For The Stack ’ s sovereign products, the decision over the exception remains crucial in several ways, including in relation to where and when the law is suspended on behalf of the drama of violence, but also where and when boundaries of Westphalian subdivisions have jurisdictional preeminence versus other spatial orders. Most importantly, it is the reversibility of the exception that makes it so fraught; it is at once outside the law yet determined by the authority of law itself and available for retroactive normalization at any time. For The Stack (and for other orders), this may work through reversibility of geographic lines of segmentation, gathering an interior at one moment and guarding against an exteriority in the next. Those segmentations may divide physical space or separate layers in a larger machine, and from this conjunction, we can trace an infrastructural sovereignty that is produced less by formal law than by the shared physical postures of political subjects in relation to common infrastructure. Within that broader framework, we can also identify platform sovereignty as a still immature combination of legally articulated political subjectivity (one sometimes determined by geographic position and sometimes not) and an infrastructural sovereignty produced in relation to the platform infrastructures of planetary-scale computation, regardless of whether these are privately or publicly owned. We ’ ll see that platform sovereignty operates within territories that are composed of intersecting lines, some physical and some virtual, and for this, deciding exceptions is no less critical. The exceptions to be decided, however, are over what geographies those lines describe and what conditions they inscribe. Is one side or the other the inside or outside? Is this a camp or enclave?
Modern state polities are defined as interior to their own circumscribing geographic partition, and their sovereignty is produced in the fragile image of that line ’ s stability, even as that line remains reversible (all extrastate actors rely on that inversion and its convolutions). In the end, this economy of reversible partitions supersedes the integrity of external and internal borders, such that any polity is always an incomplete complex of smaller subpolities, defined for itself according to its own private exceptions, both inward and outward-facing: capital cities, special economic zones, overseas territories, embassies, local ordinances, and so on. Even with these buffers, the stability of state polity is always in question, because to the extent that the state suppresses its original constituting violence (war, revolution, settler colonialism), all future agents of subsequent exceptional violence against that state become ghosts of those first rites of legal absolution and self-exception, their most exacting patriots in a way. But the political work of the geographic line and its violent reversal precedes and exceeds formal states into both their past and their future.
The Nomos of the Cloud
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