World Projects: Global Information Before World War I by Markus Krajewski (review)

Markus Krajewski’s book, originally published in 2006 and immediately perceived as an outstanding contribution to the now well-established field of media archeology, is much more than a study of globalization before the current era of total globalization (as one would say “total war”)—in this case the two first decades of the 20th century. For if the subtitle of the book is slightly deceiving (Krajewski not only addresses the prewar years, he also studies the impact of World War I—hence my allusion to total warfare—and its immediate aftermath), the two words of the title, “World” and “Project,” give a perfect summary of the author’s work. On the one hand, the book is a study of the ubiquity, so to speak, of the global in this period. Krajewski mainly focuses on Germany, where the noun “world” functions as a prefix to virtually anything else, and World Projects is above all an attempt not just to observe and describe but also to describe in a medial framework the necessity and inevitability of this globalizing movement, which goes much deeper than its often-quoted political, economic and ideological needs and motivations (they are of course the basic impetus of this turn-of-thecentury globalization, but not the only ones). On the other hand, Krajewski strongly insists on the specific role of a new type of globalization, no longer initiated by 19th-century nation-states but by a new kind of heavily networked and networking actor, namely the “projector,” i.e. the individual who proposes new plans to link the local and the global and who tries to get them implemented with the help of private capital.

The most important contribution by Krajewski to the history of globalization and media is definitely the notion of “project,” which helps him establish an essential relationship between both. It is, of course, common knowledge that media follows globalization follows media, in an endless circle: no globalization without media, no media without globalization. World Projects takes this cliché as its starting point, obviously, but succeeds in rereading it in fascinating ways. In the opening chapter, which is both a perfect synthesis of globalization theory and a strong programmatic text for the kind of project work the author is disclosing, Krajewski initiates his research by scrutinizing some particularities of the gradual normalization and standardization of time and space during the 19th century. He thereby emphasizes the multimedia character of all these channels (i.e. the fact that in order to be efficient, channels have to complete and complement each other: a road and a telegraph, for instance, or a railroad and a postal system) as well as the networked character of these channels (i.e. the fact that each medium channel is also related to other media channels, so that the network can become a meshwork linking the local to the global in a very material way, step by step). The spatio-temporal unification of the world, more or less achieved at the end of the 19th century, is not an endpoint, however, for it produces two (interrelated) side effects that will prove the trigger of all projects. On the one hand, “boredom,” an existential metaphor borrowed from Heidegger: Since the multichannel meshwork does not always work as it should, the system produces new forms of emptiness and gaps that the projectors will aim to delete by proposing supplementary types of standardization. On the other hand, the very readability of the newly unified world, which constitutes an invitation to exert always tighter and stronger control, while making room for the emergence of a new category of social and economic actor, the projector: The one who sees more than others the possibilities offered by the notyet-completed transformation of the world into one global system.

Krajewski’s book develops three major case studies, which...