Nomoscapes

Robert Lee Purrie was arrested for violating Los Angeles Municipal Ordinance § 41.18 (d) by placing his body horizontally on the sidewalk. He was “in public”—and had no option other than being in public because he had no home in which to lay down and because there was not a sufficient number of beds in the homeless shelters. Because he was unable to pay his fines and court costs he was sentenced to a term in jail. The immediate situation that served as the facts of the case was one that positioned him “in public space.” But the path of his life, like the paths of all lives, unspooled through innumerable settings that are arranged in particular ways. For Purrie, the homes that are not his, the shelters that are overcrowded, the libraries where he may relieve himself, the soup kitchens and emergency rooms, the streets, bushes, and jail cells constitute his auto-bio-geography of destitution. The auto-bio-geography of my version of everyday life is composed of very different nomic settings, by very different nomic traces. Richard Lee Purrie and I live in very different worlds, navigate nomic fields of power differently. For Purrie, the inability to acquire a space with respect to which he would have “the right to exclude” set in motion a nomospheric cascade that potentially lead to his being physically put in a space from which he had “no right to leave”: a jail cell. In the previous chapter our focus of investigation was on particular nomic

settings. But nomic settings (homes, public spaces, borders, prisons, workplaces) are not isolated from each other. They are constellated into dense, extensive, dynamic, differentiating ensembles or assemblages that form wider, recognizable worlds. These nomic worlds are the contingent products of pervasive cultural processes and forces associated with ideological projects. All human collectives “do” space-power in a variety of ways and these doings are carried out through the creation, modification, and abolition of nomic settings, through the invention, inscription, and interpretation of nomic traces, and through the routine performances of nomosphericity. As with language, music, cosmology, and other posited human social universals,

the ways in which nomosphericity can be given spatial-material expression disclose an enormous variety of forms. This chapter takes these more extensive assemblages as its central topics of inquiry. I will employ the neologism nomoscapes to refer to these larger “structural” elements of nomosphericity. An initial sense of nomoscapes can be taken from Lefebvre’s discussion of spatiality and ideology. In The Production of Space (1991) he asks, “What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?” Nomoscapes are the worldly (worlded) expression of ideologies or pervasive cultural meaning systems. “[W]hat we call ideology,” he writes, “only achieves consistency by intervening in social space and in its production and by thus taking on body therein. Ideology per se might well be said to consist primarily in a discourse on social space” (44). We have already explored these themes in the previous chapter with respect to particular nomic settings of home, public space, prison, and the workplace. We should, though, qualify Lefebvre’s assertion and note that it is more than a question of a space or of an ideology. It is always a question of multiple spaces and a matter of a multiplicity of ideologies. The notion “nomoscapes” seeks to capture some of what is suggested here. The emphasis is on the spatialization of ideologies as given expression in the language and idioms of legality; for example, property, privacy, citizenship, authority, order, and human rights. We must also take account of ideologies of “the legal” as such: the range of understandings concerning what it is, what it’s for, how it works. As will be discussed, such worlds are not the simple expression of a single, coherent ideology. First, any given ideology or ideological project (for example, liberalism, white supremacy, feminism, environmentalism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism) may be open to a wide range of specifications, and generative of a number of socio-spatial expressions which condition or compromise each other. Second, because our lived-in worlds are the products of numerous ideological projects, what might be most significant, in a particular analysis, is how tensions or contradictions within or among these diverse ideological projects may intensify nomospheric ambiguities, slippages, contradictions, instabilities, or disturbances. The primary objective of this chapter is simply to introduce “nomoscapes”

as a heuristic that will be used in subsequent chapters and to identify possible lines of investigation. This discussion will take the following form. Following a general discussion of the basic idea I will present a series of four very brief sketches of lost or archaic nomoscapes. These sketches each focus on land tenure. Unlike conventional discourses on “home” or “public space,” discourses on land tenure intrinsically concern more extensive spatio-legal assemblages. The primary purpose here is to use unfamiliar examples so as to better illustrate the basic concept. This will also provide a set of contrasts with the familiar, recognizably “modern” or “liberal” capitalist nomoscapes that we presently inhabit. This survey is followed by a

no-less-cursory sketch of some generic characteristics of modern, liberal nomoscapes, that is, of nomoscapes produced under conditions of modernity and in accordance with the general ideological commitments of liberalism. I cannot stress strongly enough that neither “modernity” nor “liberalism” are singular coherent social formations or ideologies. There have been (and are now) a number of “modernities” and “liberalisms.” However, the terms are useful insofar as the various instantiations of these do share general family resemblances that can be referred to in order to distinguish them from human-made worlds that do not share these features. It is commonly posited that any enduring social formation is characterized by some kind of “order,” without which it would not be an enduring social formation (or, as it is sometimes called, a social order). But millennia of human collective creativity has produced an enormous range of such “orders.” Modernity and liberalism, generally speaking, denote certain kinds of “order” and certain means of ordering that are historically distinctive. However, within these general parameters, modernity and liberalism are generative of a rather wide range of ways through which what counts as “order” is accomplished. For example, as different as the nomoscapes of contemporary Tokyo and Jerusalem are from each other and as different as each is from the nomoscape of nineteenth-century Mississippi, these all share certain features that justify categorizing all of them as examples of modern, and liberal, worlds. Their realizations in various times and locales are the products of often contending visions and versions of “order” (and, as importantly, of “disorder”). When investigating nomoscapes as cultural artifacts some general

questions arise: how are dominant visions of order and disorder spatialized? How is social space produced in accordance with-or in the service ofdominant social interests and visions of order and disorder? How are such spatializations accomplished through the invention, inscription, and performance of nomic traces (such as the enforcement of rules, the exercise of rights)? And how do these processes unfold in contention with alternative conceptions of order? These lines of inquiry open up other paths of investigation into the political construction and reconstruction of nomoscapes. (We will treat this topic more fully in the following chapter.) Of particular interest here are not only those political contests that are waged between the forces of liberalism and those of its aliberal others (communism, feudalism, tribalism, fascism, and so on). Perhaps more significant are those contests waged between proponents of alternative visions of liberalism itself. These alternative visions and projects suggest the presence of contradictions or tensions internal to liberalism(s) that the construction of nomoscapes (the specific spatialization of the legal) may have the effect of repressing, containing, or exacerbating. After all, liberalism has shown itself to be compatible with human enslavement, indigenous extermination, and colonialism. Liberalism is consistent with both “the castle doctrine” and criminal-protection orders; with both the persecution and the protection of

homeless people; with both immigrant rights and nativist removal policies. Within very general limits, whichever way “home,” “public space,” and “the prison” are constituted, the outcome is the worldly realization of some version of liberalism (over others). These investigations can help reveal tensions and contradictions within liberal nomoscapes. One of the distinctive characteristics of liberalisms as such is that

their general orientations to “order” are informed by arguably no-lessfundamental commitments to “liberty” and “justice.” But again, within any liberal social formation there may be a wide range of visions about what each of these commitments actually commits people to do, and about how fidelity to each commitment compromises the realization of the others. It will be suggested that historical and actually existing liberal nomoscapes (and the associated fields of power that underpin varieties of “everyday life”) are the effects of how these predicaments get worked out in practice through political projects. This chapter concludes by broadening the scope of inquiry to ask how liberal nomoscapes effect and are affected by the nomic spatialization of other prominent social ideologies such as those associated with race, gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship. Often, these axes of social differentiation are appealed to in order to justify exceptions to the general commitments of liberalism and to their spatialization. For example, consider the existence of a race exception or a gender exception to the normal commitments and ordering principles of liberalism. Insofar as people figured as, say, black or native or woman cannot avail themselves of the same nomospheric rights or are subject to different rules to those who are figured otherwise we might see that the spatialization of order, liberty, and justice that is produced in accordance with liberalism is accompanied (and sustained) by the production and distribution of spaces of disorder, coercion, and injustice which disproportionately affect those who are figured as exceptions. Nomoscapes, then, are a fundamental constituent feature of all collective

life-worlds. The co-constitution of nomicity and socio-spatiality and their effects on the operations of social power are basic to world-making and world-sustaining projects and practices. Nomoscapes can be thought of in a number of ways:

as extensive nomic fields through which lived fields of power are constituted;

as heterogenous ensembles of nomic settings and their associated traces and figures;

as spatio-material expressions of socio-legal discourses, ideologies, values and cultural dispositions;

as collectively produced artifacts through which nomicities and legalities are worlded and put into circulation; and

as spatio-legal “machines” for producing and reproducing patterns of difference and structures of marginality and privilege.