¹ Macdonald, R.A., “Office Politics” (1990) 40 U.T.L.J. 419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² We use the term “distributive justice” in the sense intended by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, c. 2–6, as implying a set of goods to be distributed (offices), a set of beneficiaries (professors, administrative and secretarial personnel, students), and a criterion of distribution. The bulk of the article addressed different approaches to the third feature of distributive justice (criteria of distribution), although the several memos also considered whether offices were the only goods being distributed in such allocative decisions, whether the set of beneficiaries was (or should be) exclusively professors, and whether the processes by which decisions were taken could be devised separately from the formal and substantive elements of distributive justice.

³ The idea of implicit and inferential normativity is derived from Macdonald, R.A., “Vers la reconnaissance d'une normativité implicite et inférentielle” (1986) XVII Sociol. Soc. 37Google Scholar & Macdonald, R.A., “Les vieilles gardes” in Belley, J.G., ed., Le droit soluble (Paris: L.G.D.J., 1996) 233.Google Scholar For further elaboration in relation to allocative decisions by administrative agencies, see Macdonald, R.A., “The Acoustics of Accountability” in Sajo, A.., ed., Judicial Integrity (Leiden: Nijhoff Publishers, 2004) 141.Google Scholar

⁴ Happily, those commentators on the paper as delivered read it in the manner it was intended. See Schwartz, Bryan, “The inalienable right to be alienated” (1990) 40 U.T.L.J. 477CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who submitted an unsolicited comment following the conference; Weinrib, Lorraine, “Why the Dean?” (1990) 40 U.T.L.J. 484CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Whyte, John, “Normative Order and Legalism” (1990) 40 U.T.L.J. 491CrossRefGoogle Scholar, both designated commentators.

⁵ Fuller, L., “Means and Ends” in Winston, K., ed., The Principles of Social Order: Selected Essays of Lon L. Fuller (Oxford: Hart Publications, 2002) 61.Google Scholar

⁶ That is, most memos in the paper took the term office to refer only to the enclosed room where professors shelf their books and answer their telephones. Nonetheless, some of the fictional professors who used the discussion about offices as a surrogate for achieving other political objectives in the faculty or the university, also understood that they were making claims about what it means to be a professor (that is, about the office of a professor) and the connection between physical space and this vocation.

⁷ Of course, just as a focus on means can never obliterate a concern for ends, a focus on ends does not exclude consideration of means. To see an office as an aspiration is also to recognize that in choosing among aspirations were are also choosing the manner in which we deploy the idea of an office to further those ends. For a discussion of this feature of legal institutions in particular see the essays in Part IV of the collection by Witteveen, W. & van der Burg, V., eds., Rediscovering Fuller: Essays on Implicit Law and Institutional Design (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2000) at 279–408.Google Scholar

⁸ Among the paradoxical ideas that this shift in emphasis implies, is that the politics of offices is engaged even in the absence of any physical place for its exercise. Moreover, just as the office as space need no longer be conceived as a central location of the professor-student dramaturgy, so too other physical places of pedagogy–the classroom, for example–are losing their theatrical character through increased deployment of web-based instruction and e-mail interaction.

⁹ The idea of legal scholarship and legal writing as inviting (perhaps demanding) diverse literary forms is not new. In the early 1980s much effort was expended to promote alternative modes, genres and forms of legal scholarship–see for example “Symposium: Legal Scholarship: Its Nature and Purpose” (1981) 90 Yale L.J. 955–1296; SSHRC, Law and Learning (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1983).Google Scholar Still, the bulk of legal writing to this day remains doctrinal exposition and critique. Empirical research is the rare exception. There is a further idea. However different the style of expression in modern legal writing, the literary genre is invariably an essay written in propositional prose. So, for example, while some non-mainstream legal writing–particularly by feminist, critical race, queer and CLS authors–is in a narrative style, almost no scholarship is dialogic, poetic or in the form of a play. Still less frequently does one encounter explicitly conceptual interdisciplinary texts where other disciplines organize knowledge, rather than simply serve as a handmaiden to legal analysis. On this latter point, see the essays about transdisciplinarity in law collected in Somerville, M. & Rapport, D., eds., Transdisciplinarity: recreating Integrated Knowledge (Oxford: EOLSS, 2000) 61–107.Google Scholar

¹⁰ In the manner of the Annales School of historical writing, Office Politics sought to offer a “thick description” (in fact, a “thick narration”) of a narrowly circumscribed situation, from which others could then construct their own narratives of distributive justice in institutional life. See Dosse, F., L'histoire en miettes: des “Annales” à la “nouvelle histoire” (Paris: Découverte, 1987).Google Scholar

¹¹ The ambition is two-fold: first, to suggest that rigorous conceptualism (or hyper-structuralism) does not automatically commit a scholar to a legal positivist epistemologysee, for example, Weinrib, E., The Idea of Private Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and second, to suggest that external analyses of law–for example, law and economics, critical legal studies, etc.–need not simply conscript other disciplines into an exogenous critique of existing legal doctrine, but can be used to (re)organize conventional legal doctrine.

¹² We explicitly adopt a critical legal pluralist hypothesis about law, and conceive the “legal” in that light–see Kleinhans, M.-M. & Macdonald, R.A., “What is a critical legal pluralism?” (1996) 12 C.J.L.S. 43Google Scholar; Macdonald, R.A., “Kaleidoscopic Federalism” in Gaudreault-DesBiens, J.F. & Gélinas, F., eds., The States and Moods of Federalism: Governance, Identity and Methodology (Montreal: Yvon Biais, 2005) 261Google Scholar; and Macdonald, R.A., “Here, There and Everywhere: Theorizing Jacques Vanderlinden; Theorizing Legal Pluralism” in Kasirer, N., ed., Mélanges Jacques Vanderlinden (Montreal: Yvon Biais) [forthcoming in 2006].Google Scholar

¹³ As for “space,” we derive much of our understanding from authors who understand the concept as both physical and social. See, notably, Lefebvre, H., The production of space, trans, by Nicholson-Smith, Donald (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar; Pallesmaa, Juhani, The Eyes of the Skin (London: Academy Editions, 1996)Google Scholar; Taussig, M., Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; Low, S.M. et al. , eds., The Anthropology of Space and Place (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Obviously, we encounter the problem of everyday vocabulary throughout this essay. It is not just in relation to concepts like “law” and “legal” that our perspective challenges naïve realism. See the essays cited supra note 12, and Macdonald, R.A. & Sandomierski, D., “Against Nomopolies” N. Ir. Legal Q. [forthcoming in 2006].Google Scholar Consider the common expression: “occupy an office.” To say that a professor “occupies an office” is to suggest a physical being in a physical space. Compare, however, the expression that a professor “holds a chair.” In this usage, which equally suggests a physical act in relation to a physical object, we are not trapped into assuming that only a spatial connection is in issue: we also attend to the political relationships that are implied by the concept of a professorial “chair.”

¹⁵ In deploying these two heuristics, we follow Henri Lefebvre who sees an organic relationship between the spatial and the lexical. Semiology presupposes spaces susceptible of a reading: just as social space is the locus and medium of speech and writing, places too have to be marked, noted, and named (Lefebvre, supra note 13 at 118, 132, 142, 211). Although we reference Lefebvre frequently in this essay, we do not claim that he is the last word on the semiology of space. Nevertheless, since many of the structural features of our schema nicely dovetail with his work, we have sought to make these connections explicit.

¹⁶ For an elaboration of the Cassirer's ideas of presentational and discursive forms, see Langer, S.K., Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957) at 79–102.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The attribution of meaning is an act of interpretation that implies a conversation in which the reader engages with text, author and object: to interpret and to inhabit an “office” is a political act. Consider in this light, Aylesworth, G., “Dialogue, Text, Narrative: Confronting Gadamer and Ricoeur” in Gadamer and Hermeneutics (New York: Routledge, 1991) 63.Google Scholar

¹⁸ More generally, we might phrase the “point” of this essay as follows. All structural modes are frames of inquiry. If the “personality” of the narrative mode reminds us that everyday doctrinal legal discourse lacks context, the “formulaic aesthetic” of the hyper-structural mode sparks inquiry about relationships of power and affect that everyday doctrinal discourse occludes.

¹⁹ The Oxford English Dictionary On-Line, s.v. “office (noun)”, online: <http://dictionary.oed.com>. Unless otherwise noted in this paper, all references to dictionary definitions are taken from this source [OED].

²⁰ These eleven acceptations of office as a noun are reduced in the Webster New Complete Dictionary (New York: Merriam-Webster, 1995) at 363 to four–space, role, service and rite.

²¹ The three spatial meanings are the sixth, seventh and tenth listed entries in the OED, supra note 19. The contemporary English word officinal (belonging to, or used in, a shop), derived from the Latin officina: opus + facio, more closely captures the idea of a location or place. For a more direct link to the two Latin words that were originally compounded (opus + facio) consider the English word opifice (the doing or making of something; construction, workmanship; the thing made or constructed).

²² As well as these eight highlighted simple uses, the OED also gives three other primary usages: 1. an authorized form of divine service (which can be subsumed for present purposes in the notion of a rite); 2. that which one ought to do or has to do in the way of service (which can be subsumed for present purposes in the notion of role); 8. short for “inquest of office” (a legal usage of now purely historical significance).

²³ Recall also the Latin origins of the term: officium: ob + facio (a dutiful or respectful action; attendance, service, duty; sense of duty, respect, courtesy; a group of officials collectively; submission, allegiance). The post-Latin etymology of the word is likewise revealing. The current English word office derives from the Anglo-Norman dialect in Old French—office, offis, offiz, offyz. Interestingly, the early Latin sense of the word office retains its primacy in French—as in expressions like remplir son office, or Office de la langue française or nommé d'office–and the other usages found in English such as place, rite and service are given as secondary. In all events, while as place, the French word office may refer to the rooms where domestic servants work, it does not embrace the primary English spatial usage—the physical location of a business or professional activity. See Dictionnaire Robert, 2nd ed., s.v. “office”.

²⁴ To do so we have combined all uses that evoke a place into a single usage, and have collapsed the idea of divine service into the idea of a rite, and the idea of one's obligations into the idea of a role. The six uses of office as a verb given by the OED track the six noun meanings developed in this paper: supra note 19, s.v. “office (verb)”.

²⁵ The thought recalls Heidegger, M., Time and Being, trans, by Stambaugh, J. (Albany: State University of New York, 1996) at 113Google Scholar: “[t]he true spatial meaning of these expressions (…) [here, over there, there] (…) for Da-sein, however, documents the fact that the theoretically undistorted interpretation of Da-sein sees the latter immediately in its spatial ‘being together with’ the world taken care of, spatial in the sense of de-distancing and directionality.”

²⁶ One of the difficulties of structuralism as a mode of discourse today is the tendency of readers to ascribe to structure either a logical or historical necessity. The more elegant and coherent the structure, the more this false necessity seems incontrovertible. Since part of our objective in this essay is to illustrate the liberating capacity of a structuralism that acknowledges (but does not explicitly argue for) its politics, we have not sought to present a genealogy of offices. See, however, Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodemity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar for a reflection on the uncertain connections between site (place) and status (relationship) in all institutional settings.

²⁷ Apparently the most recent simple use of the word, standing alone and not in a compound dates from the early 19^th century. The OED lists several compounds, however, of more recent vintage: for example, office-bound (1961) and office-flowers (1973). Modern slang also provides the expressions office-ice, office-art, and office-trash, all three of which refer to different “lower-caste” employees in large offices. These several compounds nicely signal that the material office and the relational office are mutually constitutive. The hip-hop use of office to mean “brain” seems, at this point, too occasional to constitute for the OED a new acceptation.

²⁸ On the power of metaphor see Ricoeur, P., The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), especially at 65–133.Google Scholar See also Ricoeur, P., “Metaphor and symbol” in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976) 52.Google Scholar In the case of offices the migration of the Latin officina into English was complete by the end of the 14^th century. Consequently, the understanding of office as the physical place as well as the institution wherein an office was performed or exercised had lost its metaphorical quality by the time of Chaucer and entered the language as a separate usage of the word.

²⁹ So, for example, according to the OED, the usage of the word office in its meaning as “function, task, responsibility, charge, form of divine service” can be traced at least as far back as the late 12^th century. As “service or help given by a person” to the late 15^th century; as “parts of a house where domestics prepare food” to 1536 C.E.; as “duty towards others” to 1542 C.E.; as “duty, obligation” to 1550 C.E.; as “bureau or agency” to 1863 C.E.; and as “public service of industrial, commercial, administrative, etc., nature” to 1891 C.E.

³⁰ The OED does set out nested usages, but these are given as variants or particular applications of a primary usage. For example, the fourth simple use has three variants: “4. a. That which is done, or is intended or expected to be done, by a particular thing; b. A bodily or mental function as operating; the proper activity of an organ or faculty; c. The function or action of defecating or urinating; excretion; an instance of this.”

³¹ Analytical geometry as developed by René Descartes opened the way to expressing points as ordered number pairs in a set of coordinates, and geometrical forms as a set of variables in a set of coordinates. The set of coordinates is built around the idea of axes, where the axes stand for different dimensions. See generally Reid, Constance, A Long Way From Euclid (Mineola: Dover, 2004), at 67–77.Google Scholar

³² This is not to say that our experience with dimensionality is only or even primarily visual. Young children build houses of cards, domino chains and Lego castles long before they “visualize” dimensions. As with touch, so too with sound. Even pre-schoolers hear the dimensionality of “stereo” when it is contrasted with “monaural” sound systems.

³³ Visual encounters with dimensionality are not a new phenomenon. Fifty years ago the examples would have been the difference between an ordinary photograph and a “three-dimensional” stereoscopic photograph-pair of the type popularized by “Viewmaster” machines, or the difference between an ordinary movie and “Cinerama.” And before that, the examples would have been the difference between Egyptian art and those Renaissance paintings that began to reveal perspective.

³⁴ By adding these dimensions we are ultimately seeking to overcome the limitations imposed by the reduced dimensions of the Euclidian space of our visual-spatial realm. It would be more correct to speak of overcoming the limitations of the Cartesian space by using more dimensions than were introduced by Descartes himself. On this point see H. Lefebvre, supra note 13 at 284, 293, 312–3. Even if Lefebvre were aware of the significance of dimensions, he failed to see their possibilities for counteracting our everyday concept of space. Consider in this regard, Porteous, J., Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense and Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).Google Scholar

³⁵ The differences are not just ontological. They are also epistemological. That is, even though the third dimension can be conceived by extrusion (extension) from the second dimension and can itself be extruded to the fourth dimension, its perspective and gaze are not subsumed within the fourth dimension; nor does the third dimension subsume the first or second dimensions. Much of the reflection about the fourth dimension is from Garrett Jones whose website on what he calls “tetraspace” (see online: Alkaline.org <http://tetraspace.alkaline.org/>) contains a wealth of information on the fourth dimension.

³⁶ To illustrate the pervasiveness of conventionality in frames of reference one need only attend to map-making conventions. Early Christian maps placed Jerusalem in the centre of the world; today we typically place the North Pole at the top of our plane maps or globes; in the United States, the Americas occupy centre stage, while in Europe the zero meridian does so, with the International Date Line displaced to the left and right edges. For discussion, see Robinson, A. & Petchenik, B., The Nature of Maps: Essays toward Understanding Maps and Mapping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Gould, P. & White, R., Mental Maps, 2d ed. (Winchester, Mass.: Unwin Hyman, 1985).Google Scholar

³⁷ One might have thought, thinking ordinally, that the “zeroth” dimension is beyond the first dimension in one (numerically descending) direction. For the discrepancy between ordinality and cardinality caused by the introduction of zero, see Seife, Charles, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Viking Books, 2000), at 59–60.Google Scholar See also Ifrah, Georges, The Universal History of Numbers from Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, trans, by Beilos, D. et al. , (London: Harvill Press, 1998) at 510.Google Scholar We begin with the zeroth dimension because it is hard to imagine a “minus-first,” “minus-second,” etc. dimension—although as a matter of mathematical theory, the possibility must exist.

³⁸ The simile is not, of course, exact because of differences between language metaphors and dimensions: metaphors are porous, while dimensions are typically conceived as hard integers; metaphors can produce second generation metaphors, while dimensions are cardinal–although powers (2-squared, 2-cubed) and roots (the square root of 2, the cube root of 2) permit us to imagine second generation dimensions. Regardless, the point is to illustrate that both metaphors and dimensions (especially under fractal theory) have potentially unlimited extensionality. See Mandelbrot, B., The Fractal Geometry of Nature (San Francisco: Freeman, 1983).Google Scholar

³⁹ Perceptual and geometrical spaces are terms used by Poincaré, Henri in The Foundations of science (New York, The Science Press, 1913) at 66–67, 70.Google Scholar See also Henderson, Linda, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) at 36.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ As such, they can be compared with the taxonomie exercise in, for example, traditional biology. Within the Linnaean taxonomy any given species, may also be described as necessarily a member of a more encompassing genus, family, order, class, and so on. See Linnaeus, Carl, Systema naturae, 10t^h ed. (Stockholm, 1758–1759).Google Scholar This presumptively exhaustive nested classificatory structure nonetheless encounters limiting cases like the duck-billed platypus. Linnaeus himself admitted that the system was artificial. Rather than revise or overthrow the traditional scheme, however, biologists retain it for its pragmatic value, although it is doubtful that many would attach a strong ontological claim to it.

⁴¹ Consider, for example, how the following two vectors play against the six registers. First, a dimensional vector: the zeroth and first dimensions are associated with lexical usages of office that can be conceived in the absence of office-holders; the second and third dimensions are conjoined with understandings of offices as social; and the fourth and nth dimensions envision offices as embodied in persons. Second, a representational vector: the spatial and structural registers evoke offices as formal nexus; the lexical and symbolical registers signal offices as interaction; the relational and the sensual registers confront us with offices as projections of self. While the lexical and sensual registers map fully onto the impersonal zeroth and first dimensions, the relational and structural registers appear not to do so because they require an Other that is present; hence the conclusion that physical space presumes social space.

⁴² It bears notice that “time” is not conceived as a dimension in the matrix. The idea of time as a fourth dimension was first suggested by Hermann Minkowski in a presentation at Cologne in 1908, see Eddington, A.S., The Nature of the Physical World (London: Cambridge University Press, 1928) at 52–53.Google Scholar In fact, time pervades all spatial dimensions–time is the condition by which those who existence is embodied in a particular frame (one dimensional in Lineland, two dimensional as in Flatland, three-dimensional as in Spaceland–the world we know) imagine the relationship of space to movement. That said, we concede that the concept of a dimension is plastic and can mean different things for physicists, mathematicians, theologians, psychiatrists, etc. Indeed, each register could be recast as a dimension–a possibility we suggest in inviting a multidirectional reading of the matrix.

⁴³ The six sections that follow the matrix canvass all six registers. Each of the columns can be seen to reflect one of Lefebvre's understandings of space: spatial–conceived space or representation of space; lexical–perceived space or spatial practice; relational–lived space or representational space; structural–representations of space (the sign); symbolical–the meaning of space (the signified); sensual–the physical marking of space by different sensory indicators. See Lefebvre, supra note 13 at 38–41, 141, 179, 222, 239, 363. The relationship between sense and space is perhaps the most difficult of those we suggest here. Nonetheless, it has a lengthy pedigree, and many of the associations we make are derived from earlier speculations. For example, over 100 years ago E.A. Abbott assigned different roles to different senses in different dimensions. Abbott argued that two-dimensional Flatlanders would recognize each other primarily by hearing and feeling, not by sight because all forms looked the same in the second dimension (recognition by sight was reserved for those with exceptional mental abilities). See Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland: A Romance with Many Dimensions (London: Seeley & Co., 1884) at 17–27.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Euclid, , The Thirteen Books of the Elements, trans, by Heath, T., vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1956) at 153Google Scholar, definition 1. See also definition 16: “And the point is called the centre of the circle,” ibid., at 154.

⁴⁵ Charles Seife, supra note 37 at 86–87: “[t]he vanishing point has caused most of the universe to sit in a tiny dot.”

⁴⁶ The connection of the infinitesimal to the constitution of space is what Lefebvre calls spatial architectonics, see Lefebvre, supra note 13 at 202–203. See also Rybczynski, Witold, The Look of Architecture (New York: New York Public Library, 2001).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ On invisibility see Wells, H.G., The Invisible Man–A Grotesque Romance (New York: Edward Arnold, 1897).Google Scholar Because an invisible person cannot see himself or herself, an invisible person would have no clue, apart from touching things, where he or she actually was. After a while, an invisible person would lose interest in his or her whereabouts. And as soon as he or she becomes oblivious to his or her precise whereabouts, he or she would obviously lose all sense of space.

⁴⁸ Compare Mandelbrot's theory of fractals, supra note 38. The hierarchy between parts and the whole also collapses when one is construing a text: “(…) the presupposition of a certain kind of whole is implied in the recognition of the parts”, see Ricoeur, Paul, “Explanation and understanding” in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, supra note 28 at 77.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Touch has a direct bearing on the zeroth dimension. Since touch does not operate at a distance, tactile impressions are sufficient for determining the identity of two points. See Henri Poincaré, supra note 39 at 259–64.

⁵⁰ In the first dimension, centrality–originally conceived as a point–acquires a functional reality by becoming a locus of action. Lefebvre, supra note 13, calls this “constant state of mobilization” (at 399) “differential space” (at 352–400).

⁵¹ Consider Constance Classen, Howes, David & Synnott, Anthony, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994) at 103Google Scholar: “(…) olfactory classification systems do possess a sense, a logic, but that logic is local rather than universal.”

⁵² Of course, the two dimensional space, though often represented as a horizontal surface–as for example, by Edwin A. Abbott, supra note 43–can be imagined on any plane.

⁵³ The second dimension reflects Lefebvre's idea of contradictory space. The relationships in the contradictory space may be “(…) represented by means of rectangles or squares: some are included by others, but at the same time they include-or are excluded—by yet others.” See Lefebvre, supra note 13 at 294.

⁵⁴ Note that what is conventionally called an “audience,” say for a play or other performance, can also be a “role,” and what is conventionally called a “role,” say what an actor or actress does on stage, can also be an audience.

⁵⁵ Scott, R.R., in The Collected Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1981) at 218–19.Google Scholar The challenge is expressed in the exhortation “to strip for more climbing.”

⁵⁶ The rationale for locating taste in the second dimension is that this dimension evokes the idea of pairs of opposites. “[t]astes are often more complex than smells in that they form pairs of opposites, like sweet and bitter” see Lefebvre, supra note 13 at 198. This quality of taste defines its other meanings: “[t]astes (…) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference.” See Bourdieu, P., Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans, by Nice, Richard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) at 56.Google Scholar See also Howes, D., Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁷ Of course, every dimension above zero is a container, in that it can also contain an infinite number of potential fields of interaction within that dimension. As three dimensional beings, however, our experience conditions us to perceive only three dimensional objects as containers.

⁵⁸ The third dimension can be correlated to Lefebvre's abstract space: supra note 13 at 229–91. Each of the persons constituting the manifold Other would be a dimension in his or her own right, but we choose to reduce those dimensions into a single aggregate dimension. The same procedure applies to the fourth and higher dimensions as well.

⁵⁹ This sort of open-ended communication is made possible by writing: “[t]hanks to writing, man and only man have a world and not just a situation.” See Paul Ricoeur “Metaphor and symbol” in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, supra note 28 at 36.

⁶⁰ The body for others belongs in the third dimension because it is constituted by the “social gaze”, hence by the visual sense. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, supra note 56 at 207.

⁶¹ On epistemological problems of visual space, see Feld, Steven, “Places sensed, senses placed – towards a sensuous epistemology of environment” in Howes, David, ed., Empire of the Senses – The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005).Google Scholar

⁶² Henri Poincaré explained this limitation by the complicity of the retinal sensations, the sensation of convergence and the effort of accommodation by the ciliary's muscle, supra note 39 at 204. Arthur S. Eddington submitted that we could see the fourth dimension if our eyes could move with different velocities. Quoted in Panek, Richard, The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes (New York: Viking, 2004) at 180.Google Scholar

⁶³ The fourth dimension corresponds to Lefebvre's absolute space. Though absolute space has dimensions, they do not correspond to the dimensions of abstract (or Euclidian) space, so that absolute space is located nowhere. See generally Lefebvre, supra note 13 at 229–91, 236.

⁶⁴ According to J.C.F. Zollner, the fourth dimension was the location of Kant's unknowable “thing-in-itself.” See Henderson, supra note 39 at 23.

⁶⁵ The Beach Boys, Surfer Girl (Capitol Records, 1963).Google Scholar

⁶⁶ The same feeling is delivered with exquisite poignancy by Ranyevskaya, Lyubov Andreyevna in Chekhov's, AntonThe Cherry Orchard, trans, by Frayn, Michael (London: Methuen, 1978) at 43Google Scholar: “I love this house. Without the cherry orchard I can't make sense of my life, and if it really has to be sold, then sell me along with it (…)”

⁶⁷ This is to say that absolute space, which we identify with the fourth dimension, makes no distinction between signifier and signified. Hence the individual is not an individual at all in the sense of indivisibility, because the individual consists of an infinite number of selves. See R.A. Macdonald, “Here, There and Everywhere: Theorizing Jacques Vanderlinden; Theorizing Legal Pluralism,” supra note 13 at 38.

⁶⁸ Discourse can be regarded as a rite par excellence, because it combines a formal code, or langue, and a concrete event, or parole. See P. Ricoeur, “Language as discourse” in Interpretation theory: discourse and the surplus of meaning, supra note 28 at 6–8.

⁶⁹ Picasso and other practitioners of analytical cubism tried to express the fourth dimension with visual devices—reducing the third dimension to the painted surface and then restoring it by virtue of the simultaneity of the multiple aspects of the thing depicted. See generally, Henderson, supra note 39.

⁷⁰ Discourse becomes dialogue only in the fourth dimension, or our conception of it, because “(…) dialogue is an event which connects two events, that of speaking and that of hearing”. See P. Ricoeur, “Metaphor and symbol” in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, supra note 28 at 16. Hearing belongs in the fourth dimension, as it surpasses the visual realm. W.H. Auden is even more specific, as he situates music, and thus hearing in general, in relation to both the visual and the olfactory realm in his 1948 poem, In Praise of Limestone:

“(…) these

Are our Common Prayer, whose greatest comfort is music

Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,

And does not smell…”

See Auden, W.H., Collected Poems, Mendelson, Edward, ed., (London: Faber & Faber, 1976) at 540–42.Google Scholar

⁷¹ On the possibilities of hyperspace see Stewart, Ian, Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 2001) at 281–87.Google Scholar

⁷² The nth dimension can be associated with Lefebvre's social space, which contains potentialities responding to the demands of a body transported outside itself in space. See Lefebvre, supra note 13 at 349.

⁷³ Of course, following Werner Heisenberg, we know that the very act of feeling, smelling, tasting, seeing or hearing ultimately influences what is felt, smelt, tasted, seen and heard. Every perception in an n-dimensional office is uncertain. For a contemporary rendition see the Coen brothers' film, The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), where the lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider builds a criminal defence on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

⁷⁴ So, for example, Poincaré argued that immediate experience frames mediate experience: our motor space together with tactile space helps us to construct visual space. See H. Poincaré, supra note 39 at 69.

⁷⁵ Frequently authors deploy unusual stylistic techniques, grammatical inversions, or fanciful vocabulary to transcend conventionality. See, for example, Joyce's use of “fourdimmansions” and “tesseraci,” see Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1939) at 367.27, 100.35.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ In this regard, Mary Douglas' interactive conception of institutions as the location where life's hard choices are debated and negotiated may be contrasted with the far more pessimistic Foucauldian analysis that now disciplines large sectors of the academy. Compare Douglas, M., How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985)Google Scholar with Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans, by Sheridan, A. (London: Allen Lane, 1977).Google Scholar

⁷⁷ The paradox is revealed in the vigour with which professors who have taken retirement struggle to maintain an office somewhere in the University. Without a professorial office, they feel unable to retain the office of professor. For a poignant reflection see F.R. Scott, “On Saying Goodbye to my Room in Chancellor Day Hall”, supra note 55.

⁷⁸ Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, supra note 66, Leonid Andreyevich Gayev's lines in Act Four, at 59, and in Act One, at 9.

⁷⁹ To recall, these include the linkages between office as place and office as relationship; between an office as instrumental to some purpose and an office as symbolizing self-perception; and between the various sensual apprehensions of an office.

⁸⁰ For further development of this point, see Macdonald, R.A. & MacLean, J., “No Toilets in Park” McGill L.J. [forthcoming in 2005].Google Scholar

⁸¹ The thought is wonderfully expressed by Sylvia Plath in her personal journal: “We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.”

⁸² On such a conception of law and legal space, see R.A. Macdonald, “Here, There and Everywhere: Theorizing Jacques Vanderlinden; Theorizing Legal Pluralism”, supra note 13, and R.A. Macdonald & D. Sandomierski, “Against Nomopolies”, supra note 14.