Table Of ContentSublime Communication Technologies
Sublime Communication
Technologies
Rod Giblett
Palgrave
macmillan
* © Rodney James Giblett 2008
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Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Flow Along a Channel: Communication and Its
Technologies 1
2 Crude Conqueror of Nature: Steam Railways 19
3 Mind Over Matter: Electrical Telegraphy 37
4 Shooting the Event: The Camera is a Gun, Photography is a
Shot 56
5 The Hell of Images: Cinema Paradiso 74
6 Magician's Bower and Monstrous Mechanical: The Car as
Communication Technology 92
7 The Magical in The Modern: Ethereal Radio 110
8 Disciplinary and Flanerie: The Panopticon and Panorama
of Television 128
9 Orbiting in the Sublime Company of Heavenly Bodies:
Satellites from Cold War to Gulf War 146
10 The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace and the Slimy Swamps of
War: Computers and the Internet 164
11 Blue Sky Mining: Spectrum and Space 182
References 200
Index 216
vii
Preface
This book is a critical cultural history of communication technologies.
The history it traces is a genealogy that follows the line of descent
from railways and telegraphy to computers and the Internet. The central
theme, and main object of critical analysis, is the sublime. For Benjamin
(1999a, p. 415), the sublime is simply, and literally, 'carrying aloft'.
Communication technologies quite literally carry information above the
earth. Beginning with the railway and the telegraph, communication
technologies carry information above the earth and through terrestrial
space. Later with satellites they have carried it even further above the
earth into extraterrestrial space.
Yet the sublime does not merely involve upward spatial displace
ment. It also carries a lot of metaphorical and ideological baggage. This
includes the chemical process of sublimation of solid matter into gas.
This process has also been used as a metaphor for mind-body dualism
and the privileging of mind over body; for the transcendence of the
immanent; and for the displacement of instinct into intellection and of
place into space - all of which characterise communication technologies,
including their invention, production and utilisation. Communication
technologies attempted to transcend earthly life into a secular heaven
devoid of God. The sublime is a secular theology, a modern mythology
of technology.
Drawing on chemistry, Marx and Engels in the Communist Mani
festo used the sublime without naming it as such to argue that in
industrial capitalist societies 'all that is solid melts into air'. For them,
the solidities of pre-capitalist social formations under industrial capit
alism are sublimated into thin air and have an ethereal existence.
Following a similar line, Berman in All That is Solid Melts into Air, took
up Marx and Engels' phrase and explored the etherealising project of
modernity. Yet he only discusses mass communication in general terms
(1983, p. 16) and very briefly. He never considers the technologies of
communication, a curious omission from a book devoted to discussing
modernity in which those technologies have played such a crucial and
formative part.
Communication technologies played a crucial role, not only in
modernity generally as Thompson (1995) argues beginning with print,
but also particularly in transforming the solidities of pre-capitalist social
viii
Preface ix
formations into thin air. This applies to the trajectory of development
beginning with telegraphy and radio, through television and satellites
and culminating at present in the Internet and the use of electromag
netic spectrum. Communication technologies are an integral part of the
modern project of the sublime and its triumph over the pre-modern
(Lyotard, 1989, p. 199).
The sublime is a persistent theme in the study of American culture and
history, including such aspects as: the American sublime in nineteenth
century landscape writing and painting (Cole, 1835/1965; Furtwangler,
1993; Wilton and Barringer, 2002); the city sublime (Brown, 1959);
sublime science (Miller, 1966); the rhetoric of the technological sublime
(Leo Marx, 1964); the technological sublime (Kasson, 1976/1999); the
rhetoric of the electrical sublime. (Carey and Quirk, 1989); the American
technological sublime (Nye, 1994); and, most recently, the digital
sublime (Mosco, 2004). Although the railway, and to some extent the
telegraph, figure prominently in some of these studies, other communic
ation technologies are generally neglected, as are their military origins
and uses. Mosco is the exception as he devotes a chapter to the tele
graph, electrification, the telephone, radio and television, though he
does not discuss their military aspects.
The republic of the United States of America was founded in war,
the War of Independence from its imperial master. It is a military
state from its inception. Kasson touches on the military origins and
applications of much early American technology, applicable also to
much subsequent technology and communication technologies. Not
only, as Kasson (1976/1999, p. 12) puts it in inverted biblical terms,
did 'the nation beat its plough-shares into swords,' it also beat them
into words, into code and communication technologies, such as aerial
photography, two-way radiOS, computers, and satellites, into command
communication-control systems. The military, as Cowan (1997, p. 249)
argues in her social history of American technology, 'has always been
an important sponsor [and beneficiary I would add] of technological
change,' including the communications technology revolution of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (p. 273).
Recently Rosalind Williams (2000) took up Marx and Engels' phrase in
the title of an essay reflecting on the impact of the information revolu
tion on the contemporary university and on the historian of technology.
Although she does not discuss the phrase in any detail nor relate it to
the sublime, she suggests that 'all that is solid melt into air' is quite
an apt description, not only for technology itself for the historian of
technology in the information revolution, but also for describing the
x Preface
historian him or herself, especially of that revolution as it is occurring.
He/she seems to be transformed out of existence as he/she encounters
an unstable entity impacting on perceptions of time and space even as
s/he researches it. In response Williams calls for passionate histories of
technologies grounded in political critique and for relational histories
linked to other disciplines. Grounding the history of communication
technologies in political critique and linking it to other disciplines are
the central purposes of this book.
Railways, telegraphy, radio, photography, cinema, cars, television,
satellites, and computers are all sublime technologies. They are also
products of the process of sublimation (and reproduce it themselves).
Communication technologies transform the solid, living matter of
bodies into the airy, dead matter of data. Communication technologies,
such as radio and telecommunication satellites, sublimate (or 'sublime')
the solidities of the earth and terrestrial space into the gaseous heights of
the electromagnetosphere and orbital extraterrestrial space (see Giblett,
1996, chapter 2).
Moreover, communication technologies transcend space and time by
enabling messages to travel faster than transportation. They dislocate
local place and tempo into global, placeless space and almost instant
aneous time. Bodies performing actions are transformed into cyborgs
engaging in events. This process, and the drive from which it arises, is
masculine. It involves mastery over nature inside and outside the body
rather than mutuality with it (see Giblett, 2004).
The account of communications technologies that I give is genea
logical in that a particular communication technology arises out of a
previous one, or ones: television arose out of radio; radio out of tele
graphy; telegraphy out of letter writing; the Internet and computers
converging out of all of them. This genealogy of communication tech
nologies is part of what Foucault (1977, p. 31) calls 'the history of the
present.' Spectrum, computers, telecommunications and the Internet are
key aspects of the present that have long histories in their precursors. The
history of the present also points forward to 'the history of the future'
(for a critical survey see Carey with Quirk, 1989b). Outer space and its
control, space power and the 'weaponisation' of space are the scenarios
envisaged by the new futurists rather than a global, spatial commons
owned by none and shared by all. This history of the future ends up
being a repetition of the history of the past: exploration, conquest,
colonization and exploitation. What happened on earth is repeated in
the heavens.
Preface xi
The genealogy is presented chronologically as the characteristics and
structure of each succeeding generation of communication technolo
gies were established very early on and bequeathed to each subsequent
communication technology. Rather than an information revolution
during the 1990s, we had an information generation, an information
explosion not only in terms of content and quantity but also in the
forms to express it and technologies to deliver it. Rather than conver
gence being an innovation of the 1990s between information techno
logy and telecommunications, convergence has been the norm since
railways and telegraphy when lines for the latter ran alongside lines for
the former, and the latter was used to control the former. Divergence has
also been the norm since then too as telegraphy communicated faster
than railway, the then fastest means of transportation.
The first nine chapters of the book are concerned with the history
of the present arising from the past; the final two are devoted to the
history of the present going into the future. The first chapter begins by
considering communication as a technology. Communication is basic
ally the transportation of messages. Communication technologies arose
out of transportation: telegraphy out of railways. Railways were also a
communication technology in that not only did they carry messengers
and messages, but also their windows and their curving tracks produced
the landscape as a panoramic tableau for a seated passenger. The car as
a communication technology was to inherit and develop these features
of the railway with the possibility of stopping to take in the view of
pleasing prospects from designated vantage points.
With the development of the telegraph communication was separated
from transportation. Communication could go faster than transport
ation. They were divergent. Communication became analogously the
transportation of messages. It became possible to talk about commu
nication as transportation. Communication was no longer just trans
portation. It became separated from a particular time and place, and
could transcend time and space. But there was still a physical connection
between sender and receiver, the telegraph wire.
With the development of radio, communication was no longer reliant
on a visible and vulnerable physical connection between sender and
receiver. Communication became invisible. It now became reliant on
the transmission and reception of signals through the electromagneto
sphere. It became metaphorically the transportation of messages. It was
possible to talk about communication as transportation. Communica
tion was no longer transportation. But communication was still limited
in range. With the development of communication satellites in the
