Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (review)

In Networking, Laura Otis offersa formidable account of the scientific and cultural forces behind nineteenth-century networks. Drawing on her scientific training and extensive research, Otis shows how the idea of the network invigorated writers, scientists, and engineers of the period, allowing them to visualize the workings of electromagnetics, neuroanatomy, telecommunications, mass transportation, and social relations. Along the way, Otis identifies precursors for much that seems new today, as in the case of the prematurely wired Sarah Orten, who in 1883 entered into a telegraphic courtship with a man responding to the personals ad she had placed in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Married "by telegraph," Orten only discovered weeks later that her new husband was "'a colored man'" (170).

That such networks were primarily metaphorical does not mean they were not also real: "Whether scientists thought visually, as Helmholtz and Morse claimed they did, or whether they thought verbally, comparison between organic and technological systems underlay their thoughts about communication. In the nineteenth century, the real 'language of communication' was metaphor itself" (48). It was just this figural promiscuity that allowed Otis's subjects to see Egyptian hieroglyphics, the British railroad system, and the human nervous system as kindred structures. Otis makes a strong case that Charles Babbage's practical traffic with networks (in addition to running his own manufacturing operations, Babbage acted as a consultant to the British postal and railway systems) effectively spurred his efforts to understand the logic of systems qua systems, which led in turn to Babbage's revolutionary Difference Engine, and to his realization that "thought and language were largely independent, and the symbols emitted by a body or engine had little to do with the processes being carried out" (41).

Networking is less compelling when Otis turns to literature, considering fiction by George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Henry James, and Mark Twain. Occasionally, there is a happy convergence of the literary and the scientific, as in Otis's analysis of the reciprocal influences felt by George Eliot and her partner, the physiologist George Henry Lewes. Eliot's prominent web metaphors "convey the organic structure of society," while her images "repeatedly suggest that the best vision, the best knowledge, and the best action are all based on the awareness of connections—on consciousness of one's position in a web. As a crosspoint in a network, a human being can both influence and be influenced" (119). But more often Otis's literary criticism lacks surprise, and she frequently seems engaged in the journeyman expansion of points made by critics such as Gillian Beer and Jennifer Wicke. Her efforts to connect literature and technology also sometimes feel forced or reductive, as when she writes that "James presents language as a vital connecting medium, one that links person to person like the telegraphic network along which it is transmitted" (175); or concludes that "we are all telegraphers, expecting unreliable bodies and machines to inform us about the world" (226).

The real revelation in Networking is the semiotic sophistication of nineteenth-century scientists. Take Heinrich von Helmholtz, who early on recognized that "in its nervous system, the body itself is a medial apparatus." ¹ Although "'objects in space seem to us "clothed" with the qualities of our sensations,'" such sensations "'belong to our nervous system alone and do not at all reach beyond into external space'" (45). Noting that one can "taste" different telegraph signals when a wire is placed on the tongue, Helmholtz deduces the structural equivalence of different kinds of signs; in Otis's nicely put phrase: "what was language to a telegraph key was taste to the tongue. Like electrical fluctuations, nerve impulses produce the results that they did not because of what had excited them or even because of what they were but because of the device that was 'reading' them" (44).

For Otis, the awareness of networking destroys inherited...