Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Carl Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth offers a good starting point for reflection on the theme of planetary property, not least because of the way it has been taken up in contemporary discussions of planetarity. 1 One might draw on Nomos to show how, in the contemporary geo-historical moment, appropriation has been intensified and extended into new (often algorithmicallyenvisioned) spheres or strata of the Earth.To Schmitt's figure of land-appropriation (Landnahme) we now add atmosphere-appropriation, seabed-appropriation, genome-appropriation, and so on.An alternative, but not necessarily incompatible, interpretation suggests that Schmitt's theory of nomos becomes truly interesting if one reverses the directionality of the 'grab: 'Whereas Humans are defined as those who take the Earth, the Earthbound are taken by it' (Latour 2017: 251).Latour's 'Earthbound' people are engaged not with Nature, or with the Earth as Schmitt's bounteous giver, but with Gaia as a power that draws the human into relations of 'power sharing' in which the rivalrous interests of actants have to be 'composed' without reference to an arbiter such as State or Nature.In place of Schmitt's Ius Publicum Europaeum, one could imagine a 'jus publicum telluris' (2017: 284), which would articulate this work of composition.We suggest that it is more productive, and more timely, to read Nomos differently, and to notice that it functions as a critique of a mode of appropriation that is planetary in scale and effect but which has so far 1 See, for example, Chakrabarty (2019).gone unnoticed.We say 'functions' because this mode of appropriation is not explicitly characterized in Nomos; to see it, one has to look beyond the propositional content of the text to the process of Schmitt's authorship, and to the tension or equivocation that structures the book.This tension originates in the fact that Nomos is, as Yuk Hui observes, 'first of all a work on the history of technology' (2022: 340).As we explain further on, nomos as a figure of spatial performance emerged from Schmitt's theory of the Grossraum, and in particular from his understanding of the electrical grid as a 'technological-industrial-economical-organizational domain [Bereich]' (Hui 2024, 169).Latour's observation that 'in practice, the term nomos technically fulfills the same function as the much more austere term [of] redistribution of agency ' (2017: 235) is warranted because in the 1930s Schmitt had already perceived, in the technical understanding of what it meant to 'produce' electricity, the emergence of what we now call sociotechnical agency.At the same time, although his insight into this novel mode of agency was unusually acute, it was controlled by the perspective of the conservative jurist.Schmitt observed how electrical networks produced their own topology, cutting through legal-jurisdictional lines and obviating the mode of 'global linear thinking' which (in his view) was still represented in Kantian legal positivism.But he diverted or translated what could have been a theory of technology into a theory of law; more precisely, into a theory of how nomos, as a 'terrain' generated by agonistic power relations, conditioned the articulation of legal norms.In other words, the sense of emergence that was becoming visible in technology was reduced to the forces and strategies through which a 'concrete legal order' was formed.It is possible that the engineers' theory of electrical current as performance rather than substance (see below) layered itself into Schmitt's earlier experience of the no-man's land as a 'terrain of indeterminacy' (Vismann 1997, 56), so that what he saw in the electrical grid was the formation of a 'ground' that was based on 'jus terrendi rather than 'jus scriptum' (ibid, 48).Hui suggests that Schmitt was reluctant 'to reduce the concept of Grossraum to a "technoindustry-economic" one because he was more concerned with the significance of this concept for international law', and that 'as a result, his interpretation of technology is incomplete' (2024, 169).We see a more intensified mode of equivocation.To the extent that Schmitt 'completed' his interpretation of technology, he did so by turning against it.In the course of writing Nomos, and of weaving philological sources into a mythologized and unashamedly racist 2 history of international law, Schmitt repressed his debt to 'technology'.But his insight into sociotechnical agency soon returned, this time in the form of a spectre that threatened to dissolve the ground of nomos as the basis of tellurian order.In the postscripts to the English edition of Nomos, Schmitt argued that the violence of appropriation was being repressed by new discourses of 'production' and 'distribution': 'We have no right to close our eyes to the problem of appropriation, and to refuse to think any more about it, because what one today calls world history in the West and East is the history of development in objects, means, and forms of appropriation interpreted as progress' (Schmitt 2003, 346-347).The political programme of the welfare state was one example of a set of discourses which suggested that value emerged from the processes of production/distribution, in abstraction from any original act of appropriation.For Schmitt this new episteme (or pseudo-nomos) was a phantasmatic projection, which suppressed what were actually inescapable conditions of sociality.These conditions had less to do with ontology, or with what Niklas Luhmann identified as 'Old European' rationality, than with the facticity of 2 On the persistence of Schmitt's antisemitism see Plaetzer (2023).what Schmitt called an ontonom: an order that 'emerges directly from the soil' (Vismann 1997, 51).If we read Nomos 'through' the tension in Schmitt's authorship, the partiality of the approach taken in Latour's Facing Gaia becomes evident.Latour did not know that nomos was actually technological in origin, but he astutely picked out this particular 'frequency' within the text, and made it resonate with his own project of 'redistributing' agency.More broadly, by drawing Schmitt, or selected aspects of Schmitt's work, 3 into his project of 'composing' interests, Latour also drew him into the broader episteme that Clarke and Hansen (2009) insightfully characterise as 'neocybernetic'.But if we begin with the tension in Schmitt's authorship, we notice two things.
Authors: Pottage, Alain, Keenan, Bernard
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7112658490
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