Planet Electric: Revisiting the Nomos of the Earth

s Nomos of the Earth offers a good starting point for reflection on the theme of planetary property, not least because of the way it has been taken up in contemporary discussions of planetarity. 1 One might draw on Nomos to show how, in the contemporary geo-historical moment, appropriation has been intensified and extended into new (often algorithmicallyenvisioned) spheres or strata of the Earth.To Schmitt's figure of land-appropriation (Landnahme) we now add atmosphere-appropriation, seabed-appropriation, genome-appropriation, and so on.An alternative, but not necessarily incompatible, interpretation suggests that Schmitt's theory of nomos becomes truly interesting if one reverses the directionality of the 'grab: 'Whereas Humans are defined as those who take the Earth, the Earthbound are taken by it' (Latour 2017: 251).Latour's 'Earthbound' people are engaged not with Nature, or with the Earth as Schmitt's bounteous giver, but with Gaia as a power that draws the human into relations of 'power sharing' in which the rivalrous interests of actants have to be 'composed' without reference to an arbiter such as State or Nature.In place of Schmitt's Ius Publicum Europaeum, one could imagine a 'jus publicum telluris ' (2017: 284), which would articulate this work of composition.We suggest that it is more productive, and more timely, to read Nomos differently, and to notice that it functions as a critique of a mode of appropriation that is planetary in scale and effect but which has so far 1 See, for example, Chakrabarty (2019).gone unnoticed.We say 'functions' because this mode of appropriation is not explicitly characterized in Nomos; to see it, one has to look beyond the propositional content of the text to the process of Schmitt's authorship, and to the tension or equivocation that structures the book.This tension originates in the fact that Nomos is, as Yuk Hui observes, 'first of all a work on the history of technology ' (2022: 340).As we explain further on, nomos as a figure of spatial performance emerged from Schmitt's theory of the Grossraum, and in particular from his understanding of the electrical grid as a 'technological-industrial-economical-organizational domain [Bereich]' (Hui 2024, 169).Latour's observation that 'in practice, the term nomos technically fulfills the same function as the much more austere term [of] redistribution of agency' (2017: 235) is warranted because in the 1930s Schmitt had already perceived, in the technical understanding of what it meant to 'produce' electricity, the emergence of what we now call sociotechnical agency.At the same time, although his insight into this novel mode of agency was unusually acute, it was controlled by the perspective of the conservative jurist.Schmitt observed how electrical networks produced their own topology, cutting through legal-jurisdictional lines and obviating the mode of 'global linear thinking' which (in his view) was still represented in Kantian legal positivism.But he diverted or translated what could have been a theory of technology intoa theory of law; more precisely, into a theory of how nomos, as a 'terrain' generated by agonistic power relations, conditioned the articulation of legal norms.In other words, the sense of emergence that was becoming visible in technology was reduced to the forces and strategies through which a 'concrete legal order' was formed.It is possible that the engineers' theory of electrical current as performance rather than substance (see below) layered itself into Schmitt's earlier experience of the no-man's land as a 'terrain of indeterminacy' (Vismann 1997, 56), so that what he saw in the electrical grid was the formation of a 'ground' that was based on 'jus terrendi rather than 'jus scriptum' (ibid, 48).Hui suggests that Schmitt was reluctant 'to reduce the concept of Grossraum to a "technoindustry-economic" one because he was more concerned with the significance of this concept for international law', and that 'as a result, his interpretation of technology is incomplete ' (2024, 169).We see a more intensified mode of equivocation.To the extent that Schmitt 'completed' his interpretation of technology, he did so by turning against it.In the course of writing Nomos, and of weaving philological sources into a mythologized and unashamedly racist 2 history of international law, Schmitt repressed his debt to 'technology'.But his insight into sociotechnical agency soon returned, this time in the form of a spectre that threatened to dissolve the ground of nomos as the basis of tellurian order.In the postscripts to the English edition of Nomos, Schmitt argued that the violence of appropriation was being repressed by new discourses of 'production' and 'distribution': 'We have no right to close our eyes to the problem of appropriation, and to refuse to think any more about it, because what one today calls world history in the West and East is the history of development in objects, means, and forms of appropriation interpreted as progress' (Schmitt 2003, 346-347).The political programme of the welfare state was one example of a set of discourses which suggested that value emerged from the processes of production/distribution, in abstraction from any original act of appropriation.For Schmitt this new episteme (or pseudo-nomos) was a phantasmatic projection, which suppressed what were actually inescapable conditions of sociality.These conditions had less to do with ontology, or with what Niklas Luhmann identified as 'Old European' rationality, than with the facticity of 2 On the persistence of Schmitt's antisemitism see Plaetzer (2023).what Schmitt called an ontonom: an order that 'emerges directly from the soil' (Vismann 1997, 51).If we read Nomos 'through' the tension in Schmitt's authorship, the partiality of the approach taken in Latour's Facing Gaia becomes evident.Latour did not know that nomos was actually technological in origin, but he astutely picked out this particular 'frequency' within the text, and made it resonate with his own project of 'redistributing' agency.More broadly, by drawing Schmitt, or selected aspects of Schmitt's work, 3 into his project of 'composing' interests, Latour also drew him into the broader episteme that Clarke and Hansen (2009) insightfully characterise as 'neocybernetic'.But if we begin with the tension in Schmitt's authorship, we notice two things.First, that what Schmitt actually saw was the emergence of the discourse of sociotechnical agency.Succinct though they are, his remarks on the technicalities of the electrical grid show that what he took away from the encounter was not just a vague sense of 'technology' or 'economy', but an acute insight into how the technical understanding of production/distribution involved distributed agency rather than prime movers.So, when Schmitt turned to a critique of production/distribution, he was addressing the foundations of the very epistemic formation into which he is now drawn.Our suggestion is that instead of just rediscovering the theme of technology within Nomos, it is more productive to follow up on the question that is -for us, now -posed by Schmitt's critique: what does the neocybernetic episteme suppress?Schmitt's critique might have been motivated by his conservative mythologies, but his argument that production/distribution still implies appropriation becomes particularly powerful if we reconnect it to his insight into electrification.Here, we carry the history of electricity forward from where Schmitt left off, focusing in particular on a moment 'just before' the emergence of 3 Notably, the friend-enemy distinction rather than the Schmitt's political theology.cybernetics, in which production/distribution was abstracted from energy.If, as Clark and Szerszynski put it, 'the fiery energy of the Carboniferous seeps unnoticed into social thought' (2021, 53), it does so because, ironically, the neocybernetic episteme within which we think planetarity represses its debt to energy and the organic and geological forces that energy articulates. The archaeology of nomosIn 1939, Schmitt introduced Grossraum -'the word and concept' -as 'an indispensable bridge from the obsolete to the future conceptions of space' (2011: 119).The word was already territorial:'A formulation such as Grossraum, meaning "a large-scale spatial order," which is readily comprehensible in German, can only be correctly represented in Romance languages through paraphrase, rather than simple translation' (Schmitt 1951(Schmitt (2020))).Whereas the word Raum held the 'cosmic tension between land and sea', the Latin spatium still carried the connotation of stadium, or measurable space (2020).This cultural situatedness was a property not only of the word but of the field of 'systematically connected' signifiers from which it had to be differentiated: 'space, soil, land, field, areal, grounds, area, and district' (2011: 120) The modifying prefix was just as specific: 'Gross amounts to a qualitative escalation and not an increase in the