Hence the same thing that had been true for the earth since Columbus's voyage was confirmed for the extra-terrestrial dimensions too: in the earth's circumnavigated space, all points are of equal value. This neutralization subjected the spatial thought of the Modern Age to a radical change of meaning. The traditional ‘living, weaving and being’ of humans in regional orientations, markings and attractions is outdone by a system for localizing any point in a homogeneous, arbitrarily divisible representational space.1 Where modern, position-spatial thought gains the upper hand, humans can no longer remain at home in their traditional world interiors and the phantasmal extensions and roundings-off of those interiors.2 They no longer dwell exclusively beneath their home-centred sky. In so far as they take part enterprisingly in the great departure, sharing in its ideas, discoveries and gains, they have given up their provinces of birth; they have left their local language-houses and their terrestrially fastened firmaments to move for all time within an insuperably antecedent outside – albeit an increasingly furnished outside in which social policy and interior design converge.
These new entrepreneurs from the pilot nations of European expansion are no longer rooted in their native country; they no longer float amid its voices and smells; they no longer obey, as in the past, its historical markers or magical poles of attraction. They have forgotten what enchanted springs were, what pilgrimage churches and places of power meant, and what curses lay upon twilight corners. For them, the poetics of the natal space is no longer decisive. They no longer live forever in the landscapes they were born into, they no longer breathe beneath the indigenous skies of their canopy poems; instead, they have learned to carry out their projects in the other place, the outermost and abstract place. In future, their location will be the map, on whose points and lines they localize themselves without reservations. It is the knowledgeably painted paper, the mappamundo, that tells them where they are. The map absorbs the land, and for imagining spatial thought, the image of the globe gradually makes the real extensions disappear.
For the terrestrial globe, the typographical marvel that informs modern humans of their location more than any other image, this marks the start of an illustrious success story extending over a span of more than five hundred years. Its monopoly on complete views of the earth's surface, shared with the great maps and planispheres, was only broken in the final quarter of the twentieth century by satellite photography.3 In the epoch of its dominance, the globe not only became the central medium of the new homogenizing approach to location, an indispensable worldview instrument in the hands of all who had come to power and knowledge in the Old World and its branches. In addition, through constant amendments to the maps, it documents the permanent offensive of discoveries, conquests, openings and namings with which the advancing Europeans established themselves at sea and on land in the universal outside. From each decade to the next, European globes and maps published the state of the process whose formula was supplied after the event by Martin Heidegger when he wrote: ‘The fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture. From now on the word “picture” means: the collective image of representing production [vorstellendes Herstellen].’4 What is advertised and decried as ‘globalization’ in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – as if it were a new phenomenon that had only recently befallen us – constitutes, from these perspectives, a late and dishonest moment in an event whose true scale becomes visible when one understands the Modern Age consistently as a transition from meditative speculation on an orb to the practical acquisition of facts about it. One should emphasize, admittedly, that continental Europeans did not put an end to the agony of the inherited Ptolemaic worldview until the twentieth century. Now they must catch up, almost at the last minute, with the realization which the vast majority of them refused to accept regarding themselves: that virtually every point on a circumnavigated orb can be affected by the transactions of opponents, even from the greatest distance.
The meaning of terrestrial globalization reveals itself when one recognizes in it the history of a space-political externalization that is seemingly indispensable for the winners and unbearable for the losers, but inevitable for both. The latent metaphysical information of the earth to all its users had always been that all beings populating its surface are outside in an absolute sense, even if they still attempt to shelter themselves in pairings, dwellings and collective symbolic shells – systemicists would say in communications. As long as thinking people, considering the open sky, meditated on the cosmos as a vault – immeasurable, but closed – they remained protected from the danger of catching cold from their externality. Their world was still the house that lost nothing. Since they circumnavigated the planet, however, the wandering star that carries flora, fauna and cultures, an abyss has opened up above them; when they look up, they peer through it into a fathomless outside. A second abyss opens up in the foreign cultures that, after the ethnological enlightenment, demonstrate to everyone that practically everything can be different elsewhere. What we took to be the eternal order of things is no more than a local context of immanence that carries us – leave it, and you will see that there are quite differently built rafts of order floating on the chaos. The two abysses, the cosmological and the ethnological, confront the observers with the fortuity of their existence and thusness. Together, they make it clear that the immunological catastrophe of the Modern Age is not the ‘loss of the centre’, but rather the loss of the periphery. The final boundaries are no longer what they once seemed; the support they offered was an illusion, its authors we ourselves: this notice of loss (in technical terms: the de-ontologization of fixed edges) is the dysangelium of the Modern Age, which disseminates itself at the same times as the gospel of the discovery of new opportunity spaces. It is one of the hallmarks of the epoch that the good news rides upon the bad.
It was in the Iberian ports that the plague ships of knowledge first landed. Back from India, returned from the antipodes, the first eyewitnesses of the round earth gazed with transformed eyes at a world that would henceforth be called the Old. Whoever sailed into their home port after circumnavigating the world – like the eighteen emaciated survivors of Magellan's 1519–22 expedition, who had barely disembarked before staggering into a church to sing the Te Deum – set foot on land once more in a place that could never again be idealized as the domestic-native world-cave. In this sense, Seville was the first location-city in world history; its port, or more precisely that of San Lucar de Barrameda, was the first in the Old World to receive homecoming witnesses to a voyage around the globe. Locations are former homes that present themselves to the disenchanted and sentimental gaze of the returned. In such places, the spatial law of the Modern Age is in effect, namely that one can no longer interpret one's own place of origin as the hub of the existent and the world as its concentrically arranged environment. Anyone living today, after Magellan and after Armstrong, is forced to project even their home town as a point perceived from without. The transformation of the Old World into an aggregate of locations reflects the new reality of the globe after the circumnavigation of the earth. The location is the point in the imagined world at which the natives grasp themselves as grasped from the outside; it is what enables the circumnavigated return to themselves.
The strangest thing about this process is the way countless native Europeans have managed to ignore and falsify it for almost an entire age, and to delay their participation in it for so long that, in the late twentieth century, they suddenly acted as if they had entirely new reasons to examine that unheard-of phenomenon, globalization. What arguments would they put forward if one reminded them, as a precaution, that the state of the world around 1900 – before the nationalist regressions of the twentieth century – was in many ways more open and global than it was in 2000? Certainly: the quicker and more routine the circumnavigations become, the more generally the transformation of ‘lifeworlds’ into locations spreads – which is why it was only in the age of fast transportation and super-fast information transmissions that the disenchantment of local immune structures became epidemically palpable.
In the course of its development, globalization bursts open the dream shells of grounded, housed, internally oriented and autonomously salvific collective life – that life which had previously rarely been anywhere except with itself and amid its native landscapes (Heidegger's Gegnet gives these outstripped spaces a belated and futile name). That older life knew no other constitution of the world than the self-harbouring, vernacular, microspherically animated and macrospherically walled one – it viewed the world as a strong-walled socio-cosmological extension of a locally earthed, self-centred, monolingual, group-uterine power of imagination. The premodern space, each part in its own way, was a volume stretched out by enlivened qualities. Now, however, globalization, which carries the screened outside everywhere, tears the freely trading cities – and ultimately even the introverted villages – out into the public space, which reduces all local particularities to the common denominator: money and geometry.5 It breaks open the independently growing endospheres and takes them to the mesh grid. Once caught in it, the settlements of the grounded mortals lose their immemorial privilege of being the respective centre of the world.
Viewed from this perspective, the history of the Modern Age, as we have stated, is initially nothing other than the history of a spatial ‘revolution’ into the homogeneous outside. It carries out the explication of the earth, in so far as the latter's inhabitants are shown bit by bit that the categories of direct neighbourhood are no longer sufficient to interpret coexistence with other people and other things in the expanded space. This history brings about the catastrophe of local ontologies by doing away with the old poetry of domesticity. In the course of these clarifications, all Old European countries de jure become locations on the surface of an orb; numerous cities, villages and landscapes are transformed de facto into stations of a limitless traffic where our lively modern capital marches through in its fivefold metamorphosis as commodity, money, text, image and celebrity.6 Every empirical place on the earth's surface becomes a potential address of capital, which regards all points in space in terms of their accessibility for technical and economical measures. While the speculative cosmic orb of the philosophers had, in former times, made a peak performance of security within the encompassing into an object of observation, the new ‘earth apple’ – as Behaim called his globe – announced discreetly, cruelly and interestingly to the people of Nuremberg, and via these to the Europeans, the topological message of the Modern Age: that humans are creatures which exist on the edge of an uneven round body – a body whose whole is neither a womb nor a vessel, and has no shelter to offer.
The globe may rest on a precious stand with feet of engraved rosewood, enclosed in a metal meridian ring, and it may strike the observer as a paradigm of straightforwardness and delimitation; yet it will always reproduce the image of a body that lacks an enclosing edge, the spheric outer vault. Its uppermost part already appears outside it. What philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries called ‘existing’ is thus explicated by every globe: whoever regards it is called upon to imagine themselves as a being on the threshold between the earth and nothingness. No circumstance characterizes the cartographical art of the Modern Age – and eo ipso its way of thinking – more profoundly than the fact that no globe we have ever seen shows the earth's atmosphere. Two-dimensional maps likewise provide views of airless territories. All older models of the earth neglect the atmospheric element as naturally as if there were a permanent agreement that only the solid body merits depiction. It was not until the twentieth century that the atmosphere was added once more and the objectified conditions for human milieu-connectedness made nameable. Only then can one state explicitly that existence and immersion are equally potent concepts.
Every globe adorning the libraries, studies and salons of educated Europe embodied the new doctrine of the precedence of the outside. Europeans advanced into this outside as discoverers, merchants and tourists, but they saved their souls by simultaneously withdrawing into their wallpapered interiors. What is a salon but the place where one chats about distant monstrosities? The celestial globes set up in parallel with the terrestrial globe still disputed, as long as it was possible in any way, the message revealed by the terrestrial globes;7 they continued to promote the illusion of cosmic shelter for mortals beneath the firmament, but their function became increasingly ornamental – like the art of the astrologers, who changed from experts on stars and fate to psychologists of edification and fairground prophets. Nothing can save the physical heavens from being disenchanted as a form of semblance. What looks like a high vault is an abyss perceived through a shell of air. The rest is displaced religiosity and bad poetry.8