In Berlin of late, there has been a growing number of poster walls worked on by anonymous street artists. Although I am no historian of street art, it seems as if a new type of artist has succeeded the graffiti artist; a type of artist who does not spray, paint, glue or engrave, but tears down and takes away – who digs. This type leaves behind poster walls that seem at first glance to be disfigured: torn surfaces, destroyed logos, deformed bodies. At second glance, the torn posters look like collages – except that, here, various materials have not been sampled and combined. Instead, different layers of material have been removed until a form gradually emerges: figures, architectures, structures that sometimes also seem extremely abstract. The whole seems however to have some political aim as well, as the new street archaeologists intervene in places that companies today use as a communications interface. Places where people are not only addressed but are also to be made into customers and literally recruited, as a poster slogan from Nike at the turn of the millennium clearly exemplifies: "Be part of the elite!" Companies are willing to pay a lot for these appeals. In the entertainment and lifestyle industry alone, the expensive image cultivation practised by the global players tends to consume more money than the production of the actual products. Capital, manipulative power and brand identity are thus all concentrated on the poster walls. Anyone digging there removes layers from this network of relationships and thus layers from a prominent interface of globalisation. The street archaeologists could therefore be called archaeologists of globalisation. But what does this activity of excavation and the associated exploration of missing and forgotten things mean in relation to globalisation?

From globe to »glome«
Archaeology1, when it is understood as excavation, is a search moving on the vertical plane. Whether the archaeologist is standing up to her/his knees in Iraqi desert sand or tries to glean archaeological facts from the air using infra-red photographs – s/he always takes away superimposed layers in order to reconstruct a deeply hidden object. Discoveries made in this way about ancient cultures and their social and technological achievements are very much comparable with the discoveries made by the globalisers of the era of seafaring: anyone who, while researching and exploring extra-European territories – i.e. in the course of searching in horizontal space -, found something unknown was in a position to give this new object a name and thereupon to take possession of it. It is not least because of this that the excavations of Indo-Germanic cultures in the 20th century seem to have far-reaching implications. After all, it is a matter here of discovering the origin of civilisation, no less – an extraordinarily big political issue for historians: if you dig, you write history. In this sense, archaeology and globalisation would always have been connected by a hegemonic discourse. In both cases, the issue at stake is the discovery and conquest of space with the objective of gaining the right to define and rule.2

If in the past the planet was reconstructed as a network in the course of globalisation – right down to the establishment of longitude and latitude -, today there are completely different networks encompassing the planet that fundamentally change the geographic coordinates of a location. Translated from geographical into political terms, this would mean: »The past was dominated by imperial geographies that are the outcome of projecting of national capitalist projects onto a world stage. Today global systems insert themselves into the national.«3 These networks do not only shape individual locations, for example, by removing their boundaries, but they also cause the planet as a whole to mutate. Globalisation wears away and gnaws at what was once conceived as a globe and is now merely a duplicate, a »glome«, as Jean-Luc Nancy calls this reinvented globe.4 An example of this would perhaps be a visual representation of the connections between the 14 airlines that joined to form the so-called Star Alliance in 1997: lines in fourteen colours drawn on a map of the world between urban centres; intersections create new colours; some areas are even partly obscured where the density is particularly high. The close-meshed Alliance transport network thus shows structural parallels to virtual data transport. But what also becomes manifest is a network that reshapes the globe, that defines a new space. The fact that immaterial and material space seem indistinguishable from one another opens up a wide field of associations.

Idealising representations of the globe like this have been disseminated for some time now – mostly with the tendency of glorifying the actual nature of these world-encompassing networks. For example, in an advertisement for the Dresdener Bank, an employee of this financial institution symbolically hands the viewer a globe the size of a rock melon. A promising and confidence-inspiring gesture that is accompanied by an encouraging slogan: »Take your opportunities: with global share investments«. The global financial currents can be seen on the display panels at stock exchanges, but their complex dynamics are too elusive for any visual representation to be able to depict clearly the processes that underlie them. The capital of today is shifted back and forth from mainframe to mainframe, mostly via telephone lines; the activities of economic players remain hidden.

Totality vs Ground
Anyone digging today takes away layers from under the surfaces of globalisation or on its surfaces themselves. Saskia Sassen, for example, has decided in favour of the former. For eight years she has been working at a project that she presented in a lecture at the Berlin »Live and Let Die« festival5. This project can be described as an attempt to develop an extended concept of globalisation. To illustrate her approach, Sassen got to talking about the war on terror. She described it as a diversionary tactic that disguises the deeper transformations of today. To put it another way: Sassen probes those changes that precisely this supposedly epochal operation causes to be forgotten. She is concerned with the deeper-lying structures, the movements and processes on the bed of a sea that rages and produces towering waves. Sassen herself used another natural analogy: she spoke of a vulcanologist who sits on a veranda, enjoying a glass of wine while observing the scorching eruption. This inevitable natural spectacle – as which globalisation is always being sold to us – is simultaneously image, logic and narration, which Sassen investigates in her work. In order to understand she has to descend into the volcano, into the interior of the power apparatus.

However, Sassen does not see herself as a vulcanologist, but as an archaeologist: "»I am a digger«, as she repeatedly stresses. In comparison with Foucault, for example, who chooses the prison as his excavation site, she directs her attention to places that are not so much self-representations of a massive interventions. She is more interested in the shadows that institutions of formalised power necessarily produce: multinational companies, the supernational system, the market, the regime of human rights. For years she has been digging there on the assumption that the transformations that take place in the depths also include the most complex system of our time: the nation-state. In interaction with the above-mentioned institutions, it negotiates its right to exist and role in the world. To limit this process of redefinition, Sassen focuses on three transhistorical categories: territory, authority and law. She looks at these categories with regard to their composition: not as static elements, but as dynamic ones that are synthetisised and analysed (in the sense of »de-composed«. Her provisional finding is that these three categories can be used to show up the incompleteness of the contracts between the individual and the state, an incompleteness that encourages injustices but that also represents the gauge of Sassen's extended concept of globalisation: the gauge of de-nationalisation.6

One day before Sassen, James Der Derian presented a film in Berlin that he has made together with others working on his »Information Technology, War, and Peace Project« at Brown University. It is about the profound changes in the information sphere that have arisen in the course of the war on terror.7 The result is more than a documentation of the information war waged by the US government and the US media. The pictures from the prime-time networks like CNN and Fox News, but also images from military databases and symposia, and interviews with intellectuals, army officers and scientists serve to construct a counter-simulation, a sort of counter-reality to the narrative of the media mainstream. In this sense, the film is one of numerous other info-interventions in the »military-industrial media entertainment network« (MIME-MET) that, according to Der Derian, has taken over from the old »military-industrial complex« of the industrial era. In this newly emerging field, he sees himself as a detective in Walter Benjamin's sense – and at least since Agatha Christie we know that detective work and archaeology have much in common: Christie's works an excavation in Syria was always analogous to the reconstruction of an unexplained murder in. So to what extent does Der Derian carry out archaeological work in his film?

Digging at the surface
»After 9711« traces the start of an era of info-terror from 11 September 2001 up to the war in Iraq. Most of the pictures are already familiar. What is decisive, however, is how they are presented. They are grainy, distorted, wobbly. Some of them seem to have been downloaded from the Internet – they seem lethargic and awkward, as if they still had to learn to walk. Only very rarely do the sound and picture tracks correspond 1:1. Things that now belong to the classical repertoire of documentary film serve here to produce an alienation effect. Voices from interviews have pictures from TV recordings superimposed over them, politicians' speeches, such as those by President Bush, seem to have been mixed up. At any rate, Bush's lip movements do not correspond to the spoken words that we hear. These sequences showing the US president have a particularly striking effect. Sometimes his appearance is covered up by Arabic writing, in the background there almost always hovers a broad carpet of sound: soft electronic sounds, a little ponderous, melancholy. In between come electronic fragments as well that, like the digital sparkle of mineral water, create a precise contrast to the sometimes dissolving, sometimes blurred images.

It could be said that the low-tech aesthetic of the activist media movements is reactivated here: do-it-yourself spirit in times of the information war on terror. But what the film really reactivates is primarily something else: in the aforementioned interaction of image and sound, the film develops an anachronistic quality. The images seem to have been rescued from an archive. As if one were today to put on recordings from the first hours of the long-playing record, it seems as if someone has tried, a hundred years later, to restore pictures taken in the period directly after September 11. Their »webby quality«, as Der Derian calls it, creates an impression as if a few archaeologists in the far future had sat at their digital interfaces and tried, per mouse click, to make the past speak.
Anyone who goes along with this perspective can see the numerous expert opinions in a new light. After all, most critical reflections these days seem to be submerged in the information sphere of the war on terror. Der Derian, who gives a few astute observers a chance to speak in his film, allows viewers to distance themselves from this immersive information sphere, thus releasing intellectual highlights of our time. When we hear Mary Kaldor speak, for example, the scholar who wrote a standard work at the end of the last decade with »New & Old Wars«, it sets us thinking. Kaldor's comments - which she seems to articulate with her whole body in a manner that is at once disciplined and bewildered – on the mistakes of the Bush administration, the false assessment of terrorism and the chances missed by the individual and democracy to react to all of this make the years following September 11 seem like a particularly notable phase in the history of humanity. Something that we should take in thoroughly.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---