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A Negative Anthropology of Globalization 19 Therefore, it has become difficult to find any situations that deserve to be called situations of “lived experience” (which is the English translation of the German concept Erleben), in the sense of being situations for which we do not have ready-made concepts, a well-laid approach, and, in the worst case, even tickets and a tourist guide. This development explains the no longer so new—and inevitably paradoxical—tendency within the tourist industry today to provide their clients with “adventure vacations” (or, in the German speaking countries, with Erlebnis-Urlauben).

However, the problematic consequences of pasts flooding the present cannot be foreseen. Maybe, as Niklas Luhmann once remarked, it really isn’t necessary to declare every factory chimney in eastern Westphalia a national 32 Stagnation monument to be preserved at any cost. 2 In this present it is impossible to forget anything, yet at the same time—because we are inclined to turn our backs on the future for reasons that, although reasonable, are not necessarily good—we no longer know in what direction we should progress.

III. stagnatIOn Temporal, Intellectual, Heavenly On the way to the dinner being held for conference participants at a Georgian restaurant near the Kremlin, two colleagues from Moscow who, in the final years of the Soviet Union, had managed to find another life at Oxford and in New York, gave the American a brief cultural tour. Here was Mayakovsky’s residence at the beginning of the October Revolution, there the dwelling of the young Pasternak. In front of the department store with a clock telling the time across the globe, they had stood as young boys; with the feverish patriotism of children, they heard how the first Sputnik had started its course around the planet.