Paper for presentation at the 3^rd Forum for the History of Technology in China

University of Science and Technology of China

Hefei, Anhui, PRC

7-10 November 2013

[SLIDE 1]

Hot topics in the history of technology:

a report from the 2013 SHOT conference

Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh

Vice-President of SHOT

francesca.bray@ed.ac.uk

I am deeply grateful to the Forum for the History of Technology in China, and in particular to the chair of the Local Organising Committee, Professor Yunli Shi, for inviting me to present a paper at this meeting. I am also very grateful to my colleague Dr Martina Siebert, who has kindly agreed to read the paper for me, since I am unfortunately unable to travel myself to Hefei at this time.

It would have been a particular pleasure for me to attend this 3^rd meeting of the Forum, since its theme, Studies of the History of Technology in China in Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, so exactly matches my own inter-disciplinary preferences. I am sure that I have much to learn from the papers that are being presented here in Hefei. But instead of presenting my own research today, I thought it would be a more useful contribution to the Forum’s discussions to offer a short report on the recent conference of the Forum’s sister-organisation, SHOT (the US-based but increasingly international Society for the History of Technology), of which I am currently Vice-President and President-Elect. [SLIDE 2] I hope this report on the ‘hot topics’ of our meeting will highlight some shared interests and common projects between yourselves, as historians of Chinese technology, and the SHOT community. I also bring with me from SHOT a warm invitation to develop cooperation between our two societies, and to participate in our coming international conferences.

The 2013 SHOT meeting, which took place 10-13 October in Portland, Maine, included a series of round-tables devoted specifically to identifying ‘hot topics’ and promising new perspectives, with a particular emphasis on inter- and multi-disciplinarity, and on the methodological and interpretative challenges that multi-disciplinarity raises. [SLIDE 3]This slide gives the titles of the presidential panels, selected to reflect what SHOT members identified as the hottest themes in the history of technology today.

Round-table 1, Interdisciplinarity and the History of Technology: Why Diversity Matters took technologies of modern travel as a lens to investigate the construction of difference. The contributors included an architectural historian, a curator from the American National Air and Space Museum, an anthropologist of African diaspora and a historian of gay identity. Each brought a specific analytical took-kit to dissecting the social experiences, possibilities and constraints of modern car and air travel, thus revealing their impact upon hierarchies of inequality and difference, including class, race,  gender and sexuality, and their role in forming typical yet distinctive experiences of cosmopolitanism, globalisation and modernity.

Round-table 2, Cultures of Use: History of Technology Beyond Invention and Innovation, brought together historians of colonialism and its technologies in South Africa; of pre-modern China (myself); of terrorism; of gender; and of grass-roots technical creativity in the US as exemplified in the use of duct-tape. Each of us illustrated how a focus on use and users rather than innovation or inventors not only brings in a much broader range of actors, but also acknowledges the widely distributed spectrum of technological skills and enterprises than are necessary for technological systems to function. Two speakers underlined the pedagogical and interpretive value of learning ourselves to use the technologies we study: we acquire empathy for the long-dead people whose activities we are trying to recover, and gain insights into the forms of subjectivity shaped by everyday technical activities.

A lively and very critical discussion followed the presentations. The terms use and user were first proposed in STS (science and technology studies) as concepts that highlighted the agency and the technical choices of the people who appropriate technical artefacts into their daily lives. One critic argued that in thus attributing choice to users, we risked sliding into an individual-centred or even neo-liberal approach to technology, erasing its crucial role as an instrument of power. I feel that my own presentation, like the others, in fact successfully countered that criticism, showing how the concept of user illuminated different registers of power and authority. [SLIDE 4] I argued for analysing the imperial Chinese state as a user of hydraulics (shuili). In good times the requirements of flood-prevention, navigation, irrigation and military needs could all be simultaneously accommodated within the routines of shuili. But stability came at a cost: any big decision about shuili inevitably meant prioritising one goal of good government over another, and in times of environmental or military crisis, devastating choices had to be made. Analysing the state as user, I claimed, helps the historian of technology to distinguish between the often incompatible goals of this complex statecraft enterprise, thus drawing attention to the inherent tensions between different dimensions of political legitimacy.

The themes from the round-table on Use connected closely to those of Round-table 4 on Materiality. One important thread concerned sources: how can historians recover the materiality of ancient artefacts or technologies, and the corresponding forms of subjectivity experienced by different people engaged in their production or use. A specially poignant example was that of the iron collars and shackles that were used in the United States to control black slaves. It would be insulting to talk of the slaves as users of these hideous devices, and yet they had to learn to work, to walk, to eat and sleep with these instruments of torture as part of their bodily make-up. How, then, does the modern historian or museum curator recreate the materiality of ancient objects or processes for readers or visitors? And what new possibilities for reconstituting past materialities are offered by new technologies of information, communication and display? This discussion, addressed in several panels at SHOT, linked into Round-table 7, The Computational Turn in History of Technology, which focused on the potential for historians of technology to shape new directions in the digital humanities. Many participants in this panel had come straight from a workshop on Doing the History of Technology in the 21^st Century, held at the MIT Museum, which addressed the challenges of collecting, managing and using Big Data, and of ‘fashioning a useable past’.

The panel on Materiality also brought a lively discussion on just how determinist historians can and should be in mobilising the material specificities of the technologies they study. As an example, many people throughout the conference praised Timothy Mitchell’s recent book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. [SLIDE 5] Mitchell contrasts the materialities of coal-based and oil-based energy industries to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption, Mitchell argues, that ‘oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, especially from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganise political life around the management of something now called “the economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.’

[SLIDE 6] The contributors to Round-table 6, Capitalism and Neoliberalism, echoed Mitchell’s unfolding of the entanglements of energy, capitalism, conflict and control. The technologies of industrialisation played a key role in determining both capitalist and anti-capitalist forms of state power and class structure for over a century. But over the past 20 or 30 years it has often seemed as if the material base of the social order had dissolved, giving place to the weightlessness of digital technologies and the classlessness of endemic global unemployment. Since the triumph of Chicago School economics began in the 1970s, it has been common both in politics and in the social sciences to argue that the state should devolve almost all its economic and social roles to private, market-driven corporations – the so-called ‘neo-liberal consensus’. The presenters at the panel  on Capitalism and Neoliberalism included one specialist on the oil-economy of Saudi Arabia, another on the politics of communications technologies in Europe, and a third on information technologies and personal identification in South Africa. All three raised probing questions about the extent to which so-called neo-liberal regimes of governance and extraction, and contemporary global flows of capital, labour, materials and information, have indeed hollowed out ‘the state’. With recent revelations about the NSA ringing in our ears, we energetically discussed the camouflaged powers of some contemporary states, the tensions between freedom and surveillance build into popular high-tech gadgets like smart-phones, and the psychological grounding for neo-liberal, anomic and de-politicised values that dependence upon these individualistic technologies promotes.

One could, however, criticise the shape that this particular discussion took for losing sight of history. As the field of history of technology shifts its gaze increasingly towards the very recent past, the present and even the future – this is characteristic, I believe, of the field in China no less than in America and Europe – the risk grows of losing sight of history in favour of ‘timeless’ social theory. This was a theme that came up repeatedly, both at the SHOT conference and in the online discussions on SHOT-talk. While historians of technology can and should take advantage of the tools that STS offers, we must always, even when we are studying unfolding situations in the present, keep our sense of historical context and contingency. This point was eloquently made in Round-table 3, Into the Real World: Historians and Public Policy. Policy makers, at least in the United States, love to make use of historical analogies to justify their decisions. But as history never repeats itself, so analogy may illuminate but should never determine policy choices. What historians of technology should aim for, the panelists agreed, was not to provide answers but to help define the right questions for ‘here’ and ‘now’. As Scott Knowles says in the SHOT-talk online discussion of disaster studies, it is not only the nature of technological challenges like disaster prevention, but also the terminology that we use to define or categorise them, that shifts over time. ‘The more we show the historical contingency of these terms (and the experts that promote them) the more light we can shine on the irrational and unsustainable disaster politics of our time.’

This brings me to the two final hot topics that dominated our discussions at SHOT, both of which figured prominently from the very first Presidential Panel onwards. [SLIDE 7] One is the cross-fertilisation of history of technology with environmental history and disaster studies. This is a very lively and philosophically significant debate. It requires us to question the very foundation of a difference we normally take for granted, namely the boundary between ‘nature’ and ‘human action’. Acknowledging the profoundly transformative impact of humans on our planet from very earliest times, environmental historians conceptualise the last million years of the Earth’s history as the anthropocene era. In using natural resources and in devising technical solutions to regulate natural processes, we create such natural-artificial hybrids as sewage, a horse in harness, rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, or nuclear waste. To devise acceptable or sustainable responses to these urgent anthropogenic challenges requires us to pay equal attention to human interventions and to environmental context and processes. This is a field in which many outstanding younger historians of technology are currently engaged. [SLIDE 8] This book, New Natures, is just one of many exciting new publications by members of ENVIROTECH, SHOT’s Special Interest Group for Bridging the Histories of Environment and Technology. The ENVIROTECH website offers an excellent set of resources, including essays, book and article reviews, and syllabi for teaching at various levels.

The second key theme introduced in the opening plenary falls under the general heading of disability studies. This term embraces a relatively new but extremely powerful approach in critical theory in the West, though I suspect that it may not yet have attracted equal attention in China. The first historian of technology to draw our attention to the normalising powers of technological design was the Marxist Langdon Winner. In his 1980 essay ‘Do artifacts have politics?’ (p.125) he noted:

The organized movement of handicapped people in the United States during the 1970s pointed out the countless ways in which machines, instruments, and structures of common use—buses, buildings, sidewalks, plumbing fixtures, and so forth—made it impossible for many handicapped persons to move about freely, a condition that systematically excluded them from public life.

Winner argued forcefully that democratic justice required a remedy to these material forms of discrimination and attributions of passivity. [SLIDE 9] After Winner, theorists built upon Canguilhem’s and Foucault’s analyses of norms and normalisation to rethink the political and ontological significance of how a society identifies and treats handicap or disability. Inspired by the work of Donna Haraway and other theorists of power and difference, historians of technology only engage in critical analysis of the cyborgs, prostheses and so-called assistive technologies specifically designed to aid those with physical deficiencies. They also address the multiple ways in which routine technological artefacts or socio-technical systems serve to categorise, embody and reinforce social difference. As already mentioned, Round-table 1 on diversity asked how modern forms of transportation, and the rules and regulations governing access and use of cars and roads, planes and airports, contributed to forming the world-view of Black Americans in the 1960s, forever reminding them that they could not share the spaces that White Americans freely occupied.

Most people take technologies for granted; they do not question their provenance or their design – still less the politics that are built into them and reinforced by their daily use. Thus, technologies are among our most effective policemen. One of our greatest challenges as historians of technology is as educators: how can we teach school-children, university students, technological practitioners, policy makers and the general public that technology is never politically or socially neutral?

We do not wish to alienate our audiences by ranting about the evils of the smart-phone or the automobile. Our task as educators is to provide our various audiences with information and tools that will allow them to exercise their own critical faculties. In most social circles it is taken for granted that men invent and women use, or that only the white races are truly inventive, or that technological innovation is politically neutral and always brings progress. What compelling alternatives can we as historians of technology offer to challenge these familiar ‘grand narratives’? How can we convince students of the humanities that understanding the impact of technology is not only within their mental capacities, but also their duty as responsible citizens? How can we persuade minority Americans or female students that they are not outsiders to the universal human enterprise of technical development? How do we alert engineers to the social and political impact of the projects they are encouraged to view as simply technical challenges? These are enduring concerns for SHOT members, as they must be for our colleagues at the Forum. At our 2013 SHOT meeting two plenary venues were devoted to these challenges: Round-table 5, Teaching the History of Technology: Rethinking Modes of Instruction in Diverse Communities, and a half-day workshop organised by the Prometheans (SHOT’s Special Interest Group for the History of Engineering).

[SLIDE 10] I have gone on long enough. I hope I have conveyed some of the sense of excitement and discovery that we all felt at our SHOT meeting in Portland. I also hope that this may have stimulated some of you to find out more about us. You might be interested in reading some of the arguments posted on our SHOT-talk website. And I hope that many of you might also be interested in joining our SHOT Asia Network. [SLIDE 11] The SHOT Asia Network brings together scholars interested in knowing more about technology in Asian history and promoting the study and teaching of the history of technology in Asia. Our members are located at universities around the world and collectively employ a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, including history, anthropology, geography, and STS. Please do join us!

Finally, as President-Elect of SHOT, I bring a warm and enthusiastic invitation for the members of the Forum and all other historians and scholars of technology in China to join us at future SHOT meetings, and especially at SHOT’s first Asia meeting that will be held in Singapore in early June 2016. [SLIDE 12] Details are given in the SHOT flyer that is available separately. We very much hope that Forum members will get in touch and start working with us now to prepare for a meeting in 2016 that fully integrates Chinese perspectives and concerns, making it a meeting of truly international significance!

Thank you for your attention.