Logo and Logos
By what processes of logic does law exercise its operations? And how can art be a way of both revealing legal process and activating new imaginative futures for law which, in other words, is the political task of world-making?
The logo for the Law, Art and Politics podcast is based on a visual representation of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. Zeno of Elea (c. 495 - c. 430 BC) was a philosopher and mathematician in Ancient Greece who was famous for his paradoxes of motion. Achilles is in a foot race with a tortoise where the Tortoise is given a head start of, say, one hundred metres. By the time Achilles reaches the Tortoise’s starting point, the Tortoise has moved some distance ahead. By the time Achilles reaches that second point, the Tortoise has moved ahead yet again. Whilst the gap between them grows ever smaller, it would seem by this reasoning that Achilles would never be able to reach or pass the Tortoise.
In one sense this paradox, based as it was in a mathematical paradigm before calculus and the concept of infinity, shows that we can create concepts that do not match how we experience the world by insisting on the immutability of the laws of the universe as we understand them at the time. In another sense, it shows that you can push what you assume are laws to their extreme and end up with absurdity - Jorge Luis Borges names Achilles as one of the first Kafkian characters. In another sense again, when things are infinitely divisible and we have a concept for how to know something about a particular moment, the whole universe can open up through paying attention to the smallest, singular matters. It took more than 2000 years to definitively solve how we can even move an inch. In the meantime, so much movement.
This podcast talks to people about different senses of how to admit the plurality of laws in order to address the climate crisis and the inequalities of experience in living and dying under the existing dominant legal, economic and imaginative orders. In other words, this podcast is interested in what practices of power and possibility are iterated when we produce knowledge as scholars, jurists and as artists. The search for infinity in mathematics is an analogous process of looking for the logic of a legal system that would be satisfying and give a material form to the ideal of justice. In that spirit, it is a search and a process that never ends.
Justine Poon