Once again: in the crystallized world system, everything is subject to the compulsion of movement. Wherever one looks in the great comfort structure, one finds each and every inhabitant being urged to constant mobilization; yet none of what changes and moves still has the quality of ‘history’. Possibly the only addenda to the complex of events and narratives once known as world history will be a world climate protocol, a corresponding world energy codex and the creation of a global environmental police – desiderata whose realization is currently only foreseeable as a distant option, as the USA and other high-consumption countries will, for the time being, feel too strong to forego their prerogative of increased environmental exploitation.
In terms of the human spatial experience, the main result of terrestrial globalization for the populations of European nations was that the world became wonderfully large, though this was accompanied by shock at the sublime uninhabitability of the oceans. I have discussed the ambivalent anti-maritime undertone in the affective balance of most Modern Age Europeans – culminating philosophically in Kant's demand for things to comply with the human cognitive apparatus, especially those of philosophers with lifetime professorships. This was echoed in Heidegger's regionalism, which held that life in harbour towns, let alone on ships, was an aberration. For a long time, opening the mind towards the sea remained the province of minorities, and was only truly at home in the merchant subcultures of coastal towns and, if anywhere further inland, then only among itchy-footed dreamers and readers of discoverers’ memoirs. Since then, however, the opposition between ‘sea-churners’ and ‘land-treaders’ so virulent for the entire Modern Age has lost its meaning almost entirely. Whether one is more maritime or terran in one's disposition, the rapid media of today have opened the horizon for new formats.
The caesura between modernity and postmodernity can be highlighted by referring to the spatial feelings of people within the comfortable installation. The sticky omnipresence of the news has ensured that countless numbers experience the once-wide world as a dirty little ball. Those born after the advent of television know nothing of the sweetness of life in the boundless world. The true feeling of the Modern Age, which blossomed here and there into the 1930s, presupposed slow media. Only seagoing vessels, earth globes and travel literature could give the mixture of awe and curiosity a form in which the seafaring peoples and reading persons on land could respond to the earth's newly explored dimensions. A contributing factor was that the slowness of long-distance traffic in the nautical age left the distances their dignity. The long routes kept the prices for access to foreign lands high; they contributed to the exotic veil still spread over the discovered world. Until the advent of mass tourism after the Second World War, first-hand knowledge of the world was costly, rare and seductive. We recall: Othello won Desdemona's love because he could relate how he suffered on his journeys to the wilderness.1
All this became one memory among many through the tachotechnologies of the twentieth century. Within two generations, telephone networks, radio systems and jet engines in air travel caused the overcoming of distance to be taken for granted to such a degree that space was perceived as an almost negligible factor. As it could not offer any appreciable resistance to its rapid traversals, it seemed to constitute the basic area of being-in-the-world, accommodating reduction, compression and annulment almost of its own accord. In 1848, speaking of the ‘revolutionary’ achievements of the bourgeois age in the second most famous passage of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels stated that ‘all that is solid melts into air’; to this, the sensibility of the twentieth century adds: all that is extended and demands space is compressed into a minimal inert block. Intercontinental telephone conversations are the most obvious manifestation of this; anyone who wants to see the myth of the disappearance of space confirmed need only reach for the telephone or perform a few mouse clicks.
The ‘spatial revolution’ of the present, of which Carl Schmitt wanted to give an account in his observations on the fading world-historical role of Land and Sea,2 was actually concerned with spatial compression. What it brought about was the neutralization of distances. It negated the separating effect of interstices; it shortened the paths between here and yonder to a remainder that could not be compressed any further. The residual space could be bothersome, but it was no longer in a position to demand attention or reverence. Though the moderns do not possess the gift of bilocation reported of some medieval saints, that of translocation is very natural for them – and if they cannot be in two places simultaneously, they certainly can be in any number of successive ones.
Under these circumstances, space became a seemingly ignorable factor. It had been defeated as distance and barrier in practice, been scorned in theory as a dimension serving mastery, and become a silent background as a carrier of traffic and communication; in ideology-critical terms, it had a bad reputation as a centre of reification. From the perspective of those who demanded swiftness, the only good space was a dead space; its foremost virtue was the ability to make itself imperceptible. For the sake of rapid processes, it was meant to step back from all its former ontological purposes: creating discrete neighbourhoods, scattering particles, separating bodies, positioning agents, offering boundaries between the extended, making clusters more difficult, containing explosions and drawing multiplicities together into a unity. The only traditional quality of space that remained was its conductivity – or, more precisely, the aspect combination conductivity/connectivity/mediality, without which the endeavours of modernity to overcome space through compression would not lead to any meaningful results. The space of distance, separation and placement called nature was replaced by the space of gathering, connection and compaction that surrounds us as the technical environment. Here the removed can be called into the here and now physically or in effigie from any distance. Monitors show what spatiality means today: one calls up, one manipulates, one combines, one secures, one deletes. Thanks to the global networks, countless points on the earth's surface are transformed into reading rooms – assuming that a collection3 is what Heidegger sought to show, namely the gathering of signs of being to a here-now-us collecting point for the truth. As we know, Heidegger held the bizarre view that there were only two authentic reading rooms for the great study of being: one among the pre-Socratics (or Aristotle), the other in Freiburg-Todtnauberg. Suffice it to say that on this point, as on many others, Heidegger scarcely had any followers. His view that language was the central collector is likewise not supported by the evidence in the current multimedia world.
The modern spatial compression (alias the spatial ‘revolution’) continues a cultural caesura that had originally taken place in ancient Greece through the addition of vowels to the Middle Eastern consonantal alphabets. As shown by McLuhan, Goody, Havelock and others, it was the advent of the Greek alphabet that enabled the development of Old European reader subjectivity, whose main characteristic was the ability to ‘deal with texts’ – that is, the situation-independent comprehension of meaning.4 Greek poetry and prose render explicit an otherwise latent ability of the human intellect: to imagine persons, things and constellations in their absence. Written texts enable the intelligence to emancipate itself from the necessity of in situ attendance in varyingly understandable circumstances. This means that in order to deal with a situation cognitively, I no longer need to immerse myself in it as a participant and, in a sense, merge with it; reading a description of it is sufficient, and gives me the freedom to stay where I am and associate with it what I want. After the textual caesura, being-in-the-world explicitly split into experienced and imagined situations – or rather, the textualization of imagined situations enabled them to break the monopoly of understanding-by-being-in-the-situation. The Greek alphabet initiated the adventure of the de-contextualization of meaning. What that means becomes clear if one considers that until the medial turn in the nineteenth century, all higher culture in Europe – leaving aside the specialized developments of music and panel painting – had been written culture, the simulation of something absent, and that even musical and graphic culture were tied to writing systems. This corresponded to a politics born of the spirit of bureaucracy and imperial epics.
Old European textuality belongs to the prehistory of modern spatial compression because it enabled the revolt of the text against the context, the tearing-away of meaning from the lived situations. In so far as it rehearses de-contextualizing thought (usually termed reading), it emancipates the intellect from the obligation to participate in real constellation, unlocking for it the boundless expanse of non-in situ worlds. It creates the theoretical human being – exemplarily attacked by Nietzsche in the figure of Socrates. Its representative is the strong observer, that junior of the absolute which is elsewhere in any given situation. Even on the point of death, the wise man behaves as if he had already read the scene somewhere; Socrates even claims that in life, he is already in the place where death will take him: the other location, the place of eternal forms, the home of the immortal letter. Socrates was able to become the European wisdom hero par excellence because he lived his life in constant rejection of the authority held by that which was present; above all, he rejected the expectation that he would piously immerse himself in the situations manipulated by rhetoricians, politicians and windbags. He is the chief witness of the intelligence that ‘drops out’ in order to re-contextualize itself in ideational circumstances. Since Plato, this twofold operation – the intelligence's break with current situations and its resettlement in ideal ones – has been known as philosophy. Wherever it left its traces, one had to decide between a reading or a participating attitude towards life.5
One can recognize the success of this greatest European liberation movement in the fact that there were already anti-intellectual restorations in antiquity that turned against the supposedly false freedom of floating in an imaginative space purged of real-world ties. The Jesuan polemic against the Pharisees was one such reaction of the lived against the read, as was the laughter of the Thracian maid at the scatterbrained philosopher Thales in the well. Since the Stoics, ancient teachings of wisdom have been motivated primarily by the wish to re-embed thought in lived life, even when, with typical philosophical presumption, propagating the unity of the lifeworld and the universe. Diogenes is the comic hero of the un-comical return into the embodiable.
One could call these tendencies the first re-appropriation of the in situ principle: they articulate the protest by the participatory sense against the (allegedly or actually) excessive breaking-away of the reading-observing intelligence from shared situations. Diogenes, Jesus and the Thracian maid are thus reactionaries in the precise sense of the word, at least in the eyes of those who prefer reading to living. All three, as well as the Stoics and the Epicureans, would have accepted this label – if anything, they might have elucidated their position by pointing out that life, without ceasing to be a primary impulse of its own, must occasionally be a reaction: a pure opposition to all deforming constraints and pure resistance against unjustified compressions. In the language of maids: one shouldn't put up with everything; and in leftist rhymes: without defence, your life is a pretence.
Since then, such ‘reactionary’ impulses have been wandering through the ages in manifold variations; they return with the early socialists, the Situationists, the communitarians and the group therapists. They echo in the vitalists’ criticism of the armchair theorists. They probably reached their most highly articulated level in Marshall MacLuhan's praise of audio culture, which he claimed restored to holistic, non-linear perception the rights that had been undermined by European writing culture. One response to this was Maurice Blanchot's book-romantic thesis that literature held the potential for a ‘total experience’. This position is illustrative through its absurdity: by celebrating reading as a total power of absorption, it seeks to make us forget that it is in the nature of reading to dissolve the totalitarianism of lived situations.6
A comparable development can be observed in current thought with reference to ignored space. The great return to the context now appears in the manifold reflections on ‘embedding’ as passive solidarity. Once distances are seemingly only there to be overcome, once national cultures only exist to mingle with other traditions, once all the earth's surfaces only represent the immobile counterparts to their elegant collections as geographical maps and aerial photographs, and once space as such means no more than the nothingness between two electronic workplaces – then we can predict the direction which the resistance against these de-realizations will take: sooner or later, the culture of presence will have to assert its rights once more against the culture of imagination and memory. The experience of the extended will defend itself against the effects of compressions, abbreviations and skimmings. Just as de-contextualized meaning has ‘ultimately’ always depended on being embedded into a non-omittable situation in order not to disappear entirely into abstractions, so too compressed space must be tied to the unspoilt experiences of extension if it is to avoid vanishing completely in secondary processes. This realization is articulated today by those who insist on the memory of the local against the de-contextualizing tendency of universalisms and tele-machines.
The new spatial thought is the revolt against the contracted world. The rediscovery of slowness is accompanied by that of local extension – but how? By suddenly ceasing to shrink our own existence to a scale of one to one hundred thousand, or one to ten million? By suddenly learning to read extended life in maps again?7 By finding our way back from chronolatry to topophilic feelings? If, in a word, it were once again time to drive the shameless sellers from the temple of the present?
Yet, as plausible as these corrective movements may seem – could we be sure of hearing the pure voices of the place after expelling the traders? The re-emphasis of the local has its pitfalls, for the term ‘local’ is one of the most frequently misunderstood words in the language games of those journalists and sociologists who have chosen globalization as their field. Even ‘reactionary’ spatial thought must be learned. Usually ‘local’ is used as an antonym of ‘global’ or ‘universal’ – with ‘global’ and ‘local’ referring to the same homogeneous and continuous space. Homogeneous spaces are defined by the equipotency of points within them, and the connectivity of those points through direct lines.
This spatial conception made it possible to assert that ‘The universal is the local without walls’8 – a claim that sounds striking, yet could not be further from the truth. It seems appealing because it defines the world as a sum of provinces; so there is no universality, only inter-provincial relationships. It is symptomatic because it expresses the helpless common sense that one encounters wherever the spatial constitution of existence in the global age is brought up. It is naïve because it posits a symmetry where there can be none, and tears down walls where none stand. The hybrid terms ‘glocal’, ‘glocalize’ and ‘glocalization’ introduced by the world sociologist Roland Robertson are cut from the same cloth;9 they too mirror the deceptions underlying current discourses on globalization.
The error, simply put, lies in relating the local and the global to each other in the same way as the point and the field. Wherever this occurs, the local is inevitably understood as if its nature were the same as the global, but the local residents simply refused to admit it; the local is envisaged like a spot in a regular spatial grid. Let us imagine an introverted nest on the edge of the Alps where a multinational corporation plans to set up a branch: if the managers explain to the natives why they have come, and the residents concede that there is no harm in letting the strangers in, the pragmatic union of ‘us’ and ‘them’ should be complete after a short time, and the large would soon feel at home in the small as much as the small in the large. One always assumes something unproven: that the relations between the strangers and the locals take place in a homogeneous locational space where positions are fundamentally reversible.
In reality, the meaning of ‘local’ lies in the re-emphasis of the asymmetrical with all its implications. This is an intellectual event of some consequence, as placing this weight on the place heralds a language for the non-compressible and non-abbreviated. The emphasis on the local asserts the autonomous rights of that which is extended in itself, despite the progress of de-contextualization, compression, mapping and the neutralization of space.
With localism, one could say, existentialism is reformulated in space-analytical terms. Now it is capable of saying with adequate explicitness what existence as a self-spatializing force means. It learns thoroughly how to articulate that, and why, being defined by embeddedness has de facto always been an unsuspendable factor. This gives rise to a general logic of participation, situatedness and indwelling – I refer again to the fact that contemporary art, with its turn towards installation, has achieved a significant headstart on philosophical analysis in this respect.10 This reveals that there is no existence without participation in unabbreviated being-extended, being-connected, being-possessed, unless the ability to be embedded were undermined by a psychosis or by constant fleeing – but is psychosis in particular not a type of unauthorized building, and is fleeing not space-forming in a certain sense? The indwelling relationship – as shown by the central spatial thinkers of the twentieth century – is always connected to an interior-forming activity, a de-distancing practice (in Heidegger's sense) and a pacifying cultivation (in Schmitz's sense).11 Where there is habitation, things, symbionts and persons are joined to form local solidary systems. Dwelling develops a practice of locational fidelity over an extended period – this is especially palpable, incidentally, among nomads, often misunderstood and cited as witnesses to cheerful infidelity, who usually seek out the same places in a rhythm of long-term cycles. Dwelling creates an immune system of repeatable gestures; through successful habitualization, it combines being-relieved with being-burdened by clear tasks.
For this reason, indwelling is the mother of asymmetry. It may be that social philosophers are right in teaching that humans are ‘socialized’ by learning to take over the role of the other; this does not mean taking over the dwelling of the other. The place held by the other can neither be stolen nor be rented. Indwelling transpires precisely as that which I can only do with myself and those close to me, and the other only with themselves and those close to them. The positions are ontologically inexchangeable, like the left and right hands of the bilateralized body. At most, we can enter a synoikismós, a communal residence, or a koínos bios, living together in a shared enclosure; these would give rise to a new focus of shared cultivations from whose wealth and quarrels other others are excluded. In this case, higher-level communal residences should in turn group us together with the other others; beyond a certain size, however, such syntheses would only be legal figures and rhetorical addresses.
Elementary foyer solidarity, if it can be so called, is a basic layer of the ability to say ‘we’: the first person plural pronoun is not the term for a group object, but rather the performative evocation of a collective constituted by self-excitation and self-spatialization. This does not rule out trans-local solidarity on the basis of empathy with absent strangers – the Christian churches, when not denying one another salvation, and the Buddhist sanghas, to name only these two, prove quite clearly that love can form a res extensa of its own kind as long-distance attention and coherence in the diaspora. Certainly, there is also the projective solidarity with which tele-sentimentality, the modern variation of hysteria, dons a ‘we’ costume. It is especially common among inhabitants of the crystal palace whom one shows images of disasters outside.
Whoever inhabits does not behave towards their dwelling, their environment or their social world as a cartographer or land surveyor. A geometrician who comes home stops measuring and reducing; they project themselves into the habitual at a scale of one to one. Indwelling is passive commitment to one's own situation, a suffering and co-producing of its vague and unmistakable extension; it is partisanship and a sense of self-inclusion in a regional pleroma. This can neither be reduced true to scale nor expanded beyond a certain degree.
One sees immediately that the extendedness of embedding situations is the natural accomplice of the lasting. It is the origin of cultivations that cannot be achieved without repetition and persisting with a single matter. One can, of course, move house and settle anew, one can divorce and remarry, one can emigrate and be naturalized somewhere else – as we know, the moderns do all this more often and more aggressively than the ancients. Even in new situations, however, the basic situation returns; one establishes oneself in a particular place and extends oneself by means of local resonances. Hölderlin's intuition probably articulated the in situ principle most clearly: ‘Full of merit, but poetically, man dwells on this earth.’ The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty interprets the rooting of being in its own worldly voluminosity with the statement that ‘our body is not primarily in space: it is of it’, and Heidegger offered the most general formulation possible in his analytics of being-in-the-world: ‘In Dasein there lies an essential tendency towards closeness.’12 These claims converge in a space-theoretical perspective: they state that existence, as the positing of a symbolic and physical volume, means residing in the uncompressible. One could even say that existence and self-extension converge. Dwelling implies the principle of ‘occasional sealing’, which means that even those who change their residence frequently cannot avoid developing a habitus of dwelling on their way. Psychologists have observed that people who travel a great deal show behavioural patterns which they interpret as a mobile cocooning; the models for this are the aforementioned nomads, for they, quaintly put, are at home on their travels, or, less quaintly put, they use deterritorialization itself to reterritorialize themselves.13 This is a different way of pointing out that nomadic cultures, for all the flexibility one attributes to them, constitute the most conservative, ‘domestic’, closed systems that have appeared in the spectrum of social evolutions.