Helmut Willke

Atopia, the Plus ultra of the nation-state’s Thomas

Feuerstein
self-encirclement* english | deutsch

F. E. Rakuschan
The utopia of the market
english | deutsch

The utopia of the pure market is more obscure and more modern, more amoral and
Helmut Willke
more boundless than any other utopia has been so far. It is upheld not by
english | deutsch
revolutionary dreamers but by established institutions. It is the utopia of the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund, of GATT and WTO, of The Wall Street Thomas Rainer
Journal and The Heritage Foundation, of transnational corporations and globally english | deutsch
operating investment funds. It is the utopia of the pure market. Adam Smith’s
invisible arm is picking up strength to become the lever arm of a global
transformation that transports the wealth of the nations and the welfare of the
shareholder toward a global bliss (“pursuit of happiness”) in which the boundaries
between rich and poor are drawn solely according to how unconditionally companies
and locations abandon themselves to the rules of the pure market.

The overwhelming strength of the utopia of the pure market becomes obvious only if
one comprehends it not just as a model but indeed as a utopia and if one realizes that,
in contrast to all other utopias, it is able to do without trying to influence people. So
far all utopias have failed because of the stubborn resistance of people against any
alteration, in their own nature, toward the good and magnificent. The market utopia,
on the other hand, does not have to care about man. Its sole interest is directed at the Index
institutions and their rules. Once these are in operation man follows. No
mobilisation, no education programmes, no rallies, no agitprop. Just as, for centuries,
people have entered schools and universities, hospitals and churches, courts of law
and lawyers’ offices, and have submitted to these institutions’ rules, regardless of
their own ideas and dreams, and have assimilated their natural resistance in a patient
learning process, so the pure market establishes the rules and restrictions which
people only have to entrust themselves to in order to be a player like everybody else.

Except for the fascist perversion a main feature of all utopian thinking, from Morus
and Bacon, Campanella or Marx, up to Bloch or McLuhan has aimed at promising
the equality of people, sometimes equality and freedom, and also, as an apotheosis,
equality, liberty and fraternity – in any case, there’s always equality. And every
utopia has failed because of this unrealistic fixation on equality. Once people are left
to themselves they seem to do everything in their power to stand out, to mark
differences, to desire inequalities that is, even though many consequences of
inequality may be painful in the process. All educational ideas, from Rousseau to
Mao, have come to naught in the face of the inner hydra of man bringing forth all the
more reasons for inequality the more brutally such reasons have been taken from
him.

The market utopia frees itself from this dilemma and in this way gains an astounding
strength. It is not interested in the equality or inequality of people. It postulates a
much more radical equality, although not of people, but an equality of action
parameters for the market place instead. As far as the two exclusively relevant roles
in the market place are concerned, as supplier and consumer, people in a remarkable
humaneness are regarded as equal there – regardless, that is, of religion or skin
colour, sex or origin, strength or beauty. This idyll is tarnished somewhat by the fact
that people have to step out on yet another market place offering up their labour and
that on this labour market equality depends on certain qualifications. But this may be
defined as nothing but a characteristic feature of a special market and in the larger
picture of the basic equality of market conditions may be pushed to the side; the
more so as everybody is free to act as entrepreneur rather than as employee.

Much more than on the equality of people the market utopia relies on equality in
relation to the rules of the market. And indeed these rules know of no privileges. Bill
Gates is subject to these rules just as the little corner shop is, General Motors just as
the garage down the street. And not only that, whenever and because this majestic
equality is in place, regardless of a person’s standing, it creates, without any further
effort by the players, a derivative equality of the possibilities of development and
innovation. Past merits and achievements count little when superior products or
services are offered. More radically than any revolution the rules of the market see to
it that established advantages, privileges, differences in status, or traditional claims
are swept away as soon as a more attractive product, a better price, a superior service
appear on the market. Up to the seventies IBM held a singular, seemingly invincible
position on the computer and software market. The company became the shining
example held up in business schools and the standard for national development and
promotion strategies. Corresponding claims may be made for other market leaders
such as Kodak, Daimler-Benz, Phillips, and many more. They all have been
mercilessly pushed off their pedestals because new products and better offers entered
the market. Josef Schumpeter’s “productive destruction” has gotten to them all and
only by submitting unreservedly to these market rules, and with more innovative
products and cheaper offers they have been able get back on top.

The utopia of the pure market, therefore, is a genuinely modern utopia. It does not,
like the old utopias, and like Marxism still did, rely on tangible content matter of
utopian bliss, on certain end time conditions of history as the utopian fulfilment of a
human dream. The market utopia, much rather, is satisfied with postulating
procedures and basic conditions that consequently bring forth, like a deus ex
machine, a process whose complexity may be increased at will, a utopian continuity
of change putting, while being self-referential and self-adjusting, people under the
spell of a model of order that does not depend on noble motifs but on elementary
egoisms.

“The market economy,” Karl Polanyi defines the utopia of the pure market (1984:
102ff.), “is an economic system that is controlled, regulated, and steered solely by
markets. The organisation of the production and distribution of goods is left to this
self-regulating mechanism. … Moreover, there must be no intervention in the
adaptation of prices to changed market conditions, no matter if the price of goods,
labour, property or money is concerned. Consequently there must not only be
markets for all elements of the economy, but equally no measures or politics must be
admitted that might influence events on these markets. Neither price nor supply and
demand must therefore be determined or regulated; the only directives and measures
permitted are those that insure the self-regulation of the market by creating
conditions that make the market the single effective power in the economic domain.”

Thus the market utopia does not need to postulate a revolution and to hammer it into
the heads of people. It replaces the one big revolution by a myriad of small local
adjustments. These, too, may accumulate into cataclysms but in this case no
revolutionary guards are required, only self-interested buyers. What a relief for
revolutions. The legitimacy of current changes is out of the question. Success brings
legitimacy. Just as electoral success creates political legitimacy, success on the
market puts aside all further questions, particularly as both sides of the market
transaction enter into relations voluntarily, as no buyer is forced into a particular
purchase, and no seller is forced to sell. As long as the market offers alternatives it
brings forth, with astonishing naturalness, legitimacy and effectiveness.

This built-in mechanism proves the paradoxical inhuman modernity of the market
utopia. It stakes everything on the card of the rational protagonist, on the card of
interest-led decisions of single persons, and in this way seems to take nothing more
seriously than this single human. Yet at the same time it turns out that these
individual decisions matter only marginally. What really matters are abstract
aggregates of decisions winning through against other aggregates: e.g. Harrison
White’s “tangible cliques of producers watching each other” (1981: 543). For
protagonists, as market observers, relevant market data only ever result from the
aggregation of a large number of transactions coming together to form a trend or
pattern (Hayek 1972: 16ff.). In the process man, formerly positioned so prominently,
vanishes behind a veil of irrelevance. The individual action of choosing per se is as
insignificant as the individual vote in mass democracy. Individuals cannot claim their
significance as such; they are only able to do so as elements of different aggregates,
groups, collectives, etc. of voters or buyers designating majorities or market shares
(Saul 1997: 148).

It might be instructive to look a little more closely at the ambiguous relation between
market utopia and individuality. The market does not need any individuals, only
protagonists able to observe and decide. The purity of the market and consequently
the brightness of the market utopia grow with the numbers. The mass markets of the
industrial age already were fairly advanced manifestations of a market logic of
bartering relations made anonymous. They could do without any reference to
individuality as only large numbers of transactions, “regardless of a person’s
standing”, could bring to bear this logic of the translation of generalised observation
into individual decision. Today, in the age of a renewed, more radical phase of
globalisation, world markets are established, markets without boundaries and
isolation, asymptotically approaching the utopia of the pure market. It would be mere
romanticism to ascribe individuals an enhanced status on these markets. There are so
many individuals that they do not count anymore. From the perspective of the market
they are observable and thus real merely as masses and market shares.

At a medieval town market, an oriental bazaar, or at an Indian village market persons

are of decisive importance for the successful market transaction. In the course of
modernisation this is no longer the case. On established world markets those are no
more than pale memories of past idylls. The assumption that modernity promotes
individualism or even creates it, therefore, is no more than wishful thinking on the
part of the apologists of postmodernism, as is demonstrated e.g. by the pseudo-
individualisation through “individualised mass production”. Above all, and where it
counts, modernisation in economy and education, politics and health system means a
cutting down of individual features to quotas, averages, statistically relevant patterns,
and global trends.

Like many another utopia the market utopia awards the individual such a prominent
position, even still as a rational and selfish one, because it wants it to be visible as a
figurehead. The market utopia can afford this romantic weakness precisely because
individuals count only superficially, in so far as they finally decide to buy or not to
buy. But deep down the market logic and its laws work as an architecture of a market
institution and a system of market transactions still in need of individuals as the
house needs brick stones. All of which, however, ties them into a form they can no
more escape from than the brick stone can escape from the wall. The person is “just
another brick in the wall”. The individual may behave rationally and selfishly, but by
doing so he or she fulfils a system logic that is not his or her own and that cannot
worry about collateral damage.

The atopia of globalism

Today the end of the world is not marked by the Pillars of Hercules both sides of a
strait. Place, space and distance increasingly are becoming negligible quantities for
economic transactions. The term for placelessness, atopia, describes this moment of
the market utopia that, in the idea of the utopian, heightens the nowhere to a
somewhere. Utopia describes a place that does not exist. Atopia describes the
irrelevance of the place, global placelessness. Global infrastructure systems of
telecommunication and of traffic telematics, globally operating mass media and
transaction networks make irrelevant the place which one communicates from, make
irrelevant locality that is (Willke 2001). In an atopian society with a global radius the
market utopia finds the conditions for its self-fulfilment. Even if market economists
habitually tend to ignore this, their idealised markets so far suffer from the territorial,
localised and locally binding guardianship of the state.

For humane reasons the self-description of the politics of our modern age may entail
the civilising of power, and as a historical caesura may have done so for a good
reason. But the practical task of civilising was accomplished by politics primarily by
way of the taming of the anarchy of the markets. These were just as much a serious
and direct danger to life and limb of the citizens of the burgeoning modern age as
domestic and international strife was. Impoverishment and proletarianisation of the
rural masses were the result of a market logic let loose. Only when the consequences
of this barbarianisation confronted the political systems themselves with the
possibility of revolutions, especially under the influence of the competing utopia of
communism, politics found itself obliged to call a halt to the devastating work of free
markets. This can most clearly be observed with Bismarck in Germany and in
England with the influence of reformers like Robert Owen and William Beveridge.

Since then the market utopia has been suspected of postulating a profoundly
inhumane order, which may optimise the production and distribution of goods from
the point of view of cost, yet ignores the human cost of this regime. The more
successful individual societies have been in combining, in the forms of the welfare
state, the political taming of the free market with a nevertheless functioning
industrial capitalism, and the more threatening the implementations of extant
socialist utopias, the more powerfully this suspicion prevented the unfolding of the
utopia of the pure market.

These days nothing restricts the possibilities of political control more effectively than
the two complexes of revolutions currently taking shape in the dynamics of the so-
called knowledge society and world society. The driving force of knowledge society
is organised complexity, based on specialised knowledge and at the same time
recursively enhanced by the more and more ubiquitous rooting of all social processes
in questions of know-how. The driving force of world society is globalisation
understood as a process that, on the basis of new global infrastructures for
communication processes and transactions, undermines and perforates national
frontiers and with every functional global sub-market feeds a recursive self-
enhancement.

To the extent that organised complexity and globalisation push back a political
control of society, but above all of the areas economy and financial markets,
structured in conjunction with nation-states, the market makes a name for itself as the
only alternative model for the control of complex systems of bartering relations. The
more advanced socialist societies have seen this differently and they have failed
because of this misjudgement. Today especially China is the prime example that even
a developing country, with a mostly agrarian population and an economic output that
is less than 15 per cent of the Japanese, commits itself in its economic transactions to
the idea of the market, despite and beside a socialist political utopia, in order not to
miss out on a future based on knowledge and globalisation.

Strangely enough, the prophets of the market utopia have only very surreptitiously
hinted at the civilising and cosmopolitan explosive force of their utopia. For Smith
just as for Ricardo, for Marshall just as for Samuelson it might have been too
fantastic and altogether unimaginable to call into question the state’s containment of
people and markets and to resist the Hobbesian primal fear of impending anarchy. It
is even more remarkable that it was Hegel, usually labelled as an apologist of the
authoritarian state, who built his philosophy of history on the imminent coincidence
of rationality, liberty and liberal statehood and who, as a consequence, had world
history, as a development process, end with the Battle of Jena in 1806 because there
the cosmopolitan ideals of the French Revolution had been wrested from their
nationalist appropriation through Bonapartism. On this fact, at least, Francis
Fukuyama was right to insist (1992: 60ff.) and he expanded this Hegelian idea into
the praise of a universal consumer culture rooted in liberal economic principles.

The historical irony of this situation is that the emancipation of the market toward its
very own framework of pre-conditions takes place at the very moment of its history
that marks the beginning of the end of the importance of locality in general. The
utopia of the market is confronted with the atopia of transactions. The atopian society
begins to take shape in the wake of the assumption that the difference of places
merges in the unity of global accessibility, without noticeable costs and with no
noticeable time delay, and yields to the new criteria of access/no access to the
respective networks of digitalised transactions. Atopia as the utopia of placelessness,
as the utopia of the irrelevance of diverging locality, finds its strongest arguments in
the almost real-time and free digital transactions of the Internet and in the
simultaneous global range of satellite-based communication infrastructures.

The atopia of transactions also manifests itself in the competitive and possibly
creative destruction, in the context of an economic society no longer determined by
locality, of the regulation regimes monopolised by nation-states as the pillars of
public supra-structures. Standards, taken as collective systems of rules for private
economic transactions, may be perceived locally or nationally as long as the
corresponding markets, on their part, contend themselves with a local or national
range while being subject, as “political economies”, to the political dictum. Once this
assumption has become invalid with the globalisation of markets locality and local
specificity of the standard are equally irrelevant. They are replaced by an atopian
vastness and universality that on the one hand, no doubt, becomes apparent in the
ubiquity and uniformity of McDonald’s and Coca Cola, of GSM and CNN, yet on the
other hand also in the fact that the pompousness of local sovereignty and
arbitrariness, for the first time in history, gives way to a cosmopolitan liberality
breaching the despotism of local ties and restrictions in order to realize, in the
freedom of an atopian market, locality as a mere contingency. With the help of cable
networks, modems and satellite receivers this also goes for seemingly still closed
systems like China fighting – “like the church fought the printing press five hundred
years ago” – desperately as well as hopelessly against an opening respectively
openness (Wright 2000: 6). Only if, in this sense, locality becomes a freely chosen
option, instead of a mortgage prescribed by birth and tradition, the myth and the
overestimation of locality, as witnessed in Germany even when it comes to the wages
of lord mayors, will be tamed and exposed to the disciplining liberty of an explicit
choice.

Atopia and the features of an atopian society are not an argument against the
necessity of supra-structures. An atopian society, too, needs contextual rules for the
controlling of its transactions and communication acts. Yet atopia underlines the fact
that the appropriation and monopolising of supra-structures through the politics of
the nation-state remains a part of history, like everything else. The question is which
protagonists and bodies can and will take the place of the nation-state in order to
create the required supra-structures, and which protagonists and bodies decide on
which supra-structures are required.

In all its power-based sovereignty the politics of democracies is exclusively about

creating the pre-conditions for the operational possibilities of social functional
systems and to work off their negative externalities in a socially acceptable way. The
only exceptions are the collective goods for the protection against external and
internal enemies, for peace and stability of the law that is. Apart from that, though,
politics is the repair workshop of a highly complicated, perilous and in many regards
no longer controllable social machinery powered by the operational logics of
functionally differentiated sub-systems. The most clear-sighted politics, therefore,
may be observed where it does not simply wait for the usual breakage quota of
functional systems but where it foresees that there is a self-destructive dynamic built
into the operational logic of autonomous social systems that, paradoxically enough,
depends on their very success. The invention of the welfare state is founded on just
such a case of clear-sightedness. The fundamental revision of the welfare state, as it
seems necessary today, presupposes a comparable deed of political shrewdness.

The sociological problem of globalisation and globalness consists in the fact that the
hitherto nation-state-based societies are rocked in their foundations because of the
removal of certain functional systems – like economy, science, or art – from the
context of territorial fixation and social self-control while new means of re-
stabilisation are not yet in the offing. The emerging global context, in particular, does
not yet accomplish this re-stabilising for the simple reason that capacities for a global
self-control are not even rudimentarily institutionalised so far.

This historically singular coincidence of sociality and territoriality is currently

breaking up in the “post-national constellation” (Habermas 1998) of a multi-faceted
and by no means homogeneous disintegration of social prerogatives of self-control
on the level of the nation-state. Without going into detail we might nevertheless
record the fact that the somewhat fruitless debate among the heralds of an end of the
nation-state by and by is giving way to more differentiated analyses tracing back the
loss of nation-state-based controlling expertise and skills to specific factors in the
development of trans-national controlling regimes for very specific functional
systems.

In any case, the emerging lateral world systems are challenging the territorially
rooted, modern societies constituted as nation-states exactly where the responsibility
that makes them societies in the first place is concerned: in the sovereignty of self-
control.

In the case of socialism the absurdity of trying to trivialise complex social systems,
repeatedly criticised, among others, by systems theory, could not be upheld despite
an increasingly repressive code of practice. And in the context of hierarchical-
centralist organisations it could not be saved by means of technological resources.
This practical failure of a theory of system control will have an impact on “western”
ideas of social control through politics and the control of organisations through
management. Fantasies of feasibility, or even enforceability, of organisational
reforms and restructuring, that still characterise, above all, the thinking of the welfare
state, will continue to be forced onto the defensive. Human happiness prescribed
from above through welfare society and a benevolent hierarchical management will
become more questionable still.

The dystopia of symbols – the function of art?

The split between the symbolical and the real world has accompanied human
thinking from its very beginning and in Plato’s allegory of the cave has found its first
lasting expression. Knowledge society, in this respect, introduces a strange inversion
of priorities. Earlier forms of society, and most clearly industrial society, concede real
meaning only to material facts and insist on an empirical provability of all ideas.
Thus ideas are drawn into the maelstrom of an enlightenment that, together with
religious myths, also discredits the worldly imaginations erected by philosophers and
visionaries in order to bring order and explanation models to the chaos of reality.

Knowledge society, in this sense, returns to Plato and helps the world of symbols to a
primacy, once again, over the world of things. The symbolic levels control the
material ones, just as the global financial system controls the fate of real economy, or
as the models of pedagogy control real education. But in contrast to Plato’s world of
ideas knowledge society has to be aware that its systems of symbols are anything but
benevolent and harmonious forms of the ideal. They have, much rather, piled up into
complex and opaque architectures that may appear ingenious today and collapse
tomorrow – “like the risk models of the Long Term Capital Management Fund”. The
knowledge society’s systems of symbols are made up of forms carrying their “other
sides” with them at all times. All of which brings discontinuities into play that cannot
but disappoint linear expectations and thus add to the impression that the world of
ideas of knowledge society not so much mirrors a cosmic order but rather the
structured chaos of symbolic anarchy.

In general, systems of symbols, with their separation from the real things, tend to
proliferate to become constellations of “complexity without hold” (Luhmann)
revolving within and around themselves. Certainly systems of symbols only come to
life when they are activated by persons, made use of in communication and thus
integrated in the operational mode of social systems. But in this potentiality they are
not dependent on actual persons and systems. Nobody switches systems of symbols
on or off, nobody controls them, and they belong to nobody. Nobody creates or
changes them and nobody defines the rules of their use single-handedly. They follow
a logic, a grammar of how to combine elements, that starts out independently of
actual persons and has its origins in social codes of practice. A paradigmatic example
here, once again, is the operative primacy of language, as a symbolic system, over
the respective individual act of speaking. The rules of the language prescribe the
possibilities of speaking, even though only the speaking allows the language to
become operational. The social codes of practice lay down the initial conditions for
the specific logic of a system of symbols which – with growing anonymity,
evolvement and inner complexity – it can distance itself from to the point where the
constituting circumstances are reversed: While in the first instance people set in
motion certain systems of symbols in order to solve certain problems, what emerges
in the process are generalised forms for the definition of conceivable solutions
prescribing the problems people might encounter when they activate systems of
symbols. The garbage can model for organisational decision processes, according to
which it is not problems that search for solutions but existing solutions that look for
problems, grasps this logic perfectly.

All the autonomy notwithstanding there are, accordingly, structural couplings

between the symbolic and the real worlds whose balance may be subject to historical,
ideological, and technological change. One of the reasons why the prevalence of
symbols is also possible today outside language lies with the technological
innovation of digital computers described by John von Neumann as early as 1945.
Digital computers open up a new dimension of symbolisation, as they no longer
merely are able to store data, like inscriptions or books, but also instructions on the
handling of the data and instructions on the use of instructions. In this way a
symbolic architecture of different language levels is made possible, from the simple
machine-friendly language to programming languages and on to highly aggregated
operation systems and integrated software (Evans and Wurster 2000: 34).

What emerges here, in the deep structures of the digital revolution as a real
revolution, is the self-referential progression of symbolic systems to conglomerates
of networked functional chains. These rely on the possibility, described by John von
Neumann, to autonomously link data and instructions in digital programmes and thus
to generate architectures of automatised links, to be extended at will, no longer
depending on the motifs and interests of single persons but, if at all, only on persons
as contextualising constraints of the operational mode of symbolic systems.

A corresponding argument, according to Norbert Elias’ theory of the process of

civilisation, forms the basis for the ability to set up long chains of action. In this case
it is the increase in the expectability and the bindingness of actions – through the
validity of anonymised and (relatively!) disposable symbols of power, money and
knowledge – that symbolically broadens the reality-bound actions of persons and
expands them, in a first wave of globalisation, into chains of action spanning the
world. The question whether this has actually contributed to the civilising process or
not shall not be answered at this point. Thus, in any case, chains of action relying on
symbols and complex constellations of action are gaining a significant influence on
the real everyday actions of people and organisations. Symbols become the glue
holding together individual actions and allowing the creation of patterns and
constellations of actions otherwise doomed to fail in the face of the real restrictions
of time and space.

The split between the symbolic worlds of lateral world systems and the real world of
territorially rooted society calls for a politics that brings into play understanding
beyond mere reason and system rationality surpassing knowledge by orchestrating
the multi-layered decentral clamour of the specialists into a halfway bearable concert
– without being able, though, to take on the role of the conductor. Only in this way
would it be able to lift the “fatal difference between problems of controlling and of
understanding” (Habermas 1985: 421) which, unlike Habermas believes, has nothing
to do with the idylls of the world we live in but a lot with the inability of politics to
comprehend, as its actual job, a new form and constellation of society.

“When the power of unification vanishes from the life of people and the contrasts
have lost their living correlation and reciprocity, gaining autonomy instead, then the
need for philosophy arises,” Hegel had formulated against the background of a
comparable constellation of change (Hegel 1986: 22). When the power of unification
disappears from the life of society, and the contrasts of the operational logics of
functional systems have lost their living relation and reciprocity and are gaining
autonomy, “the need for politics” arises. Building on Hegel, though, we might say
that what we have in mind is a politics envisaging indeed the general, and the
relations and interrelations of the parts, and paying attention to the difficult balance
between the possible autonomy of the parts and the necessary control of their
interrelations.

Politics will not be able to fulfil even this task without help. It will have to fall back
on the skills of many diverse organisations and institutions and on the reputation of
regimes of “private authority” and, here too, will have to press ahead with the
transition from “government to governance”. Yet in the mediation of communication
processes between these diverse protagonists and systems, in the controlling of the
anarchy of symbolic systems, the one specific competence of politics could mature
which no other system brings forth. “Insofar it is a randomness,” we might hark back
to Hegel once more. But in view of the given split between symbolic and real world,
between functional systems and society, between organisational ends and system
rationality, between innovations in the symbolic systems of the parts and system risks
of the whole, between cyclopean visions of the specialists and the collective reason
of a society, politics should be the necessary attempt “to abolish these splits and to
comprehend the having become of the intellectual and of the real world as a
becoming” in need of the mediation and supervision of politics because a natural
evolution today closes off more contingencies and options than it opens up and thus
forces too much order and allows for too little anarchy. Evolution alone is not enough
anymore: “Only that obscurity is a chaos from which a world can spring.” (Schlegel
1958ff.: 263)

For the first time in their history people are confronted with the challenge to face
unprotected a skill biological evolution happened to equip them with and which they
may have made use of in marginal areas and brought to perfection in their thinkers,
philosophers, scientists, and inventors in generally secondary fields of expertise that
never, though, were able to impress the course of history in any significant way but
instead, in case of doubt, always had to submit to the want of hunger or the violence
of the stronger: the ability of thinking and imagining, that is, which now, after a long
warm-up time, allows us to make knowledge, via an extremely accelerated continual
learning, the basis of all life processes, consequently turning even living and
surviving into projects of knowledge-based strategies and submitting them to a
controlled development.

This cognitive turn of human history does not presuppose that the biological
dependencies on food, territoriality, and family will vanish altogether – only that they
will become menial occupations. Once the supply of food is guaranteed thanks to two
or three percent of the working population, territoriality suspended through global
interdependence and networking, and family made up for with the proliferation of
family-like alternative forms of infantile socialisation and of intimacy, then a degree
of independence from the organic constraints of man will have been achieved that
will make a human quality going beyond the animalistic, the quality of cognitive
reconstructions and projections of people’s worlds, the paramount basis of their
material, personal, and social existence.

The crisis of a politics, having to reinvent governing in the context of an atopian

knowledge society by redefining and constructing its core competences against the
hysteresis of past successes, creates an inevitable confusion in its traditional systems
of symbols, above all in the legal control system, the distribution and re-distribution
logics of the welfare state, and in the deep structures of symbolic fixation. On the
surface the rules appear to be the same and they still seem to be in operation, yet in
the deep structures of their logic and in the grammar of their concatenations a virus
of atopian dissolution is running riot. The established fixed allocations give way to a
decentralised logic of contingent, situational re-combinations. Thus, for example,
dissolving tariff regulations, local operating agreements, employment initiatives,
regulations on Green or Blue Cards, local subsidies, and EU regulations on the
prohibition of subsidies etc. collude, a process pushed forward by a perceived global
competition of locations. The logic of legal systems of symbols is exposed to a
pressure to adapt that threatens their innermost principles, the “normativity of
norms”, and confronts them with the alternative of a symbolism of cognitive
expectations of expectations. It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that an anarchic
whirlwind is sweeping through the legal systems of symbols. In their grammar
symbolic systems, being operatively closed and non-intentional systems, reproduce
an analectic of thesis, antithesis and hysteresis running contrary to the harmonistic
dialectic of human perception (resolution into synthesis and the avoiding of cognitive
dissonances) and here also deepens the discontinuities between man and society.

In art’s favour Luhmann brings to bear that it were its social function to show “that in
the sphere of the possible order is possible” (Luhmann 1990: 38). Adorno puts it a
little more adventurously: “The task of art today is to carry chaos into order.”
(Adorno quoted in Welsch 1994: 25) In the same spirit, what the art of global politics
and global governance regimes is about is to show that in the sphere of the possible
(i.e. the controlling of contingent options) disorder is possible. From this perspective,
what is to be expected from art itself is that it makes, more so than it has done
hitherto, the business of creating systematic disorder its very own. Considerations on
the changes of politics under the conditions of globalness here can supply certain
stimuli but the rest is up to art itself.

Plus ultra posse nemo obligatur?

The old rule of law that nobody must be asked to do what he or she is not able to do
is turned upside down in atopian constellations. The systemic conditions adamantly
keep demanding what persons, as individuals, are not able to accomplish. Persons,
therefore, need allies. Contrary to the supposed trend toward a radical
individualisation they have to ally themselves with the very instances they perceive
as the cause of their plight: the big systems of symbols of atopian knowledge society,
including art.

Whether this is asking too much of art can only be answered by art itself. Whether
the latter becomes moralistic in the process it can only decide on itself. The
dissolution of the habitual orders of a utopian market, a territorially organised
politics, and an edifying art opens up new perspectives onto an art playing along the
edges of the world and of chaos: plus ultra!

*Stefan Bidner, Thomas Feuerstein (Eds.), Plus ultra. Beyond Modernity?,

Frankfurrt/Main 2005, p. 225 - 235, translated by Daniel Ostermann.

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