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"Technology": The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept Author(s): LEO MARX Source: Social Research, Vol. 64, No. 3, Technology and the rest of culture (FALL 1997), pp. 965-988 Published by: The New School Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971194 . Accessed: 28/06/2014 18:55 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The New School is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Research. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.31.194.106 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:55:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Technology:The / Emergenceof a / Hazardous / Concept* / BY LEO MARX "... the essenceof technologyis by no meansanything technological." - Heideggeri New Conceptsas HistoricalMarkers X he historyof technologyis one of those subjectsthat most of us knowmore about thanwe realize. Long beforethe universities recognizedit as a specialized fieldof scholarlyinquiry, American public schools were routinelydisseminating a sketchyoutline of thathistory to a large segmentof the population. They taughtus aboutJames Watt and the steam engine, Eli Whitneyand the cot- ton gin,and about othergreat inventors and theirinventions, but more important,they led us to believe thattechnological innova- tion is a - probably the- major drivingforce of human history. The theme was omnipresentin mychildhood experience. I met it in the graphiccharts and illustrationsin mycopy of TheBook of Knowledge,a children's encyclopedia, and in the alluringdioramas of earlyMan in the New YorkMuseum of Natural History.These * An earlyversion of thisessay was the Richmond Lecture at WilliamsCollege, Sep- tember26, 1996. I am gratefulto RobertDalzell, Michael Fischer, Michael Gilmore, RebeccaHerzig, Carl Kaysen,Kenneth Keniston, Lucy Marx, David Mindell,George O'Har,Harriet Ritvo, Merritt Roe Smith,Judith Spitzer, and G.R.Stange for their helpful commentsand criticism. SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Fall 1997) This content downloaded from 185.31.194.106 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:55:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 966 SOCIAL RESEARCH exhibitsdisplayed the linear advance of humanityas a series of transformations,chiefly represented by particularinventions - fromprimitive tools to complex machines- by means of which Homo sapiens acquired its unique power over nature.This com- fortingtheme remainspopular today,and it insinuatesitself into everykind of historicalnarrative. Here, forexample, is a passage froma recent anthropologicalstudy of apes and the originsof human violence: Our ownancestors from this line [ofwoodland apes] beganshap- ing stone tools and relyingmuch more consistentlyon meat around2 millionyears ago. Theytamed fire perhaps 1.5 million yearsago. Theydeveloped human language at some unknown latertime, perhaps 150,000 years ago. Theyinvented agriculture 10,000years ago. Theymade gunpowder around 1,000 years ago, and motorvehicles a centuryago (Wranghamand Peterson, 1996,p. 61). This capsule historyof human developmentfrom stone tools to Ford cars illustratesthe shared "scientific"understanding, circa 1997, of the historyof technology.But one arrestingif infre- quentlynoted aspect of thisfamiliar account is the belated emer- - gence of the word used to name the veryrubric the kind of thing- thatallegedly drives our history:technology. The factis that duringall but the verylast fewseconds, as it were,of the ten mil- lennia of recorded human historyencapsulated in this passage, the concept of technology- in our sense of its meaning- did not exist.The word,based on the Greekroot, techne (meaning, or per- tainingto, art, craft)originally came into English in the seven- teenth century,but it then referred to a kind of learning, discourse,or treatise,concerned withthe mechanic arts.At the timeof the IndustrialRevolution, and throughmost of the nine- teenthcentury, the word technologyprimarily referred to a kind of book; exceptfor a fewlexical pioneers,it was not untilthe turnof this century that sophisticatedwriters like Thorstein Veblen began to use the word to mean the mechanic artscollectively. But that sense of the word did not gain wide currencyuntil after This content downloaded from 185.31.194.106 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:55:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TECHNOLOGY: A HAZARDOUS CONCEPT 967 WorldWar I.2 (It is curiousthat manyhumanist scholars - I includemyself - haveso casuallyprojected the idea backinto the past,and intocultures, in whichit was unknown.) The factis that thiskey word - designatorof a pivotalconcept in contemporary discourse- is itselfa surprisinglyrecent innovation. Whydoes thatmatter? From a culturalhistorian's viewpoint, the emergenceof such a crucialterm - whethera newlycoined wordor an old wordinvested with radically new meaning - often is a markerof far-reachingdevelopments in societyand culture. Recall,for example, Tocqueville's tacit admission, in Democracyin America,that he could not do justiceto his subjectwithout coin- ingthe strange new term "individualism" (Tocqueville, 1946, II, p. 98); or RaymondWilliams, who famouslydiscovered, in writing Cultureand Society,a curious interdependence, indeterminacy, or reflexivityin the relationbetween concurrent changes in lan- guageand in society.Williams had set out to examinethe trans- formationof culture coincidentwith the rise of industrial capitalismin Britain,but he foundthat the word culture itself, like suchother key words as class,industry, democracy, art,had acquired itsmeanings in responseto thevery changes he proposedto ana- lyze.It wasnot simply that the word culture had been influenced bythose changes, but that its meaning had in largemeasure been entangled with- and in some degree generated by- them (Williams,1983, pp. xiii-xviii).A recognitionof this circular process to accountfor the - and the - of helps origin ' significance technologyas a historicalmarker. But how do we identifythe changesin societyand culture markedby the emergenceof technology?I assume that those changesin effectcreated a semanticvoid, that is, a setof social cir- cumstancesfor which no adequate conceptwas yet available - a void thatthe new concept,technology, eventually would fill.It wouldprove to be a moreadequate, apt referentfor those novel circumstancesthan its immediate precursors - words like machine, invention,improvement, and, above all, the rulingconcept of the mechanic(or usefulor practicalor industrial)arts. In a seminalessay This content downloaded from 185.31.194.106 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:55:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 968 SOCIAL RESEARCH of 1829, Thomas Carlyle had announced that the appropriate name forthe emergingera was "The Age of Machinery"(Carlyle, 1829). But laterin the century,machinery evidently came to seem inadequate, and the need fora more apt termevidently was felt. The obviousquestions, then, are: Whywas therea semanticvoid? Which new developmentscreated it?What meaningswas technolo- gybetter able to conveythan its precursors?In tryingto answer these questions,I also propose to assess the relativemerits and limitationsof the concept of technology. As for the hazardouscharacter of the concept, at this point I need onlysay thatthe alleged hazard is discursive,not physical.I am not thinkingabout weaponry,nor am I thinkingabout the destructiveuses of othertechnologies; rather, I have in mind haz- ards inherentin, or encouraged by,the concept itself- especially when the singular noun (technology)is the subject of an active verb, and thus by implicationan autor omous agent capable of determiningthe course of events,as we constantlyhear in count- less variantsof the archetypalsentence: "Technologyis changing the waywe live."When used in thisway, I submit,the concept of technologybecomes hazardous to the moral and politicalcogency - of our thought.My argument,let me add, should not if suffi- cientlyclear - providecomfort to eitherthe ludditesor the tech- nocrats.On the contrary,my hope is thatit mayhelp to end the banal, increasinglyfutile debate between these two dogmatic, seeminglyirrepressible parties. The MechanicArts and theChanging Ideology of Progress By the 1840s, some of the changes that contributedto the emergenceof the concept of technologywere becoming apparent. They may be divided into two large categories,ideological and substantive:first, changes in the prevailing ideas about the mechanic arts, and second, changes in the organizationaland materialmatrix of the mechanic arts.3As a referencepoint for both kinds of change, here is the peroration of a ceremonial speech deliveredby Senator Daniel Websterat the opening of a This content downloaded from 185.31.194.106 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:55:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TECHNOLOGY: A HAZARDOUS CONCEPT 969 new section of the NorthernRailroad in Lebanon, New Hamp- shire,on November17, 1847: It is an extraordinaryera in whichwe live.It is altogethernew. The worldhas seen nothinglike it before.I willnot pretend, no one can pretend,to discernthe end; butevery body knows that theage is remarkablefor scientific research into the heavens,
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