Diplomacy in a traditional sense cannot mediate security in the postmodern scene. Antidiplomacy studies the emergence of the danger, the threat of the other from within. Terror is the moment of ubiquitous danger, the insight that no wall is high enough to provide protection from the other, that security itself is predicated upon insecurity. And terrorism enacts a mode which resists domestication. The counter-strategy must be deployed at the level of the sign and of the episteme.
Terrorism relies on symbolic power.
Der Derian's point of departure is the notion that the response to terrorism must be archival. It must begin its search in a genealogy of knowledge. Speed is thus the nexus dimension, warfare's third dimension is the surface of the postmodern battlefield. Already an impending potential in World War I, the politicizing of the spatial in geopolitics did not take long. In contemporary warfare the axis of battle shifts from territorial, economic, and material gains to immaterial, perceptual fields.