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BEYOND BIOPOLITICS: THE NOMOS OF AUTOMOBILITY
Unpublished manuscript -- do not quote without the express consent of the authors
Robert Braun
Institut für Höhere Studien
Josefstädter Strasse 39, 1080 Vienna, Austria
Email: robert.braun@ihs.ac.at
ORCID: 0000-0002-0579-3532
Richard Randell
Webster University Geneva
15, Route de Collex, 1293 Bellevue, Switzerland
E-mail: richardrandell75@webster.edu
ORCID: 0000-0002-5672-0803
August 26, 2019
Introduction
Despite the rapid expansion of automobile-based mobility in the twentieth century,
and the reflection offered by a number of scholars on its social impact as well as different
constructs of meaning, it was only with the dawn of ‘automobility studies’ around the
beginning of the twenty-first century that automobility was constructed as an object of
theoretical and empirical inquiry (Featherstone, Thrift, & Urry, 2005; Sheller, 2004; Sheller
& Urry, 2000, 2006, 2016; Urry, 2004, 2006). Automobility studies, stemming from what has
been described as the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences (Sheller & Urry, 2006),
articulated an alternative and largely critical description of automobility to that of the ‘car
culture’ captured in popular culture and public discourse. It also offered critical reflection to
previous theorizations and describing the ubiquitous manifestations, representations as well
as social impacts of automobility as objects of inquiry. This was complemented by the
equally relevant ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences, following up on Focault’s famous dictum
about “[t]he present epoch […being] above all the epoch of space” (Foucault, 1986, p. 22),
with a number of theorists having rediscovered space and using it as a critical and analytical
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tool during the second half of the twentieth century (Massey, 1994; Soja, 1989; Thrift, 1996).
This paper is at the confluence of these two ‘turns’ as many have been using mobilities to
exemplify specific aspects of the spatial (Cresswell, 2010; Merriman, 2009) as well as
mobilities scholars addressing automobility issues via geographical lens (Steffen Böhm,
Campbell, Land, & Paterson, 2006; Sheller & Urry, 2000; Walks, 2015). However, we take a
somewhat different angle. We are looking at the politics of the spatial as exemplified in a
special facet of automobility: spatial violence. In order to direct our attention to the everyday
experience of mundane automobility, we present a conceptualization of automobility that
utilizes non-realist ontology and presents a phenomenological understanding of everyday
automobility; then we turn to the politics of automobility and address automobility violence
as the constitutive element of the socio-spatial order of automobility. We argue that at the
heart of automobility violence lays a special understanding of biopolitics, one that creates the
automobility self (Randell, 2017) as ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998). The core of our argument is
that this is a key political aspect of the socio-spatial order of automobility. We claim that
violence points to the original constitutive moment of the sociotechnical appropriation of
modern space. It also points to a theorization of violence that differs from traditional
understanding of the politics of violence and its relationship to power.
The automobility imaginary
Adding a – partly critical – analysis to this body of scholarship and also taking issue with the
Jasanoffian concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, 2015), one of the
most used conceptualizations of technology society confluence, we have elsewhere argued
that automobility should be conceptualized as a single non-realist imaginary, composed of
both the material artefacts of automobility and their representations (Braun & Randell,
Forthcoming). It is what Jasanoff and Kim name, in passing as dreamscape: the “collectively
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held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated
by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, p.
4). The crux of our argument is that, the largely constructionist stance of much of the
automobility scholarship notwithstanding, a dualist metaphysics informs much of the corpus
of the automobility literature. Even in its most Foucauldian conceptualizations (Steffen
Böhm et al., 2006; Cass & Manderscheid, 2018) it is argued that the hegemony of
automobility is created by the “reality producing power of [the] interplay of different forms
of knowledge and their materialization” (Manderscheid, 2014, p. 616).
Rather than articulating alternative imaginaries of automobility, as other critics of
automobility as system have done (Steffen Böhm et al., 2006; Featherstone et al., 2005;
Manderscheid, 2014), we attempt to disrupt and displace the taken-for-granted, self-evident
truths and utopian visions and images of contemporary automobility. While notions of
‘regime,’ ‘dispositif,’ ‘subjectivities,’ ‘discourses,’ ‘technologies of governance’ and so forth
provide explanations for how, historically, automobility has become the dominant system of
land transportation across the planet, and how that hegemony in the present is reproduced and
sustained, our interest lies with everyday automobility. This everyday automobility reality is
an ‘imaginary’ (Althusser, 1971; Castoriadis, 2005; Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, 2015; C. Taylor,
2002), composed not only of discourses, visions and images, but also of automobiles and the
physical infrastructure of automobility. Our sensory experiences of automobility reality do
not occupy some pre-discursive, pre-interpretive moment: they are embodied and habituated
as well as produced, reproduced and transformed within the imaginary. All this is
automobility reality. Automobility reality, conceptualized phenomenologically, is a
dreamscape: a place in which we dwell in the present with composite significations of image
and vision, of artefacts and materialities as well as those of illusion and fantasy (Jasanoff &
Kim, 2015). In this dreamscape there is no other automobility reality, some other ontological
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realm composed of the physical and material. The real and the imaginary are not separable:
there is no space or analytically definable component of automobility that is real, and a
separate part that is ‘merely’ imaginary. Automobility is the ensemble of artifacts that have
been co-produced by and within the imaginary (Jasanoff, 2004), of which those artifacts are
also components.
This said, we also need to reconceptualize the politics of automobility, the production
and distribution of power by and in automobility, in terms of such non-dualist ontology. In
our view automobility power is not produced and sustained via the interplay of different
‘representations’ of the automobile and their materialization as the constituents of a ‘system’
or ‘regime’. Automobility politics is thus not the conflict represented in the antagonisms of
the ‘system of automobility’ becoming unsustainable as the depletion of energy resources
conflict with the energy needs to sustain automobility (Urry, 2004), or the ‘automobility
regime’ dispositif finding its limits in urban rush hour material immobility caused by
congestion potentially leading to a reversal of the hegemonic order (Steffen Böhm, Jones,
Land, & Paterson, 2006). In our version the politics of the dreamscape needs to be confronted
in its entirety.
The dreamscape of automobility is the phenomenological space in which we dwell.
Space is, of course, political. “The fundamental stuff of geography” (Thrift, 1996) is also the
topography of power -- a “complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of
solidarity and co-operation” (Massey, 1994, p. 265). The politics of mobility is, traditionally,
also discussed in terms of a dualist ontology: references to representations (meanings and
experiences) and their materializations (artefacts and technologies) -- the interplay of which
produces and distributes power as ‘constellations’ comprised of the interchange of reasons,
speed, route, feelings and the frictions of mobility (Cresswell, 2010). In our conceptualization
of the dreamscape the imaginary ordering of space ‘is’ the distribution of power; domination
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and subordination need not be actualized in actual movement or by technologies enabling it.
‘Automobility’ is power, not as representation of the automobile or the embodiment of the
self in the automobility dispositif that is then materialized in our everyday experience, but as
our everyday existence ordered spatially. The politics of automobility is the spatiality of our
social being (Soja, 1989). This politico-spatiality is ontologically constitutive of automobility
(Heidegger, 1962). In the next section this is what we turn to.
In the everyday existence of automobility ‘real’ cars kill ‘real’ people: violence is the
inherent force by which space and power is arranged and ordered. Our everyday experience
of automobility is a violent order in which power is offered to the automobilized body, while
‘non-cared’ docile bodies are repressed and, often, killed. Non-cared bodies, when moving,
are confined to the pavement and, if they decide to share the road with others e.g. by crossing
it, they are ordered to do so in specific spaces, at specific speeds and by specific rhythms
(Sheller & Urry, 2000). Speed and rhythm, as well as dwelling are spatially ordered: action as
social existence of any sort is only possible within the spatial confinement constructed both
topographically and politically. Should non-cared bodies disobey their confinement, they
become ‘just enemies’, who, when meeting automobility violence, die justifiably. Violence,
even violence to the cared body or those other bodies sharing the space with them as other
mobility-artefact–human hybrids, is ‘bracketed’, made acceptable as part of the ‘just’ order
created by automobility.
Nomos of automobility
We are employing here the theoretical apparatus developed by Carl Schmitt, the twentieth
century legal theorist of the spatial order of the political (Schmitt, 2006). Thus, another term
for the automobility dreamscape would be nomos as “the immediate form in which the
political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 70).
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As Carl Schmitt writes nomos is not
“law (in German, Gesetz), regulation, norm, or any similar expression. Nomos comes
from nemein - a [Greek] word that means both "to divide" and "to pasture." […]
Nomos is the measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated;
it is also the form of political, social, and religious order determined by this process.
Here, measure, order, and form constitute a spatially concrete unity.” (Schmitt, 2006,
p. 70)
Carl Schmitt’s develops the concept of the Nomos of the Earth, a legal genealogy of the
territorial spatial ordering of the earth, to theoretically separate it from the actual norms,
regulations and the law as well as to develop a modern concept of international justice.
Schmitt’s nomos serves as a foundation of his concept of sovereignty, the founding moment
of spatio-political order. He points to the much debated verse of Pindar quoted in Plato’s
Gorgias: “the nomos, sovereign of all/Of mortals and immortals/Leads with the strongest
hand/Justifying the most violent” (Pindar, ca. 450 BCE). He then uses the concept to define
the underlying principles of a worldwide territorial order and distribution of power that was
achieved under the aegis of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (JPE), a hegemonic European legal
balance mediating relations between sovereign (European) states. Through “bracketing”
conflict and violence (the sovereign nomos justifying the most violent), the ‘rationalization,
humanization, and legalization’ of war, Schmitt claims, the Nomos of the Earth emerged.
This nomos created ‘just enemies’ with similar political character and rights, and fostered a
world order in which annihilation of the other was replaced by accepted means of managing
conflicts and appropriating land.
At the heart of Schmitt’s concept of the nomos as ontonomous and ontological
judgement lies land-appropriation as the primeval act in founding law (Schmitt, 2006, p. 46).
This ontology of the social and political order is grounded in Schmitt’s view of sovereignty
stemming from the act of conflating justice and violence as interpreted from Pindras.
Following this train of thought, we argue, sovereignty, justice and violence manifested in
spatial ordering also lies at the heart of automobility. The conflation of justice and violence in
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automobility is exemplified in Adorno’s famous dictum in Minima Moralia about the
temptation of the driver “merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the
street—pedestrians, children and cyclists” (Adorno, 2005, p. 19). The temptation is not the
instinct to kill but the possibility and potential justification to do so. In the ‘nomos of
automobility’ violence is part of automobility justice.
The nomos of automobility, as the Schmittian Jus Publicum Europaeum, also evolved
historically. By the turn of the nineteenth century urban space was shared by several
sociotechnical artefacts as well as by humans moving, selling and playing on the streets. This
interplay of actors on the streets was delicate and unstable, but not violent. Automobility,
however, disrupted the previous order and entered with a deadly force. In the decade between
1920 and 1929 more than 200 000 people were killed on the streets of America, four times
more than in the previous one (Norton, 2007). Cities were spaces where children played and
adults gathered, “before road traffic became so dominant, hectic and dangerous” (N. Taylor,
2003, p. 1611) that streets have been transformed into thoroughfares where all road and
roadside activities become subordinated to automobility (Bonham, 2006; Randell, 2017).
Bracketed violence ordered space: creating justus hostis, just enemies – those who do not
obey the spatially “regulated relations” (Schmitt, 2006, p. 54) of the dreamscape. These
relations are spatially constructed in automobility: space is appropriated and relations are
ordered in areas covered with asphalt for the automobile, violence against non-cared
inhabitants of the dreamscape is justified.
At first, motorists were seen and defined as invaders to the existing social and spatial
order. Therefore, limits were imposed on drivers both in terms of speed and in use of space.
However, motorists, advocates of the new technology and other agents heralding the new
order quickly turned against ‘jaywalkers’ – a word invented and applied to those who did not
follow the rudimentary new spatial order of the streets. The nomos of automobility emerged
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by brute force, through monopolizing the right to violence and justice, in appropriating space.
In 1924 the word ‘jaywalker’ entered into a standard American dictionary as “one who
crosses a street without observing the traffic regulations for pedestrians” (Norton, 2007, p.
358).
Today automobility violence kills 1.25 million people globally, about 3500 every day
(Culver, 2018). This is the result of physical automobility violence, a further four hundred
thousand people die every year in the EU only, from respiration diseases caused by
automobility induced pollution (EC, 2017). There is no other area of social or political life
where such a constant and violent attrition of human life and the destruction of the human
body are abided. Traditional statistical analysis attributes automobility violence to human
agency coded as ‘error’: over 90% of road violence is claimed to be ‘caused’ by human
mistake (Singh, 2015). The first death of the war for the street occurred in 1896. Today
someone dies in and by automobility every 25th
second. Automobility is the most violent
socio-political order on Earth (Paterson, 2007). The dreamscape of automobility defined as
desired socio-spatial order animated by a shared understanding of present forms of social life,
artifacts, and modes of governance (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015), is, actually, a ‘nightmarescape’.
It is of specific interest how the law, stemming for the nomos of automobility, deals
with violence in automobility. Homicide and acts of violence are punished severely in every
legal system. Exceptions to criminal homicide are limited, mostly in cases of self-defense,
state sanctioned killing, or special circumstances such as euthanasia. Even if homicide is
negligent or involuntary, stemming from breach of duty, it is sanctioned rigorously. Rules of
duty (driving a safe speed, maintaining control, exercising awareness, observing traffic
signals, using blinkers and headlights) regulate road movement and it is assumed that
violence occurs when such duty is breached. However, punitive measures of duty breach are
more often than not light in automobility, and result in short term ban of participation or
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temperate measures such as license suspension, remedial training or fines applied to the
violent and in many cases administrated in the context of a demerit-point system (Tapani
Mäkinen et al., 2003).
This dreamscape turned nightmarescape is the nomos of automobility: a global
sociotechnical order made spatially visible. This is the hegemonic automobility reality, the
imaginary within which we dwell. Violence is rationalized and made accepted in the
imaginary saturated by complex meanings that involve interpretative arguments as to why
violence is justified by e.g. efficiency, comfort or safety (of the cared body). The cared body
is power-privileged over all other bodies through the embodied and habituated meanings of
safety or efficiency within automobility. It is not the artefact that saves the lives of the cared
body; it is the nomos ‘justifying the most violent’. The cared body in the technosocial spatial
order of automobility maybe conceptualized as the dehumanized automobility cyborg
(Haraway, 2013), as the driver-car assemblage, the hybrid in actor-network theory (Latour,
2005), or the car-human entity performing public routines in public space as autoself
(Randell, 2017). However conceptualized, the nomos of automobility is sociotechnical in as
much as it is cared-body centric: shared understandings of social order focus on desirable
visions revolving around the driver-car hybrid. In Schmittian terms this cared-body centricity
creates a balance between the sociotechnical and the spatial order: the sociotechnical
dominance of the car-driver hybrid serves as the ‘guarantor’ of the spatial order (Schmitt,
2006, p. 352). Space is ordered in the nomos in complex ways: by permitted and forbidden
access, speeds and rythms (Cresswell, 2010; Sheller & Urry, 2000), as well as visible and
non-visible (often technologically black-boxed) connections and relations created in and by
spatial appropriation (Latour, 1990). The rulebooks of automobility originating in the nomos
determine ‘just conflicts’ between cared and non-cared bodies, settle clashes between
hybrids; the Schmittian ‘occupatio bellica’ (Schmitt, 2006, p. 207) applies: the temporary
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reordering of space in which ‘unintended’ violence happens is the state of exception that
upholds the original ‘constitutional’ order of the nomos. Put colloquially: ‘unjust killing’ is
accepted as collateral damage of the nomos of automobility. The exception, a constitutive
force in Schmitt’s nomos, – human error – is rationalized as technosocial necessity.
On violence in automobility
Violence is undertheorized in philosophical literature (Bufacchi, 2013). It is mostly
conceptualized by analytic philosophers in terms of intentionality and by moral philosophers
in terms of consequentialism. We take a different route here. The word violence originates
from the Greek βiá – force and rush –, that bring the combined meanings of power, mobility
and speed to the dreamscape of automobility. Hannah Arendt (1970) in her seminal essay on
violence firmly separates violence from power. She argues that while power is absolute,
violence is not: it is merely instrumental and is justified by the end it pursues. Power,
according to Arendt, needs no justification as it is inherent in the very essence of political
communities, while “violence needs justification and it can be justifiable, but its justification
loses plausibility the farther away its intended end recedes into future” (Arendt, 1970, p. 52).
In the dreamscape of automobility violence is constitutive of the political and social
order made spatially visible. Violence is not a means to any end that may or may not justify
it; it’s the constitutive quality of the order created by the nomos and made spatially visible in
the dreamscape. It is constitutive in the same way as John Searle differentiates between
constitutive rules and regulative rules: constitutive rules are world-making as opposed to
regulative rules that order already existing behaviors (Searle, 2018). Following up on Searle’s
example, while ‘drive on the right’ is a regulative rule that establishes ways of driving and
the activity of driving exists independently of it, violence is constitutive of automobility as it
creates the reality in which people experience their being in modern societies. You can not
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dwell in the dreamscape of automobility without following the order made spatially visible
by the nomos, or else you have a very high and contingent chance of not being able to live in
this world altogether (Searle, 2018, pp. 51-52).
Power springs up, argues Arendt, whenever people get together and act in concert
(Arendt, 1970, p. 31). This is the realm of the political – people are acting and speaking
together (Arendt, 1958, p. 179). In the nomos of automobility power and violence ‘spring up’
together: they are both constitutive of the order that makes acting/moving in concert possible.
Violence is power and power is violence; neither one is a means to some end, nor are they in
need of justification: automobility power/violence is the political order made spatially visible
and topographically operable. This is why it is ‘bracketed’: both are required as ends in
themselves to constitute the nomos. This is the essence of automobility order – it is in this
order that all beings today dwell, move and act.
In the nomos of automobility violence ‘does not depend on implements’ (Arendt,
1970, p. 3) as power/violence is also constitutive of the autoself. Automobility violence
transgresses traditional conceptualizations of violence as in need of implements or being
intentional to inflict harm. Automobility involves machine-human hybrids performing public
routines ordered by power/violence, made visible by the nomos in a rhizomatic dreamscape
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Power/violence is constitutive of automobility because human
agents are neither in need of implements of violence (they are autoselves), nor do they have
specific and direct foresight of the consequences of their actions beyond being actors in a
complex interconnectedness of human agents and ‘things’ (Latour, 2005). Intentionality
(Jacquette, 2013) or foreseeability (Bufacchi, 2007, p. 66) becomes blurred and evaporates in
actor-actant sociotechnical setups (Latour, 1990).
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Violence as biopolitics
As opposed to the casualties of wars between nations, there are no commemorative
memorials or statues of the unknown or, actually, known driver(s). The violent wars of land
appropriation in JPE are bracketed and tragic; death and injury in the nomos of automobility
is not even considered to be sacrifice. Automobility deaths are rationalized and dehumanized
to the extent that they are purged from memory, only remembered by friends and family, they
are reduced to statistical numbers and not humans killed by automobility. The nomos of
automobility as sovereign power establishes itself through the production of a technopolitical
order based on the exclusion of bare, human life (Agamben, 1998). This it achieves
through the enactment of the exception in which the human being is stripped of her human
status and is transformed, in relation to sovereign power, into bare life in constant threat of
automobility violence. In the rulebooks of the nomos automobility autoselves have rights to
violence – humans are in a state of exception. Bare life, encompassed in this exception,
inhabits the threshold of the juridico-political community of automobility.
This human in automobility is the Agambenian ‘homo sacer’, who
“cannot participate in the rites of his gens, nor […] can he perform any juridically
valid act. What is more, his entire existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every
right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he
can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land. “ (Agamben, 1998, p. 150)
The homo sacer is exposed unconditionally to the potential for killing; s/he is in a continuous
relationship with the power that banished him precisely insofar as s/he is at every instant
exposed to an unconditional threat of death. Those who are banned from the domain of
political beings are reduced by the sovereign nomos to life defined only in terms of zoē,
recognised only as biological beings. Zoē is thus separated from bios, qualified (political or
public) life, and in the ‘nomos of automobility’ zoē is repositioned inside the polis as the
focus of the spatial order. The nomos of automobility, in Agambenian language, has
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constituted itself from its beginnings, through bracketing violence, as an extreme form
biopolitics (Agamben, 1998). Sovereign automobility power, in this nomos, is biopolitical as
it is based on the constitution of bare life as the threshold of the political order. This new
nomos of the earth serves as the master trope for the morally compelling, politically forceful
and legally significant automobility dreamscape, of how automobility subjectivities,
autoselves as well as other actors, are formed and their spatial markers inscribed in
accordance with the proper symbolic means of apportioning the nature of their lives as well
as livelihoods.
Beyond biopolitics
Nomos adds another conceptual layer to the dreamscape of automobility. Current
conceptualizations of automobility, whether as ‘system’, ‘regime’ or ‘dispositif’, provide
historical and theoretical argumentation as to why automobility is hegemonic. Applying the
conceptual tool of ‘nomos’ to automobility points to the fact why it is sovereign – that is
political. In the dreamscape “politics [is] returned to its ontological position” (Agamben,
1998, p. 31) as this is where modern wo/men dwell. Automobility as nomos points to the
constitutive moment of the sociotechnical appropriation of modern space. As argued in this
paper, it is the ontology of automobility power/violence, or as Hannah Arendt writes in her
marginalia to Schmitt’s work in a different context, the ‘blood and soil’ of the creation of a
new world order (Jurkevics, 2017) .
Arendt goes on to say that within making blood and soil the ontological basis of the
political, Schmitt actually thought of land as the constitutive moment, while Nazis meant
blood. The nomos of automobility is order made visible through the blood spilled on the
asphalt and the violent order made just from the early years of automobility in the late
nineteeth century ‘till this day. It is a state of exception where power/violence is just and a
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political space is created in which politics becomes biopolitics and every wo/man becomes
homo sacer.
The concentration camp, the site in which the state of exception is ‘given a permanent
spatial arrangement’, is the paradigmatic space of this new political arrangement. It is ‘the
space that is opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule’. The camp,
brought into being through the enactment of the state of exception, is distinctly the product of
sovereign power. It is the space in which bare life is most clearly seized. ‘Insofar as its
inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp
was […] the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power
confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation’ – Agamben writes (1998, p. 97). The
nomos of automobility is reminiscent of the nomos of the Nazi concentration camp in as
much as it is
“the structure in which the state of exception […] is realized normally. The sovereign
no longer limits himself […] to deciding on the exception on the basis of recognizing
a given factual situation (danger to public safety): laying bare the inner structure of
the ban that characterizes his power, he now de facto produces the situation as a
consequence of his decision on the exception. (Agamben, 1998, p. 97)”
The nomos of automobility is the “camp […,] securely lodged within the city’s interior [, as..]
the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” (Agamben, 1998, p. 99) where cared and non-cared
docile bodies dwell permanently. In this context the autoself as bare life is not just the cyborg
hybrid of the ‘equipment-context and the human self’ (Randell, 2017) but every citizen and,
understood phenomenologically, their Being-in-the-world in automobility.
Conclusion: the nomos of post-automobility
The nomos of automobility is, we argue, a more useful analytical tool than other
conceptualizations when theorizing disruption and displacement of taken-for-granted, selfevident
truths and utopian visions of automobility. The core of our theoretical contribution in
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this paper is that, in the phenomenological space of automobility, we re-conceptualize the
dreamscape as the modern nomos of the Earth. In this ‘nomos of automobility’ power and
violence are both constitutive of the order made visible: this is the violent dreamscape in
which we dwell. It is the sociotechnical space in which ‘acting and moving in concert’ is
made possible. In the dreamscape of automobility power/violence is constitutive of
autoselves as well as the reality in which they dwell. Humans (both as cared and non-cared
selves) are reduced to bare life and the state of exception, normalized, is given a permanent
spatial arrangement.
While we have some quarrel with Arendt’s conceptualization of violence, her reading
of Schmitt and her, never systematically developed, concept of a different version of nomos
may provide us with clues as to what the nomos of post-automobility would look like.
“Nemein accords each his own – not in relationship to the soil, but in relationship to the
people who settle it” (Arendt, 1958, p. 68). In the center of Arendian nomos is plurality, the
primary condition of the political. Where Schmittian nomos of automobility legitimates
violence through appropriation of (urban) space, Arendtian human centered post-automobility
looks for shared space as the precondition for action. Politics for Arendt “requires a nomos
because without it the space of action would have no structure, and no world” (Arendt, 2005,
p. 267). Nomos is a topographical metaphor for the space of appearance, the precondition for
plurality and political freedom.
The nomos of post-automobility must spring from people – from the ontology of
intersubjective action, not from the blood filled asphalt of the nomos of automobility. We
agree with theorists of the spatial that intersubjective processes are always permeated with
power. When disrupting the ‘nomos of automobility’, the triad of power/violence, justice and
space need also to be disrupted. Instead of bracketing violence it is to be unveiled for what it
is: the sovereign power/violence dehumanizing wo/man as bare life. Inhabitants of the
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dreamscape of post-automobility must reacquire their political status to act freely in concert
and the space of automobility need be the relational space of the political in which plurality
becomes manifest (Arendt, 1958). Reducing wo/men to bare life, as autoselves, is inherently
unjust. The nomos of post-automobility is plural and free. Foucauldian automobility
scholarship moved in this direction by introducing the concept of autonomobility focusing on
active, collectivized and socialized mobility modalities (Cass & Manderscheid, 2018).
Nemein means to dwell. In our version of post-automobility the emphasis is on a
phenomenological reordering of the space in which we dwell. This dreamscape, as shared
understanding of forms of social life, of artifacts, and modes of governance, has in its focus
the Arendtian ‘space of appearance’ as a precondition of plurality and freedom. The ‘place
we share’ is a politico-topographical metaphor – it is the entirety of the new imaginary: an
embodied, habituated, produced and reproduced technosocial space. A reordered political and
social order made visible in a new dreamscape. The measure of reordering is the human
condition: the phenomenological (re)construction of human speed, rhythm and spatial
distribution in the polis as the space of (mobile) action for the relational postauto-self
(Dewandre, 2018) and not humans as bare life.
17
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