The Geopolitics of Genesis
The analytical comparison between “land” and “sea” as both geopolitical and philosophical concepts has become something of a meme: Hegel…
The analytical comparison between “land” and “sea” as both geopolitical and philosophical concepts has become something of a meme: Hegel, Carl Schmitt, Deleuze & Guattari and Aleksandr Dugin have written about it at length. The difference between Land and Sea powers in history is a cliché — Athens & Sparta, Britain & Germany, the USA & China.
The Land stands for rigid hierarchies, “striated space”, huge armies, arborescent concepts of tradition and knowledge, territorialization and order. The Sea describes opposite concepts: networks, “smooth space”, naval forces & pirates, rhizomatic culture, deterritorialization and mobility.
All these ideas, theories and concepts are derived from a fundamental differentiation that can be ultimately traced back to the Book of Genesis.
The Sea is older than the Land. The “Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” before God spoke: “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear”. Now “Earth” and “Seas” exist. Long before God created Man from the earth and breathed life into him, he “created great whales, and every living creature that moveth”. After this the Book of Genesis doesn’t mention the sea and the whale (a remarkable animal that will become important later on) for a long time — it focuses its attention on the earth and Man.
God creates a garden in Eden and puts Man into it. The word paradise, parádeisos, originally described a walled garden (from Old Persian, “paridaidam”). For the first time since the creation of the world, a specific territory has been demarcated from another. Whoever lives here can be driven out, displaced; thus, Man, at first, was not nomadic. His exclusion from a particular enclave can only follow his inclusion therein.
The Book of Genesis presupposes that a certain part of space must be separated before it can be cultivated; of course, this can only happen on land, where lines can be drawn and space can be striated. “The sea knows no borders other than the coast”, as Carl Schmitt said. It is a “smooth space” upon which no line can be drawn, no demarcation of space is possible and no lasting order can be created. Land can be appropriated and even owned; the sea can only be crossed. The sea as a medium represents the change of location, no specific location in itself.
In the narration of Genesis, the sea returns eons later as God’s punishment: the Great Deluge devours Man and his orders, spaces and borders. The “ground which the Lord hath cursed” disappears; the man-made space, described as the “unity of order and orientation” in Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, becomes deterritorialized. “Fences, enclosures, boundaries , walls, houses, and other constructs” disappear. A maritime existence is forced upon Noah and his clan. After the Deluge, the earth is a “smooth space” with no lines or borders. Abraham can ask Lot: “Is not the whole land before you?”.
Noah’s sons appear as representatives of land-appropriations and the founding of cities; as agents of reterritorialization. “Firm land”, Terra Firma, is the basis of all law and order, as Hegel already knew. As the flood recedes, “the sons of Noah” become founders of cities and states: Babylon and Nineveh, Sodom and Gomorrah. The land is divided; borders are drawn. These borders bloom into all kinds of differences and “by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood”. These “nations” settled in demarcated dominions and soon began “making war” with each other. The reasons for these wars were quite clear: “the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together”. As Hegel noted, the reason why the quarrel between Abraham and Lot didn’t turn into war is that there was enough new territory, enough open space for the brothers. As soon as there is no open space anymore, the “land-appropriating group” clashes with a “land-owning group” and their conflict rises to the level of war and occupation. One could argue that land is ultimately responsible for the friend-enemy distinction since it does not suffer too many people on the same spot.
There is an obvious criticism to be made: Schmitt doesn’t differentiate enough between pastoralists and agriculturalists. He ignores the possibility of a nomadic distribution. The fratricidal farmer Cain is not spatially identical to the shepherd Abel. As Deleuze notes:
The occupation of shepherd, in the Homeric age, had nothing to do with a parceling of land; when the agrarian question came to the foreground, in the time of Solon, it was expressed in an entirely different vocabulary. To take to pasture (nemo) refers not to a parceling out but to a scattering, to a repartition of animals.
This nomadic “scattering” implies a concept that is very different from Schmitt’s understanding of the division and appropriation of land as the distribution of property rights. His concept of land-appropriation is always tied to the idea of scarcity, since distributed space is always scarce space: no new land can be created, but new land-appropriating and land-searching powers can arise. A concept of Nomos that is based on the economy of space always carries martial undertones. Carl Schmitt could trace these concepts — scarce space, the differentiation of peoples and states, and war — back to the Book of Genesis. He would reply that the conflict which Abraham and Lot manage to avoid because there is still land left over is not a conflict between farmers, but between pastoralists. Both of them had too many “flocks, and herds, and tents”. The pastoral concept of land-appropriation is, of course, different — nomads don’t push the land towards striation and scarcity — but these differences do not, in any way, guarantee peace: “and there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdmen of Lot’s cattle”.
A futile quarrel is avoided because there is still free space in the world where the nomads can drive their growing peoples and herds. A few decades later, however, Abraham has to pay “four hundred shekels of silver” to the Hettite Ephron so he can bury his dead. “The field of Ephron […] and all the trees that were in the field, that were in all the borders round about, were made sure unto Abraham for a possession”. The original appropriation of land is concluded. Space can only be taken from others now — with coins of silver or weapons of bronze. There is no more land to be distributed: “the edge of the sword” decides who can own which land. Cities are being razed, men slaughtered and women taken by force. The nomadic shepherds turn into bandits and brigands; the cities build walls and raise soldiers. The reasons are still the same: “the land wherein they were strangers could not bear them because of their cattle”. While Schmitt might have missed the nuances of the agriculturalist/pastoralist split, Deleuze & Guattari simply missed the fact that nomadic distribution also leads to violence at a certain degree of population density.
The nomads of abstract philosophy roam space without dividing it into plots and estates, without imposing order and hierarchy. Doing this, on the other hand, is the main purpose of the State, according to Deleuze & Guattari:
One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire “exterior,” over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon.
This is what Schmitt calls “unity of order and orientation”:
In every case, land-appropriation, both internally and externally, is the primary legal title that underlies all subsequent law. Territorial law and territorial succession, militia and the national guard presuppose land-appropriation. Land-appropriation also precedes the distinction between private and public law; in general, it creates the conditions for this distinction. To this extent, from a legal perspective, one might say that land-appropriation has a categorical character.
The creation of borders and the distribution of land as property place the state in fundamental opposition to the nomad who in turn evolves into the deterritorializing “war machine” that strives to recreate “smooth spaces” (or at least a mode of life that resembles it). The state creates borders, walls, castles and armies to defend itself against the “nomadic war machine”, but as the state lacks the means to seal itself hermetically, there will always be certain flows that penetrate its defenses, e.g. flows of goods, information, people and money, which can become a weapon of deterritorialization in the hands of the nomad.
Whether it is Schmitt’s “pirate” or Deleuze’s “war machine”, the conflict between sedentiary and nomadic Nomos is represented by the metaphor of Land & Sea; spaces solidify or liquify; the Land is firm, the Sea is volatile. This brings us back to the whale. A mighty symbol of political theory, it is especially interesting since it represents both sides of the conflict: he lives in the sea like a fish, yet he is a mammal like us. He lives in “smooth space” and knows no borders. The whaler, who needs no roads or parcels to follow him, acts as an agent of deterritorialization. Yet the whale is also Hobbes’ “Leviathan”, symbol of the State itself. In fairytales and legends he carries cities on his back or islands within his gut.
The whale is an ambivalent, yet potent symbol.
His literary fame mostly comes from Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”, which in itself offers a grand narrative on land, sea, war, de- and reterritorialization, “smooth” and “striated” spaces & nomadism. Just like his novella “Benito Cereno”, “Moby-Dick” can become a rich source of cultural and geopolitical analysis. That is a topic for another essay, though.