In her review of Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, Isobel Roele mentions the use of ‘reverse-engineering’ as a method of counter-aesthetics. Sofia Stolk’s contribution to Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, the first contribution in the book, reverse-engineered a screen play from an educational youtube video of the International Criminal Court. What this did was to expose technicalities behind the camera’s gaze as a form of highlighting the reproduction of biases, like the camera panning or zooming in. It made explicit some of the unspoken assumptions around the narration of victimhood in international criminal justice. In this response to our reviewers, we have used reverse-engineering as a method to bring us all into conversation. We respond to the three reviewers, who so generously engaged with the edited volume, as a reverse-engineered conversation between us and the reviewers, Maria Elander, Kate Miles, and Isobel Roele.

This methodology of an imagined conversation, which could have taken place, but did not, reflects the three tactics of counter-aesthetics that we identify in the book: rupture, détournement, and solidarity politics. Rupturein breaking with the norm of reviews in that this imagined conversation plays with the idea of ‘truth’. The reverse-engineered conversation is not faithful to the truth in that the conversation did not take place. At the same time, not being faithful to the truth may enable a grasping towards a different truth, or at least a different narrative. Détournement is displayed in the diversion from the standard review form to create something new, namely a new conversation about aesthetics and international justice. Détournement is often displayed in the aesthetic choice of collage or playfulness. In this case, the collage is made up of provocations from the reviews which together create a conversation. Solidarity politics is reflected in the aim to create a desired space of interaction and discussion in which the boundaries are clear, namely that engaging politically in aesthetics is not simply about beautifying or depicting, but about exposing and positioning with the exploited and dispossessed. 

Kate: How does the collection explore other ways of engaging a critique of international justice in a more experimental approach?

Christine and Rob: Aesthetics is certainly about a broader sense-experience of international justice, beyond the written word. In that sense, it sits alongside other forms of critique, like the visual or role play, that engage with experimental forms. In addition to that, and what sets this collection apart, is our highlighting the politics of aesthetics as well as the aim of this type of critique towards a politics of transformation. So, while we embrace the types of playful projects like Sofia Stolk and Renske Vos’s Legal Sightseeing or Valentin Jeutner’s Lex Machina, as about experiencing international justice questions differently, we were very much concerned with showing how the normalised sense-experience of international justice is a narrow one; one which continues to place what our friend Tor Krever has called the ‘dispensing of justice’ in the Global North, with the seeming beneficiaries in the Global South. This, we argue, reinforces the status quo, with its various violences and inequalities. 

Maria: For a collection with 13 chapters (and two introductions) on aesthetics and international justice, it is noticeable that so many focus on victim representations. Why is it that research into the aesthetic of international justice so often turns to victim representations as the locus of inquiry and critique? What kind of aesthetics enables, even encourages, this form of critique? 

Rob and Christine: Our early conversations focused specifically on victim representations in international criminal law, especially at the International Criminal Court. As we entered into discussions with other researchers, activists, and artists, and as we broadened our own research on victim stereotyping, we soon saw the repetition of some patterns of victim stereotypes. We saw the same kinds of patterns that disempower victims (that racialise and feminise them in particular) in migration and asylum law, in human rights law, and beyond the law in memory culture. We continue to believe that this is politically important to both displace the victim at the centre of justice ideas and also to show that victims can themselves be figures of resistance, as we suggest in the solidarity aesthetics. 

At the same time, of course, we were always aware that an aesthetic representation of the ‘victims’ necessarily had consequences for the representation of the ICC itself, and that this often informed the aesthetic choices of the court. In particular, insofar as ‘victims’ were represented as powerless and without agency, they cast the ICC (and international criminal justice in general) as a neutral saviour.  Such a discourse of innocence is crucial in legitimising the institutions of international criminal justice. 

Maria: The chapters here unpack representations of victims, asylum seekers and refugees as they figure across a range of institutions, and do so primarily to problematise simplistic representations and to illuminate exclusions and omissions. In other words, representations of victims are affective: they are infuriating, inspiring, pathetic, numbing, striking and move us to action. But, remaining in the sphere of victim representation, could also (perhaps paradoxically) desensitise us for when a transformative politics is required.

Christine and Rob: We can see the risk of desensitising. That victim images from the Global South do not always lead to international justice responses in the same way can be seen in the case of the genocide in Gaza at present. Here, women and children have been disproportionately targeted, with the harrowing images of starvation circulating the world’s media. To understand justice inaction, even in terms of the standard ICL responses of criminal accountability, we have to place Palestinian victimhood in the context of the military industrial complex under late capitalism. So, a risk of staying ‘with the victim’ in representations of injustice that highlight a political economy critique is that it may reinforce the problem of not being able to visually represent capitalism. I.e., only its pathologies are represented, but not how it works. So, one of the counter-aesthetic elements that could be missing here, is one of connection, the mapping of capital flows in particular. 

Of course, we would not wish to exaggerate our own ‘failings’ in this respect. In our own interventions – particularly the framing chapters – we have been keen to foreground the specifically capitalist elements of representation involved in the ICC. In our discussion of Debord, we note that he does not understand the spectacle as a generic predominance of the ‘image’, but rather a reality brought on by the dominance of the commodity form and attendant commodity fetishism. More broadly, we understand the particular aesthetic forms produced by international criminal justice as rooted in the logic of capitalism to begin with. In a sense, though, this raises the question of whether it is even possible to differently represent capitalism and its logic whilst in some way remaining in the aesthetic sphere of international criminal justice. In other words, insofar as we adopt a political economy critique have we not entered a different sphere of representation entirely?

Isobel: This raises the question of whether counter-aesthetics have to be politically direct, or can they leave space for openendedness and ambiguity? I teach an art/law module where such openendedness is explored. The premise of the module is that the artworks best fitted to this task are not the ones whose politics can be most readily pinned to a particular context (though admittedly many students are drawn to works of propaganda and censorship) but the ones which force the viewer into critical attitudes like self-reflection, situational awareness, tolerance of irresolution, doubt, and curiosity. There is power in this form of critical enquiry.

Christine and Rob: Yes, in Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics, we included more openended artwork like this too. Terry Duffy’s International Justice Robe includes elements of aesthetics and counter-aesthetics in an openended way that allows for the spectator to make up their own mind on whether international justice institutions have redeeming qualities. Gerry Simpson’s parables, that play with humour and wit in regard to atrocities, force the reader and listener to confront their own sense of discomfort.  The upside of this is that it displaces hegemonic linear accounts. As you say, Isobel, some artists might want  viewers to meander through the exhibition in the way history meanders rather than progresses in a linear fashion, “causing us to visit and revisit many of the same lessons”. This type of meandering is perhaps best illustrated in the counter-aesthetic tactic of détournement, which translated means ‘diversion’. However, we also found ourselves most dissatisfied with these forms of self-reflection and tolerance of irresolution from a political standpoint. We found these to at times be evasive, which at a time of genocide in particular appears intolerable. 

Isobel: Yes, but the ambiguity might be a better way to reflect on the dual roles of international lawyers as participants and critics, as inhabiting many roles. It reminds us of our own complicity, that We get no brownie points merely by virtue of our presence at an exhibition about colonialism, just as the museum cannot disavow its complicity merely by acknowledging it.

Kate: This is a good segue to an omission in Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics that I wanted to highlight – a deliberate omission: There is a bias towards popular art or ‘low’ art, like posters. I wondered at this conscious decision to omit whole sections of representation, from classical paintings or sculpture, as if politics, protest, subversiveness, and resistance do not have the capacity to be imbued through all art forms. I wondered at the constraint and limitations this placed on the scope of the book.

Rob and Christine: Both of these questions raise a wider issue which we discussed throughout the workshops, namely the relationship between the different modes of counter-aesthetics and different forms of political subjectivity and organisation. 

To return briefly to Isobel’s point about ambiguity and complicity, this in some sense presupposes a political subjectivity and standpoint of being ‘international lawyers’. But this may not be the most productive position to take if we are thinking from the perspective of radical social transformation. Here, disdaining ambiguity in the name of mass political organisation or mobilisation might be the best one.

So, crudely put, in our typology of the different modes of counter-aesthetics, we noted that very often ‘détournement’ and ‘rupture’ would be the preserve of more minoritarian groupings. These forms of experimental aesthetics have historically often been associated more with intellectual experimentation than mass movements. By contrast, the aesthetics of solidarity is more associated with mass political organisations and movements. 

Now, as previously noted, this typology is crude, especially with changing popular tastes in aesthetics. However, it more broadly signals our intent and interest in popular mobilisation. Insofar as we organise our book around a politicised notion of the aesthetic, and further insofar as we link this to radical social transformation, our attention was closely focused on those forms of ‘low’ art which have a wider popular reach. 

Whilst, generally speaking, it is perhaps the case that political subversiveness can be imbued in all forms of art; insofar as one is thinking of particular political subjectivities, some will be more powerfully subversive – and transformative! – than others. 

Isobel: This resonates with my experience of the exhibition I mentioned earlier. The non-expert tone of the exhibition commentary was freeing. It removed the pressure to engage in identity thinking, where the only way to look at aesthetic objects is to match them with their proper stylistic, technical, and historical meanings.

Kate: Finally, it might be worth mentioning that there is also a significant omission in the list of contributors—the contributions to this edited volume, both artistic and academic, are largely dominated by those based at institutions in the Global North. There is a sense of missed opportunities here. …This has the sense of a beginning of a collaboration rather than an endpoint.

Rob and Christine: When engaging in any academic project, it is worth reflecting on the institutional and material limits and barriers that we face. On the one hand, as academics producing intellectual work in the imperial core of global capitalism, it is not possible to simply magically escape power dynamics through ‘collaboration’. On the other hand, we face limits in terms of funding, organisation and coordination to engage in wider collaboration.

In this sense, there is a certain Eurocentrism embedded in the book, which also reflects the embeddedness of Eurocentrism within the project of international criminal justice. In this sense, yes, the book is a starting point for this particular project and the collaboration associated with it. At the same time, it is important not to confuse an act of intellectual production with concrete politics. Even with a fuller collaboration, one should not immediately equate academic production with political activism or solidarity.