But what if the participants in the commando operations of early terrestrial globalization were neither captains loyal to the crown nor missionaries who obeyed the pope or Christ? They did not need to feel excluded from the higher chances of shelter or from the idealizations of European expansion. For the worldly minded pioneers of world-disclosure, there were ways and means to step beneath one of the secular canopies of globalization, and even a spirit not religiously committed had good prospects of getting its money's worth in the Last Bullet project. Anyone who did not acquire new lands for a European king or believers for the church could nonetheless sail into European ports as a conqueror and bringer of riches if they knew how to make themselves useful as agents of the European experiential sciences. These open-minded disciplines, which grew around geography and anthropology, constituted themselves emphatically in the incipient era of expansion as new sciences; they served an accumulation of knowledge whose methodological modernity and allegiance to the age of European world-taking were plain for all to see.
It is characteristic of these insights that they accumulated like a second capital – albeit a capital that would belong to an enlightened humanity as a whole, and not be withdrawn from public and civil use by princes and their keepers of secrets. Against the background of the new sciences of the outer humans, of usable nature and of the inhabited earth, an alphabetized European could never feel entirely cut off from the flow of their native systems of meaning, even in the most desolate abandonment on distant islands and continents. Every life on the outer front potentially bore an aura of cumulative experience that could be projected into literary documentations. I have already spoken of the immortalization of countless seafarers and explorers on land and sea maps; cartographical fame is only a special example of what one could call the general canopy function of the European experiential sciences during the globalization process. It currently and potentially protects the actors on the outer lines from the danger of sinking into the senseless white and being engulfed by the depressions that can be triggered by collisions with unassimilable newness, otherness, strangeness and bleakness.
The empirical sciences, with their affiliated literary genres of travel account, utopia and exotic novel, tend towards a transformation of all outside conditions into observations, and all observations into announcements that find their way into the great book of new European theory – ‘observers’, after all, exist only as subjects who will write what they have seen or found. The constructivist assumption that observation is description of facts with the aid of a central distinction already applied to the early long-distance travellers, in so far as they applied the distinction between taking or not taking with them throughout the world. I am thinking especially of the golden age of explorer-writers, from which names such as Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Jacques-Etienne-Victor Arago, Reinhold and Georg Forster, Johann Gottfried Seume, Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry Morton Stanley have occasionally risen to the level of world literature – as far as the breadth of their readership was concerned, at least. It is typical of the Modern Age habitus of acquiring, bringing, contributing, collaborating, going forwards and systematizing that the principal research takes place in the form of competitions. Corresponding to the races for goals to be reached, there is a writing competition on the field of scientific honour – which applied particularly to the fundamentally hystericized domain of polar research, whose protagonists mostly appeared as their own rhapsodists and publicizers of their research woes. This entanglement of research and theatre made it recognizable at a popular level that all forms of scientific expedition would also be media matters in future; one can illustrate this in the present with the amply hystericizable enterprises of genetic research, brain research and cancer research. Concerning the heroic days of globalization, one can say that had its heroes not been mirrored in an idealizing medium, their goals would never have become adequately clear or unclear to them.
Initially, however, it was not so much the mass media that observed the expeditions as they set off. Rather, all literate participants in the voyages into the unknown looked towards an imaginary hyper-medium, the only one in which the history of the lonely successes outside could be recorded and brought back: the canopy that could hold all the solitudes of researchers had to be a fantastic integral book – a book of cognitive records in which no one would be forgotten who had ever stood out as a bringer-back of experience and a contributor to the great text of world-disclosure. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, someone would attempt the actual publication of this imaginary hyper-book of European experiential knowledge. It is characteristic of the practical genius of French Enlightenment figures that as early as the mid-eighteenth century, at half-time in terrestrial globalization, so to speak, they summoned the energy to carry out the project of an Encyclopedia of valuable knowledge. It lent the previously informal theoretical canopy the edifying shape of the circle which orders and holds all knowledge – a circle that could, furthermore, be straightened into a section of the bookshelf encompassing seventeen volumes of text and sixteen of illustrations. In this work, items of knowledge from the remotest sources could be promoted to their cognitive value-forms. Thus the black of print celebrated its triumph over white in the hyper-book of the sciences.
That collecting and bringing home experiences can also have a subversive, or in some cases at least a tactless side, however, was learned by Frederick II of Prussia in his dealings with the globetrotter and naturalist Georg Forster. At his first audience with the king after acquiring a professorship for natural science in Halle, Forster supposedly said – somewhat more frankly than was customary at the royal court – that he had seen five kings in his life, three of them savage and two tame, ‘but none like Your Majesty’. Frederick the Great considered these the words of a ‘most uncouth fellow’. But how else should one have told the princes? Once the kings of the Old World could be viewed empirically like exotic chieftains (and once European residences could be observed as mere locations of royalty), it could no longer be kept from the noble lords and their followers that their time was coming to an end.1