in PATRÍCIO, C. 2016. «O Legislador Paralisado: Crise do nomos da Terra». In Movimento, in José Bragança de Miranda e Catarina Patrício (Ed.). Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, 45 (pp. 243-262). Lisboa: Unyleya. ISBN: 978-989-622-908-5
1. On the exhaustion of experience
From all sides we get signs that what we take for space is becoming distorted[1] − at least this is the kind of anxiety most propagated by a sociology that focuses on speed and on the experience of durations. As a pure challenge to the human imagination, these signs are intensified by the recognition that the Earth is becoming smaller and smaller for those who inhabit it, which is aggravated by the certainty that there is nowhere else to go. Due to the scarcity of land extension, it is said that in late modernity time has conquered "space" to space: «The time of the finite world begins», Paul Valéry had long ago said (1931, 21). The reality was filled with networks, or rather real space was expanded with the innovation of virtual space, apparently defined by the duration of the routes, tasks, stimuli and experiences.
From the archaic nomos, apprehended through knowledge of the myth, to the nomos of the land, which emerged during the great sea voyages, we perceive that both law and property relationship exist in direct connection to the Earth. Even cosmic space, boundless and infinite, is already pre-occupied by intergalactic treatises, expanding the dispute of the war of all against all beyond terrestrial space[2]. But as for the flows and mutations that technical modernity has unleashed there is another concrete link working. The expectation of expanding space to all connections emerged, covering the place of algorithms and even the interstices between fiber-optic cables "urbanizing"[3] perhaps another dimension of experience: time.
This is Chronopolitics[4]. As an attempt to understand what brings the era of synchronized politics to a single time, it is possible to take the term proposed by Paul Virilio, but always restraining his suspicion of a real spatial subtraction by the innovation of the direct and the progress of the telematic networks − once that space persists.
Even so, everything points to an exhaustion of experience, either by the immateriality of the networks, by the subitaneity of how information is spread, or even by the general motorization of the real, and which leads many thinkers of the acceleration concept to look for time as a dimension to be regulated. Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Hartmut Rosa and even Carl Schmitt warn of a de-realization and subtraction of space experiences rather than emphasizing the durations that the new technical equipment has boosted. Therefore, the chronopolitics arise as an attempt to control space and as a reaction to the shortened time duration of experiences, yet made planetary.
In the general mobilization of the "first generation", essentially objects and people circulated. With the network matrix world, there is no object, flow, or energy that is not absorbed logistically. Hence the signs of this transfer from war to the networks and their global synchronization must be taken seriously, although the conflicts are fought (still) in the two territories − in real space and virtual space.
2. The Nomos of the Earth
The modern epoch like those which preceded it, is the fruit of a spatial revolution. But let us go back to the starting point of regimes of property over space, latent in the laws that govern the relative dispositions of a nation or city, in short, of all territorialities. Carl Schmitt recovers this initial movement − we talk about the first territorial conquest.
In Schmittian geopolitics, land-appropriation [Landnahme] is the constituent foundation of the juridical order and the events that came upon it. It is with this first movement of appropriation that a primordial pattern, the nomos, is extracted from Earth. It is an initial measure containing all the later ones and from which all property regimes emerge. This is the constituent nature of the nomos: an initial and pre-juridical act, which is not a law in the sense in which we take them, it is the «measure by which the ground and soil of the earth [Grund und Boden der Erde] in a particular order is divided and situated» (Schmitt 1950a, 74).
«The land is always the first acquisition» (Schmitt 1950a, 53), asserts Schmitt recovering Kant in order to sustain how all property regimes are based on the ownership of the land. But deepen this relationship to the soil: «La terre est appelée dans la langue mythique la mère du droit» [«According to the mythic language, the Earth is called ‘the mother of the law’»] (Schmitt 1950a, 47). Schmittian geopolitics thus runs up against metaphysical geographies.
All comes from the earth and the images we take from it are the only way to grasp its totality. In Geographies - Imaginary and Control of the Earth José Bragança de Miranda clarifies to us the inscription of the myth in the delineation of the pre-global totality. In this work on the form, it is the myth that precedes the becoming image. Hence the imaginary map that Plato presents in the Phaedon is determinant to concentrate a singular image of the Earth. Reifying the globe on the scale of thought is probably the only way we can reach it.
Schmitt recognizes how all cartography of «appearance» inscribed in myths is law-producing, such as Plato's Nomoi, and already encompasses the planning of modern laws (Schmitt 1950a, 71). Thus, in addition to geography itself, it is also the history of law that is based on mythical sources (Schmitt 1950, 46). Moreover, for the German jurist, only in the myth lies the criterion for knowing whether a nation or people has a historical mission and whether its momentum as the motor of universal history has arrived or not, and also reminds us that this vital instinct that arises from the myth is enough to stimulate the force for martyrdom and the courage to resort to violence; political mythology is what we shall call of Carl Schmitt’s attempt to inscribe a people as a destiny in the nomos. It is, moreover, a thesis often invoked by the fascists. Nevertheless, this connection of mythic knowledge to contemporary jurisprudence, in a certain way, foresees the passage of conflicts to a permanent state of (civil) warfare, which Schmitt seeks to overcome through the memory of a Jus Publicum Europaeum and in the containment of the war by re-moralizing the war itself, as we shall see below.
With the disclosure of the oceans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the paradigm of the pre-global orders changes and the gradient of the world, until then inlaid in allegories[5], is affected. In large scale sea voyages the measure of the Earth is measured in its global consistency, and the nomos of the earth; the genesis of international law based on the distinction between terra firma and free sea emerges (Schmitt 1950a, 54). If the archaic nomos recaptured the inhabited world, grounding all subsequent laws, reaching the totality only by means of mythical sources, «the nomos of the earth» coincides with the superficial completeness of the star in cartography on a real scale that sustained thereafter the International Law, the Jus Publicum Europaeum, irradiated from its centre: Europe.
We must assume that land appropriation implies war. Jus Publicum Europaeum consecrated to Europe a limited, public and non-discriminatory form of war, determined by equality between belligerent sovereigns. The entire international juridical order consisted, from then on, on an effective institutionalization of war held on a new order of space.
In the Eurocentric planetary order the State[6] is celebrated. Jus Publicum Europaeum arises from inter-state space cohesion and gives European soil a specific status both in relation to the free sea and to the mainland. In fact, the nomos of the earth divides the world. On the one hand, Europe is territorialized in sovereign states, on the other a "docile" New World colonized and deterritorialized. If all nomos, while «appropriation, distribution, and production» in Shmitt’s words, triggers a movement that leads to a spatial stabilization, the nomos of the earth presupposes the existence of a free and open space that will allow stability from the exterior. The American continent is entirely available to be appropriated, divided and exploited, both in its free space and in the bodies of transatlantic alterity, never perceived as an enemy. Thus the war in Europe has been contained.
In this way, the Jus Publicum Europaeum will dissipate in the 20th century. «The Berlin Conference»[7] was its final bloom which resulted in the last great territorial takeover, carefully preserving the sovereignty of each European State. The normative design of a spatial order centred on Europe was later abandoned with the compensations imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 and the constitution of the League of Nations. With the conclusion of these international pacts the «nomos of the earth» disappears.
Born of the discovery of the New World, «the nomos of the earth» implied a movement of differentiation and expansion of the European continent in relation to the «free» territory of the colonized world. It was thanks to this unrepeatable discovery, Schmitt asserts, only comparable to the possibility of conquering a new celestial body (Schmitt 1950a, 46) that the rivalry between European sovereign states was restrained, thereby suppressing the war on the old continent[8].
But let us also clarify the Jus Publicum Europaeum. From the European inter-state configuration came the notion of relative stability but also the relativization of the concept of «enmity», possible by the eradication of the horizon of international relations from the legal dilemma that the just war represented. Through Jus Publicum Europaeum, war, as a state matter, is deemed to be morally or theologically justifiable and fair. The formation of modern law, admittedly one of the strands of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, will be inseparable from a movement of theological demarcation of the public life (Schmitt 1950a, 142). By becoming a state matter, war is separated from the theological notion of justa causa belli, acquiring the non-discriminatory normative concept of justus hostis[9]. Since each state may present itself in a conflict as a public order holder within its borders, war between nations is henceforth a conflict between hostes aequaliter justi. This is to say that equality between just enemies underlies the decisionism that Schmitt describes in his theory of law (Schmitt 1950a, 157), that is, that each sovereign state decides for itself what will be the just cause. This will suffice as a basis for the validation of the regulatory system. The remaining States, which do not take part in the conflict, can always invoke the status of neutrality, thus abstaining from all resolutions.
It was with the emergence of very extensive «free spaces» and of its territorial appropriation that the new law of interstate structure was born, translated in a balance that was based, fundamentally, on the differentiation between firm land and free sea. But the collision between the war on the sea and the war on the land was still unfolding. The opponents are co-present on a relatively homogeneous theater of operations, which extends horizontally. However, with the conquest of airspace, a new element, the air, emerges, and a new, more comprehensive and planned image of the world is produced: a kind of real-time mapping.
In this real-time cartography, observable first with the help of hot air balloons and the airplane, then with the aircraft and the satellites, new spatial concepts and new measurements are established. But just as the sea ceased to be an element to have domains and territories, inscribed horizontally in the regimes of property that are scanned on land, the same happened with the taking [nehmen] of the air, but vertically. For Carl Schmitt, the conquest of airspace has radically changed the «horizontal face-to-face», finally bringing down the ground because the air war has no stage or spectators[10]. It is with this abolition of the flatness of the territory that the nomos of the earth ends.
Considering that every technological advance on a physical medium, on a new element, is effected a modification in the image that we have of the totality of the Earth, this image leads, simultaneously, to the re-composition of the nomos. New capabilities of action, of media speed, new patterns of force and human regimentation are tested and experimented, and the models of circulation and information are modified. Following Schmittian thinking, with each new medium revealed, capacity is altered in the effectiveness of the means (Schmitt 1950a, 54). And due to this, as from World War I, aerial power[11] would finally dissolve the radius of influence of the potential fleet, definitely expanding the war on a planetary scale. From the air came terrorism.
In Terror from the Air (Luftbeben, 2002), Peter Sloterdijk matches the beginning of the twentieth century with the battle of Ypres, on April 22, 1915, when Germany launched French-Canadian gas bombs: first because chemical warfare has torn conventional warfare, then because the air has consumed land and sea as stages. And it is symptomatic that it was a continental nation, not a maritime power, to disclose such a new medium, as Carl Schmitt had noted in his 1954 book Land and Sea [Land und Meer].
Through the terrorism of the chemical war ends the balance that Schmitt conceptualized in the War in Form [Krieg in Form], precisely because the force that launches the attack does not direct it exclusively against the military, contaminating peremptorily the environment and the population[12]. Already Walter Benjamin had noticed in Theories of German Fascism:
«Gas warfare, in which the contributors to this book show conspicuously little interest, promises to give the war of the future a face which permanently displaces soldierly qualities by those of sports; all action will lose its military character and war will assume the countenance of record setting. The most prominent strategic characteristic of such warfare consists in its being waged exclusively and most radically as offensive. And we know that there is no adequate defence against gas attacks from the air» (Benjamin 1930, 121).
The terror that comes from the air is not restricted to the hydrogen bomb, or the hydrochloric gas, or the atomic bomb, or the Boeings of September 11th. Also the transmissions are inflated:
«The spatial revolution which is carrying out is especially direct, forceful and obvious. Aware as one is that the airplanes criss-cross the air space above seas and continents, and the waves broadcast by transmitters in every country cross the atmosphere and circle the globe in a matter of seconds» (Schmitt 1954, 57).
The revolution in transport and communications, the acceleration that accompanies late modernity, outlined a deep spatial revolution based on the priority given to the duration of the journeys. For Carl Schmitt it is a whole second space revolution: «Electric power, the airplane, radio, all introduced such a confusion in the existing notions of space, that it could easily be regarded as evidence of a new stage in the first spacial revolution on the planet, or even of the beginning of a second spacial revolution» (Schmitt 1954, 57). But to what extent, by real-time transmission, can the geopolitics of nations lead to a global chronopolitics?
3. On the Thesis of Mobilization
Let us now follow the action-movement that profoundly marked Modernity. It is essential to realize how it was the war that set in motion the mobilization that intensified in a technical preposition. There is indeed a model synthesis of such a movement that had been discovered shortly after the Great War of 1914-18. We speak of The Total Mobilization (Total Mobilmachung, 1930) by Ernst Jünger.
Jünger wrote about the pressing performance and use of modern technique, where German Romanticism and the heroic spirit of the military aristocracy of which he is heir converged. Between the bloody World Wars, in the midst of the existential crisis of the bourgeois political model and after the fractious rise of the communist model, circumstances that deeply threatened the European environment, and do not forget the immense role of the technique towards the realization of the planetary connection that was being built at that time, Jünger is an incontestable historical testimony, but also poetic, of the mutant reality of the first half of the twentieth century.
Ernst Jünger[13] overcame the crisis of the nationalisms that marked the World Wars and traced a truly global thinking[14]. The writer-military realized how modern technique already exceeded the soldier's individual initiative. He is a collective body that now presents himself to work and war, a body that understands much more than the organic human mass, which is no longer recruited into close proximity to hand-to-hand combat, but rather integrates a complex set of networks and machines.
However, and although essential, the technical side of mobilization is not, for Jünger, the most decisive. As he says in the fourth paragraph of Total Mobilization, the readiness for mobilization is what has become truly decisive. The growing motorization of the State, stimulated by the acceleration of technical progress, goes, uninterruptedly, bringing everything and everyone to its passage. As Jünger says, «The spirit of war was penetrated by the spirit of progress» (Jünger 1930, 123).
War and revolution conflagration, «they are both sides of an event of cosmic importance» (Jünger 1930, 123). Enmeshed as they are in their romantic idealism, they are for the writer absolutely dependent events and identical in the way they hatch in the world, precisely because they are timeless transcendence, and this is achievable in the spirit. But there is still to come, says the writer, a full understanding of what is latent in the idea of progress, that is to say, the «mask of the reason» which extends «fine wires that perform such subtle movements» (Jünger 1930, 124). But in order to unfold such energies, «it is not enough to arm the sword-bearing arm» because the mobilization must take place inside, from the armor to the marrow, «to the finest nerve of life», so that its realization can be articulated in an elaborate «electrical network of modern life», channeling energy to the «great current of war power» (Jünger 1930, 127-128). It is the «new morality of progress», that is to say, the fervor felt in the world freed by the experience of technique, which extends the threads that Jünger witnesses, more concretely in the individuations that it bursts forth.
Most definitely, technical objects act upon history and on war, contributing to a labor that has since become planetary. There is no longer anything, object or subject, that is not at the service of a mobilization that is consummated in itself, «much more than for us» (Jünger 1930, 125-129).
Through mobilization, the image of war takes on the form of a huge labour process (Jünger 1930, 126). There is no movement, from trade to transport, which is no longer bound to the battlefield; it even enrolls those who have no ties to a military career, retaining all the wealth until the last penny, until the last reservation. The pressing need and collective effort in a general mobilization is self-emphasized on a new path intersected by modern technique. Everything will be recruited, even if it is at a distance, because the technique reaches everything from a distance. Through the unlimited labor which the spirit of mobilization instilled in the world, and which includes men and machines assembled together, one lives globally engaged in inclusive movements. This is because nothing escapes mobilization, nor even a single «atom» (Jünger 1930, 128).
The war will be complete as long as the mobilization is complete − and infinite. Goebbels, in what was left for History as the «Speech of the Total War» delivered in the historical February 18th, 1943, asked the entire German people:
«The English claim that the German people do not want total war but capitulation. I ask you, do you want total war? Do you want it to be more total, more radical than we can imagine it today?» (Virilio 1984, 72).
It is with the tragic approval of an enthusiastic mobilized people that Goebbels states: «Now, people rise up and let the storm break loose!» From this point of no return, the war will supplant the space dimensions embracing reality without limits.
We know how war does not only affect the materiality of nations but also their spirit. Hence Jünger clearly exhorts to German mysticism. Walter Benjamin would have uncovered his ideological formula[15] in Theories of German Fascism, an essay assembled in the work War and Warriors (Krieg und Krieger) organized by Jünger himself, and from which he had emphasized Total Mobilization. For Benjamin, Jünger's text is nothing more than a transposition of "art for art’s sake" theses into "war for war’s sake", and is therefore a dangerous project: not so much the question of the purpose of war, but of war as an end in itself − even because in this provision for the aesthetics of war, as Benjamin says, the real is threatened with an endless war (Benjamin 1930, 121).
If for Jünger, it was the readiness for mobilization and regimentation of the entire human and technological arsenal that was absolutely decisive in the War of 1914-1918, for Benjamin it is at once the desire for such a mobilization that emphasizes the human unpreparedness to assume technology «as part of its own body». And the philosopher would go on to demonstrate how technological objects were also unprepared to restrain such man’s natural destructive zeal.
In other words, the obsession with the control and illusion of man's command over nature attests to its insufficient maturity to deal with the possibilities that the technique enhances. There lies the threat. As Benjamin synthesizes, he once again but in the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduierbarkeit, 1936-1939),
« This is the case of war that, with its destruction, demonstrates that society was not mature enough to incorporate technology as part of its body, and that technology was not sufficiently developed to master its fundamental social forces» (Benjamin, 1939,113).
So, instead of being mobilized for war and dropping bombs, the airplane should be mobilized for humanity, casting seeds. Moreover, Benjamin asserts, the fascist formula will lead to a kind of collective suicide, because it emphasizes the pure hybris of those who «hope that war provides the artistic satisfaction of the perception of senses altered by technology» (Benjamin, 1939, 113). It should be noted that Germany, whether in the First or in the Second World War, had always imputed all liabilities[16] to technology, and that is also what can be read in Theories of German Fascism (Benjamin 1930).
Chemical weapons are a heinous procedure − gas is a lasting horror that affects not only the deployed contingents as the surrounding environment. Remember Peter Sloterdijk’s essay Terror from Air (Sloterdijk 2002). With the entry of chemical weapons into the battlefield, conventional warfare has given way to a total and infinite war. Today we see, as Jünger said, through the crevices of the tower of Babel, signs of progress as indecipherable as hieroglyphs. And the military-writer asserts in connection with World War I that «the last war has a meaning that no arithmetic can dominate» (Jünger 1930, 139).
We should make the following synthesis: World War I was the first conflict that mobilized the world through a technical proposition − but not exclusively. Agamben shows well that the theological economics of salvation was a formula of world management and, in this regard, it was already a «mobilization». Now, in terms of general mobilization the difference is "physical" and not just "spiritual" as it was in the Middle Age. In spite of this, there are remnants of the model everywhere, and a brief note must be made in that regard.
Summing up the idea, from Christian theology came two general paradigms, and Agamben devised them, above all, from Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy. One of the models is clearly political theology, which is based on the transcendence of the sovereign power of God; the other is economic theology «[...] that replaces this idea with an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent order − domestic and not strictly political, both of the divine life and of the human life» (Agamben 2004, 3). He further elaborates, explaining its development and reception: that «from the first paradigm derive political philosophy and the modern theory of sovereignty; from the second, modern ‘bio-politics’, to the current triumph of economy over every other aspect of social life » (Agamben 2004, 3).
One can see that when certain conditions are fulfilled, total mobilization progresses to a chronopolitical formula, updated specifically in the present model of capitalism. In this, economy and mobilization triumph over social life, but synchronized in real time. The concept of global time and the overcoming of national time zones for the benefit of a single planetary time lead the world to being truly mobilized in the information age. This regulation of time and speeds is what we comprehend as chronopolitics. For a totalizing movement to exist there must be absolute synchronicity. Sloterdijk himself also saw this connection to time − acceleration and duration − as essential. Speed, time, technique, migration, work, are always interconnected domains converging in the unique model of capitalism, which has as its horizon a mobilization that has become omnipresent, accentuated in the postindustrial city. After the total mobilization for war, this is the "infinite mobilization" for capitalism. As the engine of social acceleration[17], capitalism articulates individuals and objects in a unique mobilization that is concentrated in the new attitude of the Absolute War, now transnational, economic and informational.
Late modernity is for the German philosopher pure being-toward-movement (Sloterdijk 1989, 33) and the Modern Age as a mobilization that inscribes the will to power insofar acting is what drives the world. It is true that Sloterdijk wants to distance himself but says nothing about Jünger’s worldview. In fact, Peter Sloterdijk just wants to get out of kinetics and slow the process down: « [...] because the direction in which it laboriously seeks to achieve such awareness is not forward, but a backwards step, the disengaging of the acceleration process in order to gain distance. Only hesitantly will we name the critical side of this mobilization theory according to a classical model: critique of political kinetics» (Sloterdijk 1989, 51).
It is now understood that the tension currently experienced between space and time, to which we have sought to match the Virilian chronopolitics, is much more of a «geographical mismatch» in relation to the constitution of the nomos than of its absorption by time. It is this long mismatch that marks «the historical singularity of the event called ‘Modernity’» (Miranda 1994, 131). Here we see the relevance of the thesis of mobilization and the inevitability of acceleration.
4. Katechon as blockade
The shortening of the territory, because it is possible to move through the physical space faster, does not mean an entire empire of time about space and its annihilation. Even capitalism, tending to be non-territorial, will not prevent mega-corporations from organizing themselves territorially. It is essential to realize that one only goes to war for territory and property. Concerning time it is the decision-making speed of response that matters, but no nation or economic power wants to conquer time for time. Concluding, one should realize that the acquisition of the sea or the air, and now of the Internet, always presupposes conquering the Earth.
Author Hartmut Rosa states that social acceleration is not a static process, and that it occurs by "waves" stimulated by new technologies and new forms of socio-economic organization; waves always followed by "decelerationist"[18] movements that Rosa himself encourages.
Speed emerges in Virilio as an absolute reference, but it is one he seeks to curb by establishing a new line of thought known as dromology. It is a sort of science of acceleration, but in a tone of warning. But even though it is impossible to suppress or even moderate the ongoing course of action, it is now up to us to present a speech-obstacle to the realization of the total motorization of the world, more specifically Carl Schmitt's Motorized Legislator.
The general technologization of the State affairs is at the center of Carl Schmitt's Motorized Legislator (Motorisierter Gesetzgeber, 1950). For the jurist, the process of mechanization of the real, or let’s call it motorization, led the world to a critical starting point. What technique is providing to experience, especially its planetary reach, but above all the acceleration of experiences and history, corrupts the influence of the State and the Constitution. It is by facing the action of the decrees that the legislator Schmitt tries to be a brake.
In the Nomos of the Earth (Der Nomos der Erde, 1950), Schmitt took back the original bind to the nomos to analyze the constitution of Jus Publicum Europaeum, an inter-state law that prevented war on land by moving it to the sea. But we also saw how the jurisprudence coming from the nomos of the earth would change after 1914. And it was with the disclosure of new means such as air that the legislative «motorization» emerged. For the jurist, the acceleration corrupts the liberal democracy because it stimulates the state of emergency and the regimes of exception. In the Schmittian insistence on maintaining a rigid space order, one can see the struggle for the conservation of a regulated experience of durations. There, the Law can act as a barrier to acceleration.
For Schmitt, the motorization of the legislator represents the disappearance of the essential difference between law and will by almost annulling the difference between laws and decrees. Therein lays a general indistinctness between the legislative power and the executive power[19], which he considers to be dangerous. The decree is the motorized law, because it gives an immediate answer, and thus the legislating machine responds in an increasingly automatic way to the cases that arrive to it. The motorization of the experiences corresponds to a shortening of the space of answer, that Schmitt contests, striving for the space and its order. No one can affirm that the space has disappeared in this suppression, but the shortening and mechanization of the decision time is by itself a decisive change, a change driven by the speed. However, the will to slow down, delay or block the acceleration, denotes an interventionism and an attempt to unify space, which easily serve as the foundation for the most violent ideologies.
In this case, the conservative Carl Schmitt finds in velocity a way of overcoming the image of God[20]. It is here that the major figure of the deceleration or even, suspension of the experiences comes out: the katechon.
In ancient times, one believed in a hidden retarding power designated by the Greek word katechon, and which very literally means «that or that which withholds» (the restrainer). This is how it appears in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians or, as recorded in the scriptures, the Second Letter of the Apostle Paul to the People of Thessalonica. Through the katechon would be delayed the so mentioned «apocalyptic end of the times». As a conservative force that maintains order, it becomes basically a categorical imperative that prevents Christians from "misbehaving" before the apocalypse.
For Carl Schmitt the katechon is a positive value that revitalizes his thinking in order to operate in the field of law and political philosophy. The biblical concept becomes a force of blocking and deceleration of durations and it is useful as an obstacle to the achievement of technical progress. It is therefore through the katechon that Schmitt’s sense of History is preserved, that is, in the mythical sources we find «the clues to know if a nation has a historical mission» and when will arrive «the extreme moment in which it becomes the motor of the universal history» (Schmitt 1923, 68). The katechon protects this design − it is its ideological purpose. Let's look in more detail.
In the Nomos of the Earth (1950), Schmitt sustains the historical importance of the concept within the Christian tradition. It is the Christian empire that emerges as the governing force. Recognizing that Schmitt ideologically fights acceleration, the Empire is the only historical force that can hold back or restrain the Antichrist (Schmitt 1950a, 64).
The katechon would be the very life force of Christendom, meaning, the European civilization under the aegis of the State and the Catholic Empire. As the Antichrist − the wicked one that Schmitt proposes to fight back[21] − comes to announce the end of time, so the acceleration manifests itself. Hence, in is his work the Messianism is a political metaphor precisely because Schmitt sought to establish a new nomos at the expense of the revitalization of religious authority. And in this regard, Agamben says that:
«Political theology can affirm itself only by suspending economic theology: thus the Schmittian doctrine of kat-echon, which is a suspension or dilation of this economic plane that rules the world. According to Schmitt political theology can find itself only through a deferral or dilation» (Agamben 2004, 7).
The Schmittian attempt to dilate or prevent the regency of the economic plan, which is discovered behind the mechanization of the state and the general shortening of the decision, space is in its essence a struggle against the growing demarcation of politics and history.
And the inextricable problem is that the technique is highly «democratic». In 1929, in a text entitled The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen), Carl Schmitt reveals the greatest suspicions about the new possibilities that technicity allows, precisely because it serves anyone, for good or for the evil, for the revolution or for the reaction. And the most frightening are the immense technical possibilities of rewriting History (Schmitt 1950b, 72-73). In the end, Schmitt's political theology, which seemed to advocate the unity of space, fears unity as an articulated or technically reconnected community[22] precisely when he claims «The European juridical erudition shall not die with the myths of the law and the legislator [...] even confusing linguistics may be better than a Babylonian unity»(Schmitt 1950b, 73).
In what concerns the issue of accelerationism, one can see clearly the transition to the era of networks and planetary mobilization. However, it must be recognized, without hindrance, that modern, highly efficient technique is already directing mobilization of the planet reaching the world, because now any subject, and also any object or network, is a planetary subject in mobilization. It should be referred, therefore, that the kinetic policy that Sloterdijk worked on is nothing more than the motorization that Schmitt discusses − a process of acceleration that also Paul Virilio and Hartmut Rosa sought to act as a brake. It is true that the analysis of the acceleration is not complete without studying also the social decelerations, made particularly visible at the turn of the 21st century with the rise of theories such as «hyper-acceleration», «turbo-capitalism», «polar inertia» or «the end of History», after all, these are approaches that underlie a certain acceleration and the reverse − its apparent paralysis. Either way, it will do little good. We continue on the same way where we were, maybe a little more tired. The problem of planetary recruitment has intensified, and decelerationist warnings won’t prevent it to stop. The Big Mobilizing Machine is in motion and understanding it forces to a new relationship with technics.
Translated by Ondina Pires
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(Dates given in square brackets refer to the original editions of the works cited.)
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_______. [1936-39] 1992. «A Obra de Arte na Era da sua Reprodutibilidade técnica». In Sobre Arte, Técnica, Linguagem e Política. Trad. M. Moita, pp. 71-113. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água.
_______. Jünger, E. [1930] 1993. «Total Mobilization». In The Heidegger Controversy: a critical reader. Trad J. Golb & R. Wolin, pp.119-39. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press.
_______. Miranda, J. B. 1994. Analítica da Actualidade. Lisboa: Vega.
_______. 2005. «Geografias – imaginário e controlo da Terra». In Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, 34 e 35, pp. 11-42. Lisboa: Relógio de Água.
_______. Rosa, H. 2009. «Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society». In H. Rosa & W. Scheuerman (org.) High-Speed Society: social acceleration, power, and Modernity, pp. 77-111. Pennsylvania State University Press.
_______. Schmitt, C. [1923] 2000. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. trad. E. Kennedy. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press.
_______. [1929] 2007. «The Age of Neutralizations and Depolitizations». In The Concept of the Political. Trad., M. Konzett e J. McCormick, pp. 80-96. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
_______. [1950a] 2008. Le Nomos de la Terre dans le droit des gens. trad. E. Kennedy. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France.
_______. [1950b] 2009. «The Motorized Legislator». In H. Rosa & W. Scheuerman (org.) High-Speed Society: social acceleration, power, and Modernity, pp. 65-73. Pennsylvania State University Press.
_______. [1954] 1994. Land and Sea. trad. S. Draghici. Washington: Plutarch Press.
_______. Shaviro, S. 2010. Post-Cinematic Affect. Washington: O Books.
_______. Szendy, P. 2011. Kant chez les Extraterrestres. Paris: Minuit.
_______. Valéry, P. [1931] 1945. Regards sur le Monde actuel. Paris: Gallimard.
_______. Virilio, P. [1984] 1989. War and Cinema – The Logistics of Perception. trad. P. Camiller. London-New York: Verso.
_______. [1995] 2000. A Velocidade de libertação. Trad. E. Cordeiro. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água.
_______. [1998] 2000. The Information Bomb. trad. C. Turner. London-New York: Verso.
[1] It will be necessary to distinguish between the broad notion of space, and land as territory. The space surface of the planet as concrete territory is that which serves as an anchor to the constitution of the nomos and requires thinking of its historical construction, based on geography and geometry. This spatial dimension has broadened with the expansion to the virtual domain.
[2] Meaning «Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies» known as «Outer Space Treaty» of 1967, and «The Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies» also known as «The Moon Agreement» of 1979. Both limit the use of celestial bodies for peaceful purposes. Respectively in http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/SpaceLaw/outerspt.html and in http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/moon/text.
[3] It is Virilio who mentions the urbanization of the time: «The revolution of mass transport of the nineteenth century, the revolution of the transmissions in the twentieth century, a mutation- commutation affecting at the same time, public space, domestic space, up to the point of leaving us in uncertainty in what matters its own reality, once that to the urbanization of real space follows, at the moment, the first fruits of a real-time urbanization with tele-action technologies, and not only with classical television» (Virilio 1995, 32)
[4] Chronopolitics is a term coined by Paul Virilio to designate the political relevance that the dimension of times acquires from the mass acceleration: «[…] the political frontiers were themselves to shift from the real space of geopolitics to the 'real time' of the chronopolitics of the transmission of images and sounds» (Virilio 1998, 13).
[5] Schmitt says in Land and Sea (Land und Meer, 1954) that man is terrestrial; he moves and walks on firm land. So, this is the reason why man calls Earth to the Star where he inhabits. In this starting point we can understand the power of mythical knowledge precisely because it always anchors to Mother Earth, from which human beings also come and to where they return (Schmitt 1954, 1).
[6] And therefore, it is no more a feudal or ecclesiastical policy (Schmitt 1950a, 141).
[7] Known as « Congo Conference » amongst the Germans. Carl Schmitt wrote a chapter about it: «La dernière prise de terres conjointe de l’Europe (La conférence du Congo de 1885)» (Schmitt 1950a, 213-224).
[8] The implementation of the Jus Publicum Europaeum implied the containment of war. It is symptomatic that in 1987, in a speech to the United Nations, then the President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan, invokes the idea of total peace in the world in case of an external threat by extraterrestrial forces.
[9] Here is the definition: «L’idée du justus hostis, c’est-à-dire la non-discrimination de l’adversaire belligérant» (Schmitt 1950a, 207).
[10] « Plus de théâtre (Schauplatz) ni de spectateurs » Szendy quoting Schmitt (Szendy 2011, 36).
[11] The invention of the U-boat as well, abridging the German term Unterseeboot which means submarine.
[12] According to Schmittian thinking, war foreshadows a balance between powerful states. Terrorism emphasizes the inequality (or shift) between powers. As Sloterdijk affirms: «What dictates this shift is the emergence of encounters between opponents vastly unequal in strength – as we see in the current conjuncture of non-state wars and hostilities between armed forces and non-state combatants. In retrospect, the curious thing about the military history of gas warfare between 1915 1918 is the fact that through it – and on both sides of the front – state-sponsored forms of environmental terrorism became integrated into so-called regular warfare, between lawfully recruited armies. This was, it must be said, in explicit violation of the Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Convention, which expressly forbade the use of any kind of poison or suffering-enhancing weapons in operations against the enemy, and a fortiori against the non-combatant population» (Sloterdijk 2002, 16-17).
[13] His connection to the Weimar Republic requires a small note. Even though it is remarkable how in On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939, Jünger would call into question, with each metaphor, the political formula that nourished Hitler's National Socialism. The writer would remain forever bound to this regime by exhorting the Blood and Soil doctrine (Blut und Boden) inspired by Karl Haushofer. It was an incitement that would justify the Drang nach Osten (Way towards the East) and other atrocities of the Third Reich, such as the persecution and genocide of the Jews. In fact, Jünger had also contributed to this "debate", so to speak euphemistically, since in Nationalism and the Jewish Question (Nationalismus und Judenfrage, 1930) the writer emphasizes racial segregation when he states that Jews are the «masters of all masks».
[14] Although, for Jünger, it makes sense to speak in Civilization.
[15] Consult Walter Benjamin’s essay Theories of the German Fascism (1930). Observe the passage: «War – the ‘eternal’ war they talk about so much here, as well as the most recent one – is said to be the highest manifestation of the German nation. It should be clear that these authors have had little success in perceiving these relationships» (Benjamin 1930, 122).
[16] To this end, see Albert Speer’s allegations during the Nuremberg trial: «Hitler’s dictatorship was the first in an industrialized state, a dictatorship which, in order to dominate its own people, used all technical means to perfection… thus, the criminal events of recent years were not due to Hitler’s personality. The enormity of these crimes may also be explained by the fact that Hitler was the first who used the means offered by technology to commit them» (consultado em Virilio 1984, 67).
[17] See, in this case, how Rosa conceives this too often repeated thesis: «The most obvious source of social acceleration in Western societies is, of course, capitalism» (Rosa 2009,89).
[18] See how Steven Shaviro comments it, which reinforces our criticism to the acceleration critics: «It is easy enough to deplore this situation on moralistic or political grounds, as high-minded cultural theorists from Adorno to Baudrillard have long tended to do. And it is tempting to wax nostalgic, and mourn the passing of a more vital, and more temporally authentic, media regime, as film theorists as diverse as David Rodowick (2007) and Vivian Sobchack (2004) have recently done. But such responses are inadequate. They are too wrapped up in their own melancholic sense of loss to grasp the emergence of new relations of production, and of new media forms» (Shaviro 2010, 133).
[19] We call attention to the following passage: «Constitutional considerations always spoke against the practice of delegation, and such concerns were appropriate. For in the end legislative bodies are called upon by the constitution to make laws themselves, not to empower other agencies to legislate; as Locke, the legal-philosophical founder of modern constitutional law, had said, they should “make laws, but not legislators» (Schmitt 1929, 65).
[20] Schmitt vehemently rejects the «belief» in technology. He claims in The Age of Neutralizations and Depolitizations that: «A magical religiosity became an equally magical technicity. The twentieth century began as the age not only of technology but of a religious belief in technology. It is often called the age of technology» (Schmitt 1929, 85).
[21] Our criticism to accelerationism is based on arguments of a conservative and theological order. Benjamin Noys also identifies it in The Persistence of the Negative (2010): «Accelerationism, in another unintentional irony, risks restoring the most teleological forms of Second International Marxism» (Noys 2010, 8).
[22] In Schmitt, it is the plane of technology that opposes theology: «Seen from the broad historical perspective of many centuries, the situation of European legal scholarship has always been determined by two oppositions: to theology, metaphysics, and philosophy on the one side, and to a merely technical demand for norms on the other. European legal scholarship developed as an independent science beginning in the twelfth century in struggle against theology and by disentangling itself from faculties of theology. Friedrich Carl von Savigny defended legal science on this flank by recognizing the secularized theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy of natural law, as well as Hegel’s system of philosophy, as a threat to its internal autonomy.» (Schmitt 1950a, 68- 69)
1. On the exhaustion of experience
From all sides we get signs that what we take for space is becoming distorted[1] − at least this is the kind of anxiety most propagated by a sociology that focuses on speed and on the experience of durations. As a pure challenge to the human imagination, these signs are intensified by the recognition that the Earth is becoming smaller and smaller for those who inhabit it, which is aggravated by the certainty that there is nowhere else to go. Due to the scarcity of land extension, it is said that in late modernity time has conquered "space" to space: «The time of the finite world begins», Paul Valéry had long ago said (1931, 21). The reality was filled with networks, or rather real space was expanded with the innovation of virtual space, apparently defined by the duration of the routes, tasks, stimuli and experiences.
From the archaic nomos, apprehended through knowledge of the myth, to the nomos of the land, which emerged during the great sea voyages, we perceive that both law and property relationship exist in direct connection to the Earth. Even cosmic space, boundless and infinite, is already pre-occupied by intergalactic treatises, expanding the dispute of the war of all against all beyond terrestrial space[2]. But as for the flows and mutations that technical modernity has unleashed there is another concrete link working. The expectation of expanding space to all connections emerged, covering the place of algorithms and even the interstices between fiber-optic cables "urbanizing"[3] perhaps another dimension of experience: time.
This is Chronopolitics[4]. As an attempt to understand what brings the era of synchronized politics to a single time, it is possible to take the term proposed by Paul Virilio, but always restraining his suspicion of a real spatial subtraction by the innovation of the direct and the progress of the telematic networks − once that space persists.
Even so, everything points to an exhaustion of experience, either by the immateriality of the networks, by the subitaneity of how information is spread, or even by the general motorization of the real, and which leads many thinkers of the acceleration concept to look for time as a dimension to be regulated. Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Hartmut Rosa and even Carl Schmitt warn of a de-realization and subtraction of space experiences rather than emphasizing the durations that the new technical equipment has boosted. Therefore, the chronopolitics arise as an attempt to control space and as a reaction to the shortened time duration of experiences, yet made planetary.
In the general mobilization of the "first generation", essentially objects and people circulated. With the network matrix world, there is no object, flow, or energy that is not absorbed logistically. Hence the signs of this transfer from war to the networks and their global synchronization must be taken seriously, although the conflicts are fought (still) in the two territories − in real space and virtual space.
2. The Nomos of the Earth
The modern epoch like those which preceded it, is the fruit of a spatial revolution. But let us go back to the starting point of regimes of property over space, latent in the laws that govern the relative dispositions of a nation or city, in short, of all territorialities. Carl Schmitt recovers this initial movement − we talk about the first territorial conquest.
In Schmittian geopolitics, land-appropriation [Landnahme] is the constituent foundation of the juridical order and the events that came upon it. It is with this first movement of appropriation that a primordial pattern, the nomos, is extracted from Earth. It is an initial measure containing all the later ones and from which all property regimes emerge. This is the constituent nature of the nomos: an initial and pre-juridical act, which is not a law in the sense in which we take them, it is the «measure by which the ground and soil of the earth [Grund und Boden der Erde] in a particular order is divided and situated» (Schmitt 1950a, 74).
«The land is always the first acquisition» (Schmitt 1950a, 53), asserts Schmitt recovering Kant in order to sustain how all property regimes are based on the ownership of the land. But deepen this relationship to the soil: «La terre est appelée dans la langue mythique la mère du droit» [«According to the mythic language, the Earth is called ‘the mother of the law’»] (Schmitt 1950a, 47). Schmittian geopolitics thus runs up against metaphysical geographies.
All comes from the earth and the images we take from it are the only way to grasp its totality. In Geographies - Imaginary and Control of the Earth José Bragança de Miranda clarifies to us the inscription of the myth in the delineation of the pre-global totality. In this work on the form, it is the myth that precedes the becoming image. Hence the imaginary map that Plato presents in the Phaedon is determinant to concentrate a singular image of the Earth. Reifying the globe on the scale of thought is probably the only way we can reach it.
Schmitt recognizes how all cartography of «appearance» inscribed in myths is law-producing, such as Plato's Nomoi, and already encompasses the planning of modern laws (Schmitt 1950a, 71). Thus, in addition to geography itself, it is also the history of law that is based on mythical sources (Schmitt 1950, 46). Moreover, for the German jurist, only in the myth lies the criterion for knowing whether a nation or people has a historical mission and whether its momentum as the motor of universal history has arrived or not, and also reminds us that this vital instinct that arises from the myth is enough to stimulate the force for martyrdom and the courage to resort to violence; political mythology is what we shall call of Carl Schmitt’s attempt to inscribe a people as a destiny in the nomos. It is, moreover, a thesis often invoked by the fascists. Nevertheless, this connection of mythic knowledge to contemporary jurisprudence, in a certain way, foresees the passage of conflicts to a permanent state of (civil) warfare, which Schmitt seeks to overcome through the memory of a Jus Publicum Europaeum and in the containment of the war by re-moralizing the war itself, as we shall see below.
With the disclosure of the oceans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the paradigm of the pre-global orders changes and the gradient of the world, until then inlaid in allegories[5], is affected. In large scale sea voyages the measure of the Earth is measured in its global consistency, and the nomos of the earth; the genesis of international law based on the distinction between terra firma and free sea emerges (Schmitt 1950a, 54). If the archaic nomos recaptured the inhabited world, grounding all subsequent laws, reaching the totality only by means of mythical sources, «the nomos of the earth» coincides with the superficial completeness of the star in cartography on a real scale that sustained thereafter the International Law, the Jus Publicum Europaeum, irradiated from its centre: Europe.
We must assume that land appropriation implies war. Jus Publicum Europaeum consecrated to Europe a limited, public and non-discriminatory form of war, determined by equality between belligerent sovereigns. The entire international juridical order consisted, from then on, on an effective institutionalization of war held on a new order of space.
In the Eurocentric planetary order the State[6] is celebrated. Jus Publicum Europaeum arises from inter-state space cohesion and gives European soil a specific status both in relation to the free sea and to the mainland. In fact, the nomos of the earth divides the world. On the one hand, Europe is territorialized in sovereign states, on the other a "docile" New World colonized and deterritorialized. If all nomos, while «appropriation, distribution, and production» in Shmitt’s words, triggers a movement that leads to a spatial stabilization, the nomos of the earth presupposes the existence of a free and open space that will allow stability from the exterior. The American continent is entirely available to be appropriated, divided and exploited, both in its free space and in the bodies of transatlantic alterity, never perceived as an enemy. Thus the war in Europe has been contained.
In this way, the Jus Publicum Europaeum will dissipate in the 20th century. «The Berlin Conference»[7] was its final bloom which resulted in the last great territorial takeover, carefully preserving the sovereignty of each European State. The normative design of a spatial order centred on Europe was later abandoned with the compensations imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 and the constitution of the League of Nations. With the conclusion of these international pacts the «nomos of the earth» disappears.
Born of the discovery of the New World, «the nomos of the earth» implied a movement of differentiation and expansion of the European continent in relation to the «free» territory of the colonized world. It was thanks to this unrepeatable discovery, Schmitt asserts, only comparable to the possibility of conquering a new celestial body (Schmitt 1950a, 46) that the rivalry between European sovereign states was restrained, thereby suppressing the war on the old continent[8].
But let us also clarify the Jus Publicum Europaeum. From the European inter-state configuration came the notion of relative stability but also the relativization of the concept of «enmity», possible by the eradication of the horizon of international relations from the legal dilemma that the just war represented. Through Jus Publicum Europaeum, war, as a state matter, is deemed to be morally or theologically justifiable and fair. The formation of modern law, admittedly one of the strands of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, will be inseparable from a movement of theological demarcation of the public life (Schmitt 1950a, 142). By becoming a state matter, war is separated from the theological notion of justa causa belli, acquiring the non-discriminatory normative concept of justus hostis[9]. Since each state may present itself in a conflict as a public order holder within its borders, war between nations is henceforth a conflict between hostes aequaliter justi. This is to say that equality between just enemies underlies the decisionism that Schmitt describes in his theory of law (Schmitt 1950a, 157), that is, that each sovereign state decides for itself what will be the just cause. This will suffice as a basis for the validation of the regulatory system. The remaining States, which do not take part in the conflict, can always invoke the status of neutrality, thus abstaining from all resolutions.
It was with the emergence of very extensive «free spaces» and of its territorial appropriation that the new law of interstate structure was born, translated in a balance that was based, fundamentally, on the differentiation between firm land and free sea. But the collision between the war on the sea and the war on the land was still unfolding. The opponents are co-present on a relatively homogeneous theater of operations, which extends horizontally. However, with the conquest of airspace, a new element, the air, emerges, and a new, more comprehensive and planned image of the world is produced: a kind of real-time mapping.
In this real-time cartography, observable first with the help of hot air balloons and the airplane, then with the aircraft and the satellites, new spatial concepts and new measurements are established. But just as the sea ceased to be an element to have domains and territories, inscribed horizontally in the regimes of property that are scanned on land, the same happened with the taking [nehmen] of the air, but vertically. For Carl Schmitt, the conquest of airspace has radically changed the «horizontal face-to-face», finally bringing down the ground because the air war has no stage or spectators[10]. It is with this abolition of the flatness of the territory that the nomos of the earth ends.
Considering that every technological advance on a physical medium, on a new element, is effected a modification in the image that we have of the totality of the Earth, this image leads, simultaneously, to the re-composition of the nomos. New capabilities of action, of media speed, new patterns of force and human regimentation are tested and experimented, and the models of circulation and information are modified. Following Schmittian thinking, with each new medium revealed, capacity is altered in the effectiveness of the means (Schmitt 1950a, 54). And due to this, as from World War I, aerial power[11] would finally dissolve the radius of influence of the potential fleet, definitely expanding the war on a planetary scale. From the air came terrorism.
In Terror from the Air (Luftbeben, 2002), Peter Sloterdijk matches the beginning of the twentieth century with the battle of Ypres, on April 22, 1915, when Germany launched French-Canadian gas bombs: first because chemical warfare has torn conventional warfare, then because the air has consumed land and sea as stages. And it is symptomatic that it was a continental nation, not a maritime power, to disclose such a new medium, as Carl Schmitt had noted in his 1954 book Land and Sea [Land und Meer].
Through the terrorism of the chemical war ends the balance that Schmitt conceptualized in the War in Form [Krieg in Form], precisely because the force that launches the attack does not direct it exclusively against the military, contaminating peremptorily the environment and the population[12]. Already Walter Benjamin had noticed in Theories of German Fascism:
«Gas warfare, in which the contributors to this book show conspicuously little interest, promises to give the war of the future a face which permanently displaces soldierly qualities by those of sports; all action will lose its military character and war will assume the countenance of record setting. The most prominent strategic characteristic of such warfare consists in its being waged exclusively and most radically as offensive. And we know that there is no adequate defence against gas attacks from the air» (Benjamin 1930, 121).
The terror that comes from the air is not restricted to the hydrogen bomb, or the hydrochloric gas, or the atomic bomb, or the Boeings of September 11th. Also the transmissions are inflated:
«The spatial revolution which is carrying out is especially direct, forceful and obvious. Aware as one is that the airplanes criss-cross the air space above seas and continents, and the waves broadcast by transmitters in every country cross the atmosphere and circle the globe in a matter of seconds» (Schmitt 1954, 57).
The revolution in transport and communications, the acceleration that accompanies late modernity, outlined a deep spatial revolution based on the priority given to the duration of the journeys. For Carl Schmitt it is a whole second space revolution: «Electric power, the airplane, radio, all introduced such a confusion in the existing notions of space, that it could easily be regarded as evidence of a new stage in the first spacial revolution on the planet, or even of the beginning of a second spacial revolution» (Schmitt 1954, 57). But to what extent, by real-time transmission, can the geopolitics of nations lead to a global chronopolitics?
3. On the Thesis of Mobilization
Let us now follow the action-movement that profoundly marked Modernity. It is essential to realize how it was the war that set in motion the mobilization that intensified in a technical preposition. There is indeed a model synthesis of such a movement that had been discovered shortly after the Great War of 1914-18. We speak of The Total Mobilization (Total Mobilmachung, 1930) by Ernst Jünger.
Jünger wrote about the pressing performance and use of modern technique, where German Romanticism and the heroic spirit of the military aristocracy of which he is heir converged. Between the bloody World Wars, in the midst of the existential crisis of the bourgeois political model and after the fractious rise of the communist model, circumstances that deeply threatened the European environment, and do not forget the immense role of the technique towards the realization of the planetary connection that was being built at that time, Jünger is an incontestable historical testimony, but also poetic, of the mutant reality of the first half of the twentieth century.
Ernst Jünger[13] overcame the crisis of the nationalisms that marked the World Wars and traced a truly global thinking[14]. The writer-military realized how modern technique already exceeded the soldier's individual initiative. He is a collective body that now presents himself to work and war, a body that understands much more than the organic human mass, which is no longer recruited into close proximity to hand-to-hand combat, but rather integrates a complex set of networks and machines.
However, and although essential, the technical side of mobilization is not, for Jünger, the most decisive. As he says in the fourth paragraph of Total Mobilization, the readiness for mobilization is what has become truly decisive. The growing motorization of the State, stimulated by the acceleration of technical progress, goes, uninterruptedly, bringing everything and everyone to its passage. As Jünger says, «The spirit of war was penetrated by the spirit of progress» (Jünger 1930, 123).
War and revolution conflagration, «they are both sides of an event of cosmic importance» (Jünger 1930, 123). Enmeshed as they are in their romantic idealism, they are for the writer absolutely dependent events and identical in the way they hatch in the world, precisely because they are timeless transcendence, and this is achievable in the spirit. But there is still to come, says the writer, a full understanding of what is latent in the idea of progress, that is to say, the «mask of the reason» which extends «fine wires that perform such subtle movements» (Jünger 1930, 124). But in order to unfold such energies, «it is not enough to arm the sword-bearing arm» because the mobilization must take place inside, from the armor to the marrow, «to the finest nerve of life», so that its realization can be articulated in an elaborate «electrical network of modern life», channeling energy to the «great current of war power» (Jünger 1930, 127-128). It is the «new morality of progress», that is to say, the fervor felt in the world freed by the experience of technique, which extends the threads that Jünger witnesses, more concretely in the individuations that it bursts forth.
Most definitely, technical objects act upon history and on war, contributing to a labor that has since become planetary. There is no longer anything, object or subject, that is not at the service of a mobilization that is consummated in itself, «much more than for us» (Jünger 1930, 125-129).
Through mobilization, the image of war takes on the form of a huge labour process (Jünger 1930, 126). There is no movement, from trade to transport, which is no longer bound to the battlefield; it even enrolls those who have no ties to a military career, retaining all the wealth until the last penny, until the last reservation. The pressing need and collective effort in a general mobilization is self-emphasized on a new path intersected by modern technique. Everything will be recruited, even if it is at a distance, because the technique reaches everything from a distance. Through the unlimited labor which the spirit of mobilization instilled in the world, and which includes men and machines assembled together, one lives globally engaged in inclusive movements. This is because nothing escapes mobilization, nor even a single «atom» (Jünger 1930, 128).
The war will be complete as long as the mobilization is complete − and infinite. Goebbels, in what was left for History as the «Speech of the Total War» delivered in the historical February 18th, 1943, asked the entire German people:
«The English claim that the German people do not want total war but capitulation. I ask you, do you want total war? Do you want it to be more total, more radical than we can imagine it today?» (Virilio 1984, 72).
It is with the tragic approval of an enthusiastic mobilized people that Goebbels states: «Now, people rise up and let the storm break loose!» From this point of no return, the war will supplant the space dimensions embracing reality without limits.
We know how war does not only affect the materiality of nations but also their spirit. Hence Jünger clearly exhorts to German mysticism. Walter Benjamin would have uncovered his ideological formula[15] in Theories of German Fascism, an essay assembled in the work War and Warriors (Krieg und Krieger) organized by Jünger himself, and from which he had emphasized Total Mobilization. For Benjamin, Jünger's text is nothing more than a transposition of "art for art’s sake" theses into "war for war’s sake", and is therefore a dangerous project: not so much the question of the purpose of war, but of war as an end in itself − even because in this provision for the aesthetics of war, as Benjamin says, the real is threatened with an endless war (Benjamin 1930, 121).
If for Jünger, it was the readiness for mobilization and regimentation of the entire human and technological arsenal that was absolutely decisive in the War of 1914-1918, for Benjamin it is at once the desire for such a mobilization that emphasizes the human unpreparedness to assume technology «as part of its own body». And the philosopher would go on to demonstrate how technological objects were also unprepared to restrain such man’s natural destructive zeal.
In other words, the obsession with the control and illusion of man's command over nature attests to its insufficient maturity to deal with the possibilities that the technique enhances. There lies the threat. As Benjamin synthesizes, he once again but in the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduierbarkeit, 1936-1939),
« This is the case of war that, with its destruction, demonstrates that society was not mature enough to incorporate technology as part of its body, and that technology was not sufficiently developed to master its fundamental social forces» (Benjamin, 1939,113).
So, instead of being mobilized for war and dropping bombs, the airplane should be mobilized for humanity, casting seeds. Moreover, Benjamin asserts, the fascist formula will lead to a kind of collective suicide, because it emphasizes the pure hybris of those who «hope that war provides the artistic satisfaction of the perception of senses altered by technology» (Benjamin, 1939, 113). It should be noted that Germany, whether in the First or in the Second World War, had always imputed all liabilities[16] to technology, and that is also what can be read in Theories of German Fascism (Benjamin 1930).
Chemical weapons are a heinous procedure − gas is a lasting horror that affects not only the deployed contingents as the surrounding environment. Remember Peter Sloterdijk’s essay Terror from Air (Sloterdijk 2002). With the entry of chemical weapons into the battlefield, conventional warfare has given way to a total and infinite war. Today we see, as Jünger said, through the crevices of the tower of Babel, signs of progress as indecipherable as hieroglyphs. And the military-writer asserts in connection with World War I that «the last war has a meaning that no arithmetic can dominate» (Jünger 1930, 139).
We should make the following synthesis: World War I was the first conflict that mobilized the world through a technical proposition − but not exclusively. Agamben shows well that the theological economics of salvation was a formula of world management and, in this regard, it was already a «mobilization». Now, in terms of general mobilization the difference is "physical" and not just "spiritual" as it was in the Middle Age. In spite of this, there are remnants of the model everywhere, and a brief note must be made in that regard.
Summing up the idea, from Christian theology came two general paradigms, and Agamben devised them, above all, from Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy. One of the models is clearly political theology, which is based on the transcendence of the sovereign power of God; the other is economic theology «[...] that replaces this idea with an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent order − domestic and not strictly political, both of the divine life and of the human life» (Agamben 2004, 3). He further elaborates, explaining its development and reception: that «from the first paradigm derive political philosophy and the modern theory of sovereignty; from the second, modern ‘bio-politics’, to the current triumph of economy over every other aspect of social life » (Agamben 2004, 3).
One can see that when certain conditions are fulfilled, total mobilization progresses to a chronopolitical formula, updated specifically in the present model of capitalism. In this, economy and mobilization triumph over social life, but synchronized in real time. The concept of global time and the overcoming of national time zones for the benefit of a single planetary time lead the world to being truly mobilized in the information age. This regulation of time and speeds is what we comprehend as chronopolitics. For a totalizing movement to exist there must be absolute synchronicity. Sloterdijk himself also saw this connection to time − acceleration and duration − as essential. Speed, time, technique, migration, work, are always interconnected domains converging in the unique model of capitalism, which has as its horizon a mobilization that has become omnipresent, accentuated in the postindustrial city. After the total mobilization for war, this is the "infinite mobilization" for capitalism. As the engine of social acceleration[17], capitalism articulates individuals and objects in a unique mobilization that is concentrated in the new attitude of the Absolute War, now transnational, economic and informational.
Late modernity is for the German philosopher pure being-toward-movement (Sloterdijk 1989, 33) and the Modern Age as a mobilization that inscribes the will to power insofar acting is what drives the world. It is true that Sloterdijk wants to distance himself but says nothing about Jünger’s worldview. In fact, Peter Sloterdijk just wants to get out of kinetics and slow the process down: « [...] because the direction in which it laboriously seeks to achieve such awareness is not forward, but a backwards step, the disengaging of the acceleration process in order to gain distance. Only hesitantly will we name the critical side of this mobilization theory according to a classical model: critique of political kinetics» (Sloterdijk 1989, 51).
It is now understood that the tension currently experienced between space and time, to which we have sought to match the Virilian chronopolitics, is much more of a «geographical mismatch» in relation to the constitution of the nomos than of its absorption by time. It is this long mismatch that marks «the historical singularity of the event called ‘Modernity’» (Miranda 1994, 131). Here we see the relevance of the thesis of mobilization and the inevitability of acceleration.
4. Katechon as blockade
The shortening of the territory, because it is possible to move through the physical space faster, does not mean an entire empire of time about space and its annihilation. Even capitalism, tending to be non-territorial, will not prevent mega-corporations from organizing themselves territorially. It is essential to realize that one only goes to war for territory and property. Concerning time it is the decision-making speed of response that matters, but no nation or economic power wants to conquer time for time. Concluding, one should realize that the acquisition of the sea or the air, and now of the Internet, always presupposes conquering the Earth.
Author Hartmut Rosa states that social acceleration is not a static process, and that it occurs by "waves" stimulated by new technologies and new forms of socio-economic organization; waves always followed by "decelerationist"[18] movements that Rosa himself encourages.
Speed emerges in Virilio as an absolute reference, but it is one he seeks to curb by establishing a new line of thought known as dromology. It is a sort of science of acceleration, but in a tone of warning. But even though it is impossible to suppress or even moderate the ongoing course of action, it is now up to us to present a speech-obstacle to the realization of the total motorization of the world, more specifically Carl Schmitt's Motorized Legislator.
The general technologization of the State affairs is at the center of Carl Schmitt's Motorized Legislator (Motorisierter Gesetzgeber, 1950). For the jurist, the process of mechanization of the real, or let’s call it motorization, led the world to a critical starting point. What technique is providing to experience, especially its planetary reach, but above all the acceleration of experiences and history, corrupts the influence of the State and the Constitution. It is by facing the action of the decrees that the legislator Schmitt tries to be a brake.
In the Nomos of the Earth (Der Nomos der Erde, 1950), Schmitt took back the original bind to the nomos to analyze the constitution of Jus Publicum Europaeum, an inter-state law that prevented war on land by moving it to the sea. But we also saw how the jurisprudence coming from the nomos of the earth would change after 1914. And it was with the disclosure of new means such as air that the legislative «motorization» emerged. For the jurist, the acceleration corrupts the liberal democracy because it stimulates the state of emergency and the regimes of exception. In the Schmittian insistence on maintaining a rigid space order, one can see the struggle for the conservation of a regulated experience of durations. There, the Law can act as a barrier to acceleration.
For Schmitt, the motorization of the legislator represents the disappearance of the essential difference between law and will by almost annulling the difference between laws and decrees. Therein lays a general indistinctness between the legislative power and the executive power[19], which he considers to be dangerous. The decree is the motorized law, because it gives an immediate answer, and thus the legislating machine responds in an increasingly automatic way to the cases that arrive to it. The motorization of the experiences corresponds to a shortening of the space of answer, that Schmitt contests, striving for the space and its order. No one can affirm that the space has disappeared in this suppression, but the shortening and mechanization of the decision time is by itself a decisive change, a change driven by the speed. However, the will to slow down, delay or block the acceleration, denotes an interventionism and an attempt to unify space, which easily serve as the foundation for the most violent ideologies.
In this case, the conservative Carl Schmitt finds in velocity a way of overcoming the image of God[20]. It is here that the major figure of the deceleration or even, suspension of the experiences comes out: the katechon.
In ancient times, one believed in a hidden retarding power designated by the Greek word katechon, and which very literally means «that or that which withholds» (the restrainer). This is how it appears in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians or, as recorded in the scriptures, the Second Letter of the Apostle Paul to the People of Thessalonica. Through the katechon would be delayed the so mentioned «apocalyptic end of the times». As a conservative force that maintains order, it becomes basically a categorical imperative that prevents Christians from "misbehaving" before the apocalypse.
For Carl Schmitt the katechon is a positive value that revitalizes his thinking in order to operate in the field of law and political philosophy. The biblical concept becomes a force of blocking and deceleration of durations and it is useful as an obstacle to the achievement of technical progress. It is therefore through the katechon that Schmitt’s sense of History is preserved, that is, in the mythical sources we find «the clues to know if a nation has a historical mission» and when will arrive «the extreme moment in which it becomes the motor of the universal history» (Schmitt 1923, 68). The katechon protects this design − it is its ideological purpose. Let's look in more detail.
In the Nomos of the Earth (1950), Schmitt sustains the historical importance of the concept within the Christian tradition. It is the Christian empire that emerges as the governing force. Recognizing that Schmitt ideologically fights acceleration, the Empire is the only historical force that can hold back or restrain the Antichrist (Schmitt 1950a, 64).
The katechon would be the very life force of Christendom, meaning, the European civilization under the aegis of the State and the Catholic Empire. As the Antichrist − the wicked one that Schmitt proposes to fight back[21] − comes to announce the end of time, so the acceleration manifests itself. Hence, in is his work the Messianism is a political metaphor precisely because Schmitt sought to establish a new nomos at the expense of the revitalization of religious authority. And in this regard, Agamben says that:
«Political theology can affirm itself only by suspending economic theology: thus the Schmittian doctrine of kat-echon, which is a suspension or dilation of this economic plane that rules the world. According to Schmitt political theology can find itself only through a deferral or dilation» (Agamben 2004, 7).
The Schmittian attempt to dilate or prevent the regency of the economic plan, which is discovered behind the mechanization of the state and the general shortening of the decision, space is in its essence a struggle against the growing demarcation of politics and history.
And the inextricable problem is that the technique is highly «democratic». In 1929, in a text entitled The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen), Carl Schmitt reveals the greatest suspicions about the new possibilities that technicity allows, precisely because it serves anyone, for good or for the evil, for the revolution or for the reaction. And the most frightening are the immense technical possibilities of rewriting History (Schmitt 1950b, 72-73). In the end, Schmitt's political theology, which seemed to advocate the unity of space, fears unity as an articulated or technically reconnected community[22] precisely when he claims «The European juridical erudition shall not die with the myths of the law and the legislator [...] even confusing linguistics may be better than a Babylonian unity»(Schmitt 1950b, 73).
In what concerns the issue of accelerationism, one can see clearly the transition to the era of networks and planetary mobilization. However, it must be recognized, without hindrance, that modern, highly efficient technique is already directing mobilization of the planet reaching the world, because now any subject, and also any object or network, is a planetary subject in mobilization. It should be referred, therefore, that the kinetic policy that Sloterdijk worked on is nothing more than the motorization that Schmitt discusses − a process of acceleration that also Paul Virilio and Hartmut Rosa sought to act as a brake. It is true that the analysis of the acceleration is not complete without studying also the social decelerations, made particularly visible at the turn of the 21st century with the rise of theories such as «hyper-acceleration», «turbo-capitalism», «polar inertia» or «the end of History», after all, these are approaches that underlie a certain acceleration and the reverse − its apparent paralysis. Either way, it will do little good. We continue on the same way where we were, maybe a little more tired. The problem of planetary recruitment has intensified, and decelerationist warnings won’t prevent it to stop. The Big Mobilizing Machine is in motion and understanding it forces to a new relationship with technics.
Translated by Ondina Pires
Bibliography
(Dates given in square brackets refer to the original editions of the works cited.)
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[1] It will be necessary to distinguish between the broad notion of space, and land as territory. The space surface of the planet as concrete territory is that which serves as an anchor to the constitution of the nomos and requires thinking of its historical construction, based on geography and geometry. This spatial dimension has broadened with the expansion to the virtual domain.
[2] Meaning «Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies» known as «Outer Space Treaty» of 1967, and «The Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies» also known as «The Moon Agreement» of 1979. Both limit the use of celestial bodies for peaceful purposes. Respectively in http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/SpaceLaw/outerspt.html and in http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/moon/text.
[3] It is Virilio who mentions the urbanization of the time: «The revolution of mass transport of the nineteenth century, the revolution of the transmissions in the twentieth century, a mutation- commutation affecting at the same time, public space, domestic space, up to the point of leaving us in uncertainty in what matters its own reality, once that to the urbanization of real space follows, at the moment, the first fruits of a real-time urbanization with tele-action technologies, and not only with classical television» (Virilio 1995, 32)
[4] Chronopolitics is a term coined by Paul Virilio to designate the political relevance that the dimension of times acquires from the mass acceleration: «[…] the political frontiers were themselves to shift from the real space of geopolitics to the 'real time' of the chronopolitics of the transmission of images and sounds» (Virilio 1998, 13).
[5] Schmitt says in Land and Sea (Land und Meer, 1954) that man is terrestrial; he moves and walks on firm land. So, this is the reason why man calls Earth to the Star where he inhabits. In this starting point we can understand the power of mythical knowledge precisely because it always anchors to Mother Earth, from which human beings also come and to where they return (Schmitt 1954, 1).
[6] And therefore, it is no more a feudal or ecclesiastical policy (Schmitt 1950a, 141).
[7] Known as « Congo Conference » amongst the Germans. Carl Schmitt wrote a chapter about it: «La dernière prise de terres conjointe de l’Europe (La conférence du Congo de 1885)» (Schmitt 1950a, 213-224).
[8] The implementation of the Jus Publicum Europaeum implied the containment of war. It is symptomatic that in 1987, in a speech to the United Nations, then the President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan, invokes the idea of total peace in the world in case of an external threat by extraterrestrial forces.
[9] Here is the definition: «L’idée du justus hostis, c’est-à-dire la non-discrimination de l’adversaire belligérant» (Schmitt 1950a, 207).
[10] « Plus de théâtre (Schauplatz) ni de spectateurs » Szendy quoting Schmitt (Szendy 2011, 36).
[11] The invention of the U-boat as well, abridging the German term Unterseeboot which means submarine.
[12] According to Schmittian thinking, war foreshadows a balance between powerful states. Terrorism emphasizes the inequality (or shift) between powers. As Sloterdijk affirms: «What dictates this shift is the emergence of encounters between opponents vastly unequal in strength – as we see in the current conjuncture of non-state wars and hostilities between armed forces and non-state combatants. In retrospect, the curious thing about the military history of gas warfare between 1915 1918 is the fact that through it – and on both sides of the front – state-sponsored forms of environmental terrorism became integrated into so-called regular warfare, between lawfully recruited armies. This was, it must be said, in explicit violation of the Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Convention, which expressly forbade the use of any kind of poison or suffering-enhancing weapons in operations against the enemy, and a fortiori against the non-combatant population» (Sloterdijk 2002, 16-17).
[13] His connection to the Weimar Republic requires a small note. Even though it is remarkable how in On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939, Jünger would call into question, with each metaphor, the political formula that nourished Hitler's National Socialism. The writer would remain forever bound to this regime by exhorting the Blood and Soil doctrine (Blut und Boden) inspired by Karl Haushofer. It was an incitement that would justify the Drang nach Osten (Way towards the East) and other atrocities of the Third Reich, such as the persecution and genocide of the Jews. In fact, Jünger had also contributed to this "debate", so to speak euphemistically, since in Nationalism and the Jewish Question (Nationalismus und Judenfrage, 1930) the writer emphasizes racial segregation when he states that Jews are the «masters of all masks».
[14] Although, for Jünger, it makes sense to speak in Civilization.
[15] Consult Walter Benjamin’s essay Theories of the German Fascism (1930). Observe the passage: «War – the ‘eternal’ war they talk about so much here, as well as the most recent one – is said to be the highest manifestation of the German nation. It should be clear that these authors have had little success in perceiving these relationships» (Benjamin 1930, 122).
[16] To this end, see Albert Speer’s allegations during the Nuremberg trial: «Hitler’s dictatorship was the first in an industrialized state, a dictatorship which, in order to dominate its own people, used all technical means to perfection… thus, the criminal events of recent years were not due to Hitler’s personality. The enormity of these crimes may also be explained by the fact that Hitler was the first who used the means offered by technology to commit them» (consultado em Virilio 1984, 67).
[17] See, in this case, how Rosa conceives this too often repeated thesis: «The most obvious source of social acceleration in Western societies is, of course, capitalism» (Rosa 2009,89).
[18] See how Steven Shaviro comments it, which reinforces our criticism to the acceleration critics: «It is easy enough to deplore this situation on moralistic or political grounds, as high-minded cultural theorists from Adorno to Baudrillard have long tended to do. And it is tempting to wax nostalgic, and mourn the passing of a more vital, and more temporally authentic, media regime, as film theorists as diverse as David Rodowick (2007) and Vivian Sobchack (2004) have recently done. But such responses are inadequate. They are too wrapped up in their own melancholic sense of loss to grasp the emergence of new relations of production, and of new media forms» (Shaviro 2010, 133).
[19] We call attention to the following passage: «Constitutional considerations always spoke against the practice of delegation, and such concerns were appropriate. For in the end legislative bodies are called upon by the constitution to make laws themselves, not to empower other agencies to legislate; as Locke, the legal-philosophical founder of modern constitutional law, had said, they should “make laws, but not legislators» (Schmitt 1929, 65).
[20] Schmitt vehemently rejects the «belief» in technology. He claims in The Age of Neutralizations and Depolitizations that: «A magical religiosity became an equally magical technicity. The twentieth century began as the age not only of technology but of a religious belief in technology. It is often called the age of technology» (Schmitt 1929, 85).
[21] Our criticism to accelerationism is based on arguments of a conservative and theological order. Benjamin Noys also identifies it in The Persistence of the Negative (2010): «Accelerationism, in another unintentional irony, risks restoring the most teleological forms of Second International Marxism» (Noys 2010, 8).
[22] In Schmitt, it is the plane of technology that opposes theology: «Seen from the broad historical perspective of many centuries, the situation of European legal scholarship has always been determined by two oppositions: to theology, metaphysics, and philosophy on the one side, and to a merely technical demand for norms on the other. European legal scholarship developed as an independent science beginning in the twelfth century in struggle against theology and by disentangling itself from faculties of theology. Friedrich Carl von Savigny defended legal science on this flank by recognizing the secularized theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy of natural law, as well as Hegel’s system of philosophy, as a threat to its internal autonomy.» (Schmitt 1950a, 68- 69)