Planet Electric: Revisiting The Nomos of the Earth

Abstract

What does Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth tell us about appropriation on a planetary scale? First, we should notice that the rediscovery of the book within contemporary theory is possible because the figure of nomos is already sociotechnical. Schmitt translated the agency of the electrical grid, which he rendered as ‘technicity’, into a mythologized force of Law. This generated a structural tension within Nomos, between the theory of nomos as concrete legal order and the observation of sociotechnical agency that inspired that theory. In Schmitt’s postscripts to Nomos, this tension becomes a critique, in which Schmitt argues that discourses of distribution and production which claimed to have dispensed with appropriation merely suppressed the moment of ‘taking’ which all social order presupposes. Here, following up on Schmitt’s insights into the production of electrical current, we reconstruct both this tension and the critique of appropriation that it points towards.