Franz
Kafka’s short story “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft”, “An Imperial Message”,
from 1919 knows a lot about the differentiation of the centre and the periphery.
The emperor’s message, sent from his throne, from the middle of his gigantic
palace, from the very middle of the known world, is transported by a young
and powerful messenger, vested with unlimited authority – however, this
young man will never reach the addressee of the message: the emperor’s
subject at the outer periphery of the dominion. The message will never
arrive because nobody is able to bridge the gap between the core of the
realm and the outside edge. In a similar text, called “Beim Bau der chinesischen
Mauer” (1917), “During the Construction of the Chinese Wall”, Kafka gives
an account of the socio-political conditions in a South Chinese province
where nobody knows the name (or anything else) of the recent emperor. The
only thing that the people are sure about there is the fact that an emperor
is existing somewhere and that one has to serve him, but how, they do not
know. The main reason for the communication gap between the centre and
the periphery in Kafka’s perspective is the lack of modern communication
technologies and transportation facilities. A modern state, which is characterized
by the complete control of all the territory within its borders, and its
administration therefore need means of transport and communication such
as railways, telegraphs, or telephones, as Max Weber emphasized in his
work on “Economy and Society”[1]
at the beginning of the 20th century.
Certainly,
the deficiency of logistics and means of communication is one key reason
for the fact that the pre-modern society of Europe and its constructions
of reality were structured by the differentiation of the centre and its
periphery. The centre: this once meant the core of the realm and capital
of the king, the residence of the leading families, the major place of
manufacturing and trade, the home of the muses, and the seat of justice
and punishment. Far away, there was neither law, nor shelter, neither education,
nor glory or rich supply of goods, simply nothing worth knowing off. And
far away meant: a substantial geographical, not a social, distance, for
example the distance between Johannesburg City and some townships. The
periphery was out of focus and control by the centre, left to the local
powers and their limitations, restrictions, and marginal decisions. In
fact, cultural superiority, natural political dominance, and social pre-eminence
were (and still are, for example if you live in New York or belong to the
Generation Berlin) typical ingredients of communicated self-descriptions
of the centre. Intentionally or not, any event, which took place in pre-modern
communication systems up to the 18th century, was selected,
sorted, and processed in consideration of the local origin of the communication.
In Norbert Elias’s opus magnum on the “Process of Civilisation” one finds
many examples for the consequences of this social practice of selection,
especially with regard to the difference between Paris and the provinces.
Central or peripheral, that was the question (another one was the question
of the social status of the persons communicating) – with grave consequences
for the probability of connection of any linguistic contribution. No matter
which kind of communication, cultural, political, economic, or scientific,
if it happened far away from the centre the probability to gain any social
attention or to ensure social connection was much smaller than in the centre.
One
has only to remember the state of media technologies in the Middle Ages
in order to understand the disregard for the periphery in the centres of
pre-modern society. It was very improbable that any announcement or communication
would bridge over the huge distance between, say, a far off province and
Paris, Rome, Vienna, or Moscow. If, nevertheless, any peripheral matter
got the attention of the centres it would have to be recorded as a message
or learned by heart by a messenger, to be transported a long distance,
and finally to be forwarded through the right channels of the central bureaucracies
or of the influential groups at court, as Kafka shows in his stories. In
spite of all the legendary “tsars couriers”, very often the centre hardly
knew that a far off periphery even existed.[2]
Today,
even the Chinese emperor could make a phone call to transmit his orders
to a remote subject if only there were still such an institution as an
emperor in our times. In concert with the invention of modern technologies
the organisation of society has changed; modern society is structured by
functional differentiation. At the time when Kafka wrote his stories, society
had already been modern for a long time. If one places the stories in a
modern context, in the context of their origin, one understands that it
is in fact absolutely superfluous for the periphery to know anything about
the emperor because the people there live their own lives and participate
in processes of communication which are in no way regulated or led by a
central power. The German chancellor is not Louis XIV, today’s Berlin is
not Versailles. Economy, education, justice, sciences, or arts are autonomous
systems now, and their flows of communication notoriously ignore any national
or geographic borders. The question what is true or false in a scientific
sense, what is right or wrong in the perspective of the positive law, what
is a profit or a loss, is independent of space. A central and absolute,
all including power, as it was ordinary in pre-modern societies, is lost
and absent in each of Kafka’s novels and short stories. Instead, media
such as the telephone are omnipresent in Kafka’s work. However, nobody
is able to use them in order to communicate with any central instance or
authority simply because there is none. The kings are dead.
Thus,
the spatial differentiation of centre and periphery seems to have lost
all its former significance while new media and communication technologies
are devaluating distance as a social category. An email to Vilnius will
reach the addressee in a few seconds, no matter how near or far the position
of the sender might be. Modern communication systems operate in “independence
from territorial borders” and from space in general as the famous German
sociologist Niklas Luhmann puts it.[3]
Whether information is processed or not is a question of the right coding
and no longer a matter of a person’s social rank or his distance from the
centre. Social systems such as economy, education, science, or arts do
not discern positions or locations, they ignore the social and spatial
dimension of communication in favour of the coding: profitable or not,
right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, interesting or boring. Norbert Bolz,
a well known German professor of media studies, wrote in a monograph on
“world communication”, which was edited last year, that “world communication
means to give up space”.[4]
In our age of globalisation and virtual reality (S. 10), Bolz declares
that we all live in one world society without borders in which the
question of territoriality has become senseless (S. 38). Helmut Willke,
another important German sociologist, has baptized this world society an
“Atopia”, a world where the topos has no place any more.[5]
I quote a significant passage of this book:
„Die atopische Gesellschaft muß sich in einer
Welt ohne Land einrichten. Im Horizont des Atopischen verlieren sich die
Stützpunkte erdenschwerer Verläßlichkeit und gravitätischer
Traditionen. Sie machen einer konnektivistischen Fluidität Platz,
deren Muster und Gestalten kommunikativ konstituierte Figuren bilden und
die als Verdichtungen von Kommunikationen sich ebenso schnell auflösen
können, wie sie entstanden sind.“ (S.
175)
I
give a summarized translation: The a-topian society exists in a world without
land. In the horizon of the A-topian the bases of firm reliability and
grave traditions are lost. They make room for a connective fluidity whose
patterns and figures form condensed figurations and nodes of communication
which can dissolveas quickly as
they have emerged.
The
a-topian society is bottomless, without solid ground, completely de-territorialized,
as Deleuze and Guattari would denominate it. The a-topian world is an immaterial
world of communication: “place, space, and distance are quantities to neglect”,
insists Willke (S. 13).
Well,
I know that, one year after the S11 attacks and some days or weeks before
a massive US military strike on the Iraq, or, to name another suggestive
example: some hundred kilometres away from the Russian enclave Kaliningrad
with all its border and visa problems with the European Union, this a-topian
theory seems to be highly problematic and questionable, but at this point,
I will just sketch this view and postpone the discussion.
The outlinedtheoretical
combination of the focus on new media with a disregard for space is a recent
take on the question under discussion. “Virtual
reality is beyond time and space, it is uchronic and utopian”,
one reads in a prominent German publication (“Digitaler Schein”, 1991).
Chronos and topos are lost in cyberspace because forms of
communication in new media environments run instantaneously wherever you
are. However, one could say that who is lost in cyberspace and who’s not
is a question of asymmetric access, but this question would imply a regard
for space and geopolitics, and hence it is not raised. The Atopian
is made of immaterial pieces of information. Hyperlinks connect the entire
globe at the speed of light. Distances and locations lose their significance.
Space erases itself in the standards of real time communication as well
as cultural and regional distinctions lose their importance in the process
of this kind of media globalisation. Your location doesn’t matter if any
“information is at your fingertips”, to cite the often quoted Microsoft
slogan.[6]
German media theory actually declares that nowadays “people live in a post-geographic
time.” Even Paul
Virilio proclaims the dissolution of space in the global networks of new
media. The “velocity of real time” puts an end to the “geographic dimension
of the world”, with the expected consequence that locations and territorieslose
their significance, Virilio writes in an essay on “Information and Apocalypse”.[7]
But
is it really a rational conclusion to believe that the human body, which
has always been located in time and space, has become “obsolete in this
era of tele-technologies running at the speed of light”? Another German
sociologist, Rudolf Stichweh, claims that the world society communicates
without any demands of the body; the global network of communicating systems
functions without bodies and without the necessity to know anything about
their possible locations. The body has no impact on processes of communication,
and vice versa, the society of communication possesses no force or means
to reach the body. As the a-topian society operates without any impact
on bodies and space it is a society without the possibility to threat people
with physical force. I quoted Willke again here (S. 221, 230) who believes
in the unconditional peacefulness of his Atopia, a peace which is guaranteed
by the post-geographical, post-spatial, post-physical mode of society. This
is what one could read in the last decade – “and I do in part believe it”.[8]
The
part of the outlined discourse that I accept is the belief in the huge influence
of new media
and modern
communication systems on the evolution of society, and I would also emphasize
the thesis that the ancient European distinction between centre and periphery
is somehow outdated. Modern social systems such as economy, arts,
politics, science, or education, only focus on the significance of the
information of an input in relation to its code and to its functional priority.
These systems usually neglect the location and the position of a contributed
act of communication. You can participate in elections, take classes or
watch television, buy and sell goods, get medical provision or attention
in the media wherever you are and whoever you are. What ever counts as
true or not, as lawful or not, as profitable or not, as ill or not, does
so without any prior regard for space. In modern societies the likelihood
of participating successfully in an election or in a scientific competition
or in a non-governmental organisation far away from the big capitals is
not reduced by the place you live in, whereas in the old Europe the voice
of the periphery was seldom heard at court. The modern global world society,
to quote Luhmann again, has made of space a mere bagatelle in terms of
communication.[9]
This might be true in the normal case but there are always exceptions,
or, to be more precise, there are exceptional cases and states of emergency,
and in these cases bodies and places still matter. In some areas of the
world, the exceptional cases have become normal. These areas are called
exclusion zones, and the bodies in the exclusion zones do not participate
in Willke’s Atopia or Stichweh’s world society, they just vegetate or “live”
their lives in the sense that Giorgio Agamben gave to the term, that is:
to have nothing but one’s naked life without any inclusion in social institutions
or infrastructures. In the exclusion zones mankind is reduced to the biological
state of mere bodies. These bodies exist everywhere at the peripheries
of the society of global transport and communication.
Therefore,
my thesis would be that it is not the modern society which operates removed
from spatial differences, but that it is rather the sociological and media
theories which have neglected this issue. As a consequence I would argue
that the differentiation of centre and periphery still matters and that
it prevails over the enunciated annihilation of space through media technologies
– not in every aspect of society, but in some vital topics.
This paper aims to outline the importance of space and its social form
in recent semantics.
The
neglect of space is astonishing because it has already been an important
term. Harold Adams Innis for instance, the Canadian theorist and teacher
of Marshall Mc Luhan, has focussed the attention of his studies on the
great differences in temporal and spatial dimensions of social orders,
resulting from the use of different transfer and storage media. A lot of
work has been done on the cultural implications of media and geographic
circumstances since the 1950s but it has been almost completely ignored
in the German discussion. Until the end of the Second World War the combined
scientific attention to geopolitics, economy, media, and culture had been
a well established and cultivated research field – but research was abandoned
all together with its totalitarian deformations. If I were to guess one
possible reason for the current disregard for space I would say: Considering
the experiences of totalitarianism with regard to the tradition of German
geopolitics (e.g. the Nazi rhetoric of space such as “Lebensraum”
and “Mittellage”), the recent self-cancellation of the nation and
its space in an a-topian world society might appear very attractive to
Germany. Geopolitics have somehow been transformed in trans-national institutions
like the EU or UNO and in trans-national media networks like the Internet.
The territorial location of politics or economy seems more and more negligible
if one describes oneself as a node of a global network or a global player
in a worldwide boundless game. Perhaps the historical heritage of Nazi
geopolitics has made post-war German media theory unable to investigate
space – and thus it has become negligent to subsequent questions about
the spatial distribution of power and technologies.
As
a consequence, the asymmetric form of centre and periphery has sociologically
been noticed merely in an historical way, as we have seen, and has been
located in the European Middle Ages some hundreds of years ago. In our
modern times this difference has been surmounted by communication technologies,
as one could state the basic supposition of German media theory and sociology.
It doesn’t matter where you are if you have access to a cell phone, the
internet or a fax machine. Briefly spoken, German semantics of new media
notoriously ignore the spatial and material dimensions of communication.
The implications of this “blind spot”, the lacking respect for space,become
especially perceptible in the works of the most prominent representatives
of German sociology and philosophy: Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas.
Neither Habermas’s central term, the discourse, nor Luhmann’s concept
of communication refer to any kind of material context where the
interactions implied in their theories might possibly take place. A direct
result of this blind spot is in both cases a disregard for the materiality
of media technologies which inevitably have a spatial extension. For example,
distribution media surmount distances in order to reach postal addresses
located in physical space; otherwise, they would be superfluous.
In
her work on “Global Cities”[10]
Saskia Sassen refers for instance to the connection of media, their material
setting and their territorial power. The hidden hardware of the cyberspace:
fibre optic cables can be disconnected violently, frequencies can be disturbed,
satellites shot, news intercepted. And the “wetware”, that is people using
media technologies, can be traced back and hunted and attacked, as has
happened in China or elsewhere. It seems absolutely naïve to claim,
as Bolz does, that in the age of worldwide communication the geographical
dimension does not play any role at all.[11]
It definitely does because everything that might be virtual or cyber today
still supposes physical, material, and therefore spatial foundations –
servers are located and connected, mobile phones or TV need transmitters,
every gadget needs a user somewhere.
This
geopolitical aspect of the media society is truly visible. If one looks
at a map and imagines the worldwide internet server locations, the millions
of kilometres of connecting cables, and the concentration of traffic, one
will immediately get an idea of the relevance of spatial differences. The
most powerful axis of this new differentiation of centre and periphery
binds up the major international financial and business centres: New York,
London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney,
Hong Kong, Bangalore, Shanghai. Rieko Akatsuka has stated that “physical
cities are connected with each other via cyberspace in a global network
functioning in real time”. In fact, the intensity of real time transactions
among these cities – particularly through the financial markets,
transactions in services and investments, and evidently always via high-speed
media – has increased sharply. The spatial relations of the global cities’
network which are thus produced can be thought of as a cross-border network
of specific sites, embedded only partly in the regional and national
environments. I say partly because in correspondence to this development
of connections an increasing inequality in the concentration of strategic
resources and activities between each of these cities and others in the
same region or country can be observed. Perhaps hierarchies within
these centres have been eliminated by the use of new media, as Rieko Akatsuka
believes and as a lot of business consultants or management counsellors
would confirm (flat hierarchies through enhanced media networks, was the
motto in the economy of the 90s), but in return new and solid barriers
have been built up instead. To sum it up: There
are some important cities and attractive centres which are interconnected,
but there is a huge periphery around them with fading importance, and moreover
there is still a black continent. And these differences matter: to live
at the peripheries implies more and more the constraint to survive in favelas
or slums; to be digitally homeless becomes more and more a symptom of exclusion.
Santiago
Sierra shows us in
each of his celebrated video experiments, which present the zones of exclusion
in highly included centres of attraction like this Triennial, what
one can do with the bodies of people living in these excluded peripheries.
I reckon, this kind of art must not be confused with any real exchange
or interaction between the centres and their extreme oppositions, the excluded
peripheries, because the videos only deal with representations, signs,
or signefiants/signifiers. No body, no material is taken out of
there, and nobody and nothing is taken in for a considerable period, no
substantial link is implemented between the centre and the periphery. I
doubt that any of the participants of Sierra’s works will ever get the
chance to visit an exhibition, a gallery, or an art fair to watch the videos.
On the contrary, the maintenance of geopolitics, which divides the world
into centres and peripheries, is probably strengthened by the information
that on Cuba men will jerk off publicly for some bucks or that whores can
be tattooed with a line for some cash. If some recent New York art expositions
have shown that Amazonian Indians can be hunted like animals or orphans
from South-American favelas can be used as organ banks or for snuff movies
the geopolitical gap surely becomes a theme and visible. But whatever the
aesthetic consequences might be: the periphery is still the periphery –
even if it is filmed or photographed or put down in novels for a culture
which makes the centres attractive, wealthy, healthy, and secure. In some
respect, the pre-modern form of the differentiation of centre and periphery
still prevails: the periphery may well become a subject of communication
in the centres but in the rarest case it will know that it is a topic.
And in none of the cases the periphery itself becomes an agent. One could
say that some works of art make the periphery become a topic and that they
present it in the centres of attraction but the periphery itself seldom
knows about that. It is not only sarcastic to state that the average artist
taking part in the Documenta 11 was born somewhere in the Lebanon, in Uganda,
in the Iran, the Ivory Coast, or Jamaica and now lives in London, New York,
Paris, Munich, or Berlin. The curator’s favourites seem to be multiethnic
and multicultural, creolité was one of the topics of the
Documenta 11 “platforms”. One artist, Glenn Ligon, who was born and still
lives in New York, says that he was born “in the Bronx” of New York. His
work reflects his “cultural dislocation” and is called “stranger in a village”.
Everyone
who is able to do so leaves the peripheries. And the peripheries are maintained
as a subject or topic, useful to win the attention of the centres. I am
very far from raising the question of authenticity, and I do not even want
to criticize this re-territorialisation of the artist, I just want to describe
the fissures between the semantics used by the curator and the reality
of the differentiation of centres and peripheries.
Obviously,
the centre as a social form and sociological term functions nowadays as
a difference with two interdependent sides. If one looks at the new global
grid of information flows and economic transactions one can distinguish
a new geography of centralization which cuts across national boundaries
and across the old North?South or East-West divisions – a centralization
based on the exclusion of the peripheral which is pushed out to the margins.
It is an integral aspect of the politics of this geography of centralization
that its periphery, the zones of exclusion, the “black holes” of the global
information society, are not noticed and without any impact on global
communication, and at this point art might help for a closer look.
The nodes of the global grid are, one could say, centres of attraction
– fascinating all the observers by their irresistible gravity. To
prefer the centres means to neglect the peripheries. And this disregard
is easier and more evident if one believes that media tend to annihilate
the significance of space and location or that the differentiation of centre
and periphery has become obsolete nowadays. It is the main effect of the
space-less semantics of new media that the differentiation of centre and
periphery could be faded out.
The
heavy impact of media technologies on space and bodies has also been a
major theme at the Documenta 11, and it might be an important effect of
these works that they make something visible which is hidden by a somewhat
scholastic and academic discussion about the a-topian globalisation and
its post-hegemonic world society of communication which is supposed to
be free of frictions. In Tania Bruguera’s installation for the Documenta
a sign on the outside warns you to cross the threshold of the installation
at your own risk. The visitorenters
a dark room and stares into the darkness without orientation but suddenly
he is blinded by very powerful spot- or searchlights. Sightless, one can
hear some persons walking in military boots, assembling and disassembling
rifles. This disturbing setting fits in with a prison, a border, a military
camp, a secured area, an extraterritorial enclave, or a guarded neighbourhood.
The visitor is the alien intruder, and the alien intruder is, if one believes
Deleuze and Guattari or Giorgio Agamben, the actual political form of the
enemy. In the perspective of these philosophers it is part of the signature
of our epoch that everybody can be transformed into this alien other who
must be excluded, or, if he or she has already intruded, must be hunted.
In this installation one can make the experience and get the feeling of
coming from the periphery, trying to gain entry to the centre. Bruguera,
by the way, was born in Havana and she still lives there.
Of
course, the curator of the Baltic Triennial knows about all this, and many
participants of this Centre of Attraction are explicitly dealing
with the differentiation of centre and periphery and its social consequences. Marjetica
Potrc’s
work “The Pursuit
of Happiness”
deals with “Border
cities like Tijuana and San Diego” and investigates into “border barriers”.
If one takes on a more conceptual, less aesthetic view, one will find a
lot of similar projects at the current documenta XI, for example
Chantal Akerman’s videos from the “other side” of the American-Mexican
border, or Fareed Amaly’s installation “from/to” which is a quasi sociological
research of the Palestine-Israel conflict, focussing on geographic and
demographic problems. In a very interesting exposé of his project,
Klinov claims that the “main Centre of Attraction of the Western Civilization”
is obviously the US-lifestyle. “All economic, political, social, cultural
and other centres”, he writes, “are only mechanisms of achievement of this
main centre” to which he gives the name Dolce Vita. Klinov claims
that one year ago, on S11, “war” was declared on this “Centre of Attraction”
or attractive centre. He does not stand alone with this opinion. I want
to point out that the important security counsellor and US-adviser Zbiniew
Brzezinski supports this hypothesis in his famous essay entitled “The only
Superpower. The US-Strategy of Global Domination”[12].
Herein he informs us about the idea that one main part of the hegemonic
supremacy of the USA is a soft power called “American way of life” or western
culture. Lifestyle, or dolce vita, is an integral component of the
so called “new hegemony” which is based on the domination of either the
communication systems or the patterns of the communicated information.
To speak with Mc Luhan’s words: the USA are in control of the media and
of the messages, they dominate the technologies and the cultural production,
they have got Cisco Systems for the fibre and Disney for the content. Samuel
P. Huntington’s outlook on a forthcoming “Clash of Civilizations” (1996)
affirms this opinion. Huntington, too, names the USA the only superpower
which is able to take global action, be this economical, political, military,
or cultural. Sometimes with the backing of Europe, sometimes with the help
of local supporters the USA act as a global leader, presenting themselves
with an absolutely clean conscience as the US agenda is deeply rooted in
universal ethic values such as human rights, free trade, freedom of the
seas, free access to information and free press, democracy, individualism,
or free markets. Of course, all these so called universal values go very
well along with the national interests of the United States. Huntington
writes: “What is universal for the West, is imperialism for the rest of
the world.”[13]
Like Brzezinski Huntington argues that most of the global institutions
of international politics like the WTO, the UNO, or even the NATO are instruments
of American interests. The problem is, Huntington writes, that the West
firmly believes in the superiority and universal validity of their own
values and institutions. This global and universal perspective gets in
conflict with regional cultures and traditions. It sounds paradox but the
universal semantics of western global policy operate regardless of space,
too – because the universal perspective of globalisation ignores the diversity
of cultures and the multilateral structure of powers. While Brzezinski
believes that the single force of the USA will prevail as the only superpower
and global leader, Huntington warns that this belief will foster the clash
of civilizations. He calls for and demands a multilateral world of equal
cultural circles. Modern media, in this view, will either be the instrument
of a hegemonic superpower or they will function as the environment for
a multitude of communicating regional cultures. Media could be part of
the struggle for hegemony because they promote a particular life style
worldwide, or media could just mediate between equal partners. It was exactly
this alternative which was shared in the description of world politics
by German geopolitics in the 1930s. At that time, the alternative to a
threatening world war for global hegemony seemed to be the multilateral
order of regional powers with limited zones of influence. Main area’s order
with a ban on the intervention of external powers, Carl Schmitt called
this model in 1940, “Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot raumfremder
Mächte”. Huntington cites exactly this model of German geopolitical
thought if he recommends the US politics to abstain from any intervention
in conflicts outside the western main area, that is: the area of America
and Europe. (S. 522) The doctrine of abstinence, Huntington calls
this political principle. Whether this doctrine could help to solve the
problems in the Near East or in Central Asia I cannot know but obviously
enough, there are two different perspectives on world politics: a more
global and universal view on the one hand which neglects regional diversity
and particular rights, and on the other hand a more regional and particular
sight which shows the tendency towards an isolation of the western powers.
The first perspective believes in the partition of the world into centre
and periphery: and the centre, that is the USA; even the S11-terrorists
share this view because their attacks were meant to be understood as a
war of the peripheries against the centre. The World Trade Centre was definitely
the symbol of the central hegemonic superpower which Al-Qaeda wanted to
destroy. The second perspective is multi-centred. The global society is
structured in a multilateral pattern which means that there is a multitude
of regional actors playing, thus, consistently, space, regional differences
and local or singular interests do matter. This is not an Atopia.
This is Huntington’s world of conflicting interest spheres and cultural
circles. But however these spin doctors might analyse world politics –
in almost every area of the world borders, walls, fences, and trenches
are built in order to secure zones of prosperity and wealth against the
alien intruder. Each of these zones has its own periphery which is excluded.
To
make one last take on the issue let me return to the field of art once
again. In his essay “black box”, an introduction into the documenta
XI catalogue, the art director and chief curator Okwui Enwezor refers
to the studies of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (S. 45). In their book
“Empire” they confirm the opinion of the US-adviser Zbiniew Brzezinski.
The USA are described as a superpower which covers the globe with its fibres
of a new kind of hegemony, not only based on weapons but on the worldwide
control of cultural and financial currencies. Today the sovereignty of
the empire, as Enwezor states, has got a “de-territorialized form”. This
term refers to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s works and indicates that power
is not defined by its control over a specific territory and its impact
on the people living there any more. De-territorialized power is a post-spatial
and therefore post-colonial and post-imperialistic power which is implemented
in the codes and customs of culture, communication and commerce. It is
without centres and peripheries. The domination of the US works beyond
space and territories. Enwezor refers to Agamben’s term of “a-territoriality”
in order to describe this new type of supremacy.
Nevertheless,
Enwezor speaks in terms of space when he refers to S11 and the consequences.
I want to mention here that the documenta book begins with a sequel of
pictures and video-stills documenting the attack and the worldwide reactions
and effects. One sees a man literally falling into death along the facades
of the WTC, one sees Ground Zero and Osama bin Laden and riots in Arabian
countries. Enwezor proclaims that Ground Zero is part of an “antagonistic
battle” between the West and the rest. He says that the western worldis
the “sphere of global totality” which controls the main flows of communication.
Whatever the West does, its dominant goal is to perpetuate the influence
and supremacy of European and American lifestyle (S. 46). The terrorist
attacks against the WTC and the Pentagon have been part of a broad rebellion
of the ‘third world’ against western domination. The political Islam, I
quote Enwezor, is a resistance movement initiated “to preserve their genuine
societies and authentic ways of living from the integration in the global
western system.” (S. 46)
In
this perspective, Ground Zero is not only in Downtown Manhattan but also
in “Gaza, Ramallah, or Jerusalem. Even in the ruins of Afghan cities.”
Enwezor says, “Ground Zero is perhaps the location where the formerly colonised
world gets its revenge from on the West.” S11 was Judgement Day. Enwezor
believes that S11 must be understood as the incident in which “the periphery
moves into the centre” (S. 47). If this implies that the periphery moved
into the centre of western attraction Enwezor is definitely right.
In
the further steps of his argumentation, Enwezor claims that the ongoing
war against the terror in Afghanistan, the Palestine fight against the
Israeli hegemony, the combats of the anti-globalisation movements in Genua,
Seattle, and Montreal, the worldwide demonstrations against the IWF and
the World Bank, that all these acts of rebellion are symptoms of the periphery
invading the centre. (S. 48) Ground Zero, as Enwezor states, is a metaphor
for this worldwide “anti-hegemonic opposition” (S. 48).
I
think this kind of relativism is extremely problematic and cynical. I do
not think one should qualify the Attac movement and the Al-Qaeda in relative
terms. Measures and terms are absolutely different here. Enwezor avoids
the term “terrorism” when he deals with the S11 attacks; on the contrary
he puts the term in quotation marks while discussing the war of the USA
against “terrorist” elements (S. 48). This relativism might also be an
ideological problem but the epistemological fallacy I am interested in
here is the paradoxical dualism of Enwezor’s article which, on the one
hand, argues that the world society is de-territorialized,
a-topian, and post-spatial, and, on the other hand, declares that a war
of the peripheries against the centre of a worldwide western hegemony is
going on. Two types of divergent semantics are used in current descriptions
of the world society. One is strongly influenced bymedia
and sociological theories which operate without any regard to spatial or
geopolitical categories; networks and nodes have taken the place of locations
and territories. The other point of view is structured by a simple dualism
of the centre and the periphery, the dichotomy of the West and the rest.
Hence, concepts of hybrid structures (S. 51) and a-territoriality (S. 45)
are confused with spatial models, especially with the supposition of a
worldwide combat of two parties, the periphery and the centre. And sometimes
it seems to be the curator’s opinion that works of art should simply illustrate
these models and concepts. However, a theory which could deal with these
diverse descriptions of current conflicts is not in sight. Fortunately,
art already shows the frictions and inconsistencies between the aspects
of the topian and the dissolution of space through media. This,
definitely, is one attraction of the “centre of attraction”.