The Justice Squid did not appear at Westminster Law School, during its hosting of CLC2026. The Justice Squid, in fact, failed to appear; it remained hidden and lurking behind the scenes, staged only by the performative meanderings of myself and the inimitable Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos.

The Justice Squid has been haunting my thoughts for a number of years now, emerging in partial and oneiric form from as the unconscious expression of my recent monograph on legal typography (insert shameless plug here). The central thesis of that book is that law desires to appear unmediated, but is everywhere limited by its medial form (in my particular focus, the visual-material forms of typographic design and arrangement).

The unknowable formless form of the Justice Squid, with its strange tentacular otherness, remains immaterial, present only as its non-presence staged by the text that signals its failure to appear in our modern realm of stuff and matter.

Below is my text, seeking in its own way to stage the Justice Squid that haunts my dreams—and the dreams of the west.

There is an image, too, of my hand-printed linocut that also seeks to stage something of the Justice Squid’s weird impossibility, and which a kind and lucky few were able to take as souvenirs from the in vivo performance.

If you can, the text should be read while listening to Bowery Electric’s excellent track Postscript, with which its reading at the CLC was accompanied. If possible, you should ideally also be accompanied by the exceptionally generous gestures of an embodied Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and his entourage of fish tanks.

Onward, dear reader. Into the deep!

—Thom Giddens, 15 September 2026, Dundee

The Justice Squid

***

We begin in the abyss.

Floating, untethered, no coordinates to orient our perspective, no differentiation or division or slicing up to provide structure or meaning. We are at sea. Dreaming, without form. A formless form, a boundless and outside-less pool of potential. We would be waiting, if there was structure enough to conceive of time. But we are in the water, drifting, without edges or limits.

This is the origin and source, the shapeless node of the fountain. What is it that emerges or comes out or manifests itself from this source, this spring or font, this spaceless space? We begin where there is not an answer to such questions, where there is only potential.

A burgeoning, a gesture from an impossible void.

Surfing the currents without shape. Awaiting landfall. Expecting, projecting, anticipating. A coming to form and meaning of whatever we are, we group of drifting jellyfish, of unknown and immaterial arrangements, of dream-matter and shapelessness. No thinking, just the ocean that precedes, that comes before, that is beyond, outside: enigmatic and replete with we boundless beings that bob and flow without edge.

We perfect ones. This is where we start our journey.

***

Hark! Observe! The Justice Squid!

It arrives where it always was.

We are in the domain of the Justice Squid. Of such tentacular and ineffable things, of horrors and beings and angels and monsters and creeping mysteries and strangenesses. Of the primal inexpressible us, we that lack structure to be known. We mingle. Here in the clines and torrents of the lawless lagoon.

No, not lawless. This is the pool and pond and lake and sea and ocean from which all things flow, from which appearance appears, from which impossible, indefinite, incredible images are revealed and made manifest and made visible and feasible by the forms and structures of matter. Revealed by the dustsheets of form, the sandy impressions on the coast.

Offshore, here in the deep, the Justice Squid lurks with us. Abyssal, formless, lightless; edgeless and squirming; waiting to descend and arise and emerge and barrel forth, to slither and squiggle its tendrical way to matter.

To bring order to the drifting mash of the unformed seas.

It waits.

***

Our journey is not a temporal one.

We are passing not through time, if we are passing through anything at all. We who wish to desire to appear, to bring forth the structuring of the world, of meaning and governance and order, of formed form. We who wish to destroy potential, to contain freedom and craft it into something liveable. Perhaps we are crossing a limit, but we must first imagine a limit, if we are to cross it.

We surging squiddy things, alien and strange beyondalites in the boundless and deeping abyss. We adopt the form of letters, prepared to emerge, font and face and trace, opening as literal forms. We who ride on the suckers of the Justice Squid, its drag and current, eddying inkily into matter as it reaches across the imagined limit to break through into spatialised space, to develop coordinates of its own.

Without recognisable reference, the strangeness of the squiddish terrors and spirits of the abyss move themselves forth. From beyond the order of the realm. From the dream-land of law, the sleeping seas glimpsing from behind the cancel grating of matter.

From here we come. From the offshore world, the great uncertainty that surrounds all things—the domain of the Justice Squid!

***

Landfall.

On the shores of rasterisation, we land. We manifest, reducing ourselves to matter, to shapes and sizes, to forms and images, to perceptible objects. Rendering ourselves as the illusion of a source by abandoning the source, the font and fountain from which we came, bringing only its trace.

In the trailing lines that drag over the sandy edge of the land, the Justice Squid’s reaching appendages squirm and clutch at the creatures it desires to subjectivate and delineate, that it propels through privilege and obligation. The Justice Squid has come to land, and we travel with it.

Where the strangeness of the sea meets the certainty of the land; the shifting sands where the land becomes uncertain as it meets the strangeness of the sea. Here we are found, we forms—the trace and evidence, the imprint and remnant, of the Justice Squid. The tentacular prints in the sand, the impresses and strikes of shape, inhabited and made strange by we fluid beasties rising and descending from the spaceless seas on the tentacles of the Justice Squid.

See it, now! From the depths it judges!

***

We order ourselves, the better to order the world.

The forms we adopt, we emerging material nodes, replace our abyssal formlessness and we become—the lieutenants of the Justice Squid! Forms that order, that structure and engineer community and exclusion.

We peel off from its invisibility and go forth, spreading and multiplying across the sheets of trees and old linen. We textual blobs, we appear in administrative form, flowing and manifesting ourselves. Armed bureaucrats and contractual obligations. We are not mere wandering print, you and I, we and them. We are letters of law, building forward on our own foundations, creating ground as we walk.

The Justice Squid throws us inside, spinning its endless form—if it had a form, if spinning existed where the Justice Squid dwells (if dwelling were possible there, if there was a there). We strange children of the abyss, falling to land. Carved away from the Justice Squid, lost from the pools of its inaccessible strangeness to the hard certainty of the coast.

***

On the shores of rasterisation, where the Justice Squid comes to die. Where it fails to arrive and instead leaves only us—its dead, derivative spawn.

We make landfall as corpses, as matter. Alive with a theatre of quantum energies, but dead of the beyond from which we are severed in order to become shaped. The Justice Squid dreams itself, urges itself to appear, to manifest, to make power, but cannot cross the necessary limit that generates form, cannot emerge unscathed onto those hazy sands. Instead, it is us who crawl across the coast, as animated husks, enveloping those we find there and holding them fast in the Justice Squid’s absent embrace.

The Justice Squid must remain unknown, hidden, must not cross, lest it become reduced to mere matter, without the drive and potential of the desire lines of the abyss, the dream realm of law, the shifting and shapeless waters of power without end or surface. We emergent forms, creeping across the sandy pages of the world. We must abandon the Justice Squid in order to do its work; we must leave it behind. We must exist, we inky forms, only as the desire to bring forth what can never appear.

We are the unrequited emergence of the Justice Squid. That is our fate.

On the shores of rasterisation, where the Justice Squid comes to die.

***