The Daily Planet #56: Metabolic Sovereignty, Part 5. The Metabolic Exception

The main task of the Sovereign - so far - has been to maintain political order, but in the future the (Metabolic) Sovereign will surely be asked to maintain metabolic order. What is climate change if not metabolic disorder, or perhaps even a metabolic emergency?

In Kim Stanley Robinson's famous work of Climate Fiction, "The Ministry for the Future,"

India decides to conduct a geoengineering exercise to reduce the amount of sunlight heating the subcontinent, an operation its military carries out proudly and publicly. (via Yale Climate Connections)

That's a sovereign being an agent of metabolic order, but of course, the way in which its being done - solar geoengineering - is hardly the best way to respond to climate disruption. More on that tomorrow.

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that future sovereigns will have to deal with exceptions - situations when normal political rules have to be overridden. Except that this time they will be exceptions of metabolic origin, not wars or financial collapse.

What's an exception?

The state of exception is a political and legal concept introduced by Carl Schmitt in the early 20th century, describing a situation where a sovereign authority transcends the normal rule of law to preserve public order and the survival of the state.

Unlike a state of emergency, which is mostly declaratory and temporary, the state of exception involves the sovereign's power to nullify existing legal norms and create new, extralegal rules. This power places the sovereign both inside and outside the legal order, as they decide what constitutes an exception and how to respond to it.

The exception doesn't have a great pedigree, for it was first invoked in the form of Nazi Germany's Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended fundamental rights and enabled Hitler's dictatorship, and the British Mandate for Palestine, where legal orders were suspended to control Palestinian communities. Scholars like Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe have explored how the state of exception can become normalized, extending beyond emergencies to justify ongoing political violence and exclusion under the guise of security.

I don't know when the first state of metabolic exception is going to happen, but it's bound to do so if we continue along the path we are on today.

State of exception

A state of exception (German: Ausnahmezustand) is a concept introduced in the 1920s by the German philosopher, jurist and Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt, similar to a state of emergency (martial law) but based in the sovereign's ability to transcend the rule of law in the name of the public order and the survival of a state. Its difference to a state of emergency lies in the two concepts' diverging relationship to the law; while a state of emergency is considered to be mostly declaratory, a state of exception is considered to be more politically significant, as it nullifies the legal validity of certain legal orders by the sovereign decision.