Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

My research examines the problem of a European “global consciousness” circa 1870-1930. Where conventionally this appears as an effect of technologies of production, communication, and transport––technology annihilates time and space, the world is remade in the image of capitalism, and distance collapsed––I explore the limitations of that history, addressing globalization theory and transnationality critically and, crucially, from the perspective of the history of experience, visual culture, and cultural history. I argue that global consciousness––the play of scales, proximities, distances, and vantage points––was not the epiphenomenal, automatic effect of globalizing technologies, but the complex, problematic outcome of certain techniques of seeing, elements of commodification, cultural technologies, and modes of modern experience. The challenge here is to bring empirical analysis to bear upon relative abstraction, to join the material and subjective dimensions of globalization. My paper accomplishes this by emphasizing natural history as a system of world representation and as a network of science and commerce. It shows how natural history mediated global diversity but also objectified it, paralleling and ultimately instantiating the commodity form. It exemplified the play of scales and vantage points, miniaturizing “the world”––as assemblage of remote climes and zones––in the diorama, the terrarium, the aquarium. Ultimately collections of specimen-commodities and the practices around them constructed the abstract global as a unified geology and zoogeography joined in relations of exchange.