{"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":26,"pdf_page":44,"physical_index":44,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"790c75f0fa57421847215f0cef4ac99d55b1c2bf0023f6dc68116cb9c8c7b245"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"Schmitt ’ s history of the origins of that European nomos is staged through the continental encounter with the supposedly unpartitioned New World, and the “ free soil ” it presented to the European jurisdictional imagination. (We know full well that the very idea of an “ empty American continent ” is itself an invitation to genocide. For our purposes, we rehearse Schmitt ’ s theoretical argument but not the validity of its worldview.) Schmitt claims that recognition of an “ unwritten ” territorial outside confronting a European interior motivated competing common laws and juridical traditions to respond by formalizing political geography. The pressing challenge of giving order to the “ free soil ” made the current heterodox and ambiguous state of jurisdictional affairs in Europe somehow intolerable by comparison. That solution ratified the subdivision of loops of land, but not sea (and largely ignoring air and the z-axis altogether), in favor of a master Archimedean point from which this political cartography would be consolidated and naturalized, as symbolized by the Westphalian compromise half a century after Columbus ’ s first expedition. Today the continuing (if still incipient) emergence of planetary-scale computation may represent a similar break and a similar challenge to the political geographic order. It does so not only because the Cloud is a new continent to be colonized, but because, as a kind of space, it trespasses the Schmittian metaphysical distinction between solid ground and liquid sea as the essential poles of geopolitical space and theory.\n\nThis puts us today neither at the end of the liberal world-state nor as subjects of a consolidated and self-transparent empire, but, rather inside something much harder to map because it is not entirely certain which space is which, what referent is physical and what distinction is abstract, the fiber-optic line or the pulse of light? This is not only a crisis of legitimacy; it is also a crisis of addressability , and one that initiates a break between one order and another, nomic or not. Our own encounter with a new world of unaddressed space generates a productive confusion over what type of Earth is to be claimed: land, sea, air, and now information; each of these seems to always be allocated, addressed, owned, and unowned differently. But this also is where we begin to depart from Schmitt ’ s framework altogether. He historicized the fate of Westphalia and the European nomos through his two metaphysical modes of geospatial governance: the opposition of an authentic grounded order and organic habitation versus an inauthentic maritime and aerial lawlessness extending over the line. The latter ’ s promiscuous forms are governed not by immediate occupation over time but by abstractions, located by flags, mathematical geologistics, and a vectorial relation to starry neighbors. <sup>15</sup> The industrial militarization of aerial space with World War I destabilized this essential opposition, and with it, according to Schmitt, the basic foundation for not only European geopolitical architecture and threatened the possibility of a renewed nomic order to come. From the sky, a pilot ’ s survey and visual capture of land smoothed the ground over and made it perceptually flat, oceanic, optical, geometric, quantitative. The drifting swirl of aerial warfare overcomes the distinction between grounded habitation and liquid movement through abstract space. Later, Virilio would echo (in terms not so unlike Schmitt ’ s) the significance of this shift and extend the analysis to include the arrival of information spaces that govern and are governed through an even more radical visual abstraction of planetary space and time, and the even more unnatural mathematization of territory manipulated from afar. <sup>16</sup> Jameson again: “ Yet the prophecy of an air-power return to total war, with the friend-foe pairing replaced by self and other, human and subhuman, is only partially correct, for it is no longer a question of air as an element, but one of cyberspace. Information is the new element that re-problematizes the spatial. ” <sup>17</sup>\n\n26\n\nThe Nomos of the Cloud","previous_page":25,"next_page":27}