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Reading Notes: Schatzberg, "Technik Comes To America"
Interesting point about terminology: "when historians now address “attitudes toward technology” before 1930, they are employing an analyst’s category not used by the historical actors themselves" (486) This is pretty standard "application of categories outside of context has issues" stuff but that doesn't mean it's not worth mentioning. (Especially if the audience of this paper doesn't, like, mainline Foucault.) For more on this, scholars to look at: Leo Marx, Oldenziel, Kline. "Oldenziel views the present-day meanings of technology as the product of a class and gender struggle in which middle-class male engi- neers became the principal avatars of technology" (487) Nice.
Argument: The use of "technology" as a word comes from the German "technik" in the early 1900s. "shifting [technology] from its original definition as the science or study of the useful arts to a new one that embraced the industrial arts as a whole, including the material means of production" (487). Having the skill "think of basically everything as a somatechnology," I see this as a technological shift itself! Whether that is useful here or not is unclear.
Limitations: focused on social sciences, doesn't look at other words in detail, doesn't look at "technik" in the 1960s. OK, I can live with those.
Ooh, technique/technology distinction in other languages that is largely not present in English makes me think of Mauss on body techniques.
Use of the word technology was actually influenced by the founding of MIT? From the readings for this class I have glanced through, damn, MIT had a finger in everything. (Although there's also an 1829 book by Bigelow, although on page 491 the author explains why it's not a good example, which... arguably is not important enough for me to be writing down, but there you go.)
". The modern Latin term technologia had three general meanings, all based on the word’s Greek etymology, which combined logos (discourse) with tekhne (skill or art)" (489) Ahahahahaha. <3 Actually I wonder if much has been done with "logos" in somatechnology.
The implicit judgements hidden in the phrase "the useful arts" are not lost on me. That would be another term that would be interesting to research in depth.
Technology was essentially a neologism around 1900. Hah. (493)
"What, then, sparked the shift in meaning that occurred between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Part of the explanation lies with what Leo Marx calls the “semantic void” created by the growth of large-scale technological systems; such terms as industrial arts were simply inadequate for this process. The meanings of technology also changed in response to gender and class struggles over industrialization, as Ruth Oldenziel has argued." (493)
Technik in German was very tied down to engineering; I wonder if this is some of why "Technical" gets used as it does here? Technical/techological in the US seem to have a lot of slippage, although there is also technical/technicality and so on.
...later bits of this are sort of disagreeing with the early claim about the 1930s; see page 497 on a 1901 economics paper where technik is coming into English, although with difficulty since technology hasn't changed as a word yet. I guess maybe 1930s is when the process is done? *reads on*
Thorstein Veblen is the main guy of this. That name is slightly familiar; maybe he was in a TST footnote or something? Bookmark for future research. Critiquing capitalism as "incompatible with the peaceful development of modern industry for the benefit of the entire community." (499)
This is very much tied into somatechnics in terms of the way the word "technology" is used to describe something that has always[-already] existed. (Chances that I overuse/abuse "always-already": 100%. I just like the phrase so much!)
"What would today be termed “modern technology” Veblen referred to as the machine process, which he distinguished from technology. He clarified his definition of the machine process in 1904 in his The Theory of Business Enterprise, drawing explicitly on Sombart’s chapter “Die neuen Technik” from Der moderne Kapitalismus. More than just machines, the machine process constituted an entire system:
The whole concert of industrial operation is to be taken as a machine process, made up of interlocking detail processes, rather than as a multiplicity of mechanical appliances each doing its particular work in severalty.
Veblen’s references to “the technology of the machine process” indicated that technology was removed from the machine process by a level of abstraction, encompassing not the physical system itself but its principles, the knowledge and skills embodied in its operation." (503) DELEUZIAN ASSEMBLAGES. OH MY ZOMG. Does "machine process" show up in D&G at all goddamnit do I have to reread that whole goddamn thing now goddamn
p504 Veblen claims technology is what makes humans, but uses examples of things that non-humans can do. GO TEAM CYBORG THEORY ok maybe I am a little punchy, but I am excited to be making all of these connections I would not have a year ago!
"For Veblen, ownership of what Marx called the means of production represented in effect a theft of the community’s collective technological knowledge." (504) ___Huh.___
People who want to make the science/technology as religion argument should apparently go read The Engineers and the Price System. There is some interesting engineer-centric utopianism going down, it looks like --- although some claim it is ironic/satiric. Which may well be, this author thinks so, other scholars don't. (Also this author used the first person here where he mostly had not otherwise.)
Discussion on page 507 makes me think about how jargon in academic fields uses words that already have meaning, like Veblen's technology did, and how sometimes people jsut start using them without noticing the definition is different and this confuses people with different trainings. (The role of "theory" to a biologist and to a literary critic, for example.)
Alvin Hansen uses technical/technological interchangeably, and separates technology from economics so that it can spread discipines (508)
Beard and progress narratives (509) --- wait, technology as a leviathan what? what? Like a Hobbesian leviathan? *so confuzzled* Gah I am just gonna let this go, I am almost done.
Also this paper has 75 footnotes, wow.
Argument: The use of "technology" as a word comes from the German "technik" in the early 1900s. "shifting [technology] from its original definition as the science or study of the useful arts to a new one that embraced the industrial arts as a whole, including the material means of production" (487). Having the skill "think of basically everything as a somatechnology," I see this as a technological shift itself! Whether that is useful here or not is unclear.
Limitations: focused on social sciences, doesn't look at other words in detail, doesn't look at "technik" in the 1960s. OK, I can live with those.
Ooh, technique/technology distinction in other languages that is largely not present in English makes me think of Mauss on body techniques.
Use of the word technology was actually influenced by the founding of MIT? From the readings for this class I have glanced through, damn, MIT had a finger in everything. (Although there's also an 1829 book by Bigelow, although on page 491 the author explains why it's not a good example, which... arguably is not important enough for me to be writing down, but there you go.)
". The modern Latin term technologia had three general meanings, all based on the word’s Greek etymology, which combined logos (discourse) with tekhne (skill or art)" (489) Ahahahahaha. <3 Actually I wonder if much has been done with "logos" in somatechnology.
The implicit judgements hidden in the phrase "the useful arts" are not lost on me. That would be another term that would be interesting to research in depth.
Technology was essentially a neologism around 1900. Hah. (493)
"What, then, sparked the shift in meaning that occurred between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Part of the explanation lies with what Leo Marx calls the “semantic void” created by the growth of large-scale technological systems; such terms as industrial arts were simply inadequate for this process. The meanings of technology also changed in response to gender and class struggles over industrialization, as Ruth Oldenziel has argued." (493)
Technik in German was very tied down to engineering; I wonder if this is some of why "Technical" gets used as it does here? Technical/techological in the US seem to have a lot of slippage, although there is also technical/technicality and so on.
...later bits of this are sort of disagreeing with the early claim about the 1930s; see page 497 on a 1901 economics paper where technik is coming into English, although with difficulty since technology hasn't changed as a word yet. I guess maybe 1930s is when the process is done? *reads on*
Thorstein Veblen is the main guy of this. That name is slightly familiar; maybe he was in a TST footnote or something? Bookmark for future research. Critiquing capitalism as "incompatible with the peaceful development of modern industry for the benefit of the entire community." (499)
This is very much tied into somatechnics in terms of the way the word "technology" is used to describe something that has always[-already] existed. (Chances that I overuse/abuse "always-already": 100%. I just like the phrase so much!)
"What would today be termed “modern technology” Veblen referred to as the machine process, which he distinguished from technology. He clarified his definition of the machine process in 1904 in his The Theory of Business Enterprise, drawing explicitly on Sombart’s chapter “Die neuen Technik” from Der moderne Kapitalismus. More than just machines, the machine process constituted an entire system:
The whole concert of industrial operation is to be taken as a machine process, made up of interlocking detail processes, rather than as a multiplicity of mechanical appliances each doing its particular work in severalty.
Veblen’s references to “the technology of the machine process” indicated that technology was removed from the machine process by a level of abstraction, encompassing not the physical system itself but its principles, the knowledge and skills embodied in its operation." (503) DELEUZIAN ASSEMBLAGES. OH MY ZOMG. Does "machine process" show up in D&G at all goddamnit do I have to reread that whole goddamn thing now goddamn
p504 Veblen claims technology is what makes humans, but uses examples of things that non-humans can do. GO TEAM CYBORG THEORY ok maybe I am a little punchy, but I am excited to be making all of these connections I would not have a year ago!
"For Veblen, ownership of what Marx called the means of production represented in effect a theft of the community’s collective technological knowledge." (504) ___Huh.___
People who want to make the science/technology as religion argument should apparently go read The Engineers and the Price System. There is some interesting engineer-centric utopianism going down, it looks like --- although some claim it is ironic/satiric. Which may well be, this author thinks so, other scholars don't. (Also this author used the first person here where he mostly had not otherwise.)
Discussion on page 507 makes me think about how jargon in academic fields uses words that already have meaning, like Veblen's technology did, and how sometimes people jsut start using them without noticing the definition is different and this confuses people with different trainings. (The role of "theory" to a biologist and to a literary critic, for example.)
Alvin Hansen uses technical/technological interchangeably, and separates technology from economics so that it can spread discipines (508)
Beard and progress narratives (509) --- wait, technology as a leviathan what? what? Like a Hobbesian leviathan? *so confuzzled* Gah I am just gonna let this go, I am almost done.
Also this paper has 75 footnotes, wow.
from class, things that aren't already covered
technik (Ger): rules and methods to achieve a given end, art of material production
Schatzberg is arguing something more concrete than L. Marx's "semantic void" --- the issue of translation from German economics -> American institutional economics, technology becomes "State of industrial arts" in early 20th century. Became knowledge & practice all at once. (la la somatechnics la daft punk)
1920s: collapses from state of industrial arts to the industrial arts themselves, merger with ideas of progress... by 1930s, becomes significant keyword in social science research. Moreso after WWII --- conflated with applied science.
(no longer about the book)
contemporary existence of "invisible technology" --- no longer tangible. Large shift toward talking about "pieces of technology," too, physical artfacts. Technology is a symbol of status (has this changed or is it just the technology that has changed)? Identity versus production. Relations of power.
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"machinic processes" does I think I wish I could grep it ;_;
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I run into Veblen now and then in anarchist literature. I hadn't filed him as a theorist of technology (or what-have-you), though. Thank you! I want to follow up several of the works you mention.
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So you figured out what a somatechnology is? Please let me know! I don't think you ever explained the term in your notes from last semester.
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"Somatechnics is ``a technological turn {\it in}
and {\it of} queer studies,'' in which it is accepted that ``the body
and technology are shown to have been {\it always already} mutually
interdependent, woven through each other.'' (Giffney and O'Rourke 2)
Somatechnics acknowledges that neither technology nor the body came first,
and that technologies ``are thoroughly embedded in contextually specific
cultural processes.'' (3) As a discipline, somatechnics has offered new
approaches to the consideration of diverse bodily practices including
transsexuality, racialization, and aesthetic body modification."
That's pretty brief, but I have to catch a plane tomorrow at like 4 AM, so.
Also did I ever send you the paper? Because if not, I should. In fact, I am just going to send it to you, and if you already had it, oops.
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No, you didn't, and I was starting to wonder... thanks for sending it, though, and I look forward to thinking about it. :)
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