On Frictionless Sovereignty

A conversation with Ryan Bishop about the complex networks of alliances and systems that scaffold globalization.

The Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648, provided the foundation for the modern state system and articulated the concept of territorial sovereignty. It established the legal basis for the constitution of modern world order and defined our “common sense” understanding of rights, land, and governance. The concept of sovereignty prevents interference from other states while also providing legitimations of laws within the nation-state, and makes the state the only political formation that can legitimately enact violence within its borders and against other sovereign nations. This model of sovereignty creates a world of borders based on the dichotomy of “the inside” versus “the outside.” However, in today’s context of globalization, neoliberal restructuring, greater mobility, the rise of international trade alliances, organizations, and planetary-scale computation, this vision of sovereignty is being fundamentally questioned.

Ryan Bishop, professor of Global Arts and Politics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, explores the complex premise upon which sovereignty emerges. He proposes a concept of “frictionless sovereignty” as a tool for understanding sovereignty as a domain of fluid mobility. He argues that the state of frictionlessness is one desired and fostered by decades of neoliberal economics and social values—the free flow of goods, images, ideas, information, capital, natural resources, raw materials, and people (at least some people). Frictionlessness is an ultimate goal for power entities: “It’s a desirable ideal that shares qualities, aspirations, and technics of a supposed teleology of the urban human form as the highest achievement in the nature and history of humanity; an achievement that operates on the frictionless absorption of nature by the urban to furnish human existence within it,” says Bishop. Specific aspects for conceptualizing frictionless sovereignty can be found in the study of polyscalar autonomous remote sensing systems and planetary computation.

Strelka Mag’s Yulia Gromova spoke to Bishop about the new geopolitical frameworks that are emerging in relation to global flows and infrastructures.

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Yulia Gromova: What is frictionless sovereignty?

Ryan Bishop: Part of what frictionless sovereignty wants to explore is how sovereignty has migrated from essentially a colonial model of state formation that was exported globally from Europe and has become our “common sense” understanding of sovereignty as isomorphically mapped onto nation-state territory and rules. These are the regulations and rights that are necessary for states and governments to enter into agreements with each other and international organizations, despite the ideal correspondence between land, territory, and state having never or rarely been achieved in practice.

Challenges to this model of sovereignty go back centuries in relation to sea trade. Similarly, one can map a trajectory in the second half of the twentieth century, from the Cold War to the present, in which sovereignty begins to be delinked explicitly from territory, and begins to get tied to flows of people, finance, and information. Frictionless sovereignty emerges as a way of saying: “I want to strategically engage or strategically distance myself from obligations and responsibilities of the state.”

Frictionless sovereignty is essentially a dream—it’s an aspiration, it’s a goal for different entities that are heady with the power of neoliberal markets, urban human teleologies, nature as standing reserve, anthropocentric history, transitive grammar, and tele-control in which a subject (either individual, state, military, corporation, or multi-agent entity) can dictate and manipulate an object without reversibility of that dynamic. An important tenet for frictionless sovereignty can be found in the following formulation: maximum benefit with minimum responsibility.

YG: At what scales can frictionless sovereignty be observed?

RB: We can look at frictionless sovereignty and its attempted operation at different but interrelated scales. At the level of individuals—especially with citizenship options available through online platforms and libertarian ideals. At the level of states—where specific politics, exemplified by something like the Truman Doctrine, which during the Cold War articulated that anything that happened anywhere in the world was of relevance and direct importance to the United States, legitimated action by the nation anywhere in the world it deemed necessary. These policies overturn common-sense, territorially-based sovereignty. And this then emerges, for example, within the work of Carl Schmitt as Grossräume—as a “sphere of influence,” with state sovereignty detached in selective ways from land or discontinuous territory. Frictionless sovereignty also operates at the corporate level, at the level of other organizational actors, such as autonomous remote sensing systems for surveillance, or profit, or military action or soft power influence, including planetary computations loosely tethered to national governments.

These scales do not operate in isolation, nor are they hermetically sealed. Each one replicates, reiterates, and affirms the others through their operations and the desires that drive them.

YG: What processes related to frictionless sovereignty can be observed at the level of large-scale infrastructures, such as Belt and Road Initiative?

RB: In the less frequently read second act of Goethe’s Faust (I’m drawing on a reading of Faust that was offered by Marshall Berman in a really excellent book on modernity entitled All That Is Solid Melts into Air), the protagonist, Faust, has transformed from being a scholar to a lover to a land developer. And with his intent on overcoming the boundary between land and sea, through the mobilization of a massive labor force that works day and night to realize his plans, he kind of manifests this modernist drive for liberation that’s undertaken with a sort of Mephistophelian zeal. And in fact, he’s aided by Mephistopheles himself.

Faust plans to provide, in this instance, the proletariat a new kind of economic possibility through opening the land. He says: “I want to open space for many millions to live not securely, but free for action.” This links up with the theoretical term of culture-technique, which was originally applied to agrarian techniques but has since migrated to other forms of human endeavor, including large-scale land development projects, literary studies, and media studies.

The Faust at the end of Goethe’s play can be recognized in many of the large-scale engineering projects that are underway in the present—many of them researched by The Terraforming or The New Normal projects at Strelka, including Belt and Road Innitiative.

Contra Schmittian terra-based biases for sovereignty claims based upon its supposedly obdurate solidity, a number of theorists (e.g. Ross Exo Adams, John Agnew, Joe Painter, and Paul Virilio) have argued that territory and networks, beginning as early as the sixteenth century, could be understood as being one and the same. All forms of political organization or polity, claims Agnew, “from hunter-gatherer tribes to nomadic kinship structures to city-states, territorial states, spheres of influence, alliances, trade pacts, seaborne empires” occupy some form of space and thus space-spanning networks exercise non-territorially determined sovereignty, in both hierarchical and distributed organizational patterns (2005: 441). Networks in this instance are multiple and include trading routes on land and water, to air in the recent past and present, to communications, to colonial connections, to labor agreements to digital media. These too can be de facto territory in the manner of distributed Grossräume, decoupling territory from bounded state land. When networks count as territory for state actors, frictionless sovereignty cannot be far behind.

China’s massive One Belt, One Road initiative (BRI), adopted by Beijing in 2013, offers such a networked, distributed, and tentacular set of infrastructural and noetic sovereign claims. The Silk Road Economic Belt provides an overland set of linkages and the Maritime Silk Road offers the same over-water. The belt links the mainland PRC to South Asia and the Middle East, and forks off to Africa and Europe. The road connects the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean toward the same large geographical areas using coastal portals, all with the grand plan of continuing the PRC’s soft power stance as champion of the developing world as established by Mao in 1949. The RAND Corporation’s 2018 analysis of the project interprets the entire endeavour as driven by China’s concerns about security; an attempt to bolster continued economic growth, increase global influence, intensify international investment along with PRC citizens living abroad, and challenge US and European influence in areas residing in Western geopolitical gray zones of minimal interest.

YG: How does the deterritorialization of economic regimes enable the emergence of new forms of sovereignty?

RB: This ties back to what we might call a surrenchère, a term used by Jacques Derrida, which is a kind of repetition of a set of relationships, but with each repetition there’s an intensification of certain elements and thus a raising of the stakes.

Going from either nation-states claiming control of seaways for trade during mercantile era, or eighteenth century colonial slave trade routes, through to actual colonial control, to the Truman Doctrine—at each stage, you get a kind of deterritorialization of the economic regimes that underpin governance. And in doing so, the basis upon which claims of sovereignty are made becomes increasingly immaterial. But then with reterritorialization back at the center, it gets materialized in the form of wealth and control at a distance.

There’s a kind of repetition and an intensification over historical epochs that Baudrillard called a shift from an epoch of enslavement, of domination to a more distributed system of hegemony, in which we’re all in the embrace at the particular moment—where there is a lot of control from central sites and there are various modes of resistance that operate underneath it, but that resistance is brought in as part of the perpetuation of the power that’s controlling it. This shift marks a move from direct to indirect, distributed and abstract control. With hegemony, realized through networks of virtual technologies and movement, total exchange at a horizontal plane allows distinctions between domination and dominated to dissipate into the systems that deliver everyone into their operation.

YG: How is this manifested through large-scale autonomous remote sensing systems?

RB: Baudrillard’s epoch of hegemony, which is also the neoliberal order of globalism, has been infinitely accelerated by planetary computation and the increased operation of multi- and polyscalar autonomous remote sensing systems working together by design and accident on planetary scales and beyond, emergent from military technologies that freed centralized command from a specific corporeal presence and thus allowed it to be everywhere at once. Tightly controlling the chain of command remotely, these current teletechnologies provide data gathering, oversight, and remote control of those materials and personnel deemed worthy of attention and direction. The accidental exo-planetary mega-structure of planetary computational platforms —and the rapidly expanding ring of satellites surveilling the planet and transmitting wireless data about it—further entrenches the hegemony of the epoch that Baudrillard labels as our own.

The building blocks of political philosophy that are being rapidly reshaped by these large-scale systems are the autos, which is “the self,” the nomos, which is “the law,” and the munus, which is the gift or the burden of being within a community (an English word with “munus” in its root). So, if you think about autonomous as a word—it’s a combination of autos (self) and nomos (law or governance); an autonomous system is a self-governing, self-controlling system.

Although encoded and constructed for different functions and to operate in separate domains, the technological operations of these systems occur through the same combination of software platforms, sensing devices, machine to machine interfaces, autonomous monitoring and acting capacities, real-time tele-technologies, automated detection and responsive action components, and widely distributed sensory data used by a whole range of agents (human and non-human).

These remote systems can be found in something like the Planetary Skin Institute or the Central Nervous System For The Earth, which is a large-scale project by Hewlett Packard and other entities. They use Smart Dust, which is autonomous remote sensing at the cubic millimeter. There are many other projects and systems that feed into new geopolitical formations operative through planetary computation and platforms. These have reconfigured the autos, the nomos, and the munus in ways that are still inchoate, emergent, and contradictory, providing a reterritorialization and deterritorialization of hybrid governmentalities.

YG: Do you believe that projects like the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative are a new form of colonialism? And if so, what are the consequences?

RB: Absolutely, it’s an updated version of colonialism in that the interests of a cosmopolitan center are enacted in spaces over which it has no proper territorial claim to sovereignty. It is only able to enact its interests through economic or military might. In doing so, extractive value from resources and labor leave the site of production and accrue to the center. As we have noted, though, the colonial move is one fraught with peril for sovereignty claims.

The consequences of these extra-territorial infrastructure projects are those of colonialism and neo-imperialism everywhere, which is, again, extracted value that doesn’t really devolve back into the site from which it’s extracted. And that’s one of the main goals of frictionless sovereignty: to maximize that extracted value. These large-scale autonomous remote sensing systems or tele-technological systems or infrastructure projects provide means for achieving that goal. It is a kind of soft power form of colonialism that easily can revert to old school, hard power, colonial control should the need arise.

YG: So what is the influence of sovereignty on urban processes? And vice versa?

RB: That is a really complex question. There’s a way in which the rural is already urbanized. And the rural stands in relationship to the urban in the same way nature stands in relation to financial systems—as a standing reserve. It is a site for the exploitation, perpetuation, and grounding of everything that happens within the urban site. Yet, it is constituted as alterity, as otherness, as something that resides beyond the limits of the city, and is, therefore, different and can be brought into the center or removed from the center at will—rather like colonization and its center-periphery relations.

As we know, “the urban” is scaled in very complex ways—so, it is almost nonsensical to speak of “the urban” as “the urban,” because our experiences of urbanization processes would depend very much on where we are positioned within it. The ability to enact political subjectivity becomes very much constrained by where one is positioned within urban formations and processes.

One of the things that we see is a consistent development of human bodies as a site of both resistance and extracted value. For example, in a profound way, black bodies in international situations become manifestations of borders—they are borders in and of themselves. I take this idea from Achille Mbembe, and it emerged in a public conversation I had with him and Bernard Stiegler last year.

Mbembe talks about flows of people as sites of extraction. He argues for an opening up of all African borders—which is beginning to happen across a number of nation-states within Africa—that would allow for people to move like the EU across geopolitical boundaries, but without any sense of ordering. But the thing is, the black body, when it begins to enter other sites, becomes a barrier, and it becomes a site of extracted value. The black body is a metonym for any group that is rendered as alterity; although blackness is literal in some instances, it’s also applicable to a host of other kinds of communities, indigenous populations in particular, that are always the site in which all kinds of experimentation occurs.

Those people that don’t count are, ironically, the most counted because they’re the most surveilled and the most tracked—governments that wish to control and exclude these bodies know exactly where they are, and how many of them there are at all times. But that’s the only way in which they will count: they don’t count in elections, they don’t count in economic systems other than what can be taken from them and what they can give to it, not what they will get in return.

This happened under colonialism. People used to think of colonial sites as historically past in contrast to the cosmopolitan center, which was interpreted in a progressive sense of modernity as being futural. But, the fact is those colonial sites were often sites of experimentation, particularly experimentation of population control, policing, surveillance, maximum labor extractive value, and hygiene—and if those experiments proved to be successful, they were then taken up and brought back to the cosmopolitan center.

The colonies were the labs of the urban cosmopolitan centers’ potential future. A famous case for this is fingerprinting—it first took place in India as a means of identification, and then it was brought back to Europe and became an integral part of surveillance and policing.

So your question opens up more, very serious, questions about where does “the urban” exist? What is the imaginary of the urban? In the Frictionless Sovereignty special issue that I have just assembled for boundary2 online, I’ve done a piece with geographer AbdouMaliq Simone. AbdouMaliq is in charge of a research group that’s called Urban Human Forms and we started to play with the idea of what falls out of that category—what falls out of the category of urban human forms—either materially, intellectually, imaginatively, or economically. What falls out of that domain?

In a way, everything that falls out of that domain is the ground upon which urbanism occurs. And so, without that “otherness,” without that “alterity,” without all of those other sites upon which a teleology of urban human existence is constructed, without all the things that flow into that we wouldn’t have the teleology that constitutes the urban human form as the desirable end result of life on the planet. Sovereignty enters this site in terms of the force that is deployed to push along that teleology, to imagine that teleology as existing and conjuring it up as something desirable. This is the tautology of the urban within frictionless sovereignty that casts itself as unavoidable, ineluctable, and desirable: the way things are and should be.

Ryan Bishop

Ryan Bishop is a Professor of Global Arts and Politics, Co-Director of the Archaeologies of Media and Technology Research Group within the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton, and Faculty Director of the Doctoral School (Faculty of Arts and Humanities).

In addition to co-editing with John Armitage and Doug Kellner the journal Cultural Politics (Duke University Press), he serves on the Theory, Culture & Society editorial.

He also edits the book series Technicities for Edinburgh University Press (with John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, and the book series "A Cultural Politics Book" for Duke University Press (with John Armitage and Doug Kellner). He previously edited the book series Theory Now for Polity Press,

Some of his most recent books include Technocrats of the Imaingation: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (co-authored with John Beck, Duke University Press 2020), Seeing Degree Zero: Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics (co-edited with Sunil Manghani, Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics (co-edited with John Beck Edinburgh University Press 2016), Barthes/Burgin (co-edited with Sunil Manghani Edinburgh University Press 2016), Virilio and Visual Culture (co-edited with John Armitage, Edinburgh University Press, 2013), Comedy and Critique in American Film (Edinburgh University Press 2013) and Otherwise Occupied (co-edited with Gordon Hon Al-Hoash/Third Text 2013).