The worst thing about Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at The New Frontier of Power (2019) is not its essentialism considering capitalism inherent relationship with democracy; neither its simplistic comparisons between the Caribbean dwellers that encountered the Spaniard adelantados (Zuboff’s word) in the XVI century; not even its repetitive prose. The worst is the concluding remarks. For more than 500 pages of repeating the same concerns about how surveillance capitalism dispossesses humanity from its most essential feature, its “will to will;” how companies like google transform our behaviour in data and then manipulate us; how day by day we are more controlled, living in a mix between Skiner’s Waldern and Orwell’s 1984, we arrive at the final remarks waiting for something that, of course, is not offered by the book. As mentioned in the previous post, the book is, at best, moved by a reactionary will to separate “good capitalism” (the one identified with General Motors, or Ford, or even the “Foundation” of America [according to Zuboff]) and a “bad capitalism,” the rogue capitalism exercised by companies like Facebook and Google (Zuboff’s favourite strawmen). Precisely this, is what makes the final remarks so dull. Zuboff forgets that the monster behind all this mess, is not the individual “genius” of Zuckerberg, but the disperse talent of the multitudes that day by day feed the machines.
For Zuboff, libertarian values like freedom are at the chore of the debate of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Since today the aim of Google, let’s say, “is not to dominate nature but rather human nature” (515), freedom, as a vague signifier that separates nature and humanity, is the object in dispute. Without freedom, then, there is no democracy. Perhaps the book, in a way, secretly influenced the masses that assaulted the capitol early in 2021. The protesters, after all, were all demanding freedom. The “Fake News,” “bad online habits,” and its consequences, that aided these rioters, are poorly discussed in the book. For Zuboff what is at stake is how we are forced to give our behaviour as surplus and how that is transformed into a voluntary servitude.
The biggest fear of The Age is that America becomes China. The Cold War tone this book carries are well justified for Zuboff. She argues, “the bare facts of surveillance capitalism necessarily arouse my indignation because they demean human dignity. The future of this narrative depends upon the indignant citizens” (522). Indignant citizens fighting for democracy, fighting for the American dream, marching for their freedom and liberty. In front of books like this, one wonders why read them. But also, one can but feel sad and sorry. If, once again, the elite of the North American University (Zuboff is Emerita professor at Harvard) is looking for the monster outside, we sadly should be reminded that monstrosity beats at the heart of America.
La reedición de Línea de sombra. El no sujeto de lo político (2021) de Alberto Moreiras comparte con Tercer espaciola importante tarea de revisar libros relevantes y que en su momento no fueron estudiados a detalle. Como en Tercer espacio, en Línea de sombra también se habla de cómo sistemáticamente la academia tradicional norteamericana ignoró los logros y análisis de este libro. En el prólogo de Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott se dice que Línea de sombra es uno de los primeros lugares desde donde se emprendió la ruta por la que ahora conceptos claves como infrapolítica y posthegenomía circulan. Estos conceptos son, ante todo, “un sostenido intento de pensamiento […] una práctica casi corporal de escritura y desacuerdo, que implica sostener el arrojo con una perseverancia orientada siempre hacia la liberad” (15). Aunque el prólogo no desarrolla esa idea sobre lo que implica sostener el arrojo, uno puede pensar que ya el título evoca sutilmente ese trabajo. Es decir, línea de sombra no es sólo una metáfora que evoca aquello que Moreiras ve como la línea que va figurando (y figura) nuestro horizonte de pensamiento, es decir, la línea de la dominación, cuya sombra somete a todo lo que caiga bajo ella, sino que también la línea de sombra vendría a ser eso que Villalobos sugiere, un intento de pensar que sostiene el arrojo pero no lo para. Es decir, si la sombra es la traza sin trazo de todo aquello que se expone a la luz, el pensar de la línea de sombra, en contra de la sombra de la dominación, es un pensar que no detiene el arrojo de lo que existe sino que guarda la sombra de su existencia, su residuo enigmático.
En cierto sentido, el residuo enigmático es el tema principal del libro. Este término es otra forma de referir se al no sujeto de lo político. Si el sujeto es el que pide que su sombra sostenga y domine, el no sujeto de lo político eso que quiere exponer y exponerse eso que Moreiras dice que “hay en nosotros y más allá de nosotros”, una suerte de exceso y precedencia, “algo que excede abrumadoramente a la subjetividad, incluyendo la subjetividad del inconsciente” (21). Ahí, entonces, se ve que el no sujeto de lo político sería la sombra del inconsciente, algo ineludible y que a la vez elude sobre todas las cosas. Los siete capítulos del libro, y la coda, ofrecen a su manera aproximaciones a ese resto enigmático, a su lugar y a su existencia. A su vez, los primeros capítulos son, ante todo, una lectura de y con otros pensadores sobre el estado de la política a inicios de siglo XXI. Si luego del 9/11 las formas de la guerra, el estado y la política entraron en crisis, ¿cómo es que habría que leer un mundo que rehúsa toda idea de exterioridad y al mismo tiempo reclama la sistemática y comunitaria subjetivación de cualquier cosa que se mueva fuera de sus murallas?
¿Cómo pensar política si la distinción de amigo y enemigo, donde según Carl Schmitt inicia la política, está completamente desbaratada en nuestro momento histórico? El punto clave de este “fin de la política” radica en la total crisis de la subjetividad. Por las formas de subjetivación es que amigos y enemigos dejan de importar, o más bien, por el sujeto es que se descubre que no hay amigos sino sólo enemigos. Si “el enemigo absoluto, no es el terrorista global, sino que es aquel de quien esperamos eventual sometimiento y colaboración, que en caso concreto significa colaboración con el régimen de acumulación global que mantiene a tantos habitantes de la tierra, en el nomos pero no del nomos, en miseria o precariedad profunda e injusta” (45), se debe a que vivimos en tiempos de política del partisano. Esto es que ahora (a inicios de siglo XXI) “la incorporación del enemigo absoluto dentro del orden moderno de lo político, por tanto ya [es] el síntoma de la descomposición de tal orden desde el siglo XIX” (60). No es gratuito, así, que, por ejemplo, los problemas del narcotráfico en México emulen, en buena medida, los problemas del terrorismo post 9/11. La guerra es indistinguible de su momento detonante, siempre se está en guerra, o en la amenaza, el espacio se hace cada vez el mismo.
Al mismo tiempo que el nuevo nomos previene y destroza al enemigo, hay un registro salvaje, algo que queda en el doble registro que se queda en el umbral del nomos, fuera de lo que exterior mismo a este orden. Eso que queda es el no sujeto de lo político, “más allá de la sujeción, más allá de la conceptualización, más allá de la captura […] simplemente ahí” (80). Si la subjetividad de la modernidad es igual a la del sujeto del capital, “una totalidad vacía” (59), entonces el “no sujeto es lo que el sujeto debe constantemente abstraer, una especie de auto-fundación continuada en la virtud” (116). Hegemonía, subalternidad, decolonizalidad, multitud y demás avatares de la metafísica, diría Moreiras, se quedan siempre cortos y no son sino máquinas de restas, pues no sólo restan y abtraen al resto enigmático, sin que precisan falsamente restituir algo que de entrada está perdido e irrestituible, aquello que se le sustrae al no sujeto. Ahora bien, el problema del resto enigmático, del no sujeto, es que no se trata de pensar en la inclusión ni en la exclusión. Pensar el resto “no es pensar que traduce, sino cabalmente un pensar de exceso intraducible; no es un pensar ni hegemónico, ni contra-hegemónico, sino más bien parahegemónico o poshegemónico, en la medida en que apunta a las modadlidades de presencia/ausencia de todo aquello que la articulación hegemónica debe borrar para construirse en cuanto tal […] pensamiento de guerra neutra y oscura, capaz, quizá de resituir eventualmente lo político como nueva administración de soberanía” (134). Así, la aparente suma que pretende el capital, o cualquier forma subjetivizante, no es sino una resta, una resta que, parecería, captura la propia resta a la que el no sujeto tiende. Esto es, el no sujeto, para Moreiras, guarda necesariamente un carácter negativo, una forma de resta que abre en su doble escritura contra la suma camuflada de la subjetividad una posibilidad de extenuación de los mecanismos de resta forzada y controlada.
El problema, por otra parte, es que si el no sujeto de lo político guarda una relación directa con la violencia divina, entonces, es probable que una de las operaciones fundamentales de no sujeto no sea la resta. Si la violencia divina es “la excepción, la substracción radical del regreso infinito, la afirmación de una suspensión no sangrienta pero de todas maneras letal de la cadena signifcante (218), entonces, la violencia divina es una suerte de cero exponencial. Como sólo el agotamiento de lo político puede ser liberado por la violencia, al liberar lo político de lo político mismo (subjetivación), de la misma forma, la totalidad vacía expuesta del sujeto, elevada por su exponente vacío (cero/ el no sujeto) regresa a un uno heterogéneo. Un uno de repetición divergente desde donde el conteo se abre siempre hacia otras partes, lejos tal vez del resto, incluso.
There is always a new nomos of the earth as new orders and orientations of the world happen. The last nomos of the earth, according to Schmitt, was the one that started tearing apart at the end of XIX century. Once much the colonies in America where independent, the United States started figuring as the new power of the world, and Europa has come together, somehow, as a single but multiple unity of power and negotiation, what land was there to appropriate? The Congo Conference of 1885 determined how things would likely look like from then on at least from the perspective of international law. The Conference has the objective of determining if all African land was “non-state soil open for European land appropriation” (216). The conference not only brought at question who were to consider Congo as a state or not, but the debates and problems of the conference depicted how the recognition of armed conflict was changing. As Schmitt remarks that European soil and its state was no longer easy to distinguish, because “the whole spatial structure of European international law had to be abandoned, because the bracketing of internal, interstate European wars had an essentially different content than did the pursuit of colonial wars outside Europe” (220). The wars that were happening in Europe were not meant to be transferred so easily to Africa or anywhere. Without an easy to determine land, then, how would the nomos still be naming, dividing and more importantly appropriating?
The problem of the new nomos of the earth, or of any nomos in general, is that land, or space, are not easy to pin down concepts. In fact, when Schmitt sees that the new developments of war technology in the XX century are abandoning old paradigms of just war and war with booty. A submarine could be used for a war with booty, as a ship did in the past, but a plain no, its main threat is that of destruction, “both land war and sea war by the fact that, in general, it is not a war for booty, but purely a war of destruction. It would be futile to see a moral advantage or disadvantage in the fact that independent air war, given the specific means and methods of the air force, does not lend itself to booty, whereas this possibility exists in both land war and sea war” (317). The shift of war from the land, to the sea, and now to the air won’t just illustrate in an analogous way, as Fredrich Engels and Karl Marx did in the Communist Manifesto, how “all that is solid melts into air”, but also, these shifts demonstrate that space is not a fixed category to the ground. That space is tied with the earth since the body of the earth is also the atmosphere, the wind, the sea, the terrain.
The end of part IV and part V, which contains three “Concluding Corollaries” that offer erudite explorations of the concept of nomos, are difficult to follow. This is because the nomos has become erratic, since the nomos of the earth is now happening in all the full body of the earth. Now more than ever we witness the appropriation of lines in the skies, the deep sea, the land, the atmosphere, and even in the psyche of every individual. Ultimately, what matters with the notion of nomos, is not it philologic debate, but that in the XXth century something (or many things) accelerated the way appropriations were happening. Something changed wars, if they ever were completely ruled and sanctioned events. Something altered deeply piracy, sabotage, looting and crime, if all of these ever were organized forms of crime. At a larger extend what is at stake with the nomos of the earth is that “we need neither abandon human reason nor cease to consider rationally all possibilities of the new nomos of the earth” (355). Schmitt wrote this in 1955, when he was optimistic that the United States could become the “greater island that could administer and guarantee the balance of the rest of the world” (355). Too easily we could think that this today will be far from reality, if that is the case, where did the “new nomos of the earth” go? Where is the most recent one?
One of the main tasks of Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (2003) is to describe the evolution of the nomos of the earth from its early years in medieval times to modernity’s cold war. This means that for Schmitt what is at stake is “to understand the normative order of the earth” (39). In a way, that normative, as translator G.L. Ulmen suggests it, is no other thing but the force of habit that orders the world (“the fixed customs of Greek education called nomos” [10]). From a jurist and international law studies perspective, it is easy to agree with Schmitt that land appropriation is the first gesture of law making (45). Only through these lenses it is visible that “every land-appropriation internally creates a kind of supreme ownership of the community as a whole” (45). Hence, those who appropriate the land acquire, almost as a mythical characteristic, “supreme ownership”. One has its property, and one is the lord of that owned. These, and no others, are the first legal facts. With the land and its appropriation not only comes law, but also the “supreme” capacity to “recognize a just enemy” which is also “the beginning of all international law” (52).
As Schmitt offers an evolution of land appropriation in Europe, its order and orientation, he also offers a story of those lines that gave rule and ruled the lands. Nomos has a direct relationship with the capacity of appropriation. Nomos, from Greek, nemei, is to divide and to pasture. Therefore, the capacity of someone in the supreme potestas to give the nomos to its land is someone who provides “the measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated” (70). By the lines that the owner of the land names to circulate its land and divide it from the land of others it becomes visible that in division pasture progress and in pasture we see division (70). Only in the walls of private property is that the one who owns the land sees “a sacred orientation” (70). With every process of land appropriation, then, comes a new nomos. The thing is that when land becomes only a celestial sphere and not immanent and infinite tabula rasa, conflict and war prevail. The way of producing the nomos of the earth is also a way of achieving peace, or better, of regulating conflict, war.
Notably —in parts I to III, at least— we see that for Schmitt the European way of doing politics and international politics are the model to follow. Afterall, it was the European states the first formations that guaranteed the flourishment of modernity and capitalism after the expansion and colonization of the “new world”. The early modern state, as Schmitt sees it, was the in-between figure of the two mythical empires, the behemoth (the Spanish colonial empire) and the Leviathan (the English maritime empire). As such, this state was one open to regulations and law making. Only through this state formation it is imaginable that old medieval concepts were adopted and redefined (jus hostis, the Kantian unjust enemy, among others). At the same time, states were also machines. If the ferocious and mythical beasts were feared, it became the duty of the Katechon in the shape of the state, to restrain. The state domesticates the beast, that with expanded dominion in land, and that who rules the waters. Through the state war is translated, war becomes a mechanism of identification: all that moves outside the moving wall of the state does not exists.
thewheelswithinwheels 