The hallmark of established globality is the state of forced neighbourhood with countless fortuitously coexisting individuals. This state of affairs can best be examined using the topological term ‘density’. A statement about density describes the degree of coexistence pressure between particles and agents. Anyone using this word holds a tool that not only keeps its distance from the common mythologies of alienation (as if all agents had originally formed a single family and later, after some disaster, grown distant from one another); it also helps to overcome the romanticism of closeness with which modern moral philosophers have sought to generalize unduly the openness, be it voluntary or forced, of the subject for the other.1
Increased density implies an increasing likelihood of encounters between centres of action, whether in the sense of transactions or of collisions and near-collisions. Where dense states dominate, the basic conditions for commodity and information traffic change in a manner that demands far-reaching moral adjustments: one-sided dictates and sustained non-communications now become equally implausible. At the same time, high density guarantees the chronic resistance of the milieu to unilateral extension – a resistance that, in cognitive terms, can be viewed as a bracing climate for learning processes. Sufficiently strong actors make each other friendly, astute and co-operative – and trivialize one another too, of course.2 They do so because they successfully stand in each other's way, and have learned to offset their respective interests. By co-operating only when there are prospects of shared profit, they reinforce the plausibility of the postulate that the rules of reciprocity should make as much sense to the others as to themselves. This applies as much to interacting states as to private actors.
Through chronic stays in dense milieus, inhibition becomes second nature to us. If it is sufficiently morally and physically rehearsed, a merely one-sided seizure of the initiative will seem a utopia that no longer corresponds to real conditions. Freedom to act, as it was once understood, now seems like a fairy-tale motif from the time when attacking still helped. If one still finds isolated cases of one-sided expansion here and there, this indicates that certain actors still think they are living in pre-dense circumstances which are conducive to disinhibition. Generally, however, one can say that all patches of ‘virgin soil’, wherever they might have been, have found their settlers. In process-theoretical terms, high density means that the success phase of unilateral practices is over – though one cannot rule out an occasional strong aftershock. The actors have been driven out of the historical Eden in which salvation was promised to the one-sided.
What makes telecommunication a concept of some ontological gravity is that it refers to the practical execution of densification. Today's style of telecommunication results in a world whose updating involves ten million e-mails per minute and electronic financial transactions totalling one billion dollars daily. This overly common term, then, cannot be adequately understood as long as it fails to emphasize very explicitly the production of the reciprocal world context built on co-operation, that is to say mutual inhibition – including all long-distance business relations, long-distance aids, long-distance constraints and long-distance conflicts. Only this strong concept of telecommunication as the capitalist form of actio in distans is suitable to describe the tonicity and mode of existence in the expanded glass palace. Telecommunication gives operative support to the old dream of the moralists, namely a world where the inhibitions are a match for the disinhibitions.
Hope, then – may Ernst Bloch forgive us – is not a principle, but rather an effect. Two things give us hope from one case to the next (and are perhaps suitable for process-theoretical generalization): firstly, the fact that people occasionally have new ideas that effect changes in life in the transition from the model to its application, both at the micro-level and on a large scale; these sometimes include inventions with few side effects and a high epidemic potential. Secondly, the observation that under sufficiently dense conditions, a practicable remainder is usually sifted out from the flood of ideas which some are willing to realize, and presents the better option for many, though perhaps not for all. Density-based reason has the effect of a sequence of filters ensuring the elimination of one-sided offensives and immediately harmful innovations – such as those violent crimes which can only be committed once or in short series. In this way, for example, accident-prone new technologies can already be eliminated while in development, or, if they are indispensable, optimized far enough for the operating risk to be tolerable.
One can call density's mode of effect communicative, but only in so far as one can term mutual restrictions of manoeuvring room communications. Once the fog has lifted, what remains of the phenomenon known in poor visibility as communicative competency is reciprocal inhibition. The much-vaunted consensus of the reasonable is the outside of the ability to prevent one another from taking one-sided actions. Likewise, the concept of acknowledgement, which is granted slightly too high a profile in moral philosophy, refers more to the power of an agent to earn recognition as a potential or actual preventer of someone else's initiative. It is Jürgen Habermas's achievement to have recognized the ‘inclusion of the other’ as a procedure for expanding the field in which mutually inhibiting mechanisms are valid – even if, clinging to the idealist tradition, he dialogically misinterprets this process: the ‘inclusion of the other’ is not the expansion of the sphere of action towards commonality but rather, on the contrary, the trace left by the tendency to disable action as such – and its replacement with role-playing in collective projects. The more others are ‘included’, the more the possibilities of taking action oneself are liquidated. The mass unemployment of ‘perpetrators’ is the sign of the time. It is important, however, to read this as a good sign: one must praise the build-up of capacities for mutual inhibition as the most effective civilizatory mechanism – albeit without forgetting that when the unwelcome and unbearable aspects of unilateral action are eliminated, the good ones are often filtered out along with them.
From this perspective, we can explain why the globalization of crime is instructive for the post-historical situation: the criminal usages inside the crystal palace and along its periphery indicate how and where active disinhibition – once idealized as ‘praxis’ – can constantly achieve new local advantages over inhibiting forces. Organized crime is based on a professionalized improvement of disinhibition that keeps finding new ideas between the gaps of awkward everyday circumstances. Spontaneous crime, however, expresses no more than a momentary loss of self-control among confused individuals, who in legal jargon are doggedly termed ‘perpetrators’. Sustained crime is mostly a nose for the gap, in the market as well as the law, combined with unperturbed vigour. This vigour fulfils the requirements of perpetration, both in a legal and in a philosophically significant sense. Successfully organized criminals are not victims of their nerves; on the contrary, they are key witnesses to freedom of action, despite the universal context of inhibition.
These findings apply especially to what has recently become known as ‘global terrorism’, of which there have been brilliant partial analyses, but as yet no satisfactory explanation. One can best do justice to its strong manifestations on a theoretical level, in particular the inconceivably simple act of 9/11, if one reads it as an indication of how the disinhibition motif was appropriated by active losers from the non-Western camp against the post-historical background. This does not mean that evil came all the way to Manhattan, as the moralistic newspaper supplements, never at a loss for quick slogans, announced. It rather shows how a new wave of actors is discovering the joys of one-sidedness for itself. They do not, like previous loser movements after 1789, follow the pattern of a ‘revolution’; instead, they directly imitate the original momentum of European expansions since 1492: the elimination of sluggishness with the act of striking out, the euphoria-inducing asymmetry of the pure attack, the irreversible headstart gained by those who are on the scene first and make their mark before the others. The antecedence of offensive violence can thus establish itself anew – though this time from the side that was previously the more disadvantaged. But as it is too late to revise the distribution of objects and territories on the globe, even for perpetrators of Islamist terror, they seize large terrains in the wide-open space of world news. There they raise their fiery coat of arms, just as the Portuguese once erected their banners of stone after landing on the coasts of Africa and India.
If one realized why circumstances play into the hands of the terrorists, one could also gain a more precise impression of one's own situation: the bombers have understood, better than many production companies, that the lords of the cables cannot manufacture all content in the studio, and remain dependent on an outside supply of events. By now they have learned from experience that they themselves offer the most sought-after events, as they have a virtual monopoly as content providers in the real-life violence sector. The infospace in the Great Installation is, for the time being, as open as amorphous Africa was to the most brutal European interventions in the nineteenth century. This means that attack always sells, and the more ruthlessly it is carried out, the higher the medial reward. With evil amusement, the attackers see why: the nervous systems of the crystal palace's inhabitants can be effortlessly occupied by any number of invaders, as palace boredom makes the residents wait for news from the outside. The underworked paranoid programmes of the affluent citizens demand that the slightest signals proving the existence of an external enemy be captured and amplified. In the hystericized infosphere, such magnifications are disseminated as a picture of the situation to the terror consumers, who absorb the indirect feeling of being under threat into their metabolism as a stimulant.
Among the terrorists, the sum of these effectively theoretical insights leads to a coherent practice: when they position their telegenic explosions in the right places, they intuitively exploit the hyper-communicative constitution of the Western infosphere. They influence the entire system through minimal invasions by – if the phrase is permissible – stimulating its acupressure points.3 They can rely on the fact that the only anti-terror measure with guaranteed success, namely absolute silence about new attacks in the media (or the introduction of an information quarantine to create a distance between the attack and its sensation-echo), is reliably prevented by their insistence on the duty to report. ‘Our’ nervous conductions therefore pass on the local terror impulses almost automatically to the adult terror consumers in the crystal palace. The compulsion to report indefinitely maintains the status of terrorism as the art of making oneself talked-about. Because of this, the directors of terror, like all conquerors before them, can equate success with truth. Bizarre or not, the result of this transaction reveals itself in the fact that one is truly talking about them – with a constancy that virtually places terror alongside the weather, the secrets of women and the latest movements on the stock market. Though a phantom that rarely materializes, it enjoys an ontological renown that is normally reserved for existentials. Compared to this, the fact that the authors of major attacks are viewed as heroes in large parts of the world not controlled by the West is only a partial aspect of terror's success.
Terrorism has proved itself as a strategy for one-sided expansion on the post-historical continent known as ‘attention’: it pervades the brains of the ‘masses’ without encountering any notable resistance, and secures a considerable segment for itself on the global market of thematic agitations. It is thus closely related to the modern action and media arts, as Boris Groys has shown in sufficiently cold-blooded analyses; perhaps it merely takes the traditions of romantically transgressive art to their heightened conclusion.4 Such art had aimed early on to force its significance and conspicuousness through aggressive expansions of artistic procedures. The development of such techniques in the course of the twentieth century made it clear that the use of shocks does not prove the greatness of a work, but is rather a simple marketing mechanism. Karlheinz Stockhausen's rightly world-famous outburst of envy towards the authors of the New York drama says more about the truth of that day than the entire industry of September literature.5
From this perspective, we can understand why neo-liberalism and terrorism belong together like the recto and verso of the same page. On both sides one reads the same clearly articulated text:
For the determined, history is not over. One-sidedness pays as much as it ever did for those who trust in the attack. The chosen can still view the world as a lordless object, and where there is a will to strike out, the witnesses for the pure attack have their prey at their mercy. The freedom to push forwards is the nature of truth.
One should admit that this is a siren song – and there are not enough masts to tie up all who hear it. Such music of disinhibition to action is welcome for tonicized individuals who wish to invest their excess powers, whether to entrepreneurial or avenging ends.
It is only on the surface, then, that a play is being performed on the world stage which is known in the coalition of the well-meaning as the ‘attack of the fundamentalists’; at a deeper level, the fundamentalism of attack ensures unrest. Although it belongs to a bygone age, its leftovers are virulent in the post-unilateral world. What drives the most resolute attackers, be they assassins, speculators, criminals, entrepreneurs, artists or chosen ones, is the longing to transform themselves into a beam of pure initiative – and this in a global situation that musters everything it can to contain offensives and discourage initiatives. Consequently Islamic fundamentalism, which is currently perceived as the pinnacle of senseless sovereign aggression, is only interesting as a mental arrangement to ensure the precarious transition from theory to practice – or from ressentiment to practice, or from appetite to practice – among a group of action candidates under the most improbable circumstances: we recall that the cognitive function of the ‘foundation’ has never been any other than to remove the inhibition of the agent whom it spurs on to action. With good reason, today's anti-fundamentalists in the realm of theory flatly deny their clients the right to expect directives of any kind from them, which is of course a protective claim – for those theorists, one should note, who understood after the twentieth century's flood of perpetrators how quickly authors of general statements can find themselves in the zone of complicity.
One does, at least, ask oneself in retrospect why it took so long for the practical significance of giving reasons for deeds to become visible. The effective reason for having a reason is the need for a motive by which a would-be perpetrator is willing to be led. Are these energies not always already in search of an excuse that will give them free rein? Since Descartes, we have known what demanding perpetrators expect of their disinhibitory reasons: anyone wishing to shock their environment through actions in a time of generalized uncertainty will scarcely settle for less than a fundamentum inconcussum. The wall that all who would perform the improbable must pass through only becomes penetrable through a strong means of disinhibition – and as the world of today, in the eyes of the ambitious and the insulted, consists purely of walls that discourage activity, the strongest wall-breakers are just good enough for the perpetrators of the last days. As Niklas Luhmann noted, radicalism is the modern way of presenting the implausible as the only plausible option.
Therefore, the only notable thing about current acts of terror against the major structures is that they prove the existence of a post-historical radicalism – which is equivalent to discovering a species of black swans. It will take a great deal of disappointment work before neo-liberals and Islamist terrorists – both of them martyrs of post-history – understand that the joys of the actively asymmetrical life belong ontologically to the ancien régime; it remains to be seen whether these swans too will then become white again.
Both types of actor are untimely in every sense of the word. The one side still wants to set off like gold-hungry seafarers in 1492, and the other dreams of riding out like monotheistically inflamed desert tribes in the seventh century. Both, however, must adapt to the situation of the time by pretending that they see modern networks as their great chance, not as the epitome of obstructive circumstances. With their belated philosophies of action, they offer the two main views of a romanticism of the offensive at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This impatient reverie confuses the gap with the open field. Its actors seek to retrieve strong asymmetry in acting out missions, projects and other gestures of a self-rewarding first-strike character in a time that has already given precedence to nicety, symmetry, inhibition, reciprocity and co-operation in East and West alike – but not in the gaps, which, due to the system's nature, are very numerous and very narrow.
From an action-theoretical perspective, then, ‘historical existence’ could be defined as sharing in a space of action in which acting out inner excesses and making world history occasionally come to the same thing. The seaman Columbus, whom sources portray as a braggart and borderline autist, defined what a historical hero of the old school can achieve. After ‘history’, however, the only ones who still attempt to make ‘history’ are those who are unable and unwilling to accept its expiry. This produces autisms without resolutions on the world stage – but with a loud echo in the otherwise uniform droning of the media. 9/11 is the clearest indication to date of complete post-historicity, even though many, in shock, wanted to see it as a historical sign – even as the starting signal for the ‘recommencement of history’.6 It brought an unnecessary date in the world that points to nothing except the day on which it occurred – and the iconoclastic plan that spawned it. The September criminals stood for a one-sided violence with nothing resembling a project up its sleeve, aside from vague references to repeat performances – references insistently misunderstood as a threat by poor strategists. A genuine threat would take on the form of an ‘armed suasion’, as the strategy theorists say; the September deed, however, suggested nothing; it was a mere demonstration of the ability to carry out a single attack on the crystal palace, a ‘measure’ that spent itself in its execution. The ‘Holy War’ for the theocratic state is not a project, but rather a virile gesture to defend the honour of the offensive. Who can say if it means any more than an armed inferiority complex? The great assassination showed no striving for the good end by regrettably necessary evil means, as taught in revolutionary meta-ethics since the nineteenth century; it was the pure reclamation of the attack in the middle of a time defined entirely by the primacy of inhibitions and feedbacks. The perpetrators and defendants of 9/11 could at least, like many iconoclasts before them, experience the destruction of a supposed idol as a gratification.
One can tell from 9/11 that on its dramatic side, the content of post-history will continue to be determined by the interactions of the deluded. This is not merely an observation like any other; the impossibility, noted by Hegel, of learning anything from history is now augmented by the impossibility of learning from episodes of post-history. Only the providers of security technology can draw their conclusions from post-historical activisms – the remaining observers are at the mercy of the ebb and flow of medial excitation, including the hectic rush of internationalized police forces who use the heightened public stress to legitimize their expansion. The clients in the great glasshouse experience chains of incidents without statements and gestures without referents; those are addressed at the special focal points. But the news and its material, the actual acts of violence and dramas ‘on site’, are now only ripples on the surface of the regular operations in the dense space.
The pinpricks of terrorists certainly do not warrant a regression of Western political culture to the ‘Hobbesian moment’: the question of whether the contemporary Western state can sufficiently protect the lives of its citizens is answered so clearly by the facts that it would be foolish to claim one should still pose it in earnest. Portraying terrorism as a ‘mortal danger’ for the entire free world is a rhetorical figure with which home secretaries and alarm-brokers go out on a limb. The responsibility for the mental absorption of terror has long since been passed on to ‘society’ – just as terrorist irritation is passed on to its recipients purely by their media, not via mobilization orders from the state. Today's state is a terror consumer like all the others, and although it is meant to be responsible for fighting it, this does not change the fact that it is just as passive and inaccessible as ‘society’. It can therefore neither be directly attacked nor react directly. The talk of the ‘war on terror’ only distracts from the realization that the attack lives entirely off the secondary medial process. What we call terrorism belongs to the structural change of the public sphere in the age of total mediatization. Anyone who truly wanted to fight it would have to sever its root in the fascination with death among the terrorist actors and their audience – which would contravene the laws of globalized entertainment.
Furthermore, the state's right to exist no longer derives from its Hobbesian functions, but rather from its services as a redistributor of chances in life and accesses to comfort. It proves its aptitude as the imaginary communal therapist of its citizens, as well as a guarantor of material and imaginary pampering for the many.7 Even its military functions are now indebted to the therapeutic style; the current wars for ‘security’ draw their impetus largely from puritanically interpreted immunological motifs.
Illiberal reactions on a larger scale are therefore never a match for terror, firstly because they knowingly conceal the immeasurable superiority of the attacked over the attackers, and secondly because they afford a symbolic meaning to isolated attacks that is out of proportion to their material content. Thus numerous commentators inflate the nebulous entity of al-Qaeda, that conglomerate of hatred, unemployment and Koran verses, into a totalitarianism of its own style; some even see in it an Islamofascism capable – in whatever unknown, fantastic way – of threatening the ‘free world’ as a whole and damping its systemically indispensable consumption-happy atmosphere. Some Western authors even go so far as to stylize the anti-American romanticism of jihad spreading among disoriented young Muslims into the cause of a Fourth World War.8 The reasons for these distortions and inflations will not be examined more closely here; naturally, the interests of the respective commentators are always involved too. (A more thorough elucidation of this practice would have to include a section on rhetorical control systems dealing with hystericization as a postmodern method of consensus.) This much is certain: the neo-realists feel in their element once more, finally encountering a situation in which they can present themselves as leaders of the undecided – their eyes fixed on the figure of the strong enemy, that old and new benchmark of the real, even if the opponent's strength is mostly the product of interested exaggerations. For the consultants, the ‘war’ is the source of their own significance. On the pretext of security, the spokesmen for the new militancy reinforce authoritarian tendencies whose impetus comes from quite different sources. The carefully maintained climate of fear in the medial space guarantees that the considerable majority of pampered Western security consumers submit to the comedy of the inevitable. A foretaste of where this leads is enjoyed by all those travellers at airports who, since 9/11, have sacrificed nail scissors in hand luggage to reduce the risk of flying.