Greetings…
It is a privilege to be taking over the editorship of History and Technology (H + T). The stakes are high in following former editors, most recently John Krige and Martin Collins, who have made the Journal into a unique venue through which to experiment with and enlarge the scope of history of technology. We rely in large measure on their previous efforts in our aim of expanding the intellectual relevance of the field. This expansion is especially challenging at a moment when, as has happened before, the place of humanities in our societies is under intense questioning. History as an investigative field faces particular scrutiny from many of those who control its teaching and funding globally, and in numerous public forums complex critical historical accounts of science and technology face newly stiff competition from selective and deterministic narratives. Simplified accounts of this kind are, crucially, coming both from those who would promote a triumphal capitalism, unhindered by inconvenient facts, and those who defend ostensibly objective techno-scientific activities against all comers. No more helpful are simplified stories of science and technology as unalloyed sources of violence or oppression. What role can and should History and Technology assume in such an atmosphere?
Our vision for H + T is of a journal promoting scholarship able critically to reflect on its own conditions of production. The specter of global authoritarianism that is currently before us would probably be reason enough for a more defensive posture asserting the value of rigorous scholarship in the age of ‘alternative facts’, whether as ideological commitment or as last resort. But we think we would diminish ourselves as humanities scholars if we did not ask what counts as rigorous knowledge and what doesn’t, or who gets to define what is a legitimate inquiry and who does not. We are convinced that this demanding position in which we would like to place H + T has fidelity to the role of the humanities in maintaining and expanding an open democratic society.
Historically and across cultures, technology – as knowledge, practice and material – has been cast as integral to human health, happiness, welfare, labor and violence. Or we might better say, it has been integral to the enactment of social goals and the adjudication of social conflicts. In the twenty-first century, the settings and objects probed by historians of technology can credibly include pre-modern or modern subjects, either industrial or pastoral, in local context or amidst imperial territorial ambitions, found in an oasis in the Sahara or in a data center in the Mojave Desert, inside bodies or inside parliaments. While this empirical openness indicates a welcome new agility in the field, it also compels questions about the categories of history and technology. We want to create with this forum the expectation that historians of technology will ask of themselves: ‘How am I constituting the category of “technology” through my historical labor?’
After all, it is through the conditions of our own history writing that our historical subjects are brought into being. As a map produces the activity for which it provides a means of completion, so a historical narrative produces the set of sociabilities for which it is a representation. As historians of technology have made clear over the last few decades, those sociabilities constitute things and landscapes, along with social relations. Our aim for H + T is to consider what can be technology in our twenty-first century accounts of a particular past episode of human experience, rather than to imagine that we are conduits of past technological behaviors.
We ask, too, about what happens to history as a meaning-making practice when one reflects on the category of technology. What happens, for example, when we undertake a deep critique of the ‘new/old’ binary that drives much of our understanding of what counts as technology? When, say, we replace invention and innovation as the objects of our historical attention with instances of maintenance and care? Which new actors enter the picture, which periodizations are more meaningful, which dynamics are unveiled? The term ‘technology’ in particular historical instances might better be disaggregated into ‘living organism’, ‘standard’, ‘commodity’ and ‘foodstuff’ … or into ‘labor’, ‘product’ and ‘fatigue’ … or even into ‘promise’ and ‘threat’. All may be retrospective ascriptions in some regard (an occupational hazard of history writing), but at least such a disaggregation opens our minds to detecting unexpected social and material enactments. Our goal is to make H + T a site where the potential impact of the Journal, and what merits inclusion in the Journal, are themselves always open questions for editors, authors and readers, making for and rewarding a dynamic, collective curiosity.
The politics of narrative
As editors of H + T, we seek studies that support our understanding of general history, asking, for example:
| • | How have instances of mechanization and other technical modernizations enacted colonial formations? | ||||
| • | How do materialities deriving from medicine or healing practices historically enact bodily ability and disability? | ||||
| • | What governmental structures emerge to determine historical infrastructural or environmental priorities? | ||||
| • | How is democracy imagined through material scalability? | ||||
| • | How are communities formulated and sustained through the transmission of technological skills? | ||||
Such questions presuppose a plurality of voices in the production of H + T. This means we will actively pursue international authors and transnational subjects, but also pieces from those not yet self-identifying as historians of technology and even those interrogating that category. But the identification of different authorial voices itself holds the risk of essentializing subjectivities, and we want to engage with recent intersectional questions about identity. In that taxonomic disruption, the very categories of race, gender, ability or LGBTQ identities are seen as historical projects. For our purposes, such analytics might historicize formulations about identity in technological moments, moving beyond a mapping of the presence or absence of minorities in technological realms or the differential impacts of technological episodes on different societal groups. That is, moving beyond efforts to bring in more women to STEM occupations, explain patterns of environmental injustice through race, or identify instances of technology transfer from more to less developed nations. Those are of course important subjects for historical analysis but ripe for newly critical and relational perspectives, we believe, in which historical efforts at classification are foregrounded.
In reflecting on our framings in this way, the heuristics making up the history of technology can become generative in unexpected ways, we hope. For example, attention to geographical scale might problematize temporal scales, or a historical focus on social structures of merit might make of biography a newly useful project. All of these priorities for the Journal make welcome narrative heterogeneity and indeterminacy, which we hope to encourage through both the form and content of the publication. In form, H + T will continue to offer contributors the options of historiographic, visual and edited special issues that can pose new and untested heuristics. We will cultivate opportunities for input about both the content and direction of the Journal, both by encouraging submissions and by facilitating intellectual encounters among existing communities and new participants.
History and technology and world
An expanded presence for histories of technologies in the places where such work now thrives and in new settings is perhaps our most ambitious aim for H + T going forward. Our sense is that questions of ideology – of intentionalities ranging from violence to care, from profit to democracy – are beautifully illuminated by the historical focus on technologies. The perception (or, had we better say ‘production’?) of the social and political participation of non-human entities in human experience has moved in recent years from inside STS to wider uptake. It is now part of history of science, technology and medicine, and cultural history in general, as objects, technologies and environments are seen to formulate social and political communities. And, if Actor-Network Theory and Post-Humanist perspectives have aided in our interrogation of what can and does count as technology in a given practice or era (including our own history writing in 2017), the ontological perspective may inspire even deeper inquiry into the conditions of the technological.
In understanding both the human and human-made as indeterminate objects of our interest, we move beyond historical epistemologies to see that things-and-culture are perhaps not most fully probed historically when treated as figure-and-ground. Similarly, we may learn that human experience and technologies are best interrogated when we question images of pre-existing skills, resources and intentions somehow resulting in things. While historians interested in technology have been rigorously problematizing ‘progress’ for some time now, there’s much more to be done: for example, the linearity and unidirectional nature of many technological depictions in industrial cultures implies that innovation and human welfare go hand-in-hand, which is of course not the case. While general history certainly sheds light on these political complexities of modernity, histories of technology can bring rich explanatory specificity and reveal new such projects of importance for the current day.
We hope H&T can support that historical revealing, building on such narrative provocations as:
| • | Experiences of materiality are never determined | ||||
| • | Technology is always a subjectivity | ||||
| • | Knowing (both our historical actors’ and our own) is invariably a social instrumentality | ||||
With these perspectives we hope that the indeterminacy and reflection needed for democratic discourse about materiality finds a home in H + T. Humanistic inquiry does not automate democracy but is certainly a necessary component of any open and reflective culture, and one we seek to nurture as the Journal’s editors.
Editors-in-Chief
History and Technology
[email protected]