PRESENCE AND ABSENCE - SPATIAL RELATIONSH IPS OF SOCIAL-ACTION

As Georg Simmel, but also Niklas Luhmann has argued, the simultaneous presence of people within a limited space makes communication almost i nevitably. Especially in premodern secieties, presence was for the mos t times a necessary and often even a sufficient condition for the deve lopment of trust, traditions and identities. In modern ,,globalizing'' societies, technical means of transportation and communication seem t o have broken this neat connections: On the one side, means of mass tr ansportation of people, i. e. trains, create manifold situations, wher e presence without communication has become frequent and sometimes eve n ,,normal''. On the other side, modern means of communication, i. e. telephones, enable more and more people to communicate without being p resent. Using terms of Anthony Giddens, this processes therefore can b e analyzed as separation and recombination of social integration (pres ence) and system integration (absence).