Pastoral Chiaroscuro: Electric Light and the Visuality of Swiss Infrastructural Development

This work examines the development of Swiss electrical infrastructure through analysis of key visual relationships produced through the technology of electric light. It appropriates the art-historical concept of chiaroscuro to study how electrical professionals and various publics used luminous contrast to structure practice, discourse, and perception in debates fundamental to the future of infrastructural expansion. From the late nineteenth century through the postwar period, light was used to highlight points of desired attention, while darkness was used to obscure less advantageous relationships in a carefully coordinated field of view. While the existing historiography of Swiss electrical infrastructure has described the country’s development effort as an exceptional case due to the speed of its expansion at the turn of the twentieth century, this work demonstrates that significant economic, political, and environmental obstacles persisted for decades beyond. It illustrates how various actors of the electrical industry deployed contrast to smooth perception of a series of precarious relationships essential to controlling the momentum of electrification. Across three chapters, this dissertation examines how light and darkness structured developmental objectives and outcomes as they were forced to confront processes of rural modernization, landscape preservation, and the production of technical knowledge. Beyond serving as a central point of representation for the development of Swiss infrastructure, this work considers how electric illumination—both in discrete application and its cumulative effect—conditioned modern visuality and contingent cultural practices ranging from cycles of Alpine pastoralism and the presentation of monuments to the public exhibition of novel technologies. It oscillates between empirical case studies and broad discursive and material analysis to uncover how illumination stood as a point of contention in negotiating how the country was to be modernized. In doing so, this project reinstates the simple contrast of light and dark as fundamental to the control and representation of infrastructure and illumination as media capable of affecting development at the national scale.