Carl Schmitt and The Buribunks

Technology, Law, Literature

Edwin Bikundo, Kieran Tranter, Edwin Bikundo, Kieran Tranter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000563665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

In 1918 a young Carl Schmitt published a short satirical fiction entitled The Buribunks. He imagined a future society of beings who consistently wrote and disseminated their personal diaries. Schmitt would go on to become the infamous philosopher of the exception and for a while the 'Crown Jurist of the Third Reich'. The Buribunks – ironically for beings that lived only for self-memorialisation – has been mostly lost to history. However, the digital realm, with its emphasis on the informatic traces generated by human doing, and the continual interest in Schmitt's work to explain and criticise contemporary constellations of power, suggests that The Buribunks is a text whose epoch has come.

This volume includes the first full translation into English of The Buribunks and a selection of critical essays on the text, its meanings in the digital present, its playing with and criticism of the literary form, and its place within Schmitt's life and work. The Buribunks and the essays provide a complex, critical and provocative invitation to reimagine the relations between the human and their imprint and legacy within archives and repositories. There is a fundamental exploration of what it means to be a being intensely aware of 'writing itself'.

This is not just a volume for critical lawyers, literary scholars and the Schmitt literati. It is a volume that challenges a broad range of disciplines, from philosophy to critical data studies, to reflect on the digital present and its assembled and curated beings. It is a volume that provides a set of fantastically located concepts, images and histories that traverse ideas and practices, play and politics, power and possibility.

Part I

Introducing The Buribunks

DOI: 10.4324/9781003091066-1

Chapter 1

The Buribunks as law, technology and literature

Kieran Tranter and Edwin Bikundo

DOI: 10.4324/9781003091066-2

Let us, true to our method, start with what is, with the facts. Both are facts: the Buribunks keep a diary and also have an enlarged mouth.¹

Carl Schmitt, The Buribunks [1918]

Diary entry 21δ1010W: Carl Schmitt and diary people

Carl Schmitt seemingly looms over contemporary legal and political theorising.² Marginalised after the war through his refusal to participate in de-Nazification coupled with his pre-war engagement with the Nazi regime, Schmitt was seen as a dangerous thinker.³ His Weimar works presented to post-war legal and political culture a dangerous critique of cosmopolitan liberalism through recognition of the irredeemable violence inherent in Western politics. The twenty-first century, with its politics of terror, nationalism and naked institutional violence, has resulted in a growing appreciation of Schmitt’s intellectual output accompanied by appropriate caution. While this has not been a blind reassessment of the man, let alone a re-evaluation of his political choices in Germany in the 1930s, theorists – particularly Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Derrida – have led to a reconsideration of how Schmitt and his core contributions can help make sense of the contemporary world, law, politics and being.

One of Schmitt’s first publications was The Buribunks (‘Die Buribunken’), published in the journal Summa in 1918.⁴ Readers otherwise familiar with Schmitt’s later writings would nonetheless be surprised by its tone and content. The Buribunks is a piece of speculative fiction. In it, a 30-year-old Schmitt discusses the future emergence of a specific type of posthuman – ‘the Buribunks’ – humans who have become integrated into a global system of information production through continuous diary writing and dissemination. The text, written in the voice of a celebratory pamphlet for the Buribunks’ global ascendency, describes the cultural origins of the Buribunks, the organisational features of ‘buribunkdom’ and the central tenets of the Buribunks’ manifesto. It is a tightly packed text. A (dys)utopian world of logos fixated elites. A parody of intellectuals. A critique of modernity through the forms of modernism. A triumphant promethean ontology that, in its extremity, seems ludicrous. An insight into the developing thoughts of the man and his complicities.

1 Chapter 2 of this volume, p 14.

2 Meierhenrich and Simons (2017).

3 Müller (2003).

4 Schmitt (1918).

Until now, The Buribunks has only been a footnote in the work of Schmitt scholars. Mentioned in passing, it is generally regarded as an early work peripheral to Schmitt’s later opus. Friedrich Kittler included a substantial extract from it in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.⁵ Kittler’s use of The Buribunks is insightful. For Kittler, it provocatively identified the transformation from analogue existence to the informational age of the digital.⁶ Contemporary readers of The Buribunks are particularly struck by its imagining of an information culture of the real-time self-dissemination of personal details as highly suggestive of living in, and with, the digital. Given the general lack of scholarly attention, little is known about Schmitt’s motivations for the text. Schmitt’s biographer suggests that the ‘realm of buribunkerism’ is an institution inspired by Schmitt’s wartime bureaucratic experience in the Army General Command in Munich.⁷ As a parody of an output- and publicity-obsessed academia, it could also suggest Schmitt’s struggle for a position within the German academy at the time.

One possible reason for the passing over of The Buribunks is that, until now, there has not been a full English translation. A partial translation did appear in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, but the full text has not been available to English-speaking scholars. In recognition of the centenary of publication, Griffith University commissioned a full English translation of The Buribunks. This translation has been approved by the Schmitt estate for publication. The latest version of this translation is reproduced in Chapter 2 of this volume.

Diary entry 21δ1010X: buribunkian activity about Buribunks

Copies of all diary entries are submitted daily and collated by local councils. Their simultaneous inspection results in indexation according to subject matter as well as authorship … Due to an ingenious scheme, later inspection through a card catalogue makes it possible straight away to determine every circumstance of interest pertaining to each person … The diaries thus arranged and inspected are submitted in regular monthly reports to the head of a Buribunk department who … is thus able to record buribunkologically all of buribunkdom. Depictions of one another in photographs and films, constant traffic of diary exchanges, readings from diaries, visits to art studios, conferences, establishment of journals, theatre festivals with homages to the personality of the artist staged before and after the show – in short, many adequate precautions ensure that the interest of the Buribunk in himself and everything buribunkian does not dry up.⁸

Carl Schmitt, The Buribunks [1918]

5 Kittler (1999)

6 Kittler (1999), p 231.

7 Mehring (2014), p 82.

8 Chapter 2 of this volume, p 24.

This volume is the final outcome of a series of activities relating to the full English translation of The Buribunks. Like good Buribunks, we undertook presentations and conferences and symposia. There was reporting of progress to funding bodies. There was publishing of the interest in the project and exchanges of texts and commentaries. The central penultimate activity was the publishing in the Griffith Law Review of the translation and early versions of several of the chapters that are in this volume. The Buribunks write, type and record in the present to acknowledge their doing in the past, so that it is available, searchable and transparent to the future. In the fullness of this spirit, it is important that we acknowledge the chapters that have had an earlier iteration in the Griffith Law Review.

Earlier versions of the translation and the translators’ notes were published as:

• Carl Schmitt (2019), ‘The Buribunks. An Essay on the Philosophy of History’ 28 Griffith Law Review 99.
• Laura Petersen and Gert Reifarth (2019), ‘The Buribunks: A Translators’ Note’ 28 Griffith Law Review 113.

Iterations of Chapters 4, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15 and 16 were published as:

• Kieran Tranter (2019), ‘Die Buribunken as Science Fiction: The Self and Informational Existence’ 28 Griffith Law Review 118.
• Michael P.A. Murphy (2019), ‘What Does It Mean to be Anti-Social? Potentiality and Political Ontology in The Buribunks’ 28 Griffith Law Review 154.
• Francine Rochford (2019), ‘Negative Space: The Paradox at the Heart of Buribunkology’ 28 Griffith Law Review 247.
• Vittorio Lubrano (2019), ‘On the Normality of Writing: Inscription/Description of Everyday Life’ 28 Griffith Law Review 173.
• Karen Schultz (2019), ‘Schmitt’s Satire in The Buribunks: Intertextual Links in Diary-Writing’s Dystopia’ 28 Griffith Law Review 206.
• Desmond Manderson and Edwin Bikundo (2019), ‘Forms of Irony in Carl Schmitt’s Political Romanticism, The Buribunks and Ex Captivitate Salus’ 28 Griffith Law Review 189.
• Attila Gyulai (2019), ‘It’s a Fact: The Buribunks are the Enemies of the Political’ 28 Griffith Law Review 231.

Diary entry 21δ1010Y: The chapters

In each second of world history, under the rushing fingers of the World-I, the letters rush from the keyboard of the typewriter onto the white paper and continue the historical narrative.⁹

Carl Schmitt, The Buribunks [1918]

The chapters that follow are divided into four parts. Along with this introductory chapter, Part I comprises the translation of The Buribunks by Gert Reifarth and Laura Petersen, along with an extended note by the translators. In the note, Petersen and Reifarth discuss the challenges and choices they made in bringing The Buribunks to an English readership. They particularly map and note the intertextualities used by Schmitt and introduce Schmitt’s own focus on diarising.

The chapters in Part II all consider and explore The Buribunks as typeset. Typesets are models, masters and measures, something hard that leaves a mark and allows for copies. Typesets represent an ideal against which the fidelity of copies can be determined. In this part, the Buribunks as Schmitt’s fictional creations with their informatic and archive management priorities are embossed. Each of the chapters considers the Buribunks and the social, institutional and ontological worlds that Schmitt creates around them as typesets for contemporary concerns. The Buribunks as invocative creations are the focus.

This is seen directly in Chapter 4 by Kieran Tranter, which essentially takes the Buribunks as the imagery of informatic existence seriously. He argues that, notwithstanding the textual apparatus of buribunkdom, they provide a measure for contemporary anxieties and transformations from the digital. He suggests that the Buribunks’ sole focus is on mastering their imprint in the collective archive; this highlights both the transition zones between the actual and the digital and the institutional pressure for the formation and maintenance of perfect digital twins emanating in both the Global West and East.

Where Tranter takes an approach of the Buribunk as a measure – indeed, a cypher for the digital – Chapter 5 by Timothy D. Peters builds beyond this relationship. Peters sees in The Buribunks a science fictional examination of the theological commitments of bureaucracy and its practices of archiving. Connecting with Schmitt’s responses to Max Weber in Political Theology,¹⁰ Peters draws parallels between The Buribunks and the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, arguing that both point beyond the economic theology of omnipresence to a need to celebrate the unseen and the unrecordable.

In Chapter 6, Richard Polt draws a parallel suggestion from The Buribunks. However, rather than reading it through the political/economic theology lens like Peters, he regards the Buribunks as shallow, jumpy creatures that manifest Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s criticisms of modern life as unauthentic. Like Tranter, he sees the Buribunks as exemplars of the hyper-connected, hyper-stimulated, hyper-surveilled data-self of the digital. Like Peters, Polt embraces the speculative invitation presented by The Buribunks, imagining a resistive and grounded practice of ‘privacing’ as a possible escape from the ‘hyper-buribunkist age’.

9 Chapter 2 of this volume, p 26.

10 Schmitt (1985).

In Chapter 7, Michael P.A. Murphy also sees in The Buribunks a speculative imagining of a dystopian society of total surveillance and total control; a backwards facing society of actuality rather than potentiality. Murphy identifies in Schmitt’s buribunkdom a parallel with Aristotle’s account of the Megarians. The Buribunks over-emphasise the actual, the archive of doing, rather than the possibility of doing. He shows how this establishes a totalised and absolute sovereignty. But, like Peters and Polt, he also identifies that The Buribunks contains strands that could be woven into resistance. Murphy concludes by exploring how anti-social Buribun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• PART I: Introducing The Buribunks
• PART II: The Buribunks as typeset
• PART III: The Buribunks as writing
• PART IV: The Buribunks as part of Schmitt’s wider oeuvre
• Index