Chapter 1 introduces the main themes of the book. It highlights three vantages on what it means to value nature on an aesthetic basis – philosophies of environmental aesthetics, aesthetic theories for the visual arts, and practices of international environmental law. It provides an outline of the book over the eight chapters, explaining how the different vantages on nature’s aesthetic value inform the analysis of photographic images in the book’s case studies of the World Heritage Convention, the Whaling Convention and the Biodiversity Convention. An overview of the international materials examined, and the visual art analysed, is provided. Here, particular mention is made of the book’s use of the rules and documentation of the decision-making processes of the World Heritage Committee, the International Court of Justice, and the Conference of the Parties to the Biodiversity Convention. In a final section, the scholarly theories that inform the book’s methods of analysis are introduced. This includes discussion of academic literature on law and image, sometimes called visual jurisprudence, and debates among philosophers of environmental aesthetics and theorists of visual art.

The treaty processes examined so far are replete with nature photographs. To consider the significance of such images, Chapter 4 starts by explaining aesthetic theorisations of nature in visual art. Over philosophical objections, it maintains that artistic depictions of the environment can be understood both critically, for example with insights from eco-criticism, and in terms of the multi-sensory experiences contemplated by philosophers of environmental aesthetics. The chapter then describes conceptions of ‘image’ in aesthetic theory for the arts, and in the field of law and aesthetics or, more particularly, visual jurisprudence. Despite a privileging of worded text, law’s visual manifestations have been identified by jurisprudents of common and civil law. The aesthetic analysis of visual art for law by scholars such as Desmond Manderson is found in studies of art for international law, and for environmental law. This chapter argues that understandings of image in scholarship for the arts can be combined with the distinct characterisations of the environment by philosophers of environmental aesthetics, to analyse the concept of aesthetic value for international environmental law.

The final chapter 8 considers the implications of an aesthetic analysis of images for international legal practice. International bodies making decisions under the three treaties examined in the book conflate and displace aesthetic value in favour of other environmental values, risking the integrity of their decisions and, ultimately, the protection of the environment for its aesthetic value under international environmental law. Photographs could be formally acknowledged for their relevance to the interpretation of the treaties and used in decision-making processes to conceive aesthetic appreciation of the environment in ways important for all nation states. They can encapsulate a sensorial experience of the natural environment shaped by imagination, emotion and knowledge from different cultures. But a critical analysis of such images is also important to distinguish aesthetic value from other environmental values such as natural beauty, cultural value and ethical value. An accommodation of aesthetic concepts and methods to develop meanings from images for the interpretation of international environmental treaties could also be taken up for other fields of international law.

This chapter offers a novel theoretical and methodological apparatus to reinterpret rule of law reform. I draw on aesthetic theory to reimagine rule of law reform as an aesthetic practice, in which efforts to build the sublime ‘rule of law’ produce both shadows of the rule of law and the shadowy figure of the rule of law reformer. I go on to argue that this aesthetic remains irreducibly embodied in the body of the reformer and that rule of law reform is, thus, in a very real sense, performance. I turn to performance studies, as well as Stanislavski’s system of training actors, to analyse these performances, and discuss precisely how they complement the methods in the previous chapter. I then put this new method into practice, rewriting my cases as dramatic performances. In doing so, I show how expert ignorance might productively be understood through the dramatic structure of ignorant experts’ action.

The introduction to the book offers an overview of the study’s aims, contents, and methodology.

This chapter expands on Theodor Adorno’s account of the enigma in Aesthetic Theory in order to scrutinise further his paradox between the critical impulse and literature that does not ‘extinguish [its] enigmaticalness’. I explore the implications of this tension in relation to J. H. Prynne’s collection Acrylic Tips (2002), and its resistances towards signification. The difficulty of interpretation, I emphasise, is not coterminous with incomprehensibility. Subsequently, I analyse enigmatical poetics in examples of both mainstream and ‘innovative’ writing. Don Paterson’s ‘The Sea at Brighton’ from Landing Light (2003) contains moments of lyrical sublimity, but then pulls back from the ‘remainder’, distrusting any notion of ‘difficult’ poetry. In contrast, Geraldine Monk’s collection Ghosts & Other Sonnets(2008) emphasises the linguistic ‘clowning’ that Adorno laments will appear to some uninitiated readers of modern art as merely ridiculous verbiage.

Personhood theory figures prominently in virtually every list of justifications for intellectual property in general and copyright in particular. Typically ascribed to the philosophical ideas of Georg William Friedrich Hegel and Immanuel Kant, this theory posits that authors have such deep connections with their creations that respect for their sense of self requires giving them a degree of ongoing control over those works. In essence, works are treated as extensions of the author’s person. As such, certain types of interference with those works would be tantamount to intruding on a part of the author’s body.

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s key analytical and theoretical concerns about Wallace Stevens, aesthetic autonomy, and modernism. It introduces the book’s main objective to show how Stevens’ poetic commitment to autonomy does not simply assert a mode of aesthetic enclosure, but serves to model and develop the forms in which the relationship between the poetry and the wider sociohistorical and cultural matrix is expressed. The Introduction positions the book’s main claims in relation to Stevens scholarship and modernist studies, and highlights the significance of the problem of autonomy to Stevens’ poetry of the 1930s and 1940s. It also provides a critical account of the major theoretical frameworks developed around aesthetic autonomy and its current assessments in modernist studies. The account given of aesthetic autonomy and the review of Stevens criticism lay out the foundations for the inquiry and the critical approach the book takes.