{"id":22756,"date":"2024-07-29T08:00:10","date_gmt":"2024-07-29T06:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/?p=22756"},"modified":"2024-07-30T16:49:00","modified_gmt":"2024-07-30T14:49:00","slug":"embracing-pataphysics-of-international-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/embracing-pataphysics-of-international-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Embracing \u2018Pataphysics of International Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

When walking down Hobrechtstra\u00dfe in Berlin-Neuk\u00f6lln, 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-\u00e0-vis <\/em>one of the few left-over public telephone booths you could find a sculpture<\/a> mirroring what seemed to be signs of vandalism with a graceful bow. This unfamiliar encounter was part of the performance \u201cSonderberuhigung<\/a>\u201d. \u201cSonderberuhigung\u201d is a German composite neologism playing on the established word \u201cSonderreinigung\u201d, i.e. \u201cspecial cleaning\u201d, and directly translating to \u201cspecial reassurance\/sedation\/pacification\/harmonisation\u201d. The artist collective \u201cSONDER<\/a>\u201d enacted the performance as part of \u201c48 Stunden Neuk\u00f6lln<\/a>\u201d, an art festival that the organisers aptly describe as a \u201cmultifaceted, partly curated, partly un-curated festival that is open to professional artists and newcomers alike.\u201d For \u201cSonderberuhigung<\/a>\u201d, SONDER used the Japanese practice of sharawadgi<\/a>, <\/em>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, \u00a0confronting what seems to be orderly or disorderly differently. For their performance on that weekend, SONDER<\/a> 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<\/a> explains<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cOur aim is to not unilaterally resolve the conflict-laden balance of mutual disorder and its organising disruption \u2013 the conflict between peace and noise \u2013 which has grown over decades, but to neutralise it sustainably.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

SONDER\u2019s performance resonates with these \u201creflecti\u00d6ns\u201d on Michelle Staggs Kelsall\u2019s beautiful writing and thinking about \u201cDisordering International Law\u201d in different ways:<\/p>\n

With her call for a \u201cdisordering sensibility\u201d Michelle questions international lawyers\u2019 learned assumptions concerning the binary distinctions and metaphysical<\/a> 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 \u201cto arrest the epistemic freefall that occurs subsequent to any thorough dismantling of embedded influential frameworks\u201d, thus \u201cseek[ing] to recuperate the ideal of lasting freedom\u201d (Kapur<\/a>, 2018, p. 234; Kelsall<\/a>, 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 \u201cintact\u201d but outdated counterpart, international legal scholars remain attached to these cornerstones of the liberal international legal order, even \u201cafter\u201d they have been thoroughly dismantled by decades of deconstruction and ideology critique.<\/p>\n

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 reflecti\u00d6ns offer, and witnessing Michelle\u2019s 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<\/a> and more explicitly Tan, 2018<\/a>), alterity and \u201cothering\u201d (Orford, 2006<\/a>; Jodoin, 2008<\/a>; Kapur, 2018; ), strategic exclusion and the violence of legal concepts (Cover, 1986<\/a>; Derrida, 1992<\/a>; for an overview of the relationship between (international) law and violence, see Antiphon, 2009<\/a> and Lloyd, 2024<\/a>) 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,\u00a0 to draw on a stream of thought and practice that has emerged in the 1960s in France as the self-proclaimed \u201cimaginary science of our world, the imaginary science of excess, of excessive, parodic, paroxystic effects \u2013 particularly the excess of emptiness and insignificance\u201d (Baudrillard<\/a>, 2008 p. 48). The writer George Perec<\/a>, who was part of this movement, for instance, extensively experimented with word play and constrained writing, as his novel \u201cLa disparition<\/em><\/a>\u201d, written without words containing the letter \u201ce\u201d, illustrates.<\/p>\n

In international law, we are still at an infant stage in exploring how much ‘pataphysics<\/a> 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<\/em> Xenidis, 2023<\/a> and Dothan, 2023<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Reflecti\u00d6ns Unfolding: <\/strong><\/p>\n

During the next couple of days, we are proud to offer a space for beginning to explore the \u2018pataphysics of international law. Throughout this week, you will find engagements with Michelle\u2019s piece along four different thematic clusters, that is state:hood, response:ability, <\/strong>the juris:generative <\/strong>and re:sources<\/strong>. Those take different shapes and form. In the lineage of artists such as Hanna H\u00f6ch<\/a> and William Kentridge<\/a>, Rose Syndey Parfitt offers a visual art piece, a \u201cCollage\u201d, as her reaction to Michelle\u2019s piece. You will have the chance to listen in on them travelling from their reflections about Rose\u2019s artwork to state:hood<\/strong>. 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 \u201c(Dis)ordering Anthropocentric Hierarchies\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Fleur Johns\u2019 piece on \u201cOrganising International Law\u201d kicks off the contributions addressing the theme of response:ability. <\/strong>Johns shifts the focus from \u201cordering\u201d and \u201cdisordering\u201d to \u201corganising\u201d, thus alluding to community and collective organising while insisting on the merits of engaging with international law\u2019s technicalities. Equally foregrounding the collective nature of international legal scholarship, Dimitri Van Den Meersche\u2019s \u201cGovernmentalities of Disorder\u201d offers a tour de force<\/em> through retracing multiple paths that critical international law scholarship has taken and linking them to Michelle\u2019s argument and drawing attention to the \u201cordering capacities of disorder\u201d. Gamze Erdem T\u00fcrkelli offers yet a different way of engaging and thinking with the questions raised in and by Michelle\u2019s article, re-asking rather than responding to them and pairing them with questions and responses in her readings of Aim\u00e9 Cesaire.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Michelle Burgis-Kasthala and Marie Petersmann take on the juris:generative<\/strong> aspects of ordering and disordering. Michelle Burgis-Kasthala takes Michelle Kelsall\u2019s 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\u2019s call to suspend the presumptions of the state in Israel\/Palestine is echoed in enactments or practices of refusal<\/a>, which are at the heart of Marie Petersmann\u2019s reflecti\u00f6n, arguing that what may need to be suspended is a tendency towards re-ordering, re-inscription, and re-unification.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, under the rubric of \u201cre:sources<\/strong>\u201d both Amaka Vanni and Umut \u00d6zsu engage with the question of what will become of the law if the Utopian elements of the \u201cdisordering sensibilities\u201d come to fruition. Vanni, in her piece, asks whether \u201cdis\/ordering international law\u201d 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 \u201cdis\/ordering has given us the language to demand the impossible\u201d, namely, inter alia, \u201cworld that decentres the interests and dictates of transnational corporations but one that upholds people over property\u201d. Fittingly, \u00d6zsu 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 \u201cwould play a vital, complicated, and ultimately transformative role, long into the foreseeable future\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s call for \u201cdisordering\u201d and the format of \u201creflecti\u00d6ns<\/a>\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n

We hope that this week\u2019s reflecti\u00d6ns, which may therefore be read as prelude, are as inspiring for you as they were for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When walking down Hobrechtstra\u00dfe in Berlin-Neuk\u00f6lln, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6639],"tags":[],"authors":[5534,3947],"article-categories":[3572],"doi":[],"class_list":["post-22756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","authors-anna-sophia-tiedeke","authors-sue-gonzalez-hauck","article-categories-symposium"],"acf":{"subline":"Introducing reflecti\u00d6ns on Dis:Order in International Law"},"meta_box":{"doi":"10.17176\/20240729-152008-0"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22756"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22911,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22756\/revisions\/22911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22756"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=22756"},{"taxonomy":"article-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-categories?post=22756"},{"taxonomy":"doi","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doi?post=22756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}