[lbo-talk] The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Sat May 14 18:13:01 PDT 2011


``To campaign today against the linear model is to throw oneself against a door that has been wide open for two decades. In the epochal global transformation from modernity to postmodernity that has been taking place in recent decades, technology has acquired, beginning about 1980, the cultural primacy that science had been enjoying for two centuries world-wide, and in the West for two millennia. Of this postmodern reversal of primacy between science and technology there is no more apposite evidence than the shift of the center of interest in all varieties of ‘science studies’ from science to technology. That shift began about 25 years ago, and today, if one asks a historian or sociologist or philosopher of science what they are working on, odds are they will describe an inquiry at the center of which is technology.''

Paul Forman

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For me, this is an odd claim. I enjoyed reading part of this article, even if I didn't agree. Below is a long ramble about the relationship between science and technology. I know I should finish the article, but...

I used to think about say physics and math as theoretical and mechanical engineering as applied. It was partly teen resentiment about my electronic engineer stepfather, who I didn't like for a long time.

But I changed my mind coming at this from a different world of art. I now think that first of all the relationship between science and technology is a dialectical one, so there doesn't have to be a directed causal chain, i.e. a linear model. Maybe more like a push-pull relationship. I think there is also push-pull system going on in making art and studying art as an historian or critic. You will miss a lot of aspects to art, unless you know how to make some.

Now to some of the history between science and technology. I think for example that Galileo worked on ballistic studies. Guns were the technology, and its likely that studying the curves of a bullet's path is almost the same as rolling balls down an inclined plane---an experiment Galileo describes in his Dialogues. I think Galileo did some work on earth fortifications also.

I got to wondering why Germany produced such high level and so many contributions to the hard sciences and mathematics in the late-19thC and early 20thC. I include Gauss for two reason. He spent most of his life in the 19thC and many of his students became famous. So this means there was a certain nationalistic pride about Germany and math. There were social, political, and technological reasons that all worked together in the same push-pull or dialectical way.

The big imperial powers used their navies to project their power around the world. There was a lot of physics and math needed by navies and ship builders. The german monarchy understood this and began the project to build a navy that could compete with England and France. Part of this master plan called for a lot ship building and armorment designers and engineers these were in short supply, so the monarchy started intitutes with the german university system to produce engineers and teach more physics and mathematics. A lot of money went into these institutes, which in turn recruited their best graduates back to teach. But there was a social problem of antisemiticism in the university system. As a consequences most of the brightest jewish students enrolled in these institutes where there was a lot less discrimination than there was in the older traditional languages and humanities departments.

In the late 1930s, through the war and post-war period the US faced a very similar scenerio to the Germans, and again followed similar social, political, technological means to reach their military goals. We became the world leaders in math, sciences, and technologies all at once, and most of these contributions were highly useful and applied to building a vast war machine. The Russians were undergoing a similar transformation and produced similar advancements in the sciences and technology.

This phrase caught my notice, ``... cultural primacy that science had been enjoying for two centuries world-wide, and in the West for two millennia.''

It's not historically accurate. During the period following the conquest of the Middle East and North Africa by the Arabs, most of the advancements in science and technology took place in the Arab world.

``The reversal in primacy between science and technology ca 1980 came too unexpectedly, too quickly, and, above all, too unreflectively to have resulted from the weight of evidence or the force of logic. Rather, it was a concomitant of the onset of postmodernity.''

This is another problematic passage.

There is an easy economic explanation that doesn't need much postmodern theory. The answer to why the change, which is again push-pull was jobs. Many science departments produced too many people who wanted to do science and most of those teaching and research jobs were full and highly competitive. That was not true of engineering in electronics, computer science, and some parts of chemistry. These fields were under going a boom period. You wanted an engineering degree. The sciences that were experiencing a boom were the biological sciences, in particular genetics and allied fields. There was a lot of federal money going into projects in these fields. The beneficiaries were big pharma, medical technology, and agriculture.

On the other hand what some theory might be good for looking into the ideological aspects that justified these economic and institutional changes. There was a near constant droning of media sources about the computer and all its soon to be miracle ways of transforming society and the world. Much of this was coming from the computer industry attempting to expand markets for the home computer systems.

Nevermind. I am grumpy today about computers and technology. I just blew off about a week trying to track down a DSL connection problem. I was certain it was an ATT problem and they were certain it was my problem.

CG



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