From the noisy monotony of the current sociological and political literature on globalization, a number of patterns can be abstracted that have good chances of becoming journalistic universals of a sort for the coming decades, perhaps even centuries. The first of these almost timeless themes is the claim that a new modus vivendi between the local and the global must be negotiated time and again; the second is that political communities ‘after modernity’ have entered a new constellation ‘beyond the nation-state’.1 The third is that the gaping divide between rich and poor has brought the globalized world to a state of political and moral tension and the fourth is that the progressive consumption of the biosphere along with the pollution of water, air and soil changes ‘humanity’ willy-nilly into an ecological community of interests whose reflection and dialogue must bring forth a new, far-sighted culture of reason. It is not hard to perceive a common tendency in all these themes: the blurring of traditional notions of political subjects and social units. Wherever one looks, one notes that the most important trends have slipped from the hands of those responsible for them, and that the problem-solvers of yesterday and the problems of today (let alone the problem-solvers of today and the problems of tomorrow) make a poor match.
We intend to translate these perceptions from the sociological debate into our own context: a political poetics of space or ‘macrospherology’.2After this shift of perspective, all questions of social and personal identity pose themselves in morphological and immunological terms, which is to say in terms of how something resembling liveable forms of ‘dwelling’ or being-with-oneself-and-one's-own can be accommodated in historically active macro-worlds. Contemporary nervousness about globalization mirrors the fact that with the nation-state, what was previously the largest possible scale of political dwelling – the living and conference room of democratic (or imagined) peoples, as it were – is now subject to negotiation, and that this national living room already has some very unpleasant draughts – most of all in those places where high unemployment rates converge with routines of lamentation at high standards. Looking back, we can see more clearly the extraordinary achievement of the nation-state, which was to offer the majority of those dwelling there a form of domesticity, a simultaneously imaginary and real immune structure, that could be experienced as a convergence of place and self, or as a regional identity in the most favourable sense of the word. This service was performed most impressively where the welfare state had successfully tamed the power state.
The immunological construction of political-ethnic identity has been set in motion, and it is clear that the connection between place and self is not always as stable as the political folklores of territorialism (from ancient agrarian cultures to the modern welfare state) had demanded and pretended. Weakening or dissolving the link of places and selves can allow us to see the two extreme positions that reveal the structure of the social field in an almost experimental state of disintegration: a self without a place and a place without a self. It is clear that all actually existing societies have always had to seek their modus vivendi somewhere between the poles – ideal-typically at the most favourable distance from each extreme position, and one can easily understand that in future too, every genuine political community will have to give an answer to the double imperative of self-determination and place-determination.
The first extreme of dissolution – the self without a place – is probably approached most closely by the diaspora Judaism of the previous two millennia, which has been described not unjustly as a people without a land – a fact that Heinrich Heine put in a nutshell when he stated that the Jews are not at home in a country, but rather in a book: the Torah, which they carried with them like a ‘portable fatherland’.3 This profound and elegant comment illuminates a fact that is frequently passed over: ‘nomadizing’ or ‘deterritorialized’ groups construct their symbolic immunity and ethnic coherence not – or only marginally – from a supporting soil; rather, their communications amongst themselves act directly as an ‘autogenous vessel’4 in which the participants are enclosed and stay in shape, while the group moves through external landscapes. A landless people rooted in a scriptural tradition, therefore, cannot fall prey to the misconception that has imposed itself on virtually all settled groups throughout human history: understanding the land itself as the container of the people, and viewing their native soil as the a priori of their life's meaning or their identity. This territorial fallacy endures as one of the effective and problematic heirlooms of the sedentary age, as the basic reflex underlying all seemingly legitimate applications of political force. Indeed what is termed ‘national defence’ relates directly to it. National defence is based on the obsessive equation of place and self – the axiomatic logical error of territorialized reason (which struck the great majority of Israeli citizens after 1948 as a desirable one to make). This error has increasingly been exposed since an unprecedented wave of transnational mobility began to ensure that peoples and territories everywhere qualify their liaison. The trend towards a multi-local self is characteristic of advanced modernity – like the trend towards a polyethnic or denationalized place.
The Indo-American cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has drawn attention to this state of affairs with his conceptual creation of the ‘ethnoscape’, allowing us to examine issues like the progressive deterritorialization of ethnic connections, or the formation of ‘imaginary communities’ outside nation-states and the imaginary sharing of the images of life forms from other cultures among countless individuals.5 As far as Judaism during its period of exile is concerned, its provocation lay in the fact that it constantly reminded the peoples of the Western hemisphere of the seeming paradox and actual scandal of a factually existing self without a place.
At the other extreme, the phenomenon of the place without a self becomes increasingly clear. The earth's uninhabitable regions – the white deserts (polar world), the grey ones (high mountains), the green ones (jungles), the yellow ones (sand deserts) and the blue deserts (oceans) – are paradigmatic of this extreme ‘selflessness’; the secondary man-made deserts can be placed alongside them. In the context of our investigation of spheric conditions, the latter are of interest by way of contrast as they constitute places with which people do not usually develop any cultivating relationship, let alone attempt any identification. This applies to all transit spaces, in both the narrower and wider sense of the term, be they facilities intended for traffic such as train stations, docks and airports, roads, squares and shopping centres, or complexes designed for limited stays such as holiday villages and tourist cities, factory premises or night shelters. Such places may have their own atmospheres – but these do not depend on a populace or collective self that would be at home in them. By definition, they do not hold on to those who pass through them. They are the alternately overrun or empty no man's lands; the transit deserts that proliferate in the enucleated centres and hybrid peripheries of contemporary ‘societies’.
It does not take much analytical effort to see that in these ‘societies’, globalizing tendencies work against a prior normality – life in massive, ethnic or national containers (along with their specific phantasms of origin and mission) and the unendangered licence to confuse land with self, decisively infringed upon by globalizing tendencies. On the one hand, such ‘societies’ loosen their regional ties through large populations acquiring unprecedented mobility. On the other hand, there is an increasing number of transit places that cannot be inhabited by those who frequent them. Thus globalizing and mobilizing ‘societies’ simultaneously approach both the ‘nomadic’ pole, a self without a place, and the desert pole, a place without a self – with a shrinking middle ground of regional cultures and grounded contentments.
The formal crisis of modern ‘mass societies’, which is now seen chiefly as a loss of meaning for the nation-state, thus results from the advanced erosion of ethnic container functions. What was previously understood as ‘society’ and invoked with it was usually, in fact, nothing other than the content of a thick-walled, territorially grounded, symbol-assisted and generally monolingual container – that is, a collective which found its self-assurance in a certain national hermeticism and flourished in redundancies of its own (that could never be entirely understood by strangers).6 Because of their self-containing qualities, such historical communities – known as peoples – stayed on the point of intersection between self and place and usually relied on a considerable asymmetry between inside and outside; this usually manifested itself in pre-political cultures as naïve ethnocentrism, and at the political level in the substantive difference between inner (domestic) and outer (foreign) policy. The effects of globalization increasingly evened out this difference and asymmetry; the immunity offered by the national container is perceived as increasingly endangered by those who profit from it. Certainly no one who has tasted the advantages of free transnational movement is likely to desire a return to the militant enclosures of older nation-states in earnest, much less the totalitarian self-hypnoses that often characterized tribal life forms. Yet for numerous people today, the purpose and risk of the trend towards a world of thin-walled and mixed ‘societies’ are neither clear nor welcome. Globalization, Roland Robertson rightly observes, is a ‘basically contested process’.7 The protest against globalization is also globalization itself – it is part of the inevitable and indispensable immune reaction of local organs to infections through the larger format of the world.
The psychopolitical challenge of the Global Age, which Martin Albrow aptly describes as a wilful result stage of the Modern Age, lies in the fact that the weakening of container immunities must not be dealt with simply as decadence and loss of form, that is to say as an ambivalent or cynical abetment of self-destruction. What is at stake for the postmoderns is successful new designs for liveable, immune relationships, and these are precisely what can and will develop anew in ‘societies’ with permeable walls – albeit, as has always been the case, not among all and not for all.
In this context the epochal trend towards individualistic life forms reveals its immunological significance: today, in advanced ‘societies’, it is individuals who – perhaps for the first time in the history of hominid coexistence – break away from their group bodies as carriers of immune competencies, groups which had to that point functioned primarily as protection. They seek in great numbers to disconnect their happiness and unhappiness from the being-in-shape of the political commune. We are now experiencing what is probably the irreversible transformation of political security collectives into groups with individualistic immune designs. (This trend would remain in force even if a purported or genuine ‘return of war’ were to lead to a renewed primacy of the political. Such a returned war would certainly have a therapeutic, defensive and immunitary character; the re-militarized individualistic group could only relapse into collectivist moods episodically.)
This tendency manifests itself most clearly in the pilot nation of the Western world, the USA, where the concept of the pursuit of happiness has nominally been the foundation for the ‘social contract’ since the Declaration of Independence. The centrifugal effects of making individual happiness the guiding concept have thus far been balanced out by the combined energies of communities and civil societies such that the traditional immunological precedence of the group over its members also seemed embodied in that synthetic people, United States Americans. Meanwhile, the tables have been turned: no country, population or culture on earth practises as much biological, psychotechnic and religioid self-concern in parallel with a growing abstinence from political commitments. In the 1996 presidential election, the USA saw its first voter turnout of under 50 per cent (Clinton's re-election). In the November 1998 elections to the House of Representatives and the Senate in 1998, roughly two out of three voters stayed at home (though experts did not view the 38 per cent turnout as a particularly bad result).8 It was only through an exceptionally hard-fought election campaign that some 60 per cent of eligible voters were mobilized to cast their votes in the re-election of George W. Bush in November 2004. This testifies to a situation in which the majority feel sure that they can largely abandon solidarity with the fates of their political commune – guided by the highly plausible notion that the individual will, in future, no longer (or only in exceptional cases) find their immunological optimum in the national collective, but at best in the solidary system of their own community, or more precisely the victimological collective, though most clearly in private insurance arrangements.
The axiom of the individualistic immune order gained currency in populations of self-centred individuals like some new vital insight: that, ultimately, no one would do for them what they do not do for themselves. The new immunity techniques (in their institutional centre, private insurances and pension funds, and at their individual periphery, dietetics and biotechnology) presented themselves as existential strategies for ‘societies’ of individuals in which the long road to flexibilization, the weakening of ‘object relationships’ and the general authorization of disloyal or reversible inter-human relationships had led to the ‘goal’, to what Spengler rightly prophesied as the final stage of every culture: the state in which it is impossible to determine whether individuals are diligent or decadent (but diligent in what respect, and decadent in relation to which height?9). It is the state in which individuals have lost their ability of exemplary world-formation. The individualized humans behaved as if they had realized that the optimum immunization cannot be attained by absorbing ‘the world’ in a multi-faceted way, but rather by defining one's contact with it very narrowly. As a result, the last metaphorical difference, namely the distinction between noble and common, lost its meaning. The end of the heroic age of discovery and creation was also the end of great men, those all-encompassing individuals who seemed capable of unifying their respective epochs and collectives in themselves. They were followed by the individualistic cycle in which everyone made themselves their own speciality. The consequences are well known. One of them was that the anthropological phantom of the Modern Age, l’homme monde – the microcosmic, the variously receptive and expressive, the complete human – disappeared like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.