Sebastian Giessmann. The Connectivity of Things. Network Cultures since 1832. The MIT Press. 2024
Chapter Reviewed: Chapter 4: Channels: The Politics of Networking Around 1850
Review by: Leila Markosian
Geissman’s fourth chapter departs from the theoretical level of network cultures, and begins to historicize the social and political function of the network as a technology of colonization. As far as networks determine the flow of capital and shape the boundaries of political control, the expansion of connectivity hews closely to the expansion of Western hegemony. In this chapter, Geissman explores the emergence of “the great canals of the nineteenth century” to emphasize that “the mastery of physical space was a matter of networks of transportation and media” (44, 45).
In this chapter, Geissman introduces the idea of the network as a technology of imperialism, one that operates “centrifugally” as a security apparatus: through networked pathways, the politics, economic markets, and cultural productions of the empire are interpolated outward, simultaneously embedding the psychology of the empire into an increasingly wider sphere of national territory while imbuing the sense that the unfettered spread of imperial values is tantamount to freedom for those in the path of the flow (45-49). Geissman illustrates his commentary on the relationship between networks and colonialism through a brief history of the Saint-Simonians, a utopian socialist movement advocating urbanization; “canalization,” from Paris to North Africa; and the emergence of international law in supposedly neutral network sites.
Geissman calls attention to the brutal hypocrisy of “canalization” by quoting directly from its contemporaneous advocates: the Saint-Simonian writer Charles Duveyrier imagined the city-space as being composed of “mixed limbs” that “are like the flesh, the nerves, the bones, the brain, and the entrails of man,” while the German cultural geographer Friedrich Ratzel claims that “[traffic] routes seem to us to be the conductive tissue between large and small groups of humanity” (51, 59). Geissman’s repeated emphasis on the personification of networked space only serves to darken the contrast by which colonial subjects were dehumanized through the process of canalization. However, despite a nod towards the destructive consequences of canal/colonization, Geissman does not devote much ink to specific instances of colonial subjugation facilitated through networks. Inasmuch as Geissman aims to present a material history of the canal, he succeeds in painting a picture of the engineers, scholars, and politicians behind the construction of such networks; but he avoids detailing the role of canalization in the daily lives of colonial subjects, save for a reference to the “forced laborers” used to construct the Suez Canal in Egypt (62). This chapter is impressively broad, drawing a line between early imaginations of urbanization to the politics of telegraphy. Geissman delves into the history of the social movements behind network cultures in the nineteenth century, and touches lightly on the tensions between networks, colonization, and the burgeoning feminist and socialist movements expanding in tandem with the canals. However, Geissman loses the microscopic tact he developed in earlier chapters: although he convinces his reader that the history of the network is the history of the colonial world order, he zooms out before we can understand how this came to pass, and in spite of whose intellectual or cultural protest.