The skipped rules of the modern state
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Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a strong semantic change invests the idea of the city. Even in the sixteenth century it is, in the words of Giovanni Botero, “a gathering of men”, that is to say a set of human beings, a complex of relationships, a style of relationships. But between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it passes to mean exactly the opposite: things, houses, everything that can be touched and held still, as decreed in the Encyclopedie of the Enlightenment.
“The precession of the simulacrum”
The chat about postmodernism has so far prevented us from having memory of it, assigning to what would come after modernity the constitutive act of the latter, an act that Baudrillard called “the precession of the simulacrum”. If the expression makes sense, it indicates not only the precedence of the cartographic image over reality, but also the claim that it derives from it. As the frontispiece of Leviathan, a precise portrait of the genesis of the state “mortal God”, illustrates programmatically. In the engraving, the gigantic body of the monstrous prince, corpus civile et ecclesiasticum inside which the citizens are allegorically gathered, rises to dominate the city and the countryside.
Precisely thanks to this functional pre-existence justice, which before Hobbes was a virtue that took shape in society, instead becomes jurisdiction as explained by Reinhard Brandt, a formal solution to the problem of the coordination of clearly determined and determinable rights, a controllable act of attribution of what everyone deserves. In this way good and justice are found to depend on a condition that proceeds formally.
Plato
For Plato the urban order was a reflection of justice, for Hobbes the urban order is valid as justice, quality of order and no longer, as before, of the sovereign. It is evident that justice (substance) is to jurisdiction (form) in the same way that the city understood as a set of relationships between its inhabitants is to the enlightened city reduced to its topographical skeleton. This happens because this double determination is based on the same representation, a common matrix: that of the Euclidean geometric extension, whose properties are the basis of every modern state territory because first they are the basis of every cartographic image, of every table. In fact, the terrible apparatus of the upper section of the title page is valid only as a signifier. The meaning, exactly as for Saussure, lies in what lies under the bar that cuts the image in half: in the tabular logic, that is cartographic, authentic machina machinarum of all modernity, which by breaking down reality in a systematic form feeds its functioning. In order to exist, every modern state must assume the nature of a map, of which it is the copy: which remains true even if one of the first things that is still handed down at school (and it really would be time to stop) is that it is the map instead. the copy of reality. If you notice, the modern state territory must theoretically possess three characteristics: continuity (it must be a whole piece), homogeneity (a single language and a single religion) and isotropism (all its parts must be functionally turned into one piece). same direction, the capital). None of the approximately two hundred states into which the face of the Earth is divided today fully obeys these rules, which nevertheless remain formally such, and are those that for Euclid specify the geometric nature of an extension.
It is the geometric nature of state territoriality that indicates its derivation from the cartographic image, which in modern times has ensured its spatial properties. The title page of Leviathan illustrates at the same time the genesis of this process and at the same time the effect of the application to the world of the disenchanted mechanical materialism of which the map is the bearer: within the “monster of unreasonable thought”, as Hobbes called the State , the bodies of the subjects who in turn make up the body, motionless and all turned away to eliminate every single individuality, already anticipate in the reciprocal equivalence and fungibility of their arrangement the logic of mass production, the same that the philosophers of Frankfurt they will see in de Sade’s erotic machines. But this is the world of yesterday, which precedes globalization. Within which the subjects instead now move and, to put it poetically with Rimbaud, returns to press “the devouring work that gathers and rises in the masses”.
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