Outline of a General History of Technology
Hu Yilin
I. A Survey of Western Studies in the History of Technology
In the English-speaking world, the history of technology as an established academic discipline roughly began in the 1950s. Its landmark was the publication of the monumental Oxford History of Technology (volumes 1 through 5 were published from 1954 to 1958, the final two volumes in 1978, and the general index for volume 8 was completed in 1984). Another milestone was the founding of the American Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in 1958 and the launch of its journal Technology and Culture in 1959.
From roughly the late 1950s to the late 1970s was the first stage in the emergence of the history of technology. John M. Staudenmaier’s Technology’s Storytellers[1] looks back on and reflects upon the work in the history of technology during this stage. In this period, scholars focused more on the origins and development of particular technological inventions themselves, and the history of technology was concerned chiefly with recording and displaying humanity’s various inventions and innovations. Technology was often regarded as a tool for conquering nature or as an application of science, and the history of technology reflected the history of human progress.
Charles Singer, the editor of the Oxford History of Technology, expressed a representative view: “The editors are convinced that in our technological civilization man’s value lies in his comprehension of methods and skills, by means of which he controls the natural environment and increasingly renders actual life more comfortable.”[2]
Of course, this narrow view of technology was questioned from the very beginning. In his Technics and Civilization, published in 1934, Lewis Mumford criticized this view of human nature as that of “man as a tool-using animal.” For Mumford, although technology was the thread of history, the protagonist or focus of history was always human beings, and human value lay in rich cultural creativity rather than in the mere growth of power. Thus Mumford always discussed specific technologies within broader cultural environments and historical contexts.
Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change, published in 1962[3], is also a classic model: it examines technology within an integrated context that includes culture, economics, religion, and every other aspect.
By the late 1970s, doing the history of technology within cultural background and historical context had gradually become the mainstream in the academic world. The marker was a series of academic conferences held by American historians of technology to commemorate the bicentennial of the founding of the United States. In particular, at the Roanoke Conference[4], participants unanimously held that the history of technology should not be confined within a single discipline, but should draw on the resources and perspectives of economic history, human history, social history, and others in order to examine the historical context of technological development.
Volumes 6 and 7 of the Oxford History of Technology, published in 1978, also reflected this trend. These two volumes differed somewhat in style from the previous five, paying more attention to the corresponding social and political environments.
At the same time, with the rise of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) in the 1970s, social constructivism also exerted a profound influence on the history of technology in the 1980s. Trevor Pinch, David Hughes, and Wiebe Bijker’s 1987 book The Social Construction of Technological Systems[5] can be seen as a programmatic work for social-constructivist history of technology.
On the other hand, also in the 1970s and 1980s, the fashion in historiography began to shift from cliometrics to the New Cultural History. The New Cultural History no longer clung to charts and data, but instead focused on the overall cultural environment and the fine-grained scenes of everyday life. Subsequently, many historians also started from cultural history and turned to material culture history, the history of the body, the history of everyday life, and so on, thereby entering the territory of the history of technology.
In short, from the 1980s on, the history of technology, in line with developments in the philosophy of science and historiography, moved toward contextualism.
Of course, this is not to say that before the 1980s historians of technology only cared about technology itself and not about other aspects of culture. The very name of the journal Technology and Culture shows that this discipline never ignored culture from the beginning. But in the early period, the other aspects of culture were often mentioned only as negative peripheral elements when describing the history of technology, as reference dimensions parallel to technological development, and had no direct relation to the origin and development of the invention itself. After the 1970s, however, “culture” came to be seen more as active and constructive elements, as necessary preconditions for technology to be invented or disseminated. In addition, early history of technology, including some social constructivist work, cared more about the process of invention or innovation itself, paid attention to the internal logic of technology itself, or merely cared about the influence of cultural factors on technological invention, but did not pay attention to the effect of a new technology on the cultural environment after it had been popularized and applied. The new trend, by contrast, no longer focused on technological invention; in short, technology and culture were no longer parallel to one another, nor in a relation of who determines whom, but were intertwined and mutually constitutive.
In addition, the center of attention in the history of technology, or the “protagonist” of the narrative, has also been changing. In Staudenmaier’s 2009 review[6], this is regarded as the most important change in the field over the past twenty years. That is to say, the focus is no longer on those world-famous “great inventions” of (patriarchal) prominence and the corresponding inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs, but more on the technological practices of ordinary workers and ordinary citizens. In the new narrative of the history of technology, small-town citizens and inventors are equally important; kitchens and R&D laboratories are equally important; technological explorations that ultimately fail are examined alongside successful major inventions; and women, non-Western traditions, minority groups, and other formerly marginal domains receive much more attention.
II. The Mission of a General History of Technology
We can see that the basic trend in the history of technology over the past few decades has been to avoid “grand narratives,” oppose a Whiggish view of progress, enter historical contexts, and focus on fine-grained scenes of everyday life.
But under this trend, writing a general history has become a problem. Postmodern historians care more about specific problems that are minute, marginal, and fragmented, but when it comes to how to organize a complete and coherent general history, there seems to be no better strategy.
Of course, assembling narratives about various technologies from various periods is not an unworkable way to compile a general history of technology, as in Singer’s Oxford History of Technology and Carlson’s Technology in World History[7]. But without a clear thread to tie them together, such a general history can only be a collection of materials, and can hardly serve as a complete, independent historical narrative. For example, we might simply put Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber into one book in chronological order, but that book would still only be “the Four Great Classical Novels” and would not become “a story.” As a general history, despite unavoidable leaps, it ought after all to tell a coherent story; merely attaching the corresponding date labels to all kinds of events and arranging them accordingly is not enough to tie them together.
To solve the problem of a general history that is not “general,” we need, while absorbing the new developments in the history of technology over the past few decades, to re-examine the historiographical problems of the history of technology and to investigate the relationship between technology and human nature, and between the history of technology and human history.
Why We Need a General History of Technology
The question is, why can’t we be satisfied with the fragmentation of history, and why must we tell a complete story?
First, this may be a need for teaching or popularization: one needs to provide a basic, panoramic picture for beginners. But the question is, is this panoramic historical map a necessary prerequisite for people to understand the technological scene of a specific period? In fact, just as a world map is not a prerequisite for a tourist map of a particular place, a general history is not a prerequisite for understanding specific historical details.
But although a general history does little to help us understand one specific historical context in depth, it is beneficial for understanding the relations between different historical contexts and, in particular, for understanding the historical position of our present situation.
The significance of history is not only to provide some strange stories for curiosity’s sake; the interest of history arises from our questioning of our own situation: Who are we? Where do we come from, and where are we going?
And history answers the question: what is our place in human history, and what is the genesis of this situation?
As the author of A Global History, Stavrianos, said: “Every age must write its own history. Not because earlier history was written incorrectly, but because every age faces new problems, produces new questions, and seeks new answers.”
The appearance of a world map changes not only people’s knowledge of the world, but also their self-knowledge. The impact of world maps on Chinese people when Western learning spread eastward was precisely a renewed understanding of the self. A panoramic view of history likewise provides a kind of self-understanding. A Whiggish history of progress, like the fantasy of the Central Empire, places itself at the center of everything. We must break such an arrogant and complacent picture, but that does not mean we should no longer draw a new picture. Whether or not our position ought to be at the center, we always hope to find and establish the place where we belong.
The Integrity of a General History
To provide the history of technology with a general, complete, and coherent picture, one must necessarily carry through some basic thread or guiding interest. But as Staudenmaier says, contextualism makes clear-line narratives[8] questionable. Whether it is progress or decline, it is hard for us to find a clear thread running throughout the rich variety of historical situations.
In fact, what integrates the picture is not necessarily a single thread, but a particular perspective. History is an answer to the questions of our present situation; that is to say, we organize historical materials from our own standpoint.
In a sense, this is a return to “Whig history.” If we define Whig history in a broad sense as working backward from present outcomes in hindsight, then this is indeed a kind of Whig history. But unlike Whig history in the narrow sense, first, our reconstruction of history is conscious, a perspective adopted through reflection rather than an unexamined prejudice; second, we acknowledge the multiple possibilities of history, suspend value judgments, and do not take modern outcomes as the sole or highest standard. In short, drawing a neighborhood map starting from myself is one thing; drawing myself in the center of the neighborhood is another. From my own angle, the location of the public toilet may well be more important than the position of Old Zhang’s house, so in the map I draw, the positioning and marking of the public toilet are often more prominent, but that in no way means that I think Old Zhang’s status is more despicable than that of a toilet.
The writing of a general history of technology should be based on the concerns of our own era. For example, if we are concerned with modern people’s mechanized worldview and rigid pace of life, then we try to trace the origins and development of the relevant mechanical technologies and examine what in them is necessary and what is contingent. If I am concerned with modern political systems and social life, then I may need to trace more of the origins and development of the relevant technologies of communication media.
Thus, in our historical narrative, the weight assigned to different things depends on our different concerns about our present situation. Of course, through historical tracing, this may in turn affect our understanding of the present situation. There is no objective standard that transcends all perspectives for measuring the historical significance of each thing.
Integrating Technological Determinism and Social Constructivism
There has long been a dispute in the history of technology between technological determinism and social constructivism. Around 1990, American historians of technology influenced by social constructivism consciously carried out a “settling of accounts” with technological determinism[9]. Social constructivism no longer regarded technology as an autonomous system with its own logic of development, but as something shaped at every moment in society.
But the contradiction between technological determinism and social constructivism may be only a misunderstanding. This opposition is based on a view of technology or society in which technology/artefacts and society/culture are seen as two opposed things, and thus the question arises of “who determines whom.” In fact, the relationship between technological artefacts and human society may be a two-sided relationship such as “inside–outside” or “front–back.” Technology is the solidification or externalization of social structure, while social interaction is constrained and guided by technological structure. Rather than saying that technology determines culture or culture constructs technology, it is better to say that technology and culture are different sides of the same structure.
Therefore, a general history of technology is also a history of culture. We take the development and transformation of technological artefacts as the thread of historical narration, but what we are concerned with at the same time is precisely the transformation of human culture. Technology is both the external manifestation of cultural change and its internal cause. Technology and culture mutually constitute one another. Like asking whether the chicken came first or the egg, it is meaningless to ask who determines whom. Of course, in concrete situations we can explain which chicken may have hatched from which egg, and which egg came from which chicken. In concrete contexts, we can analyze the social origins of a new technology, and we can also trace the technological preconditions of a particular social form.
Reconsidering the Relationship between Technology and Science
At the very beginning of the rise of the history of technology as a discipline, scholars basically abandoned the narrow “common sense” that “technology is the application of science.” But if one then simply concludes that technology has nothing to do with science, that would probably be too lazy. Since a general history of technology traces things out from the present condition in which science and technology are closely intertwined, it naturally cannot avoid the question of how technology and science are entangled. If in this era the combination of technology and science is no accident, then how is that possible?
Science in the narrow sense, that is, modern mathematical and experimental natural science, can be regarded as a special branch of technology, one of the consequences of Western history of technology. The development of modern technology around the First Industrial Revolution, although in fact not an application of modern science but an independent development, does indeed share some of the same logic and the same spirit of the age with modern science.
And in the broad sense, if science refers to general human knowledge, including embodied knowledge and tacit knowledge, then technology can in turn be said to be a kind of “application of science,” a form in which knowledge is solidified and retained, an extension of human memory.
Therefore, a general history of technology can simultaneously be a kind of cultural history or intellectual history. That is to say, technological objects, like scientific theories, are regarded as achievements of human thought, except that the latter are forms of knowledge solidified by specific technologies such as paper and pen, while other technologies likewise solidify human knowledge in their own different forms. And by examining the structures of thought embodied in various technological objects, one can also outline a logic of the development of human thought.
III. How to Write a General History of Technology
To define a discipline, there are roughly four questions: form, matter, agent, and purpose. Or rather, the structure or shape of the research, the material or content of the research, the researcher, and the meaning of the research. These four aspects are interrelated and mutually influential, but they are also independent and can be distinguished and discussed one by one.
Early research in the history of technology aimed to highlight human progress; thus the structure presented by such history was linear and Whiggish; its main concern was technological invention itself as the achievement of progress; and its main researchers were positivist archaeologists or technical experts.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, history of technology research under the influence of social constructivism and cultural history aimed to display diversity; the structure of the history of technology tended toward fragmentation; it paid more attention to the social environments of technological invention or application; and its researchers were sociologists or anthropologists.
The general history of technology that is attempted here aims to question human beings’ own situation; the structure of historical narration is mosaic-like, or “galactic” in style, meaning that when one looks closely each isolated chapter is fragmented, but once the perspective is widened, unity emerges; this kind of general history of technology is concerned with technology as environment rather than the environment of technology; its researchers are historians or philosophers.
| Form | Material | Efficient Cause | End | |
| Early history of technology | Linear | Technology itself | Archaeologists | Praise progress |
| Social constructivism | Fragments | The environment of technology | Sociologists | Pursue novelty and strangeness |
| General history of technology | Galaxy | Technological environment | Philosophers | Reflect on the self |
It can be seen that, compared with the first two kinds of history of technology, the general history of technology is not so much a third, entirely new model as the “synthesis” of the first two kinds of history of technology. It does not deny or discard the achievements of the first two kinds of history of technology, but rather tries to integrate them. Therefore, this kind of history of technology is necessarily a “General History.”
Technology as a Totality
The “General” in “general history” contains the meanings of synthesis, totality, and generality; thus “general history” itself already represents a kind of historiography, or rather, it requires a kind of historiography. For what is called a totality is not merely “the sum of its parts.” Simply stacking a series of thematic histories or period histories together does not make a “general history.”
Even if we take only the meaning of “totality” or “the whole,” we still find it hard to call the Oxford edition of A History of Technology a “general history of technology,” because although the seven-volume set, vast in scale, collects hundreds upon hundreds of technologies spanning thousands of years, on what basis can it be called “complete”? Obviously, no history can encompass everything; memory is always a kind of forgetting, record is always a kind of selection. Whether one volume or seven volumes, a “collected edition” of multiple specialized histories does not automatically become a “general history” simply because its length reaches a certain scale.
A general history of technology is not a total compilation of the history of technology, not a “total history” assembled from one “partial history” after another. On the contrary, in a certain sense it is “prior to” the history of specific technologies.
This is not strange. For instance, although in the history of the development of disciplines, transcendental philosophy or phenomenology is obviously later than modern science, what they investigate is precisely that which comes before modern science and makes modern science possible. Although what we call a “general history of technology” is later than the history of specific technologies in the history of disciplinary development, in a certain sense “general history of technology” is precisely that which comes before “the history of various technologies” and makes the latter possible.
According to Gestalt theory, the whole is not only not equal to the sum of its parts; more importantly, the whole is prior to the parts. We do not first experience the various parts of a thing one by one and only at the end assemble them into an impression of the whole. On the contrary, our grasp of the whole is precisely the precondition for experiencing the individual parts.
When we examine any technology, we examine it as technology. Technology, so to speak, is always some medium “for doing …”; it is not some ready-made object standing alone in front of us, but is always outward-opening and directive. The hammer points to the nail, the nail to the wood, the wood to furniture, the furniture to the house, the house to dwelling… Heidegger revealed this “network of instrumental references” of linked rings, which ultimately points to the entire life-world, as the background on which any specific thing can appear.
Precisely because we naturally possess such a life-world as the whole of a network of references (we are thrown into a world, that is, into our “historical situation”), we first have some kind of understanding of the world as a “whole of meaning,” and only then can we grasp the meanings implied by certain “fragments.”
Therefore, a general history of technology does not study the sum total of specific technologies, but “technology as a totality.” In a certain sense, a general history of technology is less “A General History of Technology” than “A History of General Technology.” This technological totality can, in Heidegger’s terms, be called an overall meaningful whole, the world-in-total, or the surrounding world; or, in more ordinary language, it is simply the “technological environment.”
Ways of Investigating the Environment
However, although it is said that the whole is prior to the parts, and the environment prior to the object, when we want to describe some whole or some environment in language or writing, we nevertheless have no choice but to describe it part by part. A general history of technology likewise has to narrate one specific technology after another. This is the limitation of language as a medium, or the paradoxical nature of the very concept of “environment.”
An environment is, after all, relative to content or center; thus once we try to “focus” on the environment, the environment becomes content and is no longer an environment. How can one study the environment as environment?
First, although the whole is not the sum of the parts, examining the parts can still help us grasp the overall environment. For every specific technology is a link in the network of references. As the saying goes, pull one hair and the whole body is affected; a deep inquiry into any single link will draw out the entire network, and every node is influenced by the whole network. Therefore, starting from any specific technology or particular scene in history may reveal the overall characteristics of the corresponding life-world. Of course, each era can find several most representative technologies, and these are the hubs of the network of references.
However, this requires us not to treat these specific technologies with a reified gaze. That is to say, we cannot merely enumerate individual technologies as already completed achievements; rather, we must investigate each specific technology in an open, dynamic form.
A part of a network is still a network; a part of an environment is still some kind of environment. The “surrounding world” is not, in the first place, a plane that can be taken in at a glance, but something with depth and layers.
That is to say, within the horizon of a general history of technology, individual, specific instances of technology are still examined not merely as objects, but also as environments. Ecologically speaking, “environment” is made up of countless “microhabitats” linked together; each specific species occupies a certain layer of microhabitat. To study each specific species as an isolated evolutionary achievement cannot reveal that species’ way of life or its position in the ecological sphere.
A general history of technology likewise examines each specific technology as a kind of environment. This environment is a layer or dimension within the larger environment of the whole era; the era’s environment is nothing other than the linkage of countless microhabitats of specific technologies. There is a self-similar “fractal” structure between the large environment and the small environment, and technological environments at different scales often present similar structures.
The paradox has not yet been dissolved. We still need some way of investigating the environment as environment, rather than as a center of focus.
But this kind of inquiry is in fact not difficult. For example, when we need to investigate what a concert hall is really for, the proper way is not to stare at the concert hall, but to listen to music inside it. That is to say, what is brought into the focus of investigation is not the concert hall, but the music. When music is the content under investigation, the concert hall is the environment in which music can appear.
However, we also cannot sink too deeply into the music itself; otherwise the background of the music will retreat completely backstage. When one is immersed in or accustomed to some environment, that environment becomes hidden and unmanifest; we pay attention to the content the environment presents, and take the environment’s influence for granted. In such a state of “falling away,” we likewise cannot investigate the environment as environment.
The key is that between “using without knowing” and “stepping back to observe,” there is not a sharp binary division; there is also some intermediate state, or rather, a state of switching and shifting. Perhaps we can call this third attitude between the everyday attitude and the scientific attitude the phenomenological attitude.
Or, more plainly, it is the attitude of “learning” or “trying out.” For example, when I pick up the microphone but have not yet begun to speak, I may first “test the sound.” I have already started using the microphone, but I have not yet made what is conveyed through it the focus. I may merely say meaningless syllables like “hello, hello, hello,” or ask through the microphone, “Can the students in the back hear me?” At this moment, we are both using the microphone and can also say that we are not yet using it; we are both attending to the microphone and can also say that we are not attending to it. We are listening to what the microphone conveys, paying attention but not really caring about its content. We are listening attentively, but not with any concern for what meaning the syllables “hello, hello, hello” themselves may hold; rather, we are attending to or checking the microphone’s effect on speech. In this way, we are precisely studying the role of the technological environment, but without placing the environment at the center of focus.
If we only ever listen to music inside concert halls, then the meaning of the concert hall will remain forever obscure. Only when we can switch back and forth among multiple environments—living rooms, concert halls, open-air squares, portable music players, and so on—can we examine the different meanings of different environments.
This is also why a general history of technology must necessarily be a diachronic study and cannot be merely a taxonomy of technologies. For it must pay special attention to the emergence and transformation of technology. It is when new technology has just come ready-to-hand for people, but has not yet become familiar and habitual; it is when one is alternating and shifting among different technologies—that the meaning of technology as environment is most likely to appear. And only through historical retracing, through the reenactment of the process of switching and probing, can we make it possible for us to reflect on those technological environments that have long since become our “default settings” and to which we are no longer surprised, thereby confirming our own situation.
Revolution and Paradigm
We may call the period that a general history of technology will focus on, namely the period when old and new technologies replace one another, “technological revolution.” This concept can be modeled on Kuhn’s theory of “scientific revolution.” First, the technological environment provides a “paradigm”; a paradigm is nothing other than a way of life that serves as a model. The technological environment not only regulates our lives, but also determines our worldview and our scale of values.
Paradigms can be large or small; every layer of the surrounding world, or every microhabitat, has a certain paradigm. Within a certain paradigm, technology develops, but the way of life remains relatively stable; this can be called the “normal period” of technological development. By contrast, a technological revolution must break the stable state of the existing environment and reorganize a new way of life that is “incommensurable” with the old one.
In the normal period of technological development, there is a relatively clear scale for measuring technological progress, for example the so-called “higher, faster, stronger,” or a computer chip being upgraded from 386 to 486; this is a form of normal technological development. By contrast, so-called technological revolutions often have no such monotonous scale of measurement. For example, from desktop computers to laptops to tablets, the speed of chips may actually decrease, but the entire set of life practices surrounding the computer has undergone transformation, and the relationship between the computer and other technological environments has also been reorganized. Tablets or smartphones still retain some comparability with earlier desktop computers or “big brick” mobile phones, but any simple scale of measurement struggles to reveal the technological change that has taken place within them.
A general history of technology is not concerned with how manufacturers and engineers strive with painstaking precision to improve chip speed and reduce manufacturing costs; it is more concerned with the remaking of the life-world by new environments in periods of technological revolution.
The paradigm of technology includes both the level of manufacture and the level of use. At the level of manufacture, the improvement of technological products also has different stages such as normal development and technological revolution. For example, the development of computer chips under the rule of Moore’s Law is mainly technological improvement in the normal stage. From the very beginning, people knew that we could improve technology by certain definite means; thus we could predict that in a year and a half the efficiency of a computer chip would double. This is because the makers all follow a certain paradigm. But in a period of technological revolution, technological improvement is largely unforeseeable; for example, the development of quantum computers can no longer be advanced by the method of improving traditional computers.
But what concerns us more is the level of use. Every technology, to a greater or lesser extent, regulates or guides our lives in a specific way. As Kuhn said, a paradigm is first of all some kind of pre-rule exemplar, like the example problems in a textbook. By imitating these exemplars, we learn and form a habit of discovering and solving problems. The problems to be solved are often not ready-made; what counts as a reasonable problem, what counts as a legitimate answer—these standards are all contained within the paradigm.
At times, paradigms are condensed into some seemingly isolated, explicit propositions, such as theorems and rules written in black and white. But Kuhn points out that paradigms are not essentially those isolated propositions; rather, they are the subtle and pervasive constraints and guidance that the scientific community as a whole, as an overall environment, exerts on the practical activities of each participant in different fields. These explicit propositions are the sedimented products of common practice, not the preconditions of common practice. Of course, these sedimented and solidified things also in turn guide the unfolding of practice.
For technology, every concrete and isolated technological artifact is the sedimentation and solidification of some definite rule or procedure; therefore every technological product has its paradigm of use, but in the final analysis it is the technological environment as a whole that provides us with the paradigm of life.
For example, the kitchen knife and the iron wok provide typical ways of processing ingredients. Without the corresponding technology, the ways of processing ingredients may be completely different; some things might not even be regarded as ingredients at all. Behind the kitchen knife and a series of technologies like it lie a series of specific ways of life, including cultivation, breeding, transportation, insulation, markets, water supply, coal gas, and so on. This chain of technologies and their corresponding ways of life are all interrelated with the practice of cutting vegetables. This entire technological environment regulates how we carry out practices such as cooking and eating.
The kitchen knife is one link in the entire technological environment, while cooking is one segment of the whole of life. In the practice of cooking, the kitchen knife is the “means,” and the dish is the “end”; but if we understand the meaning of the kitchen knife only from the angle of purposive means, that is obviously not deep enough. The kitchen knife is merely a focal point where the whole life-world converges with the technological environment, and the impact caused by its transformation must also be all-round. Yet in traditional narratives of the history of technology, people are only concerned with the structural development of the kitchen knife itself, and pay little attention to the mutual influence between the kitchen knife and the structure of the life-world.
For example, in the Middle Ages, the difference between nobles and ordinary wealthy people in diet mainly lay in the kinds of meat they ate (poultry, game, and pork), whereas in the Renaissance it was distinguished by how finely the meat was cut.[10] This change in the scale of measurement may have something to do with the development of the kitchen knife, or perhaps also with the emphasis on the “process of operation” brought about by printing (after the rise of printing, “cookbooks” changed from private records into public reading matter, thus shifting from focusing on the dish itself to focusing on the process of preparation), or perhaps with people’s understanding of “nature” (the Renaissance liked the natural flavor less masked by seasonings more than the Middle Ages did). These questions of connection may be hard to reach a definitive conclusion on, yet explorations like this remain scarce to this day.
The Extension of Man
In the final analysis, what a general history of technology cares about is not technological progress, but human life; a general history of technology is also a history of human life, or, in a certain sense, a history of humanity.
Technology and human beings are not externally related to one another. The technological environment or surrounding world is indeed something “outside the human body,” but it is not something opposed to human beings. It is like when I stick my tongue “outside the body”: it is still part of me. As McLuhan said, technology—almost in the sense of “extending” the tongue—is “the extension of man.”
The literal meaning of the extension of man is the extension of bodily functions. For example, glasses are an extension of sight, and a hammer is an extension of the ability to strike with the fist.
Sticking out the tongue can enhance taste and licking; extending oneself toward a hammer can increase the force of striking, with the difference simply being that the hammer is relatively easier to separate out. We may as well understand technological implements as “plug-and-play,” more easily “portable” “organs.”
These “portable,” or rather “transmissible,” organs are the externalization of human capacities, the retention or solidification of human memory. The hammer, like numbers and writing, records human memory. Only compared with rich writing, the memory that a hammer can carry seems too thin; therefore we often focus only on the hammer’s reinforcing effect on force, while ignoring that the hammer first records a certain way of using force, and only then strengthens force. Writing likewise strengthens human capacities. For example, numbers can preserve people’s memory of quantity, but numbers also greatly expand people’s ability to calculate and record quantities.
Human beings are distinct from other animals less in that they use or create technology than in that they dwell in technology, or rather, live within technology. Human will and thought are able to linger outside the human body and continue themselves in technical artifacts or social technologies. This exteriorization also makes “history” itself possible.
Memory is always a kind of forgetting. My having the memory of yesterday does not at all mean that every detail experienced by the yesterday-self has remained from first to last reproduced in my mind. On the contrary, being able to remember always means being able to forget; memory is always able to remain somewhere “outside” me, and thus can be retrieved at any time. Therefore, the form of the container of memory is at the same time the form of memory itself.
Hence the history of technology is also the history of memory, or one might say that the history of technology is the history of thought; more precisely, the history of technology is a transcendental history of thought, the a priori condition that makes the history of thought possible.
Transcendental history does not rigidly narrate the actual chronological order of history; rather, it first pays attention to the internal logical order—what are the preconditions that make something possible? Under what sort of technical environment is it possible for such and such a mode of thought or intentional orientation to exist?
This “prior” of the transcendental is a “prior” in the sense of intentional history rather than actual history; but in any case, the transcendental is still historical, a prior relative to a concrete historical situation, though in other contexts it is itself also a product of history.
For one species to survive and reproduce in an environment, there is an internal logic and pattern to it; and what counts as internal and external for this species may be exactly reversed for another species. The internal logic of the development of mechanical technology constitutes a certain external environment for scholarship or art, while the condition of thought is likewise external to the development of machinery; different technical micro-niches often serve as one another’s environment. The development of scientific thought is only a certain specific mode of memory, chiefly borne by technologies such as writing and numerals, and like the memory modes corresponding to other technologies, it is all a matter of micro-niches at different scales. A general history of technology attends to the internal threads by which each technology breeds and develops, but attends even more to the interconnections among different technological environments.
[1] John M. Staudenmaier(1985), Technology’s Storytellers, MIT Press
[2] Volume I of History of Technology, Chinese translation, p. 19
[3] White, Lynn (1962). Medieval Technology and Social Change, Oxford University Press
[4] The Roanoke Conference–Critical Issues in the History of Technology: Roanoke, Virginia, August 14-18, 1978, I. Summary, see Technology and Culture, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Oct., 1980), pp. 617-620
[5] Bijker, W. E., Hughes, T. P., & Pinch, T. J. (Eds.). (1989 (1987)). The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. The MIT Press.
[6] John M. Staudenmaier, ‘SHOT at Fifty’, Technology and Culture,Vol. 50, No. 3 (Jul., 2009), pp. 623-630
[7] Carlson, W. Bernard. Ed. Technology in World History, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
[8] John M. Staudenmaier, ‘Rationality, Agency, Contingency: Recent Trends in the History of Technology’, Reviews in American History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Mar., 2002), pp. 168-181
[9] Merritt Roe Smith (ed.), Does Technology Drive History? : The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. MIT Press. 1994
[10] History of Private Life
The above is the revised version submitted for the Shenyang conference; what follows is the original version from that time
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//The following text may be regarded as a supplement to the previous An Introduction to the Historiography of a General History of Technology. That earlier article was written to take part in Professor Wu’s project, and was mainly a survey, without yet unfolding my own historiographical approach. But when I needed to expand my own plan for writing history, I found that this matter was rather difficult. I browsed a great deal of English-language literature and discovered that there was very little that could directly provide help or support. After reading Senior Brother Dazhi’s introduction to Gilles and other French scholars of technology, and then Debray’s Introduction to Mediologie (recently translated into Chinese), not to mention Stiegler from earlier on, I felt that the French line of thought was more reliable. But these resources are difficult to use directly, so for the moment I can only temporarily break away from literature support and rely entirely on myself to sketch out a rough outline first. Although it is nothing more than an extension of the “strong program of media history,” I am trying to use “technology” to replace “media.” Compared with media, the word technology is more ready-made and objectified, but that is precisely its advantage: writing “a general history of technology” is less philosophical than writing “a general history of media,” and thus appears a bit more approachable. The goal is to first write a semi-popular A General History of Technology.
I have also been hesitating between “general history of technology” and “history of technological thought,” and have temporarily decided to call it “general history of technology” first; on the one hand this is also more approachable, but on the other hand it is also more accurate.
Since the earlier “introduction” I submitted to Professor Wu was never actually presented in the seminar, I am planning to report on it together tomorrow. Of course, in substance there is not much substance there either; more time would still be better spent on free discussion…
Recently I have indeed been rather lax, especially too lazy to write articles; by the time I force myself to write, I have very little feeling left, and it really is inexcusable. Starting from today I plan to move my pen now and then, whether I have something to say or not, and quickly recover my writing state. I hope to manage two book reviews and two commentary pieces each week, and also to make up as soon as possible the travel notes from this year’s phenomenology and philosophy of technology conference. Please supervise me…
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Since this continues from the previous introduction, let us begin the chapter numbering directly from Three…
III. The Definition of a General History of Technology
To define a discipline, there are roughly four aspects to consider: form, matter, agent, and purpose. Or, in other words, the structure or shape of the research, the material or content of the research, the researcher, and the significance of the research. These four aspects are interconnected and mutually influential, but they are also independent of one another and can be distinguished and discussed one by one.
Early research in the history of technology had as its purpose the demonstration of human progress; therefore the structure of such history was linear and Whiggish; its main concern was with technological inventions themselves as achievements of progress; and its main researchers were positivist archaeologists or technical experts.
In the second half of the twentieth century, research in the history of technology under the influence of social constructivism and cultural history aimed to display diversity; the structure of technological history tended toward fragmentation; it paid more attention to the social environment of technological invention or application; and its researchers were sociologists or anthropologists.
The general history of technology that is being defined here aims at asking about human beings’ own situation; its narrative structure is mosaic-like, or “galactic,” meaning that when viewed up close each isolated chapter appears fragmented, but once the perspective is widened, a unity emerges; this general history of technology is concerned with technology as environment rather than the environment of technology; its researchers are historians or philosophers.
| Form | Matter | Agency | Purpose | |
| Early history of technology | Linear | Technology itself | Archaeologists | Praising progress |
| Social constructivism | Fragments | The environment of technology | Sociologists | Seeking novelty and strangeness |
| General history of technology | Galaxy | Technological environment | Philosophers | Reflecting on the self |
It can be seen that, relative to the first two kinds of history of technology, a general history of technology is less a third, entirely new model than a “synthesis” of the first two. It does not deny or discard the achievements of the first two kinds of history of technology, but rather tries to synthesize them. Thus this kind of history of technology must necessarily be a “general history (General History).”
The “general” in “general history” contains the meanings of synthesis, totality, and generality; therefore “general history” itself already represents a historiography, or rather, requires a historiography. For totality is not merely the “sum of parts”; simply piling together a series of thematic histories or period histories does not thereby make a “general history.”
Even if we take only the sense of “totality” or “wholeness,” we still cannot call the Oxford History of Technology a “general history of technology,” because although its seven volumes, huge in scope, collect hundreds and thousands of technologies spanning millennia, in what sense can it be called “whole”? Obviously, no history can encompass everything; memory is always a kind of forgetting, and record is always a kind of selection. Whether one volume or seven, a “bound volume” of multiple thematic histories does not automatically become a “general history” just because it reaches a certain length.
A general history of technology is not a total collection of technological history, not a “total history” compiled from one “partial history” after another; on the contrary, in a certain sense it is “prior to” the history of concrete technologies.
This is not strange. For instance, although in the developmental history of disciplines transcendental philosophy or phenomenology clearly come later than modern science, what they investigate is precisely what comes before modern science and makes modern science possible. Although what we call a “general history of technology” comes later than the history of concrete technologies in the developmental history of the discipline, in a certain sense the “general history of technology” is precisely what comes before the “history of various technologies” and makes the latter possible.
According to Gestalt theory, the whole not only is not equal to the sum of its parts; more importantly, the whole comes before the parts. We do not successively experience all the parts of a thing and then sum them up to obtain an impression of the whole. Quite the contrary: grasping the whole is precisely the precondition for experiencing the parts.
When we examine any technology, we examine it as technology. Technology always refers to some medium “for doing…” something; technology is not some ready-made object standing alone before us, but always something open outward, something that points beyond itself. A hammer points to a nail, a nail points to wood, wood points to furniture, furniture points to a house, a house points to dwelling… Heidegger revealed this “network of equipmental references,” a chain of mutual referrals that ultimately points to the whole lifeworld, as the background against which any concrete thing can appear.
Precisely because we naturally possess such a lifeworld as the whole network of references (we are thrown into a world, that is, into our “historical situation”), we first have a certain understanding of the world as a whole of meaning before we can grasp the meaning contained in some “fragments.”
Therefore, a general history of technology does not study the sum of concrete technologies, but rather “technology as a totality.” In a certain sense, a general history of technology is less “A General History of Technology” than “A History of General Technology.” This technological totality may, in Heidegger’s terms, be called the meaningful whole, the worldhood of the world, or the surrounding world; or, in more everyday language, it is simply the “technological environment.”
However, although the whole comes before the parts and the environment comes before the object, when we want to describe some whole or some environment in language or writing, we are nevertheless forced to describe it part by part, and a general history of technology also has to speak separately of this or that concrete technology. This is the limitation of language as a medium, or the paradox inherent in the concept of “environment” itself.
An environment is something relative to content or center; therefore once we try to “focus” on the environment, the environment becomes content and is no longer environment. How is it possible to study the environment as environment?
First, although the whole is not the sum of the parts, examining the parts also helps us grasp the whole environment. For every concrete technology is one link in the network of references; as the saying goes, move one hair and the whole body is affected. A deep investigation of any link will draw out the entire network, and every node is influenced by the whole network. Therefore, starting from any concrete technology or specific scene in history may reveal the overall characteristics of the corresponding lifeworld. Of course, every age can be found to have several most representative technologies; they are the hubs of the network of references.
However, this requires that we do not treat these concrete technologies with a reified gaze. That is to say, we cannot list individual technologies as if they were finished achievements; rather, we must investigate every concrete technology in an open, dynamic form.
A part of the network is still a network; a part of the environment is still some kind of environment. The “surrounding world” is not something flat and immediately visible at a glance, but something with depth and layers.
That is to say, from the perspective of a general history of technology, individual concrete instances of technology are still not examined as objects, but also as environments. For instance, the “environment” in the ecological sense is composed through the interlinking of countless “microhabitats”; each concrete species occupies a certain layer of microhabitat. To study each concrete species as an isolated evolutionary achievement cannot reveal that species’ way of life or its position within the ecosystem.
Technological history treats every specific technology as a certain kind of environment as well. This environment is a layer or dimension within the overall environment of an entire era; the environmental whole of an era is nothing other than a web formed by innumerable small niches of specific technologies. Between the large environment and the small environment there appears a self-similar “fractal” structure; technical environments at different scales often display similar structures.
The paradox has not yet been dissolved; we still need some mode of inquiry that treats the environment as environment rather than making it the focal center.
But such inquiry is in fact not difficult. For example, when we need to investigate what on earth the significance of a concert hall is, the proper way is not to stare at the concert hall, but to listen to music in the concert hall. That is to say, what is placed at the center of investigation is not the concert hall, but music. When music is the object of inquiry, the concert hall is the environment in which music is made present.
Yet we also cannot sink too deeply into music itself. If we do that, music’s background will completely recede backstage. When we immerse ourselves in, or grow accustomed to, a certain environment, that environment becomes hidden and unmanifest; we focus on what the environment presents, and take its effects for granted. In this state of “falling,” we likewise cannot investigate the environment as environment.
The key point is that between “day-to-day use without knowing it” and “stepping back to observe from the side,” there is not a stark binary division; there also exists some middle state, or rather a state of switching and oscillation. Perhaps we can call this third attitude, midway between the everyday attitude and the scientific attitude, the phenomenological attitude.
Or, more simply put, that is the attitude of “learning” or “trying out.” For example, when I pick up a microphone but have not yet launched into my speech, I may first “test the sound.” I have already begun using the microphone, yet I have not made what is conveyed through the microphone my focal point. I may merely utter meaningless syllables like “hello, hello, hello,” or ask through the microphone, “Can the students in the back hear me?” At this moment, we are both using the microphone and, it could be said, not yet using it; we are both attending to the microphone and, it could be said, not really attending to it. We are paying attention to what the microphone conveys, but we do not truly care about the content itself. We are listening attentively, but not to notice what, if any, meaning the syllables “hello, hello, hello” themselves contain; rather, we are attending to, or checking, the microphone’s influence or effect on speech. In this way, we are precisely studying the role of the technical environment, but without placing the environment at the center of focus.
If we always only listen to music inside concert halls, then the significance of the concert hall will remain forever obscure. Only when we are able to switch among multiple environments—living rooms, concert halls, open squares, portable music players, and so on—can we investigate the different meanings of different environments.
This is also why technological history must necessarily be a diachronic study, and cannot be merely a taxonomy of technologies. For it must pay special attention to the processes by which technologies arise and change. It is when new technologies have just been brought ready-to-hand by people, but have not yet become familiar and habitual, and when one is oscillating between different technologies, that the significance of technology as environment is most likely to reveal itself. And only through historical tracing, through the reenactment of the process of switching and probing, can we make it possible for ourselves to reflect on those technical environments that have already become our “default configuration” and are long since taken for granted, and thereby confirm our own situation.
We might call the period that technological history will chiefly attend to—the period in which old and new technologies are exchanged and transformed—“technological revolution.” This concept may be compared with Kuhn’s theory of “scientific revolution.” First, technical environments provide “paradigms”; a so-called paradigm is nothing other than a way of life taken as exemplary. Technical environments not only regulate our lives, but also determine our worldviews and our scale of values.
Paradigms come in large and small forms; every surrounding world, or every small niche, has a certain paradigm. And within a given paradigm, technology also develops, but the way of life remains relatively stable; this can be called the “normal period” of technological development. By contrast, technological revolution is precisely the breaking of the existing state of stability in the environment and the reorganization of a new way of life that is “incommensurable” with the old one.
During the normal period of technological development, there are relatively clear scales for measuring technological progress—for example, the so-called “higher, faster, stronger”; for example, a computer chip being upgraded from 386 to 486. This is a kind of normal technological development. But what is called technological revolution often has no such monotonous scale of measurement. For example, from desktop computers to laptops to tablets, chip speed may in fact decline, yet the entire set of life practices surrounding the computer undergoes transformation, and the relationship between the computer and other technical environments is also reorganized,
Technological history is not concerned with how manufacturers and engineers painstakingly improve chip speed, but rather with how, in periods of technological revolution, new environments reshape the life-world.
In the final analysis, what technological history cares about is not technological progress, but human life; technological history is also the history of human life, or, in a certain sense, the history of humanity itself.
Technology and human beings are not relations external to one another. The technical environment or surrounding world is indeed something “outside the human body,” but it is by no means something opposed to human beings, just as when I stick out my tongue “outside the body,” it is still a part of me. As McLuhan said, technology—almost in the sense of “sticking out” the tongue—is the “extension of man.”
The literal meaning of human extension is the extension of bodily functions. For example, eyeglasses are an extension of sight, while a hammer is an extension of the ability to strike with a fist.
Sticking out the tongue can enhance taste and licking; extending oneself into a hammer can advance the force of pounding and smashing. The difference is nothing more than that a hammer is, relatively speaking, easier to separate out. We might understand technical instruments as “plug-and-play” and more easily “transplantable” “organs.”
These “transplantable,” or rather “transmissible,” organs are the externalization of human capabilities, the lingering or solidifying of human memory. A hammer, like numerals and writing, inscribes human memory. It is only that, compared with the rich capacities of writing, the memory a hammer can carry seems far too thin; therefore we often focus only on the hammer’s strengthening of force, while ignoring the fact that the hammer first records a certain way of using force, and only then strengthens force. Writing likewise strengthens human capacities. For example, numerals can preserve people’s memory of quantity, but numerals also greatly expand people’s capacity to calculate and record quantity.
Compared with other animals, what is unique about human beings is not so much that they use or create technology as that they dwell in technology, or, to put it another way, live within technology. Human will and thought can linger outside the human body and continue themselves in technical artifacts or social technologies. This externalization also makes “history” itself possible.
Memory is always a kind of forgetting. My having the memory of yesterday certainly does not mean that every detail experienced by yesterday’s self has been continuously reproduced in my mind from start to finish. On the contrary, to be able to remember always means to be able to forget. Memory can always linger in some place “outside” me, and therefore can be retrieved again at any time. Thus, the form of the container of memory is simultaneously also the form of memory.
Therefore, the history of technology is also the history of memory; or one could say that the history of technology is the history of thought, or more accurately, that the history of technology is a transcendental history of thought, the a priori condition that makes the history of thought possible.
Transcendental history does not rigidly recount the actual chronological sequence of events; rather, it first attends to the internal logical sequence—what are the conditions precedent for something to be possible? Under what technical environments would such-and-such a mode of thought or intentional inclination be possible?
This “prior” of the transcendental is prior in the sense of intentional history rather than actual history. But in any case, the transcendental is still historical; it is prior relative to specific historical situations, yet in other contexts, it itself is also a product of history.
A certain species survives and reproduces in an environment according to its own internal logic and patterns; and what counts as inside and outside for one species may be exactly reversed for another. The internal logic of mechanical technological development constitutes a kind of external environment for scholarship or art, while the condition of thought is likewise external to the development of machinery. Different technical niches often serve as one another’s environment. The development of scientific thought is only a specific mode of memory, chiefly carried by technologies such as writing and numerals; like the memory modes corresponding to other technologies, it too is a small niche at a different scale. Technological history attends to the internal lines of development of each technology, but it is even more concerned with the interconnections among different technical environments.
IV. Outline of Technological History
Language——fire kindling——society
Domestication——pottery——dwelling
Wheeled vehicles and boats——cities——transportation
Counting——money——writing
Weapons——weaving——division of labor
Mining——smelting——manufacturing
Water control——medicine——administration
Measurement——machinery——order
Papermaking——printing——replication
Coal——steam engine——energy
Electricity——chemicals——industry
Internal combustion engine——assembly line——automation
Newspaper——telegraph——network
……
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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