Orders of Service: Markus Krajewski, The Server

Most of us spend a good deal of our time peering at screens, typing on keyboards, and dabbing at phones, dealing with information that flows in and out of our field of view depending on what we request from some distant source or what some remote institution thinks we should see. In general, this incessant activity of requesting and delivering is mediated by digital technologies designed according to what is called a client/server architecture. The operations of these systems are opaque to almost all of us, but the fact is that their functioning is essential to everything that happens on the Internet. A technologized notion of service is therefore key to much of our everyday life. Where does it come from, and how has its history informed this curious contemporary usage? Markus Krajewski, an enterprising and iconoclastic historian steeped in the media-theory tradition of Friedrich Kittler, takes on those questions in The Server: A Media History from the Present to the Baroque (translated by Ilinca Iurascu. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. 456. $50). Krajewski transports the concept of service that purportedly lies at the heart of contemporary media back and forth across half a millennium, attempting to elucidate what it is and how it became so imperceptibly central to contemporary life. Originally published in German in 2011 and now available in a fine translation, The Server is a bravura exercise of what he would call "recursive" history.

The first half of The Server is an exquisitely detailed historical sociology of the master-servant relationship since the Renaissance, written in the grand tradition of Norbert Elias or Max Weber. It is somewhat leisurely (Krajewski takes thirty-two pages to get to the point where he can define a servant as "someone who has a master") but never less than fascinating and erudite. The erudition is necessary, moreover, because the argument of the book turns on the fine structure of the servant's "cultural technique." The servant figure, Krajewski declares, can be viewed as "a search engine avant la lettre" (p. 87), and like such modern devices its rules of operation are not immediately visible. Servants cultivated a peculiar mixture of observing and unseeing, of presence and absence. Their comportment, appearance, and conduct enabled them to act as forms of "media." Beyond that, they may be seen as intermediary figures in a grand historical process of the depersonalization of agency. The second half of the book makes this point more explicitly, building on the work of Steven Shapin, Otto Sibum, and other historians of science and technology to show how a depersonalized concept of service came to be designed into modern cultures of knowledge. In the final section, Krajewski ties this long-term history expressly to contemporary media cultures by showing how our client-server architecture arose in Silicon Valley.

The first half of The Server reads as if a twenty-first-century gamer had been given the exercise of summarizing Gormenghast. Krajewski makes free use of terms and concepts from contemporary media to characterize the world of baroque service, using sources ranging from household maps and participants' correspondence to satirical plays and novels. So, for example, a servant is said to move through the corridors of a great house like a cursor skitters across a screen, and a visitor to Vienna's imperial palace finds his movements coordinated by a "script" listed in a manuscript logbook. The language Krajewski chooses to describe life in the eighteenth-century mansion is that of search engines, filters, address spaces, and operating systems. An extended example is his account of the importance of livery. The use of highly particularized dress defined by the master, he notes, became common in the early seventeenth century, from which point the court elites accrued liveried servants in large numbers. Livery became highly variegated, representing both the master and the precise rank and status of the wearer. In literature, at least, not only the handsome appearance but even the studied idleness of these people reflected well on their masters. Krajewski's gloss on all this is that the donning of livery amounted...