The world as concept and object of knowledge

At the present moment we are experiencing an extremely prolific and intense discourse on globalization, in terms of processes, movements, and frictions. At the same time, we seem to have only a rather vague idea of the place, or rather the site or the scene, where these processes and movements unfold: the world. In contrast to the process of globalization, which seems to be just as open-ended as history itself, the world is limited and absolute. But where are the limits and what do they mean? What can we say about them? The paradoxes brought out by globalization are not, at least not only, products of the digital revolution, not even of modernity, but reveal a whole set of possible emergence histories, genealogies, crisscrossing back in time, often very far back. Nevertheless, the histories of globalization are almost by necessity histories of the present, exposing hidden, older, and often forgotten layers of meaning in the utopian or dystopian discourses on our common global future. How, then, by means of what concepts, representations, tools, technologies, and practices, does the world emerge, or rather is the world brought into being as an object of human experience and activity, and, furthermore, how do these concepts, representations, and so forth deal with the paradoxes and challenges of limited space and unlimited time as well as with the multitude of contrasting genealogies? One of the briefest, but by no means the worst, definitions of the concept of globalization has been proposed by Manfred Steger: in attempting to “compress” his preliminary results “into a single sentence,” he defines globalization as “the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space.”1 A closer look at the definition, however, shows how it takes a key element for granted. Preoccupied with the processes and relations that unfold within “world time” and “world space,” Steger never asks the question that in the end seems to be the most striking one: what is