The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 84 页

Framing lines, separate or conjoined, subdivide the ground or link points together. A plurality of lines, both dividing and linking at once, might fold on itself in various ways and in these overlaps create irregular twisty grids, populated by air pockets of various sizes and identity, inside or outside, enclaves and exclaves. Lines are agents of geopolitical form and their various types (e.g., lines of flight, lines of intensification, lines of transformation and subdivision) curve into the frames that present geopolitics to itself: the border, fenestration, aperture, plan, section, elevation, orifice, capital city, special economic zone, demilitarized zone. ²⁸ When the nomic line that partitions polities from one another is looped, it too becomes a frame, and as a form of geopolitical design, these arrange and present political geography. For contemporary governance, the simultaneous unwinding and reinforcement of modern jurisdiction, and its fragile pairing of geography and law in mutually validating representational systems, hopes to organize the world according to certain framings, and it defends its drawings with force. As a nomic technique, these generate and enforce jurisdictional conventions and exclude alternatives. ²⁹ For example, however inspired or misguided the Mountbatten Plan may have been, the partition of India was a design decision, and the image and map of the region that would result was constituent of a specific design imaginary. ³⁰ Scaling from one line to a whole system, the looping segmentations of the Westphalian model are bolstered into a geopolitical architecture, as are the sectional planes of our more vertical Stack. This compositional geopolitics has its own history filled with frames and topographies projected variously into the past and future as much as onto real living territory. Especially at the Interface layer, we will see that the violence of presentation and preemptive representation — projection as territory and territory as projection — is the engine of any Stack geopolitics, inherited or invented, at work now or to come later. Again, authority and its authorship can speak only to what it can see and sense, and in turn what it can measure, and so geopolitics and geoscopy are always bound up with one another. ³¹ The Stack works within given geographic limits and draws new geographies with those limits. While landscapes have direct physical agency (that is, “ geography, ” as in “ Montesquieu credits the rise of the West to geographical advantage, such as not having to govern wide flat expanses such as the Great Steppe ” ), ³² we are as interested in another connotation, per Grosz, one more like geo-graphy, as in “ earthwriting ” or “ earth-drawing. ” Specifically this geo-graphy is both a kind of writing of space and of expressing, communicating, politicizing compositional images of terrain as a precondition of the social and technical construction of spaces to be defended. For there to be any kind of abstract jurisdiction — secular, sacred, national, networked — there has to be a figure of space through which force can work at all. Schmitt ’ s concept of the nomos is one establishment of this, but geography more generally frames the referent over which any governing, compositional, projective frame seeks authority, and here Grosz ’ s animalian frame becomes a basis of geopolitical constitution. Geography , in this sense, is a specific kind of relationship between world and image , in that it is itself both an image of the world and a real rendering of physical landscape according to that representation. Its force and coherence are based in both the abstract image and the physical world as they refer to one another, and in the course of real politics, by their mutual conjoining into one defensible inscription. ³³

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Earth Layer