My extended discussion of Schmitt and this term, nomos, needs some explanation. My interest is not to make a new contribution to the already well-trod domain of Schmitt studies or to suggest that we cannot develop a practical theory of sovereignty and political geography without first steering clear passage through his thought and legacy. Instead, some of Schmitt ’ s problematic concepts are used for both the particular things that they may illuminate and also for what is to be learned by what they obscure, and how and why they do both of these. In this sense, his concepts stand in for other related perspectives that deserve criticism, specifically those that begin from and end with a basic distinction between the physical and virtual when trying to make sense of computation and space, let alone geography. Implicit or explicit, this lazy association of analog systems, with physics and nature, and digital systems, with artifice and artificiality, dulls and confuses our debates about technology in ways we cannot afford. A corollary to this is a discourse on “ the political ” that fetishizes oppositional antagonisms, and another that can comprehend technology only as an instrument or topic of governance, and not as its actual form. <sup>10</sup> The nomos, however, is one of his concepts ( “ exception ” is another) that might be twisted and reused in such a way as to force it toward very different conclusions that he intended. But what is nomos exactly?
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The Nomos of the Cloud