{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":25,"pdf_page":43,"physical_index":43,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f81ff45a70a6ed8c5e2ef1ead7bf2ed5d67d98c03463ecb221cccc6ca31b4e2e"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"In his 1950 work, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, the legal theorist offered a sweeping history of Western geopolitical architectures. The work focuses on how Roman, British, and Germanic legal empires drew the geometry of territory — specifically European territory — into a stable of political geographic orders from which spatial sovereignty over land, sea, and air was derived. <sup>11</sup> Schmitt defined nomos as “ the Greek word for the first measure of all subsequent measures, for the first land appropriation understood as the first partite and classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution, is nomos. ” <sup>12</sup> It is a both a structural logic in accordance with the primal first act of territorial inscription that gives rise to its subsequent formalization; it is a making of a territorial order through the execution of a territorial claim and physical occupation that precedes it. It also refers to a set of “ principles governing human conduct ” regarding war, space, and governance, but Schmitt makes use of nomos to suggest something both more concrete and transcendental than the abstractions of law. Nomos is described as prior to every legal, economic, and social order; <sup>13</sup> it is constituted by appropriation, distribution, and production, and only through this can it move from the particular to the universal: from arbitrary territorial capture, to representations of spatial delineation and to a geopolitical order. It is at once a physical oppositional arrangement, a discursive order, and an organic naturalization of this. Fredric Jameson offers another interpretation on Schmitt when he writes,\n\nThe concept of the nomos is a periodizing and structural category (whose family likenesses, besides one to the Marxian “ mode of production, ” might also include one to Foucault ’ s historical é pistemes) then inevitably brings with it the problem of the break, not particularly solved by the notion of a “ transition. ” In Schmitt, however, the fact of the break is an energizing one: first, because it suggests that each break, the historical disintegration of a given nomos, will call for a historically original production of a new legal superstructure or Novum. This call then lays in place the notion of an active moment of constitutive power … <sup>14</sup>\n\nSchmitt wrote The Nomos of the Earth following World War II, during which he served in Nazi Germany, and the “ break ” that concerned him was the end of a European order and the rise of an American era that he views with deep suspicion. He was pessimistic that the US was capable of such responsibility — and even if it was, that its reign would be desirable given “ the nature ” of “ North Atlanticist ” conceptions of space. As the US and the other Americas became a more central geopolitical actor, both the global omniscience of British-Greenwich naval ubiquity and the Roman-Germanic legal order of grounded jurisdiction were displaced by other forms of transactional sovereignty. In Schmitt ’ s history, this shift also validated transnational claims of sovereignty over entire continental zones, such as the Monroe Doctrine, which Schmitt greatly admired as a model of how a multipolar nomos should work. The catastrophes of World War I and II led to the establishment of a binary architecture held in place by the extranational domains of the US and Soviet blocs, their hierarchies of client states, their proxy battles over postcolonial nations, their transformation of Berlin into an enclave inside an enclave, and so forth. Today another multipolarity between China, the other BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies, the North American Free Trade Agreement, ASEAN, the European Union, and the Eurasian Economic Union, among others, plays out both in and over types of space that are equally geographic and technological.\n\nThe Nomos of the Cloud\n\n25","previous_page":24,"next_page":26}