In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

CENTER = PERIPHERY (INFINITUDE) 365
less compelled to do today, push us on toward the conquest of remoteness
[Entferntheit]. With the 'radio,' for example, Dasein has so expanded
its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-distancing
[Ent-fernung] of the 'world'-a de-distancing whose implications for
the meaning of Dasein cannot yet be visualized" (Heidegger, 105).
This theme of the collapse of distance is also apparent in a number of
nonphilosophical discourses. Nobody generates more variants of it than
the French writer Paul Morand:
Our fathers were sedentary. Our sons will be even more so, for they
will have nowhere left to travel on the earth. To go and take the
measure of the globe still holds some interest for us-but after us? ...
We're on our way toward the tour of the world on eighty francs. All
that has been said about the poverty of man won't be truly borne out
until the day that fare has been reached. To the long list of things that
make existence unbearable, I add the fact that we are forced to live
crowded together on a globe of which three-quarters is occupied, alas,
by water (which could just as well have been found in the air or under
the ground). We will succumb in the end; we will waste our lives in this
locked compartment, sealed up in the economy class of this little sphere
lost in space. For the earth is astonishingly small; only boats permit us
to doubt this smallness, because they still move so slowly" (Morand,
10-11)
As devices belonging to a technology-dominated space, telephones and
telegrams suggest that the old epistolary formula by which people promise
to be "present in spirit" is being transformed into a palpable reality
where absence comes close to presence. This is precisely what Benito
Mussolini does when he sends greetings to a convocation of Futurists
organized in honor of the poet Marinetti. He makes the transmissive
medium of the telegram his message: "Consider me present at Futurist
assembly synthesizing twenty years of great artistic political battles often
consecrated with blood. Congress must be starting point not arrival
point" (II Futurismo, 2).
It is only a short step from such technologically grounded claims of
presence to a new fascination with the possibilities of telepathy as spiritual
interpenetration-a fascination to which Sigmund Freud feels compelled
to react. [see Wireless Communication] But forms of existential
closeness are certainly not the only-or most important-effects of the