‘Poems, like architecture, know how to move readers’ (p. 112). So argues Elizabeth Fowler in her recent Poetry and the Built Environment. Much like real buildings, but this time virtually, and in ways that retain connections to the real, poems invite us, by way of poetry’s various linguistic devices, to move in particular ways – to simulate travelling through the poem. As we move, so we are affectively transformed, and we also engage cognitively – that is, the postures, gestures and movements that poems invoke and invite are also carriers of attitudes and ideas. Poetry, and more generally for Fowler art, is deeply and dynamically fleshy.

Before, reader, you turn away, seeing little, if anything, of relevance here to law and legal scholarship, let me suggest otherwise: like other discourses, law is replete with fleshy and kinetic language – that is, language that refers to and invites us to simulate movements, gestures and postures, thereby expressing value and conveying meaning. There are many examples: one must have ‘standing’ to sue;Footnote ¹ equity is a shield and not a sword; statutory interpretation involves asking the ‘upright‘ legislator a question; the origins of property lie in the fruits of one’s labour or having power over some object, such as grasping it in one’s hand. Reaching back further, into the Roman and, later, medieval and early modern roots of many legal concepts, one encounters the ritualistic gestures that they were communicated by: for example, a handshake;Footnote ² paying tribute by kneeling;Footnote ³ ‘beating the bounds’ to remember the boundary of a propertyFootnote ⁴ or orchestrated gestures involving the use of props, such as scales.Footnote ⁵

Of course, much of this will strike readers of recent legal scholarship as old news. There is, indeed, now a large literature on the importance of the body and bodily metaphors for law and legal scholarship, including work influenced by cognitive metaphor theory.Footnote ⁶ And there are, no doubt, connections to be made between this literature and the kind of insights proposed by Fowler. However, Fowler is arguably more a part of another kind of scholarly initiative, which is considerably less well-known in legal scholarship: one that places more emphasis on movement, gesture and posture. This literature may be termed the ‘kinesic humanities’, and includes path-breaking work by, for example, Guillemette Bolens, Terence Cave, Kathryn Banks, Timothy Chesters and Ellen Spolsky, among others.Footnote ⁷ What makes this literature distinctive, and yet to be properly related to law and legal scholarship,Footnote ⁸ is the intense focus on the relationship between language, our ability to simulate movement (and thus our sensorimotor imagination), and the (ethically and politically loaded) expression and communication of values and concepts.

Within this body of literature, Fowler has a unique place. This is, in part, due to her own background in architecture, and thus her very acute sensitivity to the importance of how spaces are designed to afford and enable certain movements, and thereby also create certain atmospheres, moods, and socialities – a sensitivity that she applies to the virtual architecture of literary works. Fowler does not just emphasise movement, gesture, and posture, but does so as part of a more holistic package in which literature draws on our abilities to orient and find our way through certain spaces – and one that also enlists the spatially located intelligence of our senses. As she puts it, ‘Space transports us… by attracting and repulsing with light, colour, continuity, sightline, smell, transparency, sound’; features of the built environment invite us, draw us in, directing and orienting our bodies in various ways – for example, ‘doors act toward us: they might instruct us to enter, welcoming us to a community, or they might warn us of danger… exclude or include us, or segregate us from another class of person’ (p. 35, original emphasis). Fowler’s point is that literature does the same: literary works create fictional, virtual spaces, which also transport us, relying on and appealing to our kinesic intelligence.

A large part of Fowler’s inspiration is the work of medievalist Mary Carruthers, and especially her concept of ‘ductus’, or the path of a work:Footnote ⁹ what literary works do, much like real spaces (e.g. monasteries), is create a path for readers to follow, not passively, but actively, co-creating meaning and significance, generating and constructing images, with deep and long-lasting implications for selves and communities. The key point here, for Carruthers as much as for Fowler, is to see how active, generative, creative and inventive this process is, and for both writer and reader: the writer generates a virtual built environment, adorning that environment with various signposts and other devices or engines for moving a reader, while the reader, as they make their way through a work, simulates and makes their own the various movements, gestures, and postures that the work encourages and facilitates. In doing so, the reader is transformed, both affectively and cognitively, while also appreciating the writer’s capacity to move them (thereby forming a kind of collaborative bond with the writer). Movement within certain spaces is key to cognition of all kinds, whether that be the inventive capacities of memory, the conveying of attitudes, or the construction of concepts.

If, again, we try to translate into the language of law and legal scholarship, we might recall the tendency of lawyers and legal scholars to speak of ‘areas’ of the law, as if districts of a large city, some walled off from each other, some with well-trodden paths between them, some in the centre and some on the outskirts.Footnote ¹⁰ This city might also be said to have larger blocks – for example, private law and public law, which sometimes feel like the East and West of a city (Berlin), including the dark, underground tunnels between them. Talk of mapping – of a particular legal system as well as of families of different traditions – or visualisations of chains of legal validity as forming, say, pyramids, are all commonly encountered spatialisations of legal doctrine or law in general. Law and legal scholarship, like other domains of abstraction, rely heavily on spatial imaginaries and our capacities to orient ourselves within spaces. Quite possibly, too, works of doctrine or legal scholarship – perhaps even cases – might be approached as creating a ductus, a path, through which the reader is enjoined to travel through a normative landscape.

Virtual spatialisation affects other domains of discourse or theorisation – for example, the arts of language, perhaps especially rhetoric, have long drawn on our ability to move through spaces, and have themselves often been conceived of via imaginary topographies.Footnote ¹¹ Rhetorical devices (often personified as characters living in this imaginary world) take words from one place to another – metaphor, for instance, is a form of displacement – and thus create the possibility of meaning through turning and twisting in a myriad of ways. Topological reasoning (or reasoning from a ‘topos‘, a place) relies precisely on our capacity to move from place to place, constructing a complex image of a phenomenon from multiple perspectives.Footnote ¹² One learns to reason and know by participating in imaginary places: moving through gardens,Footnote ¹³ creating storehouses or palaces through one which ambles, picking up resources, making new thoughts and arguments (as in the medieval memory arts, as again Carruthers has shown). Here, rhetoric and logic work in tandem with poetics: they are ways of inventing, of making insight, precisely by inviting us to move. The medieval world, in particular, is full of texts that play explicitly with the kinesic qualities of rhetorical and poetic invention – for example, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova (c. 1200).

Talk of displacing, turning and twisting as modes of generating meaning, or as engines of invention, already points to something important, and that we also tend to associate with the special purview of art and poetry – that is, creating opportunities for disorientation, so that, in the space and time allowed us to be lost and find one’s way again, new possibilities might emerge. And, indeed, it is towards the strange spaces of poetry, and art more generally, that Fowler gravitates most. Certainly, it matters that poetry’s language-made virtual spaces induce the sensation of presence and performance, enabling us to simulate movement in particular ways, both connecting to our embodied habits and allowing us to enrich the rituals that infuse certain spaces. But poetry comes into its own with the creation of spaces that invite incompatible, impossible, or otherwise difficult movements.Footnote ¹⁴

For example, the poet-narrator of Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls dreams, at one point, that he is brought to a gate. This, however, is no ordinary gate, through which one might pass thoughtlessly, but instead a gate with two inscriptions, one of which urges the traveller ‘into that blessed place’ where ‘green and pleasing May shall ever endure’, and the second, on the other side, which speaks of ‘the sad weir/ Where the imprisoned fish lies high and dry’, a place where ‘no tree shall ever bear fruit or leaves’ (p. 38). As Fowler explains, the inscriptions ‘are performative, attracting and repulsing their readers by putting them into two postures that impossibly conflict’ (p. 39). Reading the poem, and following its ductility, we suddenly find ourselves suspended in a space between contradictory potentialities – ‘the gate traps our surrogate, the dreamer-poet, in a kind of double bind… he’s suspended, vibrating like a piece of iron set between two magnets and unable to go forward or back’ (p. 39). Importantly, this is not poetry failing but instead performing the kind of virtual space-creation that we need: we need spaces where we can safely vibrate, hesitate, or in a movement that Fowler often invokes, roam.

The virtual spaces of poetry are resonant; they disorient us so that we can renew our capacities for reorientation; they dislocate us, so we can again find our way. The resonance of these spaces need not be created via inviting contradictory movements; sometimes, instead, poems saturate us with a series of simulated embodiments – rituals of movement around certain spaces, ‘scripts’ for ‘movement, emotion, and thought’ (p. 57) – that are so intense and dense (enabled, too, by the rhythm and melody of the language) that the effort required to simulate them slows us down, immerses us and provides us with so delicate a choreography that we cannot help but enter a state of grace, a meditative, prayer-like state in which new possibilities (for selves as much as for societies) open up. Fowler finds such prayer-inducing poems in an inspiring range of poetry – Chaucer features prominently, certainly, but we also find wonderful readings of Seamus Heaney, John Donne, John Milton, John Keats, and Tracy K. Smith.

Poems work, one might say, when they achieve a delicate balance between both enabling and frustrating movement: they tap into our sensorimotor capacities, giving us the pleasure of simulating movement, gesture and posture, often in ways that reinforce the kinds of ritualistic acts we perform in certain places, thereby also expressing emotion and signalling attitude; but they also challenge those very same capacities, dislocating and unbalancing us, asking us to perform the impossible (e.g. fitting ‘the lake in the heart, the moon in the forehead, a house in the bones’, as in Heaney’s poetry of longing and loss: p. 75), thereby serving as ‘an engine that converts the potential energy of language into the kinetic energy of reading bodies’ (p. 75), or conjuring up paradoxical spaces, involving compression or expansion, with ‘large disparities of scale’, which ‘produce strange feeling-effects for the body of the reader’ (p. 84).

Here, we might ask: if simulating these movements, postures and gestures is so difficult, and even painful, then why is it that people invest the energy and effort needed to read such poetry? Why might selves need poetic language? Why, too, might communities need it? What would happen to communities that lost the ability to fashion a language via which they could create and simulate such delicately wrought enabling and frustrating virtual spaces? These questions have ethical, political and epistemic importance. For instance, we can ask: does the practice of knowing, individually as well as communally, need poetry’s ability to both orient and disorient? Think, for instance, of knowing justice in the context of legal institutions: justice is complex and we need to be perennially reminded of this (especially in times that overvalue efficient decision-making by artificial intelligence machines); the complexity of justice, its sensitivity to ever-new constellations of circumstances, requires the ability to pause, hesitate, roam, and search for new resources and new ways of seeing and framing what might matter. Law’s capacity to do justice to justice – one that arguably law only ever pursues and never achieves – and our related ability to maintain a balance of discipline and flexibility need poetry and poetic language. If law as a discourse depends on virtual spatialisation (and, equally, as a material practice, on actual, real spatialisation), then, given poetry’s deep connection with bodies moving through spaces, we need poetry’s capacity to animate language, to make it present, bring it to life, keep us interested, but also to trigger us into reflection and transformation.

Time and again in her book, Fowler shows how poetry inserts space and time between sensation and meaning, inviting us to dwell and roam there, learning to cope with the temporary pain of dislocation and disorientation. Thus, for instance, Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale invites its readers into a series of enclosed spaces, such as ‘city-states, the walled garden, the prison tower, the stadium, the three temples and the temples painted on their walls’ (p. 123), positioning the poem’s characters within those spaces, where they ‘scan’, searching for themselves. When, in the course of this scanning, one of those characters (Palamon) suddenly cries out ‘A!’, we, the readers, are offered a puzzle as to what this exclamation might mean: ‘Do we understand it as pain, and so a wound to be healed? Is it anger, to be revenged or consoled? Is it a joy, to be celebrated? Is it love, to be pursued?’ (p. 129). It is in creating space for puzzlement of this kind that we need poetry.

In the above example, poetry finds ways to tap into the ‘plasticity of the passions’ (p. 129). This is important, for we operate, in social life, with only a limited vocabulary of passions and their associated rituals of movement, posture, and gesture. What poetry can do is crack open our habitual associations, put pressure on affective rituals and scripts in certain cultures, and give either new meaning to old terms or make us search for new ones. Part of the point here is that we need poetry’s (and art’s more generally) ability to involve us, to immerse us and our bodies; poems move us, but they don’t just channel us thoughtlessly, as other aspects of the built environment might – they create strange virtual spaces, in which we can be lost and become conscious of the need for reorientation, for building anew. Poems, as Fowler also puts it, operate with ‘ductile strategies’ that ‘combine to produce a thrilling, disturbing, tense, and deliberative readerly experience’ (p. 134). We need them, our bodies need them, for without them we might never be able to be conscious of what is around us and how it is affecting us.

Fowler’s book itself has a powerful ductus. It begins with gates of all kinds, offering us a gentle way into her conceptual space, and it proceeds, again, gently, with remarkable readings of a wide range of poems in a variety of genres (though with a special interest in elegy), until finally culminating in what is a most powerful ending, inviting us into the politically charged world of Tracey K. Smith and Kara Walker. Reading the book, prior to the two chapters of this last part, one gets the feeling that Fowler is working up to something: there are frequent mentions of the politics of movement, posture, and gesture, and of the affectively embodied rituals and scripts around spaces that constitute a kind of network of social forms, again with powerful political effects. These hints and suggestions then come together in the book’s finale, where Fowler zooms in on, and dwells in the company of, the politics of art that makes pain, injury and injustice visible.

Fowler does this by offering two readings: one of a poem by Smith responding to a photograph of nineteenth-century sugar-cane workers, and another of Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby.Footnote ¹⁵ Fowler shows how both poem and installation turn the spotlight on ‘human sensory responses in social configurations and structures that rely on conventions of architectural spatiality’ (p. 205), and in particular the kind of movements, postures, and gestures inscribed into certain spaces that create social hierarchies, reinforcing social domination and submission. Racism carries its own choreography of ‘backways’ and ‘bottoms’ (p. 209)Footnote ¹⁶ – for example, of slave bodies forced to stand straight for a photo while otherwise bent over in pain. What poetry can do, and in this case Smith’s poem in particular, is ‘activate all these spheres of ductility, making them alive and visible so that we can roam among them as we read the poem, enlarging the spaciousness we perceive in them… The poem gives us access to suffering and room to imagine a resistance to it’ (p. 213).

Similarly with Walker’s installation: creating a ‘heroically scaled-up, entirely white fondant sculpture, styled like a giant sphinx and accompanied by a series of five-foot tall children, her attendants, made of cooked, dark, molasses’, the installation ‘was poised to commemorate, as if guarding, the ruined site of the transatlantic slave and sugar trade’ (p. 219). The installation, through its techniques of ‘figuration, distortion, and scheme’, provoked ‘racist and sexist aggressions in us’ (p. 223), thereby also offering us the opportunity to ‘re-script’ the embodied vocabulary of racism and sexism. The sphinx represents a ‘Mammy’ – the figure of the ‘enslaved wet nurse and caretaker of white children’, complete with swollen lips and exaggerated, sexually available organs (p. 228). By positioning the Mammy in a certain posture, but also by being interactive and thus inviting us ‘to master her – to enjoy her, abuse her, benefit from her, be fed by her, rely on her, mount her’ – we come face to face (uncomfortably so) with ‘the abuse of enslaved workers, the brutal capitalist poisoning of the human metabolism, [and] the viral enforcement by commerce of human addiction’ (p. 237).

Both poem and installation play on our all-too-ready-to-hand, socially and culturally induced, bodily habitus – from the pleasure we take in sugar to the movements, gestures, and postures of social domination and abuse. Art enlists our kinesic intelligence and turns it back on itself: ‘We are invited to transform our addictive consumption of unpaid and overworked persons into an awe for what they have accomplished mixed with a disgust at our own poisoning by participation in the degradation of so many human bodies, our own included’ (p. 239). Art inserts a space between sensation and meaning, between gesture and consequence, between posture and attitude; in so doing, Fowler argues, ‘art gives us a station’ (p. 243) – it makes the present present and thus helps us reflect on it and change it. Here, all of art’s techniques – all of poetry’s formal devices, for instance – matter enormously, for it is these techniques that enable both immersion and, potentially, reflection. These techniques, in Fowler’s treatment, are precisely those of creating virtual spaces in which we can participate – in which we can perform, enacting and re-enacting social rituals and scripts, while also (at least potentially) observing ourselves doing so. Art, and poetry, and their spatialisation capacities, become deeply social forms that society cannot do without, both in terms of the reinforcement of habitus, but also in terms of the potential for refraction and change.

If we care about theorising law’s sociality, there is an enormous amount to encounter in Fowler’s new book. Fowler’s insights tap into a now flowering theoretical literature on law’s bodies and spaces, including both work in critical legal geography and in critical legal design. What Fowler’s book brings into view is how much there is to learn about such embodiment and spatialisation from across many genres and in many media of the arts. This very much includes the poetry of the pre-modern world, which Fowler weaves in so effortlessly alongside contemporary arts, thereby also offering us an exciting new kind of intimate medievalism.Footnote ¹⁷ If we really wish to understand the power of legal forms, as social forms, and the choreography of domination and subordination these enable, then we need to draw on the insights offered us by artists of past and present generations. And Fowler is a wonderful guide, showing us how things made with language, like law, can create spaces full of pleasure and pain, and ones in which we are trapped until and unless, with art, we make them visible.