Some scattered thoughts on the Telegraph and Ecocriticism

What do we do with the telegraph?

As Picker and Carey separately demonstrate, its environmental consequences were fairly wide-ranging. For Picker, Victorians were “insulated” from the environmental/material devastation necessary to produce the medium that provided a figure for collapsing geographical difference. Although Carey doesn’t frame it in specifically ecocritical terms, the communications revolution he claims telegraphy inaugurates—essentially by detaching communication from physical transportation—is responsible for the rapid acceleration of the global capitalism underwriting our current environmental crisis.

But how do we think of the telegraphs effects from a literary ecocritical standpoint?

Carey’s claim that “The telegraph brought about changes in the nature of language, or ordinary knowledge, of the very structures of awareness” (202) is provocative, though not satisfyingly fleshed out. The rhetoric of global unity, the annhiliation of space and time, etc,--though ubiquitous utopian sentiments of the time-- seem easily explained away as examples of “false-consciousness.” A number of contemporary literary critics have managed to say some interesting things about the way the telegraph impacts literary forms. Richard Menke has linked Victorian realism to the type of social connectivity promoted by the telegraph. Paul Gilmore has recently made a convincing case that popular notions of electricity (fostered chiefly by the telegraph) result in new ways of thinking of the relations between aesthetics and sympathy. But none of this work takes on an explicitly ecocritical task.

“Social ecocriticism” seems the most promising angle of approach, but we are left with a number of the tensions that Buell discusses. For instance, although the “universal humanity” that the telegraph is supposed to produce is often code for a white, Anglophone “humanity” (something Gilmore argues), the same techno-optimism was important to abolitionists and other social progressives. On one hand, we can see the desire for the collapse of space and time as a good thing—universal humanity through improved technology, the improved manipulation of nature through technology, promise the end of slavery. Being fastened too much to the “local” can result in ethically dubious concepts, such as the 19th century “environmental” theories of race.

Buell’s discussion of the ambiguities surrounding the concept of “place” might be one way to approach the problems presented by the ideological changes that come with the telegraph. (Incidentally, Buell describes these “intractable ambiguities” in electric terms---e.g., as a matter of how “the circuits and loops of place tie nature and culture together”). He lists three major ambiguities:

1. “the fraught relation between environment and emplacement”
2. “the nested quality of place – the disparate modes of attachment that the term implies. What counts as a place can be as small as a corner of your kitchen or as big as the planet”
3. the possibility that “ ‘non-places are the real measure of our time,’ as anthropological theorist Marc Augé has claimed” (Buell 69).

To add to the list, another ambiguity may be that any “place” involves, to some degree, the annhilation of space and time—to the extent that by defining boundaries and instituting tradition it necessarily closes open, abstract space. The collapse of space and time that the telegraph brings about—at least in imaginary terms—is one in which the abstract “space” of thought and language reduces interpersonal and geographical differences. Although an ethics of place-attachment would hope to avoid this type of homogenization, to coordinate any substantial movement towards local attachment requires that we think in global terms.
In this respect, it is interesting to consider that certain strains of our current ecological vision may be caught up in a loop that the telegraph is, in some ways, responsible for. Consider Carey’s claim that “The telegraph permitted the development, in the favorite metaphor of the day, of a thoroughly encephalated social nervous system in which signaling was divorced from musculature. It was the telegraph and the railroad—the actual, painful construction of an integrated system—that provided the entrance gate for the organic metaphors that dominated nineteenth-century thought. Although German romanticism had… [its] place, it is less to the world of ideas and more to the world of actual practice that we need to look when trying to figure out why the nineteenth- century was obsessed with organicism” (215-16). Though I’m a bit skeptical about this simple materialist explanation of organicism, I think it is interesting not only in comparison with the dialectics and ambiguities involved in our own environmental thinking, but to the ambiguities presented in 19th century environmental thinking. I have chosen Whitman’s “Passage to India” as (hopefully) providing some good examples of this type of ambiguity.

If the early telegraph’s fanfare may be dismissed as another example of eco-ignorant anthropocentrism, it may be more useful to look at how the vision of global unity supported by this technology is a new or emergent form of anthropocentrism—a dream of global consciousness that continues to inform our ways of thinking about the environment. (One thing I’ve been thinking about, especially in terms of our discussion of the animal, is whether or not anthropomorphism is anthropomorphic (if that makes any sense) in assuming the human as some sort of universal being. But, of course, the dangers of not thinking in these terms are many)

And for your pleasure, here’s an example of the telegraph being thought of as a human space insulated from—and in the midst of—a very nonhuman space, the “outer-space” of the time, the bottom of the sea:

The Deep-Sea Cables--Kipling

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar–
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world— here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat–
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth–
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"