaning”, and directly translating to “special reassurance/sedation/pacification/harmonisation”. The artist collective “SONDER” enacted the performance as part of “48 Stunden Neukölln”, an art festival that the organisers aptly describe as a “multifaceted, partly curated, partly un-curated festival that is open to professional artists and newcomers alike.” For “Sonderberuhigung”, SONDER used the Japanese practice of sharawadgi, mostly known as a thinking tool for designing land- and soundscapes. The idea behind this practise is to re-establish an equilibrium by reframing irregularity and conflict,  confronting what seems to be orderly or disorderly differently. For their performance on that weekend, SONDER carried out spatially limited fine cleaning measures and treated noise with artificial silence and natural sounds. At the same time, they professionally integrated disturbing noises and artificial disorder into the cityscape in quieter areas. SONDER explains:

“Our aim is to not unilaterally resolve the conflict-laden balance of mutual disorder and its organising disruption – the conflict between peace and noise – which has grown over decades, but to neutralise it sustainably.”

SONDER’s performance resonates with these “reflectiÖns” on Michelle Staggs Kelsall’s beautiful writing and thinking about “Disordering International Law” in different ways:

With her call for a “disordering sensibility” Michelle questions international lawyers’ learned assumptions concerning the binary distinctions and metaphysical claims underlying the liberal international legal order and highlights how critiques often fail to escape the liberal vocabulary, while joining Ratna Kapur in the quest “to arrest the epistemic freefall that occurs subsequent to any thorough dismantling of embedded influential frameworks”, thus “seek[ing] to recuperate the ideal of lasting freedom” (Kapur, 2018, p. 234; Kelsall, 2022, p. 732). Like the performance imposing silence where there was noise and infusing pre-existing silences with sounds, a disordering sensibility towards international law can, in part, consist in training ourselves to tune out the all-too-familiar and overpowering sounds of the liberal international legal vocabulary so that we can listen to voices and vocabularies we had been trained to tune out instead. The cornerstones of the liberal international legal order, which Michelle encourages us to approach with this disordering sensibility, include the notion of subjects of international law centred around states, responsibility, jurisdiction, and sources. Not dissimilar to the sculpture of the seemingly vandalised and re-assembled telephone booth bowing before its “intact” but outdated counterpart, international legal scholars remain attached to these cornerstones of the liberal international legal order, even “after” they have been thoroughly dismantled by decades of deconstruction and ideology critique.

At the same time, there appears to be something more subtle and maybe more precious going on. After having had the privilege to engage with the rich diversity of perspectives, which those responding to our call for reflectiÖns offer, and witnessing Michelle’s engagement with these crystallising pieces, the emphasis shifted. It shifted from questioning the underlying assumptions about reality and existence international law relies on, that is the metaphysics of statehood (Crawford, 2007, p. 5 and more explicitly Tan, 2018), alterity and “othering” (Orford, 2006; Jodoin, 2008; Kapur, 2018; ), strategic exclusion and the violence of legal concepts (Cover, 1986; Derrida, 1992; for an overview of the relationship between (international) law and violence, see Antiphon, 2009 and Lloyd, 2024) to thinking about our practice or research, how much creativity and painting outside the lines of our established (critical) methods are desirable and necessary? How explorative and experimental is the research we are conducting? Ultimately,  to draw on a stream of thought and practice that has emerged in the 1960s in France as the self-proclaimed “imaginary science of our world, the imaginary science of excess, of excessive, parodic, paroxystic effects – particularly the excess of emptiness and insignificance” (Baudrillard, 2008 p. 48). The writer George Perec, who was part of this movement, for instance, extensively experimented with word play and constrained writing, as his novel “La disparition”, written without words containing the letter “e”, illustrates.

In international law, we are still at an infant stage in exploring how much ‘pataphysics is desirable and how much of it do we need to shake up the stabilised episteme of international legal thought? Any ‘pataphysical mode or research is necessarily collaborative and experimental and with openness to failure. It goes beyond what is today well established as creative international legal thinking, that is thinking in terms of analogies (for critical engagement see Xenidis, 2023 and Dothan, 2023).

ReflectiÖns Unfolding:

During the next couple of days, we are proud to offer a space for beginning to explore the ‘pataphysics of international law. Throughout this week, you will find engagements with Michelle’s piece along four different thematic clusters, that is state:hood, response:ability, the juris:generative and re:sources. Those take different shapes and form. In the lineage of artists such as Hanna Höch and William Kentridge, Rose Syndey Parfitt offers a visual art piece, a “Collage”, as her reaction to Michelle’s piece. You will have the chance to listen in on them travelling from their reflections about Rose’s artwork to state:hood. Among other things, Rose Parfitt mentions in this conversation that she is drawn to animals because they can cross borders without showing a passport. Adithi Rajesh, in her piece on “(Dis)ordering Anthropocentric Hierarchies” echoes this sentiment by engaging with international law through an ecofeminist lens, grappling not only with anthropocentrism but also with the question of how environmental exploitation interacts with imperialism and colonialism.

On Tuesday, Fleur Johns’ piece on “Organising International Law” kicks off the contributions addressing the theme of response:ability. Johns shifts the focus from “ordering” and “disordering” to “organising”, thus alluding to community and collective organising while insisting on the merits of engaging with international law’s technicalities. Equally foregrounding the collective nature of international legal scholarship, Dimitri Van Den Meersche’s “Governmentalities of Disorder” offers a tour de force through retracing multiple paths that critical international law scholarship has taken and linking them to Michelle’s argument and drawing attention to the “ordering capacities of disorder”. Gamze Erdem Türkelli offers yet a different way of engaging and thinking with the questions raised in and by Michelle’s article, re-asking rather than responding to them and pairing them with questions and responses in her readings of Aimé Cesaire.

On Wednesday, Michelle Burgis-Kasthala and Marie Petersmann take on the juris:generative aspects of ordering and disordering. Michelle Burgis-Kasthala takes Michelle Kelsall’s careful demonstration of how most critiques of international law ultimately reinforce hegemonic international legal orders as a starting point to reflect on the role of international law in Gaza and Palestine more broadly. Burgis-Kasthala’s call to suspend the presumptions of the state in Israel/Palestine is echoed in enactments or practices of refusal, which are at the heart of Marie Petersmann’s reflectiön, arguing that what may need to be suspended is a tendency towards re-ordering, re-inscription, and re-unification.

On Thursday, under the rubric of “re:sources” both Amaka Vanni and Umut Özsu engage with the question of what will become of the law if the Utopian elements of the “disordering sensibilities” come to fruition. Vanni, in her piece, asks whether “dis/ordering international law” is the panacea to the many frustrations found in critical international legal scholarship. In a sense, she answers this question in the affirmative by stating that “dis/ordering has given us the language to demand the impossible”, namely, inter alia, “world that decentres the interests and dictates of transnational corporations but one that upholds people over property”. Fittingly, Özsu offers some insights from Marxist theory on how such radical change may actually be possible, describing such change as a series of transitions in which the state, and therefore the law “would play a vital, complicated, and ultimately transformative role, long into the foreseeable future”.

On Friday, Michelle will offer her contrapuntal reading of those engagements with her lines of thought. Counterpoint is a technique of composition whereby multiple voices are harmonically related, but their rhythm and harmonic contour remain independent from each other. This multiplicity of voices being at the heart of both Michelle’s call for “disordering” and the format of “reflectiÖns”, we would like to extend an open call to keep adding new voices to this symposium in the future, be it in the form of traditional blog posts, images, poems, music, recorded conversations, or other formats.

We hope that this week’s reflectiÖns, which may therefore be read as prelude, are as inspiring for you as they were for us.