Technology: the emergence of a hazardous concept - Technology and the Rest of Culture

Social Research, Fall, 1997 by Leo Marx

". . . the essence of technology is by no means

anything technological."

--Heidegger(1)

New Concepts as Historical Markers

The history of technology is one of those subjects that most of us know more about than we realize. Long before the universities recognized it as a specialized field of scholarly inquiry, American public schools were routinely disseminating a sketchy outline of that history to a large segment of the population. They taught us about James Watt and the steam engine, Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, and about other great inventors and their inventions, but more important, they led us to believe that technological innovation is a--probably the--major driving force of human history. The theme was omnipresent in my childhood experience. I met it in the graphic charts and illustrations in my copy of The Book of Knowledge, a children's encyclopedia, and in the alluring dioramas of early Man in the New York Museum of Natural History. These exhibits displayed the linear advance of humanity as a series of transformations, chiefly represented by particular inventions--from primitive tools to complex machines--by means of which Homo sapiens acquired its unique power over nature. This comforting theme remains popular today, and it insinuates itself into every kind of historical narrative. Here, for example, is a passage from a recent anthropological study of apes and the origins of human violence:

Our own ancestors from this line [of woodland apes] began

shaping stone tools and relying much more consistently on meat

around 2 million years ago. They tamed fire perhaps 1.5 million

years ago. They developed human language at some unknown

later time, perhaps 150,000 years ago. They invented agriculture

10,000 years ago. They made gunpowder around 1,000 years

ago, and motor vehicles a century ago (Wrangham and

Peterson, 1996, p. 61).

This capsule history of human development from stone tools to Ford cars illustrates the shared "scientific" understanding, circa 1997, of the history of technology. But one arresting if infrequently noted aspect of this familiar account is the belated emergence of the word used to name the very rubric--the kind of thing--that allegedly drives our history: technology. The fact is that during all but the very last few seconds, as it were, of the ten millennia of recorded human history encapsulated in this passage, the concept of technology--in our sense of its meaning--did not exist. The word, based on the Greek root, techne (meaning, or pertaining to, art, craft) originally came into English in the seventeenth century, but it then referred to a kind of learning, discourse, or treatise, concerned with the mechanic arts. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, and through most of the nineteenth century, the word technology primarily referred to a kind of book; except for a few lexical pioneers, it was not until the turn of this century that sophisticated writers like Thorstein Veblen began to use the word to mean the mechanic arts collectively. But that sense of the word did not gain wide currency until after World War I.(2) (It is curious that many humanist scholars--I include myself--have so casually projected the idea back into the past, and into cultures, in which it was unknown.) The fact is that this key word--designator of a pivotal concept in contemporary discourse--is itself a surprisingly recent innovation.

Why does that matter? From a cultural historian's viewpoint, the emergence of such a crucial term--whether a newly coined word or an old word invested with radically new meaning--often is a marker of far-reaching developments in society and culture. Recall, for example, Tocqueville's tacit admission, in Democracy in America, that he could not do justice to his subject without coining the strange new term "individualism" (Tocqueville, 1946, II, p. 98); or Raymond Williams, who famously discovered, in writing Culture and Society, a curious interdependence, indeterminacy, or reflexivity in the relation between concurrent changes in language and in society. Williams had set out to examine the transformation of culture coincident with the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain, but he found that the word culture itself, like such other key words as class, industry, democracy, art, had acquired its meanings in response to the very changes he proposed to analyze. It was not simply that the word culture had been influenced by those changes, but that its meaning had in large measure been entangled with--and in some degree generated by--them (Williams, 1983, pp. xiii-xviii). A recognition of this circular process helps to account for the origin--and the significance--of technology as a historical marker.

But how do we identify the changes in society and culture marked by the emergence of technology? I assume that those changes in effect created a semantic void, that is, a set of social circumstances for which no adequate concept was yet available--a void that the new concept, technology, eventually would fill. It would prove to be a more adequate, apt referent for those novel circumstances than its immediate precursors--words like machine, invention, improvement, and, above all, the ruling concept of the mechanic (or useful or practical or industrial) arts. In a seminal essay of 1829, Thomas Carlyle had announced that the appropriate name for the emerging era was "The Age of Machinery" (Carlyle, 1829). But later in the century, machinery evidently came to seem inadequate, and the need for a more apt term evidently was felt. The obvious questions, then, are: Why was there a semantic void? Which new developments created it? What meanings was technology better able to convey than its precursors? In trying to answer these questions, I also propose to assess the relative merits and limitations of the concept of technology.