Saint Simonianism – netzeundnetzwerke.de

18. Oktober 2024

Charles Joseph Minard’s Statistical map of European railroad traffic

So I continue with another image that represents a significant entry in my network history The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832. The book came out on October 15, by the way. Chapter 4 follows the twisted paths of Saint Simonianism. Yet, this week’s image is not as ambivalent as the rest of the chapter which deals with early socialism’s colonial ambitions. Polytechnicien Charles Joseph Minard’s 1862 statistical map of European railroad traffic rather underscores the Saint-Simonian ambitions for a mobilized industrial Europe. Minard’s other statistical maps and diagrams have become a classic in the history of visualizing information. But this image primarily expresses the ambitions of Saint-Simonianism to create a vibrating infrastructural network for the good of society.

Charles Joseph Minard, Statistical map of European railroad traffic of 1862. Lithograph, 1865. 97.5 cm × 76 cm.

4. Oktober 20244. Oktober 2024

Prosper Enfantin: Colonisation de l’Algérie

This week’s image from The Connectivity of Things is a colonialist map. It was published as a fold-out part of Prosper Enfantin’s 1843 book Colonisation de l’Algérie. In this treatise, the Saint-Simonian cult leader Enfantin was upfront about the strategic placement of settlements and settlers in Algeria. While the early socialist movement of Saint-Simonians movement had started with utopian dreams of a new networked unity of orient and occident in the 1830s, this map deliberately drew a reséau de soumission –– a network of colonial submission and police power.

Chapter 3 of the book is focused on theory and heuristics of writing network history in „An Archive of Networking.“ Yet, this map features prominently in chapter 4 of the book. It is called „Channels: The Politics of Networking around 1850,“ and it deals with the ambivalent history of network ideology and practice in early socialism. There’s not just a breathtaking colonial history to be told here –– which includes the Suez Canal –– but also one of early feminism, romanticism and social engineering. I’ll come back to the Saint-Simoniennes and Saint-Simoniens next week.

Prosper Enfantin, Colonisation de l’Algérie. Engraving by L. Bouffard, lithograph by Joseph Lemercier, 1843. 49.5 cm × 66.5 cm. Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

9. September 20245. November 2024

The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832

Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more.

Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking turned into a veritable cultural technique, Giessmann takes readers below the street to the Parisian sewers and to the Suez Canal, into the telephone exchanges of Northeast America, and on to the London Underground. His brilliant history explains why social networks were discovered late, how the rapid rise of mathematical network theory was able to take place, how improbable the invention of the internet was, and even what diagrams and conspiracy theories have to do with it all. A primer on networking as a cultural technique, this translated German classic explains everything one ever could wish to know about networks.

A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English.

The MIT Press, Infrastructures Series
October 15, 2024
444 pp., 6 x 9 in, 82 b&w illus.
Open Access version: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12547.001.0001

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