Abstract
It will hardly be a surprise to readers of this journal that the enduring centrality of the idea of sovereignty to the organisation and expression of our planetary legal and political relations can be viewed as a contributory factor towards climate change and the various other profound ecological challenges that we associate with the Anthropocene – the label now well established as a descriptor of this, our latest geological epoch (the timing of its origins still much disputed) in which humanity has come to have a significant impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems. After all, the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change affect the entire atmosphere, regardless of the source of the fossil fuel extraction and use that produces these emissions. It follows that solutions to global warming require regulatory co-ordination on a global scale. But as indicated by the relative ineffectiveness of a succession of treaties up to and including the 2016 Paris Agreement – failings most recently highlighted at the 2021 Glasgow Cop26 Summit, such co-ordination is thin on the ground. In a world divided into over 190 sovereign states, each with its own selfish political interests to safeguard and pursue, and each with its own relationship to the economic and industrial base responsible for the flow of emissions and for the erosion of carbon sinks (such as the Amazonian forest), commitment to effective collective measures of climate mitigation remains highly tenuous. And we have to dig only a little deeper to discover an economic logic in symbiosis with this political logic. For the very model of economic relations that sovereign self-interest confronts and responds to, privileging as it does a carbon intensive trajectory of development, is typically predicated upon a legal regime of private productive property rights to which the modern sovereign state has long been a congenial host.
Daniel Matthews would presumably not disagree with any of this, but his challenging and innovative new study goes in search of a more profound set of connections between sovereignty and ecological destruction. As his title indicates, he is more concerned with the ‘aesthetics’ of sovereignty. By this he does not mean, or not primarily, the ‘beauty – or ugliness of the sovereign form or the technologies of power which it exercises’ (59). Rather, he refers to the entire range of ways in which ‘sovereignty is engaged in ordering the sensible domain’(12). This includes both sovereignty's diverse modes of appearance - how it is expressed and conveyed in institutional, literary, artistic, architectural, and other representative forms – and, most crucially for his purposes, its associated modes of perception – how it encourages particular ways of apprehending the world, whether visually, affectively or even somatically. Read alongside two other sites of investigation - the material domain of sovereign practice and an imperceptible ‘remainder’ that falls outside the gaze of the ‘properly’ political - these two aesthetic registers complete a fourfold view of sovereignty that Matthews believes captures more adequately than previous models the ways in which it impacts upon the world.
In developing his argument, the author moves through critical and constructive phases. He is critical of the limitations in what he sees as the two dominant recent approaches to sovereignty. On the one hand, there are those who focus on the changing nature of legal and political authority under conditions of ‘postnationality’ and globalisation, and inquire whether or not sovereignty can be stretched and adapted to fit this new context. On the other hand, there are those, primarily inspired by Foucault and Agamben's ‘biopolitics’, who draw a distinction between the crude power of life and death of the mediaeval King, viewed as the true paradigm of sovereign power – and the capacity of the modern state to provide a more comprehensive and more finely grained disciplinary authority over subject ‘bodies’. For all their differences, both approaches, according to Matthews, fail to grasp two key features of contemporary political life; the resurgence of forms of ‘sovereigntist’ civic and ethnic nationalism, and the emergence of a climactic regime in which various ‘biogeochemical forces’ (56) are impacting on the social and political domain.
I confess to finding the first limb of this criticism unconvincing, or at least less persuasive than it might have been even just a few years ago. For there has been a glut of writing in recent years, often led by those who have traced (and sometimes celebrated) the movement of political authority beyond the state, that seeks to come terms with the challenge posed to cosmopolitan projects and sensibilities by the sovereigntist claims of various emergent or consolidated national ‘populisms’ (see e.g. Krygier et al., 2022). Central to this is a (renewed) awareness of the resilient power of sovereignty as the symbolic container of a politically centralised and culturally homogenous conception of statehood. The second critique, however, is much more central to Matthews’ argument, and also more persuasive. Here the key notion is that the received idea of modern sovereignty, in which a territorially demarcated collective people and their institutions of government are front and centre in the political drama, and the physical world is simply the set on which they perform, supplies an impoverished understanding of how we humans are ‘earthbound’ – the Latourian term that he adopts in his main title. That is to say, it fails adequately to grasp how as subjects we are situated within rather than above or against - place, community and natural forces.
The main part of the book is devoted to cashing out this claim through interrogating three key aspects of modern sovereignty, namely territory, peoplehood and scale. In each case critique is combined with, and reinforced by, the suggestion of a broader aesthetics and an alternative framing of the political. So the abstract flatness and environmental detachment of the modern understanding of territory and territorial jurisdiction is contrasted to a notion of terrain, and ‘terrain prospect’, that aims to foreground the ways in which legal and political agency is entangled with dynamic geophysical forces and relations. As regards peoplehood, the ‘we, the people’ of popular sovereignty, the conscious fictitiousness of whose claim to a transcendent quality follows and secularizes a line of thinking that goes back to medieval discourses of the King's embodiment of a higher authority derived from divine command, is seen to be insufficiently grounded in the organic and inorganic ‘earthly forces’ (137) that condition human agency. Any assertion of humanly collective political authority, Matthews argues, must go beyond the simple unity of an aggregation of deracinated human atoms. It must instead be ‘brought within a fleshy and corporeal reality’ (136), and must channel a sense of obligation, dependence and need that acknowledges the complex variety and precarious collective condition of any ‘sympoietic earthbound people’ (137). On the matter of scale, the main force of Matthews’ critique concerns the overconcentration on the nation state as the centre of political life, and on how the narrowness of that focus is insensitive to many of the factors bearing upon ecological destruction. Yet, in an argument which reinforces his scepticism towards the postnational rebooting of sovereignty, he does not find a satisfactory alternative in the ‘global’, which he views as a ‘deeply anthropocentric’ (16) site and register of discourse. Instead, he returns to the city, the locus of the pre-modern polity and the centre of the kind of modern urban life in which the ‘ahuman’ environment, built and otherwise – is most prominent, and where so many of our ecologically harmful practices are centred.
There is much to admire in this study. Its care of language, easy style and seamless continuity of argument make it a real pleasure to read. Its unusual mix of personal experience (through which each Chapter is opened), detailed empirical analysis, and high theoretical reflection, is strikingly effective. Its interdisciplinary reach is impressive. Matthews moves skilfully not only between law, social science and humanities, but also across Earth System Science, meteorology, strategic studies and various other sub-disciplines required for the kind of holistic appreciation of the earthbound condition that he finds so missing in contemporary understandings. He has his intellectual heroes and reference points – Bruno Latour, and, through Latour, Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, Simone Weil (in particular her insistence on the priority of obligation over right, and her notion of ‘attentiveness’ as a measure of aesthetic attunement), Stuart Elden, Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, among others. Yet there is never any doubt that it is his own distinctive voice and thesis that is leading the discussion. It is a book of genuine depth, one that seeks to shift attitudes rather than simply make sparring points, and so also one that the receptive reader should seek to absorb over time rather than digest immediately. That means that an early review may be premature, and certainly cannot do justice to the weight and subtlety of the author's argument. Let me, however, raise two connected queries, less as challenges to his thesis than as invitations to Matthews and others to continue the discussion.
The first concerns the force of the author's critique of the narrow remit of conventional anthropocentric understanding of modern sovereignty, in particular the approach that focuses on the possibility of postnational sites of sovereign or quasi-sovereign authority. In this regard, my own work (see esp. Walker, 2020) supplies one object of his critical attention, both in his monograph (57), and, at greater length, in a companion article (Matthews, 2021). The natural world, according to his reading of my reading and that of others with a similar mindset, is ‘conceived of as a largely immobile scenography that simply provides the staging for human political dramas’ (57–58). On this view, much conventional theorisation of sovereignty echoes the deeper aesthetic limitations that characterise the representations and receptions of sovereignty at the level of the quotidian political imaginary and practice.
An opening response to this would be – ‘true, but don't shoot the messenger!’ That is to say, to the extent that inhabiting the sovereignty frame renders subjects ‘constitutively insensitive’ (Matthews, 2021: 77) to these wider concerns, work that operates within that frame of limited sensitivity is merely acknowledging the constraints of the actual in restricting its attention only to these extensions of the sovereign remit that have current cultural and political traction. Indeed, my own emphasis on the possibilities of a sovereignty ‘surplus’ is precisely concerned with the ways in which the ‘stage’ on which the political drama is being performed is subject to pressures of incremental adjustment to accommodate subnational, supranational and other non-state-framed interests; and, moreover, to stretch the metaphor further - perhaps too far - how the contestation of this adjustment (say, over a sovereign state's continuing membership of a sovereignty-aspiring European Union) might be seen as itself a kind of meta-drama performed in the absence of a single commonly assumed background sovereigntist ‘scenography’ Of course, the point could still legitimately made that a full understanding of the dominant orientation and limits of the contemporary sovereign frame should be as eloquent about what lies outside that frame as it is about what sits inside or at its contested margins. Here I would concede Matthews has a strong point, and through his exploration of sovereignty's imperceptible ‘remainder’ provides a set of insights that is lacking in my work and that of many others.
Yet even here I would want to enter a qualification. Matthews’ adoption of the dramaturgical metaphor of play and stage has certain analytical consequences. It draws a bright line contrast between content (play) and form (stage), and in so doing tends also to give priority to the constraining function of ‘largely immobile’ form. But, as I suggested above, the image this conveys can become too rigid. Form is contestable, and indeed is increasingly contested in the kinds of ways I already noted. What is more, causality, or ‘framing’ influence, can run both ways. What makes it ‘on stage’, and so produces the drama of human political engagement, is influenced but certainly not predetermined by the form that the stage has historically taken. In turn, that substantive engagement can lead to the development of new forms and the erection of new ‘stages’ of engagement, as we already see in the progressive diversification of the (albeit limited) regulatory treatment of climate change mitigation away from exclusively national sites over the last 30 years.
Of course, we can still argue about degrees of rigidity of form, and Matthews’ metaphorical choice is intended to convey just how rigidly he sees the aesthetics of modern sovereignty acting to ‘blind’ (136) us to the nature and extent of our current predicament. But this is ultimately an empirically contingent matter. The aesthetics of sovereignty that do the deep work of framing can and do change, however slowly this change typically unfolds. Matthews himself makes that point when noting that at the time of medieval kingship the modern notion of popular sovereignty would have been viewed with as much scepticism, even incomprehension, as his ‘sympoietic earthbound people’ is today. And, most tellingly, in indicating in his conclusion the dearth of imaginable alternative frames, he is bound to concede that we can still meet the existential challenge of climate change through some version of the sovereignty prism - one in which an improved ‘lighting system’ renders visible what has long been invisible (173).
This leads directly to my second query. For if the relationship between form and content is somewhat looser and more malleable than the dramaturgical metaphor suggests – and so, it follows, the relationship between the types of shifts in sovereigntist thinking that I and other ‘postnationalists’ investigate and those sought after by Matthews is perhaps closer than he contends – can we not, as it seems we must, given the urgency of the contemporary ecological crisis, countenance change in the sovereignty-framed political mindset as running faster rather than slower? And for all the mix of self-interested denial or minimalization of the climate crisis on one side, and anticipatory resignation on the other, is there not at least some evidence of this already happening? Are we not seeing a significant shift in global public attitudes towards the dangers of ecological destruction? Of course, there is still massive political resistance, from the fossil fuel giants, many of their ‘sovereign’ backers, and countless other narrowly self-interested parties. But it is not resistance of an order that can any longer entirely exclude or remove climate change from the political stage and agenda.
If that is the case, what might it suggest about the focus of the Matthews study? Is his critique of the blindness induced by modern sovereignty not directed at a world that, however hesitantly, has already lifted the scales from its eyes? I could not help but think at points in the course of my reading that while his aesthetically loaded critique of modern sovereignty explained a lot about the profound background of our climate crisis, revealing the deep synergies between a longstanding culturally embedded narrowness of political focus and the prevalence of a development-driven capitalist economic agenda, we are now inside or approaching a new moment of urgency and awareness. Whereas even ten years ago his intervention would have been a wake-up call, therefore, today it reads more like a revealing study of why the wake-up call has taken so long. And while the specific forms of aesthetic reframing that Matthews suggests are still important – a more geophysically aware understanding of terrain, a more grounded conception of peoplehood, a greater emphasis on the city as the epicentre of the climate crisis – the sense that these are prerequisites of the fuller political engagement that is needed, rather than supportive co-developments, has gone. However fitfully and unevenly, the call of the political is now being heard, and political action is the urgent priority, even as this fine book helps explain why we have taken so long to reach that point and why so much remains to be done in so little time.
