Technoscience Comes with Millenarian Overtones

Editors’ Introduction Talk of technoscience comes with millenarian overtones. In some current usages in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS), claims about the close alliance of systems of knowledge production, technical control, and trans- national capital are mixed up with versions of an imminent future of decentered, networked, and distributed capacities and visionary possibilities across species and across natures. But the eschatology of those who first introduced the term into English was initially much darker. Technoscience as a concept appeared at the start of the Cold War. In early 1946, the Yale law professor and military propaganda expert Harold Lasswell wrote of modern science and technology as a Western Euro- pean monopoly whose universalization, even if temporarily blocked by the bipolar politics of US- Soviet rivalry, would inevitably subject the world to the rule of the machine, “a condensed way of referring to the modern technoscientific complex.” Lasswell commended Werner Sombart’s ferociously anti- Marxist writings on prole- tarian socialism as a guide to how encounter with technoscience would dynamize “the traditional outlook of any culture,” however “supine.”1 Technoscience thus became a commonplace index for the allegedly inevi- table system of modern capitalist industrialization, its mobilization of scientific and technical expertise, and, decisively, its military- economic dominance. Those who bemoaned scientists’ enlistment in the bureaucracies and testing grounds of the military- industrial complex, or who reckoned that scientific virtue might just be able to resist such enlistment, used the term technoscience to describe the threat. By the late 1950s, the word was linked directly to thermonuclear extermination. “The vast power technoscience has placed in [the human race’s] hands,” Edgar N. Schieldrop observed in 1959, would apparently generate “a disaster surpassing all our night- mares.”2 Responding to what seemed the “wholesale madness” of game theorist and Princeton economist Oskar Morgenstern’s tract on the rationality of nuclear warfare, Radical History Review Issue 127 (January 2017) doi 10.1215/01636545- 3690834 © 2017 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. 1 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2017/127/1/468765/RHR127_01Intro_FF.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 2 Radical History Review one reviewer argued that technoscience was moral pollution. Any “moral- political perspective concerning the use of force” had collapsed, it was argued, because any practitioner in Cold War America “inevitably succumbs to the technoscience of our time.”3 There are thus several reasons why political histories of technoscience, concept and reality, are necessary, especially since genealogies of the term among con- temporary STS scholars are more likely to begin with Donna Haraway than with Lasswell. Attending to the initial emergence of the term in the original Cold War milieu of imminent global military catastrophe and intense economic and scientific mobilization by the capitalist state system — a critical point of departure for Haraway’s influential 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” — illuminates important and consequential linkages between the historical development of understandings of science and technology and the condition of political and economic crisis in modernity. Radical historians have rightly attended to that modern conjuncture and explored in detail the pathways through which liberation struggles and contests over the fates of colonial, racist, and patriarchal regimes were fought out. Less common, however, has been any systematic attention to or reflection on the more effective modes of making sense of midcentury technoscience, which is often treated as a historical phenomenon with fixed boundaries, a specimen frozen in amber. In broader narratives, which include the radical science movements that flourished from the interwar period and which were then transformed under Cold War regimes, histories of the sciences’ past and projections of the future of technoscience always carried considerable public and polemical significance. In many industrial societies of the mid- twentieth century, radicals actively sought to integrate a critique of technoscience into the political and social lives of citizens and activists. As a result, radicals’ various positions on the questions of science, technology, and society have had, and continue to have, serious consequences both for subsequent struggles and for the condition of scholarship on the history and sociology of science and technology. One way of making sense of the dilemma is to consider that obstacles to radical historical engagement with technoscience may well stem from a perception of the cloistered, specialist, and recalcitrant quality of the records and archives of the technoscientific enterprise. To increase the cast list of protagonists in histories of technoscience, it is vital to recover and interpret the traces of those workers and activists, artisans and collaborators whose labors and experiences have formed such a major part of the long history of technoscience at stake here. This is just the set of resources with which radical historians are familiar. Thus one aim of this issue of RHR is to begin to account for the methods and approaches that would make the track records of engineers and campaigners, farmers and programmers, and miners and housekeepers more accessible and inter- pretable as part of the project to make a useable past for the technosciences of our time. The issue offers examples of scholars actively using new kinds of materials in teaching about issues in radical science and technology, historians simultaneously Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2017/127/1/468765/RHR127_01Intro_FF.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Schaffer, Serlin, and Tucker| Editors’ Introduction 3 engaged with and documenting current struggles in industrial and political systems of exploitation and production across the global South, and colleagues directly involved in the hard work of making sense of the many ways political, historical, and technoscientific worlds are mutually interwoven. Political histories of technoscience must first deal with the thorny issue of the roles of technologies and sciences in historical process. In a striking irony, insistence on the unique determination of socioeconomic transformation by science and technology has long been associated with, if not dependent on, a strange neglect and devaluation of critical and sophis- ticated work in the history of science and technology. High on the agenda of radical histories of technoscience, in other words, is the compelling need to better integrate an effective analysis of socioeconomic dynamics and reformulated understandings of the material enterprises of science and technology. Friedrich Engels’s bold formulation in 1845 at the very start of The Con- dition of the Working Class in England, insisting that steam engines and cotton machinery had uniquely and unprecedentedly given rise to an industrial revolution that entirely transformed civil society, long dominated much historical material- ist understanding of technology’s status in social development.4 On this showing, it has been supposed, technical knowledge and scientific organization functioned like a kind of unmoved mover, their powers somewhat removed from history, in little need of social and political analysis, yet driving its development. The mid- twentieth- century political construction and subsequent reconstructions of the cat- egory of technoscience began to offer resources for revision and reorientation of such models. Evidence of markedly uneven development in the social and labor relations of technoscientific systems proved crucial. Handicraft and embodied forms of labor demonstrably survived and informed the emergence and maintenance of machinofacture and automation. STS dramatically manifested the manifold ways the everyday conduct of scientists, engineers, administrators, and technicians closely resembled forms of skilled work by artisans and craft laborers. Labs and clinics, power plants and agronomy stations would be better understood as sites of complex and socially charged forms of embodied labor and knowledge. Demands of gender and class politics made it crucial to engage with the vital forms of labor pursued in domestic, urban, and pastoral sites typically excluded from consideration by technoscience. Such systems were understood as much more flexible, persistently recon- figured by the clashing demands of capital and labor and by the severe hierarchies of gender and race. Established notions of technological inertia were strongly criti- cized: much conflictual politics was embodied in the very structures of technoscientific projects. Perhaps most significantly, resources have been developed for a deliberate dislocation of received historical geographies of the technoscientific enterprise. Engels’s analysis was strikingly territorial: he famously referred to England, and especially Manchester, as the classic soil of the industrial revolution. The implica- tion, that such transformations always went hand in hand with new organizations of Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/2017/127/1/468765/RHR127_01Intro_FF.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 4 Radical History Review space and land and with novel kinds of communication

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