The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 20 页

1. Dividing Sovereignty

In starting with and from political theory in this first part, it is important to acknowledge in advance that “ sovereignty ” is positioned as a question, not as a given conclusion. The implication is not that software is new and sovereignty is timeless, thereby leading one to ask how sovereignty now works through software, but rather that both are now mutually contingent and that the work of software at a global scale itself produces unfamiliar sorts of sovereignties. Even so, the many connotations of sovereignty are highly contested in political philosophy, and this book is unlikely to temper this and may disappoint anyone looking for the definitive explication of the concept. Even so, we can say that in the most prosaic sense, state sovereignty is drawn out by rules of an international system that is itself guaranteed by the federation of states. According to this, a state would have a right to the legitimate exercise of control and governance within an exclusive geographic domain, usually of land, including certain monopolies over legitimate violence and the recognition of and by international law. This arrangement is predominant but incomplete. It is characterized, at the very least, by its own continuous breaching. In relation to this system are other several specific sovereignties in play: the legal sovereignty of states recognizing one another; an interdependence sovereignty of stable global flows of resources and capital ; domestic sovereignty , and the state ’ s authority over its own internal mechanisms and institutions; and Westphalian sovereignty , that states have the right to separately determine their own domestic structures of authority. The Westphalian mode is, as I ’ ve suggested, also predicated on a particular and arbitrary geographic design of political space defined primarily as zones of land, named by and as states. Sovereign decision has, of course, been a focus of renewed attention, from Jean Bodin ’ s definition of the sovereign as the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth through to the more Hobbesian definition of the sovereign as “ he who decides on the exception. ” ⁴ The exception is that which is on the face of it undecidable by the law, but which the sovereign assumes the right to adjudicate nevertheless. The sovereign is he who has the power to suspend the regularity of the law and issue enforcement into the indeterminate state of this “ emergency. ” Giorgio Agamben ’ s reading of Carl Schmitt moved this “ decisionism ” close to the primitive core of political authority (particularly after 9/11, when irregular jurisdictions and executive actions were announced regularly as the new normal). ⁵ His work also convened a lively discourse on sovereignty, including resistance to its forms, in relation to constituted and constitutive violence, drawing heavily on Walter Benjamin ’ s 1934 essay, “ A Critique of Violence, ” as well as Agamben ’ s own employment of Schmitt ’ s terminology to identify the camp (specifically the concentration camp) as “ the nomos of the Modern. ” ⁶ Sovereignty here is not limited to the work of states. In his later-career lectures on biopolitics at Coll è ge de France, Foucault outlined his idiosyncratic history of neoliberalism, which for Foucault was itself a unique subspecies of capitalism. He argued that one of the things that makes neoliberalism unique is that markets do not operate in conjunction with or in conflict with sovereign states, but rather that sovereignty is itself shifted from states into markets. For sovereign markets, rights of economic exchange supersede the governance of public order at the level of the individual and the collective. ⁷ Abstracted calculation supporting the strategic financialization of assets, both real and speculative, takes on new importance, and so at least in this regard, the historical emergence planetaryscale computation and neoliberalism are intertwined. However, as we examine in some detail with regard to platform sovereignty, that pairing is neither requisite nor inevitable.

20

The Nomos of the Cloud